ABSTRACT
For writers and other cultural practitioners in contemporary Singapore, the implications of “triumphing over death” are social and civic as much as they are personal and creative. This chapter uses the Singapore Memory Project to offer an opening survey in its consideration of the relationships among death, memory, and civic engagement in Singapore’s poetry and its curation into official discourse. In Singapore, geographical signs of political and economic hegemony are primarily projected through the state-sanctioned remodeling of the city. The title of Yeow Kai Chai’s “Memento Mori” poems, in its injunction to remember one’s death, stands guard against the temptation to amnesia and the “snowdrift of forgetting.” Indeed, the poems can be seen to perform the kinetics of the city itself, in their redeployment of fragmentation into paratactic play, and in the mobility of their distance perspectives and situational terms.
