Library pioneer Hedwig Anuar's teenage essays charm with precocity

The retrospective publication of one's adolescent writing runs the risk of exposing unsatisfying juvenilia. But a slim new volume of essays by the first Singaporean director of the National Library Hedwig Anuar, now 96, escapes that fate.

- Shawn Hoo

Vestiges: Essays 1945-1946, a kind of precocious psycho-geography of Singapore's streets and visual culture, charms by revealing a sparkling 17-year-old mind.

Anuar – then Aroozoo – wrote these essays in her cursive hand in a slender notebook her daughter Shirin Aroozoo found while decluttering her home a few years ago. As Anuar has late-stage Alzheimer's disease, Vestiges is published by her daughter to celebrate a different facet of the library pioneer.

The titular "vestiges" are, most obviously, the scars of the Japanese Occupation. Many of these essays turn from seemingly breezy subjects, like the poetry of clouds, to dark epiphanies of "war clouds on the horizon".

In another essay, Anuar diagnoses the post-war love for "painfully bizarre" fashion as a move away from war-time austerity.