2003-11-18 - 9:48 a.m.

At first glance, Anwar Sadali’s improbable self-published book, ‘169’ looks like a catalogue. On the table of contents, we find a list of the publications which have been deemed unsuitable for public consumption by the Singapore Films and Publications Department. It is a mystery how Anwar obtained this list, and his preface sheds very little light. As a matter of fact, the preface, written by Anwar himself, is quite a masterpiece of subterfuge—he manages to avoid all the important questions, like his identity, for example, and how he has managed to obtain every single one of the banned materials, the kinds of Internet-trawling or antique-bookshop hunting he has done as conquistador of the contraband.

In his preface, Anwar takes great and insistent pains to represent himself as ‘an ordinary Singaporean’. One is instantly reminded of those lengthy preambles in what were essentially books of erotic fiction published in the 60’s, which often excused the luridness of their contents by making claims that the books were written for ‘educational purposes’. Often bordering on Victorian hypocrisy, the authors of these books represented themselves as ‘sexologists’ rather than pornographers, which as many people would know, makes the distinction between adult material that is edifying instead of merely entertaining. Some of these authors even went as far as to obtain a seal of approval from a psychologist, whose credentials would be prominently stated after his or her name at the end of the contributory foreword. One is tempted to suggest that Anwar’s exposure to these very kinds of books during his quest might have influenced the writing, both in content and style, of such a pre-emptory preface, but this is a point that will be elaborated upon later.

But Anwar makes no claims that might have allowed him a temporary position on a moral high ground. He writes that he is neither a sociologist who wishes to extrapolate the contents of a taboo list against the social norms of his country, and neither is he some kind of bibliophile, whose instincts are incorrigibly completist, and whose only interest is in amassing all the books that have been conveniently inventorised by some inaccessible institution. (Foregrounding the kind of wry humour that will re-appear in his reviews, he states that perhaps his avoidance for the term ‘bibliophile’ could have been provoked by its criminal connotations, ever since the root word ‘philia’, to mean ‘like’ in New Latin, has evolved to denote perversions, ‘necrophilia’ and ‘paedophilia’ being cases in point. And until proven otherwise, he would like to believe that there is nothing criminal about the investigative process employed during his mission, nor its product, which is now resting innocently in his readers’ hands).

The very fact that he would review each and every one of these books puts him above that of someone who is merely filling up his shelves, but his lack of periodising, historicising, categorising and rhetoricising makes him fall short of fulfilling an academic task. In the penultimate paragraph of his preface, he returns to an earlier point: that he is like any other ‘ordinary Singaporean’, whose distinguishing weakness is perhaps his curiosity, neither a virtue nor a vice, since these ethical categories are to be judged only by what doors have been opened, what abysses unveiled. Labouring over these points, he states that the crimes of Pandora and Eve, one unleashing evil, the other prompting exile, were not those of curiosity, but defiance. And since he is merely reviewing banned books, and not importing them into Singapore, through means sophisticated or straightforward, involving surveillance-deflecting Japanese technology at the airports or stealthy sneaks behind the coastal guards by Bintan boatsmen, Anwar protests that he cannot be accused of breaking any injunctions.

Anwar makes no attempt at classifying his material; in fact the books he reviews appear in alphabetical order. Hence tawdry magazines jostle alongside political documents, solemn religious treatises collide with frivolous penny paperbacks. Among the more readily identifiable publications are magazines such as ‘Penthouse’, ‘Playboy’ and the much tamer ‘Cosmopolitan’, as well as novels, which in addition to those banned on sexual grounds, such as ‘The Bedside Philosophers’ by the Marquis de Sade and Henry Miller's ‘Sexus’, also include Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verses’, a novel considered incendiary in many Muslim countries.

The list also throws up a few surprises. One wonders what to make of books carrying such titles as ‘Tall and Torrid’, ‘Swamp Lust’ and ‘Soft Lips on Black Velvet’. In Review #134, Anwar describes the 1961 novel ‘Tall and Torrid’ by Jack Lynn as ‘a thriller punctuated with bedroom scenes, or rather, erotica in the guise of a thriller’. He goes into a perfunctory outline of the plot, but one detects a sense of boredom as he is doing so, perhaps even mild dismay. Beneath the casual prose one detects a weariness: surely he had not sought out these books at some obscure shop specialising in out-of-print esoterica, only to be in the possession of a copy bearing the dog-eared creases left behind by those who, if not juvenile, have the reading palates of juveniles.

While Anwar himself does not explicitly state his bewilderment that such titles should persist on the list, the reader of ‘169’ can readily form his own judgements. Why is it that titles which are no longer in publication still being banned? Who, in the present time, has heard of magazine titles such as ‘Nudist Photo Field Trip’, ‘Spick Extra’, ‘Flicks’, ‘Leg Watcher's Special’ and ‘How to Decorate a Bachelor's Apartment’? Why the arrest warrant for the outlaw who is already dead? This act seems to border on the absurd, until one realises that the very nature of censorship rests on the belief that certain values are fixed. Even if society changes, its set of values will have to be maintained in a state of perpetuity. As values persist, although the ones who have preached them have long passed away, so do the corruptions that emanate from books, even after they have been victims themselves to the corruptions of time, reduced to loose paper and cellulose powder. Over time, the decisions that first resulted in the composition of the list become as immutable as the values they are supposed to protect, and any modifications can only be those that involve additions, and absolutely no subtractions.

