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2002-04-12 - 2:33 a.m. S11 An essay on memory ------------------------- I once had a Geography teacher in secondary school who had the strangest habit. She never could bring herself to say the word ‘money’ in class. She came up with her own euphemism for it, accompanied by some finger gesture, ET drawing a luminous sign in the air after a galactic excursion into a capitalist solar system. She would ask us what factor determined the location of tertiary industries, rural-urban migration, population policies…and then she’d smile beatifically, and pre-empted our answers. Yes, she would say, yes, that’s right. S-11. The sign of the ‘S’ impaled by the twin spikes of eleven. The serpent itself, curled around the tree of knowledge. The thing that makes the world go round. And round. A snake wound like a Moebius strip. Parallels without convergence. The root of all evil. If you wrote S-11 down for any Geography question, my teacher used to say, you’d probably get a few marks. (Jump cut) I’m at S-11 again with Rizal. There are very few people like Rizal around nowadays. He’s what I’d call one of the last of the true Malays. He’s an oral historian to the core, he tells the kinds of stories that make you want to tell them over and over again to your mother, your friends, to your children even if they don’t understand a word you’re saying. And as with most oral historians, he doesn’t believe in writing any of it down. The word is a function of space and time. The word cannot be dissociated from the breath. The word is mortal. When you commit words to paper, writing about an oral historian, you are killing him softly. Rizal tells me, once a man rode a horse on the expressway all the way up to Malaysia, trailed by seven police cars. He shows me 'Coney Island of the Mind', signed by Ferlinghetti himself. When he meets some women he kisses their hands as if their skin was perfumed Victorian-style. Maybe Rizal’s cursing me as I’m writing this. He wants to stay low, low enough to duck away from curious glances of foggy-spectacled students, the bewitching eyes of soulless beautiful women, the low-flying contempt of bureaucrats. There’s always some shady spot under the green canopies and fairy lights of this place. The jukebox plays music from the Velvet Underground to Teresa Teng. It’s so that when you’re totally absorbed in some conversation with one of the degenerates who hang around here, your shadow will have something to dance to. ‘Look at that, Alfian,’ Rizal tells me, pointing at the ultraviolet strip that’s used to lethally attract stray insects, ‘That’s what this place is about, man. That’s the reason why we come here.’ Kamikaze flies. Rizal once worked in the National Library. I ask him what he thinks of the fact that it’s going to receive the kiss of death from the government’s wrecking ball. He looks thoughtfully into the distance. He strokes his chin. He doesn’t answer me. The word is mortal. So are libraries. (Jump-cut) On the night I watched Zai Kuning perform ‘Decomposed’ I had a nightmare. Why was the body such a frightening thing? I remembered the sight of a man in a state of hyperalgesia, as if even the oxygen he was breathing in was burning his lungs. At times he stared at the audience as if he could see the X-rays of our bones. Then there was that chicken bit. I can’t quite recall what he did with that stripped carcass of a chicken, but it must have been something horrific. Something is protecting me from that memory. Now I see Zai and his wife, Misumi. And their baby, Rumi, named after the Sufi poet Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, whose name stands for ‘love and ecstatic flight into the infinite’. Zai tells me that Rumi wants to start walking even when she hasn’t even begun to crawl. ‘I hope that she will dance when she grows up,’ Zai confides. Misumi smiles. She tells me her daughter’s gums are ‘itchy’. Teeth are starting to grow. Zai was an Artist-in-Residence with the Substation. His work has always been about rediscovering the body, the body as a victim of history. In his own words, ‘There are memories hidden inside our bodies. Over time, these memories have turned into secrets…what is the memory of the hand, the spine, the ass, the foot?’ I look at Rumi, and she is yawning. In the next few months, she will learn to sit up, to grasp at things, to clap. At the same time, her parents will be unlearning the way they sit, squat, bend, lie down, walk. I prepare myself mentally for a déjà vu: one day I will see Zai on stage, in a cone of light. Yawning. But this time, with a full set of teeth. (Jump cut) I hear that now Kai and Green are working at the National Library. Kai’s in the middle of conceptualising a piece for the Singapore Art Museum, where he intends to photograph security guards. Green tells me he’s going to write an additional chapter to Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ but make it in the form a video. I’ve always wanted to ask Green if that’s his actual birth certificate name. Green was one part of Zai Kuning’s Metabolic Theatre Laboratory. Kuning means ‘yellow’ in Malay. Once the group did a performance called ‘Bluemonkish’. There are no Reds among us, of course. Unless you want to consider the Marlboros being passed around the table. A few months back I remember Lee Wen painting words on his body with edible paint. He walked around with edible paint. He looked like Jesus. On one arm was the question ‘What is art?’ and on the other, ‘Is it necessary?’ he used brown, which was chocolate-flavoured. I wondered if black edible paint would taste like oyster sauce. My vanity and myopia don’t sit in well with each other, so I usually stumble around town in a state of half-blindness. It makes me feel like a clairvoyant, seeing blurred shapes at bus stops, waiting under traffic lights. But the minute I reach S-11, I fumble for my spectacles and put them on. I scan the area. An arm is waving. Someone recognises me. (Jump cut) I don’t want to romanticise this place. They pump up all the lousy songs way too loud and the good ones they don’t play when I’m around. And $1.20 for a can of Pepsi is daylight robbery. The woman at the counter scowls at me because I tell her I don’t understand a single word of Mandarin she is saying. I blame it on the sweater I’m wearing, with the words ‘Freedom Man’ on it in Chinese characters. I’m not sure if S-11 will be around anymore. I know that the National Library will have to go. My mother used to tell me of how she would bring me to the National Library when I was small. When I first saw all the books, I had clenched my fists and gone into some kind of a fit. I think one of the hardest things is to try visualising what you were like when you were a child. It was at S-11 when I first met someone I fell in love with, who had the eyes of a gypsy. I watched that someone make out with my best friend. There was no place for me in the space between their lips. Like Haresh once wrote: ‘Nostalgia is dangerous’. I think of all kinds of loss. I scroll up and read what I have written. 1) The word is mortal. 2) The body decomposes. 3) When you die, the eyes are one of the first things to go. The ears are the last. I am at S-11. I close my eyes and listen. Bono is crooning ‘I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.’ (Jump cut) The year is 2005. At the coasts, the reclamation projects are still dribbling Indonesian-imported sand into the sea. A tunnel runs below what was once the National Library. In place of S-11, an Internet café now stands, just one among many that extend all the way from Capitol Building. A boy doing a school Geography project surfs for material. Typing the word ‘money’ in the search engine brings up a list of finds that rivals that which springs up from the word ‘sex’. Fingers click furiously. It is raining outside but nobody seems to notice. You can walk in and look from one face to another. You detect similar expressions. You will not be surprised if they all had the same heartbeats. Every Singaporean counts. What is he or she counting? Does the body count? You walk into the café. A computer screen explodes into pixels. A stealth bomber and an Apache chopper have a high-resolution collision. A computer-generated woman with triangular cheekbones congratulates a game player on a mission accomplished, in a breathless Marilyn Monroe voice. You will not recognise me. You have visited my homepage, and signed my guestbook. You have sent me an e-mail saying that you would like to meet me and talk about S-11, that old eating joint where I used to hang out. This is because you had stumbled into an article I once wrote about that green-canopied refuge beside a red-brick building. You walk out of the café and look back at the signboard, to make sure that you are at the correct place. Perhaps you are little early for the appointment we had arranged over e-mail. Perhaps you are already too late. But you are at the right place. The sign says: S-21. Footnote: S21 was a nation-building programme promoted by the PAP government 4 years ago, supposedly meant to provide citizens with a greater sense of participation and ownership over political discourse. Some of its tenets include ‘Every Singaporean Counts’ and ‘The Singapore Heartbeat’. Petitioners who sought to save the National Library from demolition (to make way for the Singapore Management University’s architectural blueprint) tried to wave the citizen-empowering rhetoric of S21 in the face of signatured doom. They realised that S21 was ultimately useless currency, as valuable as banana money that was in circulation during the Japanese Occupation.
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