2003-03-19 - 4:49 a.m.

I would like to start by first sharing with you a poem I had written recently, about a certain incident in my childhood. It is called Keppel Road, which is the place where I lived when I was attending my first schooling year.

Keppel Road

Talc on my face. And the instruction:
'Do not mix with your own kind.
Learn from the others. Copy them
In what they do, find out their secrets,
Learn how to compete with them.'

I obeyed. Sat beside a Chinese boy.
Lined up beside another.
By the end of the year
I was third in the class
My prize a box of building blocks.

And later, in Primary School,
'Cikgu, cakap Melayu apa?'
In Secondary School I refused
To join the Malay Cultural Club.
I practised the language only

One week before the Orals.
And then that one time
I relented and joined them
As a chorus member
For a Dikir Barat performance

I was the stiff one. All on video.
Mother, I wanted to know then
What it was you took from me.
I knew what you had given me
When you put that white mask

On my face, talc heaped up like snow
On my eyelashes. In the video
My wooden hands are grasping in the air.
In my memory your hands
Are smooth, fragrant, and sinless.

For those who are unacquainted with Malay, the line 'Cikgu, cakap Melayu apa?' means 'Teacher, how do I say this in Malay?' The Dikir Barat is a kind of choral singing accompanied by hand gestures which originated from Kelantanese harvest festivals. Singaporean Malays have appropriated it as a type of cultural performance, and it is widely performed by school troupes during celebrations such as Teacher's Day.

I think few would disagree with me if I were to identify my mother's actions as one that can be interpreted as a form of social engineering. Somehow, my mother was convinced that the Chinese were superior academically, and that my interactions with them would result in some intellectual osmosis. Seen the other way, interaction with my own Malay schoolmates would inevitably result in me being embroiled in the mechanics of an ethnic ghetto and adopting its values and practices--and a ghetto as notorious as the Malay one in Singapore, with its history of shameful statistics on delinquency and drug-addiction. Years later, the PAP government would start imposing a racial quota in schools limiting the number of minority students, revealing to me that such racist ideologies pevaded beyond the confines of my house. Of course there is the possibility that by ensuring a schooling environment that is Chinese-dominated the school's so-called 'common space' becomes a politically-contrived 'cultured space', but I shall not deal with that issue in this paper.

I know this forum is supposed to be on culture and history, but I'll get there in a moment. I want to speak now about the kind of self-loathing I experienced while growing up as a Malay person in Singapore. I bought into theories of cultural deficit--that Malay culture does not value capitalistic enterprise, that Islam is resistant to modernity. With sighs of resignation I would study bar charts that record the underachievements of the Malay community. I hunted, or rather scavenged, for traces of dignity by scanning the lists of names on anything from cabinet portfolios to award-winners of National Science Olympiads. I had always felt that there was something wrong in being non-Chinese in Singapore, that only the Chinese came closest to national ideals such as thrift, industry and pragmatism--Malays were known to spend extravagantly on interior decoration, took minimal labour jobs as despatch riders and carpark attendants, and sent their children to madrasahs with scant consideration for job prospects in a secular society. I was like Abdullah Munsyi, the scribe of Raffles, who found himself in adoration of the supposedly rationalist and liberal humanist values of the Europeans, and at the same time mortified by the feudal practices of the slave-trading Malays.

In other words, I had been colonised.

Franz Fanon was one of the first post-colonial writers who used a psychoanalytic model to examine the effects of colonialism. I shall quote Fanon here who defined the colonial relationship as the psychological non-recognition of the subjectivity of the colonized.

"Every colonized people- in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality- finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation...If he is overwhelmed to such a degree by the wish to be white, it is because he lives in a society that makes the inferiority complex possible, in a society that derives its stability from the perpetuation of this complex, in a society that proclaims the superiority of one race; to the identical degree to which that society creates difficulties for him, he will find himself thrust into a neurotic situation." (Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks 18, 100).

