Written Things

Singapore Sling

A short passage from a piece on “The Singapore Sling” I wrote, which will unlikely make it to the final cut. I’m quite proud of this one bit:

“The Long Bar does very little to contradict my orientalist theory. It’s mummified orientalism. The whole experience is crypt-like. One enters up a vintage stairwell—grasping its storied balustrade for support— then stalks across an expanse of smugly-discarded peanut shells. The crunch is eerily osseous, as are the colonial trappings of the space. Mechanised punkahs swing miserably from the ceilings, operated by and evoking the ghosts of long dead punkawallahs. There is far too much rattan. Everywhere, like spectres, are the spiritless faces of visitors caught in the limbo that is heritage tourism, drinking muted-red vitality from poco grande glasses. The confusion on their faces is elemental. It attends to almost everything about the place. With me, the museum pieces, like vengeful spirits, seem to demand “why” of the living. Why? Why? Why is this drink so famous? Postcolonial distaste fills my mouth. I refuse to indulge the peanut shell strewing. Finally, the drink is brandished at the table by a waiter who almost ironically intones that one enjoy one’s drink.

A first sip of the drink and as if by magic, the live band whose genre I can only describe as Hotel Four-Piece starts to play “Careless Whisper”. Everyone except the nonchalant bassist and bald saxophonist sports an atrocious Bon Jovi perm.”

On stuff that claims to be boundary breaking

I caught “Fourplays: ABCD” by Theatreworks this evening. It was directed by Vertical Submarine, a visual arts collective. Gonna write this in point form as a tribute to form breaking.

1. Preamble: If you open the programme notes with something akin to “we don’t actually like theatre,” then I’m not inclined to trust your decision to use theatre as a medium. But that was just a rant.

2. The piece was essentially 4 great short stories by Arlt, Borges, Cortaza and Duras planted over live action. The strategy was the interplay of extra-diegetic narration with diegetic speech. In other words: actors mostly moved around and spoke selectively as narration happened above them. 

a) on a formal level, what was certainly at work was an attempt to blur the distinctions between prose and drama— speech and reading, writing and movement etc. Vertical Submarine clearly has an interest in breaking boundaries. Here, a choice quote from an interview they gave to promote the piece, in answer to the question ‘do visual artists make good playwrights?’:

“These are categories that arose out of the specialization and division of labour, of which many of us, including writers (another one of these categories) are not aware, which is very sad.”

i) if I were to be conservative, I would say that ‘division of labour’ is a stupid way to characterize the emergence of artistic forms over the history of human art-making. But that’s just a conservative thing to say, and might be faintly territorialist, old-fashioned and pre-theoretical. If I were to be progressive and take on board what is clearly a kind of post-structuralist way of thinking of things, then, yes, in many ways Art is the Great Work whose constitution is divided, probably arbitrarily, amongst different forms. The Work is the great reservoir from which there are many outlets that admit it into the world; all artists are at some point only conduits of Text etc etc and should thus think of their work as completely porous, interchangeable and their roles not as productive geniuses, but as transcribers. Or taps. 

ii) Thesis: the problem with Vertical Submarine is that it hasn’t in fact been very consistent, in praxis, with its genre-breaking philosophy. 

3. One of the key ideas of the kind of boundariless/boundary-breaking art-making like Fourplays: ABCD is that the recipient of the work of art is complicit in/responsible for the production of the work, often more so than the actual artists, who are in any case usually taken to be incidental. It’s an idea taken from Barthes-type literary criticism, viz. the Text is produced by the meeting of Reader and Work, or: interpretation is the text. It’s also a strong idea in theatre, i.e. that the audience is the final collaborator. Right out of this critical tradition, V.S., in the same interview from before, say, in response to a question about how the three who make up V.S. split the work between them:

“The work is not only divided between the three of us but between the whole production team and TheatreWorks, and even the audience who made serious effort to watch the play.”

[it’s probably not immediately clear how deliberately annoying these people are from the quotations I’ve chosen so far, and so the full interview bears some reading if you want to understand part of why I’m writing this piece]

i) It follows that the Work that’s presented should either a) make some room for the Reader or b) remain unapologetically expressionist and obscure, to some extent unreadable, such that the act of readerly inscription, production, whatever etc becomes the point.

