Snake Wine and Other Malayan Writings

One of the best-written accounts in English of Singapore in the early 1950s, Snake Wine is the record of Patrick Anderson's two years a lecturer at the University of Malaya. Collected here together with a short story and two poems, this book “offers an important perspective on the politics and cultures of emergent national elites”.

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One of the best-written accounts in English of Singapore in the early 1950s, Snake Wine is the record of Patrick Anderson's two years a lecturer at the University of Malaya. Anderson, a successful British-born Canadian poet, has, according to the blurb for the original edition ""an unjaded eye, an unconventional mind, a taste for the exotic, a keen sense of the droll and a lively interest in the diversity of human manners and motives"". He follows this curiosity far beyond the Bukit Timah campus to a Singapore that has yet to experience the great transformations of the 1960s and 70s.

Anderson's position and background represent privileges he cannot escape, but he cultivates his marginality as a leftist and bisexual. He writes with a gentle humour about the contradictions of his own position as a teacher of English literature to students like Wang Gungwu, Hedwig Anuar and James Puthucheary, a generation preparing themselves for the the struggles that would lead to the formation of Malaysia and, ultimately, an independent Singapore. As Philip Holden writes in his introduction, Anderson's text both enacts and ""consciously undermines its own authority and struggles with issues of privilege, exile, and authority"". Set in the fluid world of the colonial port city, it is ""saturated with queer sexualities"".

Snake Wine, collected here together with a Singapore-related short story and two poems, is an engaging read on many levels, but also one that ""offers an important perspective on the politics and cultures of emergent national elites which is still relevant in Singapore today.