The second question is, why a title like ‘Tall and Torrid’, and not its other cousins and variants? There must have been numerous titles of the sort published in the 60’s and 70’s—erotica packaged as thriller, as mystery, as horror, as science-fiction even. Why does the list not then run into the thousands? One can argue that such bans occurred on a purely symbolic level, the proscription of one ‘Tall and Torrid’ designating that other books echoing its contents also be rounded up. In that case, how did ‘Tall and Torrid’ manage to assume this status as prototype? The only answer is what one has always suspected: the act of censorship is implacably random; its operations are not the product of enforceable criteria but whims and winds, the chance occurrence of a saucy book lying in the bedroom of a Minister’s son, a confiscated journal making the fateful trip from a tourist to a customs officer to the Ministry of Culture.

One of the more fascinating aspects of ‘169’ involve Anwar’s reviews of those publications which are pictorial in nature. ‘In the centrefold, a naked blonde woman is spreading her legs with a vacant expression on her face—an expression that invites the viewer to superimpose other appearances: maybe a grimace for those for whom sex involves domination and aggression, a look of bliss for those who prefer to please,’ goes his Review #53 for an issue of ‘Hustler’. But subsequent reviews of other smut rags gradually become strangled, from the analytical to the descriptive, to the point that they become nothing more than technical footnotes. For Review #109 of the ‘Penthouse’ centrefold, Anwar says, ‘A woman. No clothes. On a couch. Anterior view. Legs open. Making an obtuse angle of about 120 degrees,’ an observation made perhaps with the aid of a geometrical protractor. The author’s personality though, managed to resurface in Review #168 of ‘XXX’ where he says, ‘The main difference between the female anatomy in these photographs and those found in medical textbooks is the difference between a ‘pussy’ and a ‘vagina’, I believe.’

As if to arouse himself from the tedium of appraising pornography, Anwar seems to devote longer reviews for those publications of a political or religious nature, as he shows for ‘Malaya's Case for Independence’ and the religious publications of the ‘International Bible Students' Association’ and the ‘Watchtower Bible and Tract Society’, which are Reviews #84 and #167 respectively. In the former, he examines how Singapore’s narrative of Independence has been scripted by those in power. In the latter, he looks at a disempowered community, Singapore’s Jehovah’s Witnesses, who, even if their organisation is not banned, are at risk of being arrested and imprisoned for possessing their banned religious works, a fate that befell a 72-year-old woman as recently as 1995.

We return then to a question posed earlier: what exactly were the effects of such a consistent exposure to prohibited literature on Anwar Sadali? It is important here to note that the preface was written after Anwar had completed writing all his reviews, and contains a few paragraphs where he attempts to diagnose the results of an experiment where he himself was the test subject. In his own words:

‘My curiosity has been satiated. I have, so to speak, entered the back door to a realm of knowledge guarded by barbed wire fences. Now I am merely curious about how the entire experience has transformed me. I have encountered alternative political as well as religious ideas, but I doubt that this immediately qualifies me as either a dissident or a heretic. As for pornography, of which I now consider myself somewhat of an expert, it has struck me that some of the intrusions that journalists make into people’s lives offer views more obscene than that of a dildo-camera, and what is the difference between a woman who shows off her labia minora and the woman who writes a newspaper column about her haemorrhoids?’

The more interesting question though, and doubtless one that would be asked by a majority of Singaporeans, is whether Anwar Sadali will get into any kind of trouble for publishing ‘169’. It is true that the censors have banned the possession of any item on the list, but there is no evidence that Anwar is in possession of any of them. Quite likely, he has destroyed his entire collection, and his reviews are the only traces left of them. But what status can one attribute to the reviews of forbidden publications? What exactly is the censorship position on the mediated transmission of banned items, which circumvents direct distribution and dissemination channels? Is it possible that the textual description of the nude image, due to the suggestive powers of language, is more pornographic than the image itself? And what does one make of Anwar’s quotations from these banned works, like in Review #46 of John Cleland’s 18th century bestseller, ‘Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’:

“Presently he guided my hand lower, to that part which nature and pleasure kept their stores in concert, so aptly fastened and hung on to the root of their first instrument and minister, that not improperly he might be styled their purse-bearer too: there he made me feel distinctly, through their soft cover, the contents, a pair of roundish balls, that seemed to play within, and elude all pressure but the tenderest, from without.”

Are fragments of a banned work, removed from their origins, also illegal? What if one reproduces only a clause, such as ‘presently he guided my hand lower’, or perhaps even the word ‘lower’? What if one rearranged the clauses in the passage above? These questions might strike one as ridiculous, but only as ridiculous as the policing of language.

At the end of his preface, Anwar reluctantly admits that the experience of combing through illicit material has indeed changed him. He admits that ever since the book was published, he has been waiting for the proverbial knock on the door, the telephone call in the middle of the night. He tells us:

‘I cannot deny anymore that I have indeed changed. A metamorphosis which is indeed unsettling, the kind of psychological alteration that can occur only to one who has read too much. And indeed I am a man who has read too much, and am now infected with one of the most intractable perversions known to any social being: I have opened up my door and invited a stranger into my head, more precisely a policeman, I have sanctioned his entry and rape; I have become paranoid.’

Which will sufficiently explain why the book is called ‘169’, despite containing only 168 reviews. Not for the mischievous concord between the number ‘69’ and the book’s sexual contents. Not an editorial oversight due to the non-participation of a professional proofreader. Unsurprisingly, Anwar Sadali has predicted the entry of his own book into the canon of the unthinkable and unmentionable. One can only wonder whether this review of his book of reviews will suffer a similar fate, making the final tally a round figure. But then one asks what about a review of this review, and a review of that former review, and so on? How many degrees of separation before we can escape the shadow of the list—that edifice constructed to safeguard the ‘values of society’ but which is actually an impregnable monument to both the archaic and the arbitrary.

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