[Strategy A is still largely manipulative and not purely ‘boundary breaking’, because a work that compensates/accounts for the reader is in effect creating its own reader (a more high-minded version of, say, pink-coloured women’s magazines producing their own ideological reader… at some level, no work can truly avoid this, since it always relies on some kind of language, which is itself constitutive of the reading subject but whatever).]

ii) I’ve seen some very good examples of strategy B in Singapore. There was “Dream Country,” conceptualized by Marion de Cruz and executed by a collective of directors and performance artists. To my mind, what “Dream Country” invested in was a game of signs and associations: the basic visual motifs were urns, water, women, earth and rough textile. Then, there was the dynamic language of movement, expression and (minimally) sound. Finally, there was a vague dramatic arc which I can’t remember. The kind of work that’s done here is a collaboration between audience and work: an entire spectrum of narratives, ideas, feelings etc, probably limitless in number based on whatever intellectual or visceral reactions and associations the piece’s languages provoked. This was good. Moving and thrilling at moments but often frustrating. It was nonetheless compelling because it challenged the audience to be attentive and to participate, and at some points the work was sublimely beautiful in the primal simplicity of flesh on soil, flesh on material. The work itself, even without one having to map over a complex readerly narrative, was often riveting for that reason. 

iii) Basically what I’m saying is that a V.S-type theory of art should read something like this: the work is what it is, we don’t apologise for it, we’re not trying to make you understand it, it defies definition, it comes from a place of deep thought and meditation, it needn’t be beautiful, but there is truth in it, it may not be fully readable, but it will provoke you, it will challenge you to do part of the work, to be part of the work. 

4. The problem with FPABCD is that it didn’t go far enough to be valuably and meaningfully boundary-breaking. In fact, it wasn’t boundary-breaking at all. In further fact, it broke the number one rule (I use the term casually) of funky avant-garde post-structuralist type art which is that FPABCD often told instead of showed. 

i) I realise “show don’t tell” is a kind of playwriterly mantra, since the act of dramatic storytelling relies on live, real-time evocation rather than narratorial perspective, i.e. in drama, nobody really tells you what’s going on, and if you can hear the heavy voice of a narrator, then the playwright’s stepped in too much. I don’t necessarily mean “show don’t tell” in this micro-sense.

I mean “show don’t tell” on a formal level, where ideally the work is left there unexplained, operating on its own internal logic, and there’s nothing so vulgar as deliberate indication, explanation or hand-holding (i.e. telling) to orient the reader/watcher within any kind of fixed interpretive frame-work. If the critical canon surrounding Shakespeare, pointing to the deep ambiguity of all those plays, says anything, it is that this “show don’t tell” thing isn’t even necessarily restricted to postmodern boundary-breaking theatre. But it becomes increasingly important to any work that claims to be boundary-breaking, because the conventional rules of interpretation, i.e. ‘this form says that you interpret so-and-so as this’ (e.g. the reliable romantic comedy schtick where the dyspeptic, slightly awkward wing-people of the romantic leads hook up at the wedding) are = in a de facto state of suspension, thrown out of the window with the broken boundaries. 

ii) By saying that FBABCD “told” more than it “showed,” I’m saying that it  constantly, doggedly, even delightedly framed how it was to be read in some of the most comically obvious and self-aware ways that, in the absence of V.S.’s own philosophies about the production of art, I would have thought were ironic. The fact that it frames interpretation at all is doubly damning considering the other frame that was going on, i.e. the framing of 4 short stories. Doubly damning because it wasn’t just FBABCDwhich V.S. was teaching us to interpret, but the 4 short stories as well. 

5. I’ll do a kind of detailed commentary of two of the pieces that most stuck out (to be fair, I left at intermission and missed the Arlt).

6. Playlet One, but let’s not call it a playlet, let’s call it something neutral like ‘Piece’. Piece 1 was based, actually in essence lifted wholesale, from Borges’s “The Shape of the Sword”. Borges’s piece is a story about the narrator, Borges, who has a drunken conversation with a mysterious Englishman in a tavern, which Englishman turns out to be Irish. Asked by Borges to describe the history of a horrific gash across his face, the Englishman/Irishman tells a harrowing story of his experiences in some Irish civil war or another. At a pretty hair-prickling moment, it turns out that the Irishman has been falsely narrating the story as the guy who gave him the scar, apparently in order to actually tell the story without being judged as the fucker who betrayed the man who gave him shelter etc etc. 

