2024 Week 46: Sketches From SWF

Singapore Writers Festival. Meh. I have an uneasy relationship with it. I don't consider myself a ~writer~ in the literary sense so it's not a nourishing community event for me. I don't read contemporary books so I'm not particularly excited by the authors. And the last time I went, I felt so discomfited by the class homogeneity of the crowd.

And yet I found myself attending it again this year. If nothing else, by forcing you to choose between multiple concurrent events, attending SWF is a pretty effective way to figure out what you're actually interested in (not what you say you're into!). 2 years ago, my preoccupation was being a person on the internet. 

This year? At Unearthing Singapore's Indigenous Legacy, the veteran (and very very cool IRL) Malay writer Isa Kamari summed up it up: 

"We writers have a duty to tell the stories that need to be told."

Hearing this line - with its powerful deontological punch - caused multiple gongs to go BONGGG!! in my head. So that's why I feel so much hate for writers who waffle on about their rich-people problems, as if the world needed any more representation of that! The writers who don't bother to break out of their comfortable class bubbles, to investigate and report what life is like for people who have it a little worse!

That panel was a politically charged conversation about decolonising Singapore's history with Firdaus Sani (Orang Laut SG, begun in response to an NEA poster describing his ancestors' home Pulau Semakau  as "an award-winning landfill") and Nabilah Said (ex-SPH journalist who is now, thankfully, writing plays instead).

During the Q&A someone asked for books and other resources to learn more about Singapore's real history. After a long pause, we got a couple of piecemeal recommendations like Syed Hussein Alatas' book on Raffles and Alfian Sa'at's play Merdeka. And... that was it! So sad, right? There are so many people (incl. the 3 speakers) individually decolonising the state narrative - yet there isn't a single easily accessible synthesis of their labours that you can pick up for $25 at Kinokuniya. (Huh, that was weirdly specific. Maybe it should be my project.)

Another quote that made a deep impression on me was Johannes Widodo, who introduced himself as a "mongrel" in The Role of Cultural Preservation:

"Look at the map of Nusantara: it's all water. Water has no national boundaries. So we are all mongrels."

Widodo also hates the word heritage. He's skeptical about the idea of culture as something fixed in the past, owned by a group of people, and preserved like so much summer fruit. It's a colonial mindset, he thinks. The other panellists were Zulfadli Rashid (wrote Air, based on interviews with the Orang Seletar) and Syarifah Nadhirah (Malaysian artist working with Orang Asli, documenting their botanical knowledge). Both projects demonstrate how local narratives, knowledge, livelihoods are indistinguishable from political reality. (I really hope the play Air comes out in book form.)

It is a recurring annoyance, that status quo-challenging cultural output isn't in a form that I can touch/own/read at leisure. During Storied Creatures I got a glimpse into knowledge that exists purely in aural (Mark Wong's oral histories for the National Archives) and experiential (Nusantara nerd Hafiz Rashid's museum tours). Ugh, so frustrating! Only Fairoz Ahmad has a book out (Neverness, which preserves the vanished Malay village Engku Aman).

Physical output can also be ephemeral. Case in point: zines (pictured above) thanks to the limited (1 copy?) print run. Same for some magazines. I was so happy I managed to get the last copy of Mynah Vol. 4 at the festival bookstore. Its editor Ruby Thiagajaran remarked, during Cultivating a Literary Ecosystem through Criticism, that no critic has ever written a review of Mynah. Now that I've read it from cover to cover, I realised why this is a problem. Being a physical indie magazine, its stories go out public circulation once the print run sells out. These stories should live on on the internet and elsewhere, by being discussed and written about.

So in conclusion. My preoccupation is: where does one find the stories that challenge the status quo but that need to be told? Certainly there's a lot of it on Instagram and Substack - so I hear. But I cannot accept the psychic cost of using social media. I wish for stories to be in book and printed material form, something that can survive algorithm changes and the rise and fall of large-cap tech companies domiciled in tax havens.

Maybe one day - long after chatGPT achieves singularity and annihilates most of the population here - one of the simple coastal fisherfolk living on the sparsely-inhabited 64-island archipelago once known as "Singapore" will come across a library of semi-rotted books about the land's history? That's a nice thought.

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A couple more sketches & pictures.