What was happening, simply, was my transformation from being a Self to an Other. I am sure many of you here consider colonialism as a distinctly European phenomenon fuelled by the Enlightenment project, but here I am highlighting a certain aspect of colonialism which makes irruptions into the psyche, and not necessarily a geographical mass or socio-political system. I am talking about the mental space of the Malay Singaporean being inseminated with various ideologies through a phantasmagoria of images. I am talking about the sexual fantasies of the middle-class Malay university student who prefers fair-skinned Malay girls, and the dreams of power of the working-class Malay cleaner to be a rich Chinese towkay, driven around by a Malay chauffeur.

What recourse was there for someone like me, who felt the threat of vanishing, who sensed a disembowelling of his identity, who was deeply suspicious that the reincarnation of the Antiquated Malay into the New Malay simply meant putting on a Chinese mask? There had to be some instrument of liberation, some avenue in which I could recuperate that selfhood. Like any colonised subject, my first impulse was to examine my own culture, as opposed to the dominant Chinese culture. I wanted to explore those particular aspects which I would not have to apologise for, and which I could later vigorously defend to stake an equal claim to a national discourse locked under Sinocentric hegemony.

Here I thrust headlong into the topic of today's forum. There is no such thing as an ahistorical culture, as much as one would want to assert that Singapore's culture is one of a permanent state of forgetting or of an eternal present. The transmission of culture itself is a historical act. At the risk of advocating cultural essentialism, an unreflective nativism or in plain PAP-speak, branded a racial chauvinist, I wish to ask the questions: is there such a thing as a Malay history in Singapore? If so, in what ways does it offer a counter-ideological challenge to a Singaporean, or rather, multicultural history?

In a poem by Mohd Rafaat Hamzah, a youth is asked who the founder of Singapore is. The youth replies 'Raffles', and the response in the next line, is the word 'dusta'. 'Dusta' is an Arabic-derived word which means 'lies', but carries with it a much greater degree of severity. It is unclear to the reader the identity of the person who utters this word 'dusta'--it could be the character in the poem who first asked the question, the author, Rafaat himself, or perhaps the voice of History itself. What is clear, to me at least, is that the instance of the founding of Singapore is a potential site of contestation in enacting an indigenous history. In our history books, Raffles is portrayed as a benign colonialist with an enlightened mission who was responsible for two significant events: Singapore's transition to modernity, as well as the influx of Chinese and Indian labour. To some others, Raffles' position is more dubious, as exemplified by the title of a book by Syed Hussein Alatas called 'Thomas Stamford Raffles, 1781-1826: Schemer or Reformer?' It is a fact that many Malays do see the handover of Singapore by a puppet Temenggong as an act of treason and naivete, a combination of both feudal avarice and Imperialist manipulations, and a starting point of the Malays' long narrative of dispossession.

At the base of Raffles' statue is the following inscription:

ON THIS HISTORIC SITE

SIR THOMAS STAMFORD RAFFLES

FIRST LANDED IN SINGAPORE

ON 28TH JANUARY 1819

AND WITH GENIUS AND PERCEPTION

CHANGED THE DESTINY OF SINGAPORE

FROM AN OBSCURE FISHING VILLAGE

TO A GREAT SEAPORT AND

MODERN METROPOLIS

A few things would strike the casual observer. Firstly, why such laudatory epithets for someone who was essentially a colonialist who was more interested in furthering the interests of Britannia than that of the local population? Secondly, how true is that reference to 'an obscure fishing village', which ignores Singapore's then position as part of the Riau-Lingga empire, thereby relegating Singapore's 1819 history to the realm of pre-civilisation oblivion?

According to the academic Stephen Chen from a paper called 'Engineering a Nation: Singapore's Development as enclosure and Myth:

"This Myth of civilisation still persists even though artefacts uncovered from Fort Canning hill suggest extensive trade routes and a highly developed culture prior to Raffles. According to the Malay Annals, which were first compiled around 1520, Sang Nila Utama sailed to Temasek in 1299 and landed in Telok Blangah. Some historians suggest that since there were no lions in Singapore, Sang Nila Utama’s renaming of Temasek signified he was re-establishing the lion throne which he had set up in Palembang. He ruled Singapura for 48 years and was buried on Bukit Larangan (Forbidden Hill) that the British later renamed Fort Canning in 1860. It seems highly improbable that a ruler would abandon his seat of sovereignity and bring his entourage with him just to rule a small fishing village with few inhabitants for 48 years. The details of the rule of the Malay Kings are sketchy because the history of the colonialist has enclosed and recoded them into myths in the Myth of progress."