i) Several things are interesting from a literary point of view: the twisted narration— essentially three levels of narration, two obvious, one hidden until the end. Narratorial self-distancing: the Irishman-masquerading-as-the-guy-he-screwed-over constantly debases himself (in disguise). It’s a brilliant feat of postmodern narration with a nod in the direction of the gothic tradition. So a few things are at work in the story: levels of truth, distancing, judgment; a certain kind of Uncanniness as well which emerges at the end when the repressed, embedded voice of the villain rises and merges with the voice of the narrating subject. 

ii) It’s a frighteningly rich text to mine in a literary-critical sense, a great deal to work with. Most of the story’s complexity has to do with the texture of embedded narration: the reader constantly moves from reality to reality, like descending the levels of Chris Nolan’s Inception. This is something that happens seamlessly and for the most part unconsciously in prose form as we’re tossed from one level of reality to another: the tavern, then Ireland, then back to the tavern etc. It also carries across fairly successfully to live narration. In prose, the horrific, Uncanny aspect of the ending only happens because of the persuasive, conversational nature of first person narrative— the beauty of the Borges story is that it twists a knife deep into the eye of the reader and subverts readerly expectations of narration. It’s the classic case of an unreliable narrator, except it comes as a big shocker at the end. The frames collapse, the text is briefly chaotic, and then it all resolves in an ugly, tainted finale. 

7. The problem with V.S.’s staging of this story was that it assumed the prose form needed tinkering with. I’m not being conservative when I say this: in staging the story the way they did, I’m suggesting V.S. missed the postmodern complexity of the story. The staging was painfully literal: two actors, one the outermost frame narrator, the other the Englishman, sitting in a tavern. The Englishman character basically reads out his narration as Borges writes it. Struggling against the naturally immersive quality of prose narration, V.S. used lights and sound to create a separate space on the stage, a space into which the Englishman occasionally steps so that V.S. can evoke prose’s transportive storytelling quality.

8. The V.S. staging of the Borges story contradicts V.S.’s boundary-breaking philosophy in two ways. 

i) There’s no boundary-breaking work being done in a staging that essentially tries to re-create the reading experience in a live medium. That’s basically saying that instead of teasing the margins between storytelling through prose and live performance, V.S. tried to re-create one in the other, i.e. no boundary is broken— ideally, watching the V.S. staging is like actually reading the story (in one’s head). Which would be cool, if the V.S. staging actually came close to the quality of prose narration. For the most part, what V.S. offered us in the staging of the Borges was a pale imitation of the reading experience. e.g. where prose narration does its immersive/transportive work imaginatively, the V.S. staging utilised corny Hollywood-style SFX and patently racist Irish music in a way that was hand-holding and directional. In fact, what V.S. does is worse than a pale imitation of the reading experience, it is a circumcision of that experience by locking down in actual tangible, visible and audible detail (through costume, music and props) what would otherwise be left to the readerly/spectatorly imagination. Clearly, very little thought was put into this aspect of the direction. Consider how contemporary theatre and performance studies offer V.S. the tools to achieve what would have been a more successful boundary-breaking staging. Just off the top of my head: a single actor, flitting in and out of realities with a shift in timbre or a gesture or a shift in the lights, could have magically achieved with barely any obvious directorial intrusion the kind of fluid narratorial performance that is inherent in the prose form. It’s not even a particularly cutting edge idea: Schubert did it to chilling effect in Erlkonig with the solo singer straddling three voices.

ii) which leads to the 2nd way in which V.S’s staging of the Borges story failed on V.S.’s own terms. The literal, actualised specificity of the staging misses the protean quality of framed narration, and the direction makes up for it by being overly heavy-handed. The main cause of this is that the two characters are constantly on stage, physically fixed in the context of the outermost frame narrative (i.e. the tavern). The V.S. staging never successfully transports the Englishman out of the scene, he’s always literally there, even if he’s thrashing about in Ireland in the throes of civil war, he’s doing so in a pantomimic way in the tavern, in the presence of a guy who doesn’t say very much to him. For this reason, the stacked texture of narration which is so essential to that final stab in the reader’s eye is completely lost— there’s only one, flat level, made even worse by V.S’s largely 2-dimensional and horizontal visual composition. The flatness is so bad that when the twist does come, V.S. resorts to all kinds of histrionics, from maudlin shaking-head-in-hands acting on the part of the frame narrator to, I kid you not, a jang-jang-jang crash of thunder. The subtlety of the Borges is completely lost. Where the horror in the Borges comes in suddenly hearing, out of nowhere, the sound of evil in the voice of the trusted narrator, in the V.S. staging, there’s instead a failed attempt to produce this in melodrama.

