A Reporter’s Memoir: NO HARD FEELINGS

Robert’s Routes blazes a
trail

It takes courage to write on one’s life, but to write so
explicitly as well-known poet and playwright Robert Yeo has done in Routes A
Singaporean Memoir 1940-75 takes even more courage.

It is a welcome addition to a genre that has been neglected
for obvious reasons; Asians are generally reticent, particularly on intimate
matters. With few exceptions, the majority of those who have penned their
memoirs have come from the political arena, like Lee Kuan Yew or former
detainees such as Said Zahari and Teo Soh Lung.

Theirs were more in the nature of political memoirs and
their basic motive was to tell their side of the story for posterity.

In Routes, Robert has done the opposite; his recollections
is highly personal and come complete with details of boyhood peccadilloes,
loves and escapades, scenes from his work and career as a teacher and lecturer,
and excerpts from his poetry and plays.

According to the great American writer Gore Vidal, a memoir
is ‘’how one remembers one’s life, while an autobiography is history, requiring
research, dates, facts double-checked.’’

On this basis, I would classify Routes as an auto-memoir.
Like a historian, he has adopted the chronological approach, arranging his massive
material mined from dairies, letters, press reports, poems…to supplement his recollections,
on practically a year by year basis.

All in, his tome takes 23 chapters and 384 pages and that
also is only for the first half of his life up to the age of 35 years. He has
no preface and on the basis of his one-page acknowledgement, it is not possible
to know what drives him to tell his story, why he decides on 1975 as the
cut-off point, and whether there will be a second volume on the latter part of
his life.

In the hands of others, such an approach might result in a pedestrian
offering, but somehow Robert’s Routes has escaped that fate.

I think his instincts as a playwright came to his rescue. He
has cleverly presented his materials like in a slideshow, interspersing
intimate details of personal and family life with eye-witness accounts from public
life such as Lee Kuan Yew breaking down on TV when announcing the separation of
Singapore from Malaysia.

By interspersing his prose liberally with excerpts from his
poems or letters sent to or received from family and friends, and selections
from press reports on several of his literary offerings, he has managed to vary
the contents to the extent of sustaining interest.

Every chapter is preceded by two quotes, from a variety of
sources including hit songs; some of them do help to set the mood, but some of
them, I suspect, have been put up as embellishments.

I wish Robert had given more emphasis in his account to his
literary works. Still, the inclusion of excerpts from some of his poems and his
efforts to put them in context, have to a large extent added spice to the book.

It is like adding ‘’sambal
belachan’’ (dried shrimp-based chilli paste) to complement Malay dishes
that has the effect of making even ordinary fare much more mouth-watering.

Overall, I find Routes interesting enough to be able to
plough through from beginning to end without any hardship, but somehow at the
end I find myself not fully satiated, like having a meal minus the dessert and
coffee. So I hope Robert will come up with a sequel.

I think I first met him in 1973 at the bar in Pantai
Valley’s Guild House, possibly through one of my female colleagues in the New
Nation paper to whom Robert was at that time, to borrow a word from Bukit Timah
campus days, ‘’smelling’’.

I can still remember the hint of glee at which she
subsequently confided in me of the attention being showered on her by an ‘’up-and-coming’’
poet.

I am only three years younger than Robert and for people like
me reading Routes is like taking a walk down memory lane, meeting a number of
old friends whom I have lost touch with, such as Dudley de Souza, former NN
education Correspondent, whose accounts of reporting life in NN fuelled my
interest and perhaps pushed me on to the journalistic path, and Chandran Nair,
former head of Times Books International, to whom I still remember with much
affection as the man responsible for turning me into an author in 1979 with the
publication of -  Race, Politics and
Moderation  A Study of the Malaysian
Electoral Process.

To the younger generation of readers, they may possibly be
regaled by his accounts of boyhood life playing with tops and marbles and
catching fishes and spiders, and have their eyes opened by his references to the
days when the PAP ruled Singapore with knuckle dusters, and students wishing to
go for further studies needed to apply for a suitability certificate.

In a book that is almost technically perfect, I spotted without
any effort a number of little slips such as a few instances of repetition in
almost identical sentences like, for instance, having to queue to go to the jamban (Malay word for toilet).

On two trivial matters, I hope I will be forgiven for
nitpicking. The first is that the red-light terrace houses along the infamous
Desker Road are not single but double-storeyed, and the second is that the
difference between male and female spiders lies in the shape of their bodies
and not in the length of their limbs.

With about a hundred illustrations and a nice cover to boot,
Routes will attract even the casual reader to run through its pages and maybe,
like me, get drawn to read from cover to cover.

I hope that more Singaporeans especially those from the
literary and arts circles will be inspired by Routes to come out with their own
accounts of life in Singapore.

Ismail Kassim

24^th August 2011