One cannot help but consider that the Raffles effigy is used strategically to provide legitimacy for a history that posits 1819 as time zero. The deification of a colonialist also serves to authorise the colonial enterprise as a benevolent force that is inimically tied in with the ideology of progress. Eerily enough, one of the founding fathers of the PAP, Lim Chin Siong, often appears as a footnote in official history records, a fate shared by the Scotsmen William Farquhar as well as John Crawford, two protagonists responsible but generally less celebrated for Singapore's transformation into a trading port and urban centre. Considering such omissions committed in the name of a national history, I cannot help but entertain the idea that Singapore as a nation was not built on anti-colonial resistance, but is merely an extension, and perpetuation, of a colonial project, handed down from the British to its new Chinese masters. In the words of Stephen Chen again:

"Here then, is the key to the success of the development project in Singapore. The PAP never ended colonialism, they were perfectly at home encased in the neoclassical grandeur of City Hall; it merely substituted the Myth of civilization with the Myth of development. By enshrining the Myth of Raffles and colonization, it links and incorporates its own Myths to the Myth of empire..."

The current colonial enterprise, so invisible to most of us because of our belief that independence had brought an end to colonialism, enacts itself through various channels. It would be too easy to think that the State is responsible for much of this epistemic violence, but as Edward Said points out in his book 'Orientalism', the project of empire was abetted by various players, including academics, scientists and writers. The following list provides what I think are examples of sites for the inflitration and performance of the colonial project. Since this paper intends to only provide a brief overview, I will merely mention them without structuring them taxonomically:

1) The Tourism Board's valorisation of the Merlion myth at the Sentosa Merlion, where visitors are told about how it was first sighted by Sang Nila Utama. Apparently, when a storm threatened to capsize Sang Nila's ship, the Merlion rose out of the waters and thereafter, the weather became calm. This is a curious detail that was not recorded in the 391-year-old Malay Annals. The Merlion itself was designed as an emblem for the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) in 1964. The inclusion of Sang Nila Utama, a historical figure, in its creation myth is a profanation to Malay historical documents.

2) The bronze statues along Boat Quay depict a group of boys jumping into the river. The artist has depicted all of them as slit-eyed, with distinctive Chinese features, suggesting to the viewer that the original inhabitants of the island were Chinese. These suggestions achieve their force through two factors: firstly, that the earliest settlements in Singapore were built near the Singapore River, and secondly, that we mostly perceive immigrants as adults, since most of them were indentured labour.

3) The canonisation of the Nanyang artists, who were famous for their Bali project, where they painted Balinese 'natives' in an attempt to represent the South East Asian indigene. Most of the subjects consisted of bare-breasted Balinese women in indolent postures of decorating themselves, dancing, or in repose. The Bali project, as much as it married the formalist aspects of Chinese and Western painting, also created an Orientalist chasm between the artist and subject: between self and other, urban and rural, sophisticate and primitive. A more extensive study of these images might explain the attitudes of many Singaporeans to the Indonesian riots, which was conceived as an uncivilised population succumbing to base impulses, and also the persistence of the myth of the 'lazy native'.

4) The tendencies, in SAF policies to feminise the colonised, viewing Malays as prone to religious hysteria or communal irrationalities. Responding to a call for dialogue by the Malay community on the position of Malays in the army, Lee Kuan Yew himself agreed in principle, but warned that discussions should not be too emotional; in his own words, no 'baby-talk'.

5) The rhetoric of Singapore as an 'immigrant society', frankly obliterating the important distinctions between 'transmigration' and 'internal migration', the latter referring to movement within the Malay archipelago among people who share certain cultural, linguistic and even phenotypic traits.