iii) In many ways, the original Borges, locked in its prose form, is a lot more boundary breaking than the V.S. staging. In Borges, horror is produced from a subversion of the pact readers make with narrators. This is subversive on a literary-historical level considering the received esteem for narrators that Western literature has handed down over the years. Also, considering Borges’s own ambivalent position, there’s a strong postcolonial element at work. This is a level that V.S. claims they wish to access, seeing as they refer in the programme and in that interview to the ambivalence felt by both Latin-American and Singaporean writers of writing in the language of colonizers… but the V.S. staging completely shoots itself in the foot here. What V.S. does is reduce the complexity of the Borges to a turgid, largely static and uninteresting situation where one guy talks a lot and another doesn’t, and where the guy who talks a lot later turns out to have been lying all the while, which kind of pisses off the guy who doesn’t talk. This clearly stems from V.S’s vague curatorial angle which claims that FBABCD examines the ‘impossibility of dialogue,’ which is such a crock of bullshit considering there wasn’t any attempt to retrofit the Borges into a dialogic structure at all. Nor was there any understanding that the key dialogue in Borges, which is a broken, flawed and corrupted dialogue, is that between the reader/listener of the narration and the narrator. This is to say that a narrated staging of the Borges with an interest in the “impossibility of dialogue” obviously needs to include the key listener, i.e. the audience, in the narration, through clear performance strategies like actual audience-directed monologue. V.S. doesn’t do this: we’re completely locked out of the conversation because V.S. is 100% fixated on the failure of communication between the two people on stage. They completely miss the point.

9. What I think is actually at work in FPABCD is a kind of showy cleverness, where V.S. is mostly interested in a) demonstrating that they’ve read and understood these stories b) want you to know this. This is most clear in their staging of Duras’s The Malady of Death. This story directly fits the second part of the curatorial angle to do with the “impossibility of human relationships”. A man hires a prostitute for a couple of days and wishes for the encounter to transcend sex and become love; she basically eludes him. It’s a terse and obscure meditation on the inscrutability of women to men. 

i) Strangely, during the performance, it became crystalline clear to me that the story was really a complex metaphor for the act of reading or interpretation. I’m not kidding. The vacant, inscrutable text of the woman’s body and heart, her confounding refusal to easily give meaning, the orgasmic joy of finding “a few words” that resonate with the man’s own soul… the whole Sex/Text, Orgasm/Meaning thing is what Calvino does to a frustrating degree in On a Winter’s Night A Traveller and, to me, it couldn’t have been clearer what was going on in Duras. It’s not that I’m especially clever or perceptive, here’s why: the V.S. staging practically threw this reading at us.

ii) The man of the story does nothing but walk around reading, get this, a book. The woman who appears in the scene with him constantly walks over to a pile of papers and writes feverishly on them, at one point even throwing them about feverishly as if no one saw that coming. There’s also a voice-over narration which cross-fades in and out with spoken lines from the actors, so the whole thing feels like it’s suspended in text— sound, image and meaning inter-penetrate in a way that’s evocative of that space in our heads where reading happens. Later, another woman arrives who turns out to be the prostitute in question and the first writer-lady at some point literally writes on the hooker. I made absolutely no sense of the thing except on this one interpretive level which was so blatantly announced in the direction that I couldn’t miss it. 

iii) And I don’t think the point was to miss it. It was clearly a reading that had been discovered at some point and made to dominate: once there, it constantly called attention to itself as if to reflexively comment on the difficult, obscure nature of the piece (it’s highly intractable in its original form), and the audience’s own struggle to make meaning of it. 

