A Sort Of Legacy

Last Wednesday when we were in KL our neighbour Susan sent us a text letting us know of the death of Lee Kuan Yew, the 'founding father' of Singapore. We were not surprised since the former Prime Minister had been in poor health for quite some time, yet, as I pointed out to Noi at the time, it was very likely a false rumour since Susan had picked it up on what people these days term 'social media' and I was vaguely aware that such unpleasantly false rumours had been circulating for some time. So we didn't entirely believe the 'news', though appreciating that such news wasn't exactly unlikely. We texted back to her thanking her for up-dating us and reflecting on the fact that the old man's passing was probably for the best given his very poor health and the relief that a calm closure was likely to bring to his family.

Oddly enough I'd been intending to finish reading the last of the poems in the anthology A Luxury We Cannot Afford - which I mentioned a week or so ago - during our break in Malaysia and I did so immediately upon hearing the (false) news. They struck me as powerfully apposite, as did others I'd read in the weeks earlier of which I reminded myself that day. And then Susan let us know, rather embarrassedly, that she'd got it wrong. I mention this on the day when the 'real' news has come of Mr Lee's death as in a sense I've been thinking very directly indeed of what this news means for Singaporeans and others interested in this Far Place since last week and what I might find to say about it as an interested observer of the city state since 1988 (a time when he was still Prime Minister.)

I reached three conclusions then and, a week later, I see no reason to change my mind. The first was that for all my familiarity with the Man and the context in which he lived and operated I wouldn't be able to add anything of real insight to the plenty that others would find to say. There was much to admire about him and some things that might be reasonably questioned, and all this was fairly obvious. The second was that a good deal of what was going to be said would inevitably simplify the Man and his times; some commentary would be probably distortingly hagiographic in nature, and other commentary critical in a way that would lack depth and a sense of the historical realities that informed the lived reality of the lives (his and others) and times involved in the full picture. The third was the oddest; the one of which I felt simultaneously the most sure and yet the least certain. I had a sharp sense, which still remains, that the anthology I'd enjoyed reading so much was likely to constitute the sharpest, most penetrating picture of the Man I was going to read, and, in its genuine engagement with him, emerge in time as the best tribute possible. The hard truths, and the soft, therein come as close as anyone is likely to get to forming, not a balanced or dispassionate assessment, but a humane and sincerely concerned attempt to make sense of the outlines of a figure aspiring to greatness.

The success of the attempt lies not so much in the value of individual poems, though it isn't difficult to pick out a number that stand powerfully enough on their own, but in the way the poems rub against each other, sometimes provocatively so, sometimes playfully, and add up to something rich and strange and honest. I don't think the Man himself would have appreciated this at all, but it's surely part of his achievement to have played a key role in shaping, at least to some degree, the society that allowed, possibly cultivated, the space for this work.

Of course, only time, and its perplexing teasing out of human affairs and the meaning we find in them, will tell how any of us might be judged. And all any of us can really hope for is that the final judgment will be a compassionate one.