Rivers as Counter-monuments in Manila and Singapore : The Urban Poor’s Remembrance in Liwayway Arceo’s Canal de la Reina (1972) and Suchen Christine Lim’s The River’s Song (2013)

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Southeast Asian cities like Manila, the Philippines, and
Singapore have witnessed economic, political, and cultural
changes over the years, especially after periods of
colonization. States control their urban fabric—that is, its
organization, planning, and design of cities—and thus
dictate the flow of capital and forces of labor. Urban poor
settlements, an offshoot of capital accumulation, are
(re)moved around these cities in accordance with governing
visions of development. For populations that are forced into
changes brought about by urban development, practices of
remembering are also controlled by dominant powers. These
“monuments” are established in/as spaces to oblige an
image of membership into a society ruled by such powers.
Nevertheless, alternate sites of remembering counter these
monumental spaces. This paper takes an interest in two
novels that feature such places. Liwayway Arceo's Canal de
la Reina (1972) and Suchen Christine Lim’s The River’s Song
(2013) both figure rivers in Manila and Singapore,
respectively. The eponymous river is the central axis of
Canal de la Reina, entangled in class conflict and swift
urban change in post-Commonwealth Manila. In The River’s
Song, the famous Singapore River provides a refuge for
reminiscing about Singapore before the city-state’s independence.
Comparing these novels to what Filipino comparatist Ruth
Jordana Pison calls fictional “counter-memory,” we argue
that their rivers remember personal and embodied
experiences eliminated from hegemonic accounts of the city.
Thus, they function as what we call “counter-monuments”
for the urban poor marginalized in the history of the
Philippines and Singapore.