10. Obviously, the philosophical issue with this is that V.S. was massaging a reading. In spite of its exploration of the “impossibility of dialogue,” here, V.S. had very little trouble laying interpretive signposts all over the place to help us along. The fussy direction, the busy, overlapping sound scape… the direction called attention to itself, and for this reason the work was not left to be what it was: it actively directed us to meaning. There’s nothing so boundary-breaking about this. What V.S. is doing by laying such a thick level of interpretation over the Duras is claiming some kind of authorship-via-interpretation. This is, in and of itself, an okay idea considering the creative work that’s often involved in interpretation, translation and mistranslation. Directors do it all the time with revisionist or avant garde or updated stagings of classics that draw out some interesting level of meaning or another. Writers do it all the time with interpolative re-writings. But it is super not-okay for V.S. because the paradigm in which they work, which they defend with such snottiness, is apparently completely porous, collaborative and unstructured. But claiming authorship is claiming boundaries between reader and writer, it’s claiming ownership. “Look here: this is my interpretation. This is my version”. 

11. Obviously, I left the theatre very angry. Not because of all the above, but because the show was so blatantly bad— it was very bad theatre. But I couldn’t criticise it on that level because the project they set out to do was to not-do theatre, on some level to expand our notions of what theatre is. They had some kind of mystic shield over them whose name is The Avant Garde. I was so pissed off by this, that I decided I needed to find a way to expose the sham-ness of their boundary-breaking philosophy, and I hope I have.

12. I’m frankly sick of this kind of theatre. It’s not like I didn’t understand it. It was bad: it was so unremittingly, smugly bad. It’d be a lot less bad if these people had approached the project with some kind of honesty—“I really like these stories, I want you to experience them”. But V.S. tried to float this under a far more fancy-sounding angle: “oh these stories are all about the impossibility of communication and human relationships. Yeah, we’re trying to destabilize notions of what is and is not possible in the theatre, we’re breaking down boundaries between forms.” I mean, if you want to do four Latin American writers and one French writer because their names give you ABCD, then just do it. But when the work contradicts the curatorial angle (which is vague at best), and when the work contradicts the art-maker’s supposed approach to art-making and audiences and the theatre in general, and when the creators wish to subvert a form without actually understanding it, then it’s all a little sad and quite upsetting.

13. There’s too much of this going around: stuff that is internally inconsistent, poorly conceived and executed. It’s also pretentious. The tacit claim of this kind of work is that it doesn’t give a fuck about what audiences think, but that’s really a kind of macho guise to hide behind. At least with V.S., it masks the absence of discipline, rigour and truth which  make what seems like an old fashioned cocktail for art, but, hey it’s a pretty damned good one. I wish people would stop supporting this stuff without any discernment: it’s not good to claim that one is being ‘open minded’ about it—if it’s bad it’s bad. It’s like the emperor’s new clothes: call it out for what it is. 

What I’ve Learned from Rain

Piece I wrote for Esquire Singapore, out in this April’s edition. 

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What I’ve Learned From Rain

The past couple of months have been strange ones for Singapore, and I’m not talking (yet) about irritable shifts in the national temper. I’m talking about rain. Rain used to be something abstract that existed in the realm of the subjunctive, like a parking ticket or a by-election. In the past few months, however, since at least late 2012, rain has taken on a kind of morbid predictability. The strange thing to me is that despite this, Singaporeans seem always to be caught by surprise by inclement weather. I mean surprise to an almost malicious and self-righteous degree, e.g. large bunches of people stranded outside the H&M along Orchard Road (one of the most notoriously unsheltered parts of the downtown belt), staring accusingly at the rain falling from dark clouds that had been looming above for the past hour.

I remember my first visit to Tokyo. I happened on the city in late May which, as it turned out, was the beginning of the seasonal rains. The one thing I took away from that rain-dampened trip was that Japanese people in the wet seasons never seem to leave home without an umbrella. I learned that the Japanese have a kind of obsessive reverence for the weather, a spiritual and communal connection to the patterns of rainfall, sun &c that stems from larger cultural attachments to the passing of seasons.

Put it down to our fairly static weather patterns, but Singaporeans don’t have the same deep connection to the natural world around us. We’ve never really cultivated a relationship with our weather: no Singaporean I know habitually checks the weather forecast, nor do we typically leave the house with an umbrella. The rain always gets the better of us. Unless otherwise indicated, we assume it’s going to be hot, humid and sticky.

Now this probably sounds like a stretch, but I’m going to put it out there anyway: I think our relationship with rain might tell us something a little more profound about the way we as a nation relate to ourselves and our “culture”. i.e. unless otherwise indicated, we just assume things will stay the same or aren’t worth thinking about, and we don’t take very much interest in anything.

