Tears and Garlands: Lim Chin Siong, Coldstore, and the End(s) of Narrative

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the role of biography in contemporary remembrance of the moment of decolonisation in Singapore. To challenge a hegemonic developmental narrative told through the biography of Singapore's first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, many popular and academic historians have focused on the lives of political figures previously written out of history. Most notable among these is the opposition leader Lim Chin Siong, who was detained in 1963 in Operation Coldstore, one of several waves of detentions by the security forces during Singapore's transition from internal self government in 1959, through membership of the Malaysian Federation in 1963, to independent nationhood in 1965. Such acts of storytelling, however, while having an important status as testimony, often simply invert the dominant narrative, trapping their protagonists in a new series of historical binarisms. In contrast, life writing in media less closely wedded to narrative, such as poetry and photography, has perhaps a more radical ability to ask questions of history, through a focus not on storytelling but on images extracted from contexts, on the moment before narrative starts.

KEYWORDS:

• Lim Chin Siong
• Lee Kwan Yew
• Singapore
• decolonisation
• biography

Notes on contributor

Philip Holden is Professor of English at the National University of Singapore, where he researches life writing and Southeast Asian writing in English, often with a focus on issues relating to gender and multiculturalism. He is the author of Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State (2008) and co-author of The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English (2009), as well as articles in Postcolonial Studies, Interventions, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Biography, Life Writing, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Philippine Studies and Textual Practice. His present research examines life writing as a social practice.

Notes

1. Ramakrishna ultimately rests his case on a statement that Lim ‘had finally admitted his CPM ties’ in a 1982 Internal Security Department interview (120). Yet ‘ties’ are not membership, and the excerpts of Lim's testimony from this and subsequent interviews that Ramakrishna quotes fail to show a persistent direct connection between Lim and the CPM.

2. Liew's graphic novel came to public attention in Singapore in May 2015, when its Arts Council publishing grant was withdrawn for alleged sensitive political content. The novel is a fictional biography of a Singapore comic artist, but two of is central characters are Lee Kuan Yew and Lim Chin Siong: it is the visual elements of the text that perhaps enable the most radical historiographic questioning.

3. We have made every effort to locate the copyright holder of the photograph. Anyone with such information is encouraged to contact the author.