6) The obstructions to serious archeological study in Singapore. Many historians interested in archaelogical study here speak of their frustrations when negotiating with developers to study a site undergoing excavation. They are often confronted by impossible deadlines and restricted access. Whether this is a result of a state directive or simply bureaucratic inflexibility is unknown, but no concerted, government-supported attempt was made to test the hypothesis that the civic district held the remains of an ancient Malay fort when development began at Bras Basah Park for the new university.

7) The election of an intermediary between the coloniser and the colonised, in much the same way as translators were handpicked during colonial times. There is a Minister-in-charge of Muslim Affairs, but none for say, Christian, Hindu or Buddhist affairs.

8) The predominance of Chinese artefacts in the permanent collection of the Asian Civilisations Museum, where the exclusion of artefacts from the Malay world raises questions of whether the Malays had a civilisation to begin with.

As can be seen from the above examples, the complicitous parties in the orientalist project consists of a motley bunch comprising the tourism board, the academia, the construction industry, the military, the heritage committee as well as artists. And their net effect is to not only annihilate the history of the colonised, but also to invent new myths of primacy as well as exaggerate the superiority of the colonisers.

Here is Edward Said again, on Orientalism: 'The Orient is seen as separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passive. It has a tendency towards despotism and away from progress. It displays feminine penetrability and supine malleability. Its progress and value are judged in terms of, and in comparison to, the West, so it is always the Other, the conquerable, and the inferior.'

What then, is the meaning of nationhood, to a Malay Singaporean like me? What is the meaning of a nation when there are still colonised subjects who are framed as separate, backward, sensual and passive? Time and again I have been told that Malay history is irrelevant, since it privileges one of Singapore's four main races over the others. I have been told that it is a liability, a statement that is closer to the truth, since the majority Chinese would scarcely like to be reminded that they are a settler community. Then there is also the question of what recognising the indigeneity of the Malays would mean in terms of modifying State policies. Would the government be obliged to commit more fervently to Section 152 of the Constitution which states the special position of the Malays, beyond providing conditional subsidies for education? Would it be as wantonly audacious as it had been in ordering the eviction of the residents of Istana Kampung Glam, the final trace of a Malay royal lineage, or the closure of the madrasahs?

I am only too aware of potential abuses when a community insists on its nebulous claims to power by constructing a puerile nativism based on an imagined past, as illustrated by the racially-elitist Bumiputra policies in Malaysia. Yet at the same time I often ponder on the ethics of erasing a community's history so as to appease the insecurities of other communities. The history of the Chinese, Indians and Eurasians is a history of transplantation. Their trajectory is moulded by a survivalist ethic which sought to initially adapt to and later conquer their new habitat. It is a narrative where survivalism emerges as triumphalism. The history of the Malays, on the other hand, is one of displacement. Its narrative is one which is still reeling from the shock of loss and the bewilderment of being reduced to second-class citizens. Unless this distinction is recognised, then multiculturalism in Singapore will never be the democratic utopia it purports to be, but a fascist institution where a minority community is castrated on the false altar of a hypocritical meritocracy. How can I be asked to participate in nation-building and yet be told to leave my own history at the door?

The single biggest threat to maintaining my Malay identity is not the onslaught of so-called Western values, nor the rise of locally and culturally-incompatible Islamic fundamentalism, but to have the word 'Malay' under the race category on my pink Singapore identity card. As a colonised subject, who is now aware of my situation, the condition of living in Singapore is one of abject humiliation, a pathological limbo state where I feel guilty, over-scrutinised and criminalised, for who I am, and for who I cannot be. I paraphrase Franz Fanon here, substituting the word 'Negro' with 'Malay':

"Without a Malay past, without a Malay future, it is impossible for me to live my Malayness. Not yet yellow, no longer wholly brown, I am damned." (Fanon 138) And it is this damnation that I feel, that has prompted me to pack my bags and leave for another country at the slightest opportunity, taking my doomed history into exile along with me.

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