Accordingly, I think that we’ve not explored— through introspection, self-awareness, lamentation or celebration— who we are as a people because we’ve never had to. This in turn is because, since the fact of 1965, we’ve been content to take as the sum of our lives the logic of work, wealth-accumulation and the display of wealth. Other than that, we’ve been completely disinterested in ourselves, or at least in a sustained, honest and difficult reflection about who we are as a society. It seems needless to say that this is not imperative in the logic of city- (not nation-) building: introspection can be damaging and disruptive to a city run on an algorithm whose terms are order and efficiency.  

But we’ve spent so many years ignoring ourselves that now, in these times where we’ve been forced to consider questions of us and them, we’re beginning to find that who we are is neither as stable nor articulable as we thought. The scary thing to confront is that there might not actually be anything to categorically call a “we”. Even Singlish and Food, these two supposed hallmarks of what it means to be Singaporean, are vestiges of our shared cultural and social history with Malaysia. To wit: on a recent trip to New York City, I met a lady who worked behind the counter of a Vietnamese ban mih joint in Chinatown. The minute she spoke, I heard the familiar cadences of home and asked her if she was Singaporean. “No,” she said, “I’m from Malaysia”. I could’ve sworn she was one of us, but I guess she was one of them. 

What’s left when you pare away the history is the cold truth. “Singaporeanness” is really just the inevitable logic which undergirds any city. It’s not about multiculturalism, or Asian values, or tolerance or surviving great adversity. It’s about money, work and personal gratification. Our “culture” is made of the values and behaviours which grow from that base. It’s an infrastructure of selfishness. It’s the culture of the nouveau riche.

If we’d spared the time as a people to take a hard look at ourselves, we might perhaps have realized this earlier. The following might also be true:

We would have noticed that we depend on badly-made versions of ourselves to eke out a sense of identity.

Pursuant to #1, we would have noticed that our most popular art forms—mainstream film, television and theatre— traffic in weak comic potshots at lives spent on trains and offices; films and T.V. shows and plays which celebrate—albeit wearily— our kiasu-worker-drone ideology.

We would read and write more, in anger, in consternation, with urgency and fear, about ourselves. 

We would react in horror not at the atrocities STOMP! routinely collects but at the belief that we can and should openly shame people who don’t behave properly according to our thresholds for difference.

We would recognize that the energy behind this recent blossoming of political dissent is less a Renaissance in citizenship than it is a selfish fear that our comfort is at stake.

We relate precisely to our culture as we do to our weather, i.e. disconnectedly. Our meteorological disconnect parallels a more crucial plugged-outedness from what might loosely be termed our “shared imagination,” viz. our sense of who we are, our culture. Sadly, it’s only when the rains come, when the unpleasant consequences of our wealth-driven ambitions catch us by surprise, that we’re suddenly forced, collectively, as a nation, to have this ambivalent and impossible debate about who we are. Just as with the MRT, which only began to call attention to itself because it started screwing up, Singaporeans are only now beginning to pay attention to our culture because it’s become clear in recent months just how broken it is.

We should watch ourselves. Keep one eye on us, and another on the dark clouds that have been amassing for so many years now. Watchfulness: this is what I’ve learned from the rain.

queer nation

I think we don’t realise enough how big a problem the concept of the Family presents to queer activism in Singapore. Yes, we oppose traditional ideas of the family in service of a larger fantasy of gay marriage and adoption, i.e. everyone should be allowed to love and form families, not just people who want to have kids; anyone can form a parental unit, not just heterosexual couplings; love is the lowest common denominator, and you should recognise that in all its forms etc. Yes, this seems to oppose very trenchant values associated with family: i.e. relation by blood, intimacy as the sole province of heterosexual family units and a dynamic, plural view of society organised in alternative ways. This is all fine, except we additionally wish for gay desire to become a national issue i.e. frame the issue as one of diversity within the nation; i.e. for the state and the nation to recognise gay people as citizens.

But we perhaps don’t really understand how central the idea of Family is to Singapore’s present-day conception of Nation and citizenship. It’s become clear in recent months with the emergence of Singapore’s demographic and immigration crises that the tacit understanding of national identity has to do with birthright. Whether one was born/raised here has become a point of identification: you’re not Singaporean if you weren’t born and raised here— even if you’ve lived here for a great many years, the fact of your being here is tied to a wave of immigration meant to supplant the lack of people being born here. We’re told to reproduce, to marry or face the consequences of being crowded out of our city. This kind of rhetoric has proven incredibly persuasive for many Singaporeans and has resulted in a very bitter, chauvinistic nationalism. Family has become central to Singapore’s national identity— being part of a family, having a family, propagating a family have become the terms along which one’s in-group and out-group status is decided. The state itself enshrines this in housing policy, in benefits given to people with children, in an emphasis on bringing up children which extends to areas as diverse as education and media censorship…

So when we declare 377(A) is a national issue, i.e. when we claim that gay Singaporeans are good Singaporeans, are good citizens, we don’t realise that gay people actually fall very far away from what it means for something to be a national issue. Despite gay people’s own desires to form families, to get married, to settle into domestic partnerships, they still don’t fit into the structures built by blood-relation; queer families don’t in any way accord with national conceptions of good citizenship— i.e. married with the potential to produce kids. In fact, as backward as this sounds, gay people actually disrupt and offend prevailing notions of the family. As much as we can on an intellectual and theoretical level refute these meanings of family, our national identity is too strongly and nervously tied to the family unit for queer desire to be an issue of political urgency. National identity is too strongly forged by a crisis of heterosexual culture to admit the desires of gay people as a national concern. We are part of that crisis.

If 377(A) is to be framed at all, it shouldn’t be framed along national lines, certainly not along family lines. It should be framed as part of a larger attack on nationalism. It is to become essentially unpatriotic. This is to say that the struggle is not simply to make Singaporeans tolerant of homosexuals, but to revise our conception of the nation, to make it more porous, more inclusive: it is to take a stronger front on the question of xenophobia, on cosmopolitanism, to perhaps dispense altogether with the idea of and desire for an ‘authentic’ Singaporean identity. It is to find ways of being, existing, understanding ourselves outside of the state, outside of families (to some extent, we’re already doing some of this through the kind of expression we’ve found in our queer spaces, in which we articulate alternative, non-familial ways of forming social units and carve out spaces outside of homophobic discourse). Our struggle should include the predicaments of single people and immigrants, HIV/AIDs patients, i.e. those who don’t fit comfortably into an essentially heterosexual conception of the nation. This is because, at least within the current economic environment in which we operate which will always be a function of a struggle between ‘local’ and ‘foreign,’ Singaporean identity will always be attached to generationality and reproduction; it will always favour the childbearing needs of families.

Increasingly, we’re realising that to become truly cosmopolitan and diverse, to be a city of immigrants and not a nation of ex-immigrants-who-have-set-up-root-here-formed-families-and-developed-an-artificial-sense-of-nationhood, would be to accept the diminished importance of birthright and nation. It’s perhaps time for queers to dispense with the need to be part of the nation altogether. 

Needing “Literature”

A long Facebook status-update I posted re: this (in a small measure) and the general self-congratulatory preaching to the choir that has been the recent online buzz about dramatically declining numbers of ‘O’ level Literature students. 

==

1. Isn’t it odd that we’re couching the ‘debate’ w/r/t capital-L Literature in terms of its use-value, i.e. “helps us deal with ambiguity,” + “makes us more compassionate” + “helps us deal with our essentially meaning-making natures”… odd because the root of the problem as far as anyone can tell is that the discourse on education in Singapore is driven by a pragmatic use-value approach viz. “can’t be bothered if we can’t use it”. To my mind, any kind of “we ~need~ literature” perspective, even in absolute terms such as “we ~need~ literature to live” is basically playing into the trap. 

2. No one ~needs~ Literature— what a bourgeois idea. Here I mean Literature as an academic institution. It’s the uglier side of the big fouffy love of words and language and humanity which has been dragged out to play so much in recent weeks. Literature is to a large extent that body which takes it upon itself to govern what is and is not culturally significant and worthy of study. Is there anything more obnoxious than that? 

Yes: the idea that people ~need~ Literature— the study of Academe-ordained works— to “nurture their souls”. Or that the only way for us to deploy language for the purposes of challenging, making sense of or improving the world is Literary: through poetry, fiction and drama. People have been meaning-making, story-telling animals for generations without the institution of Literature telling them how to do so. Literature for the most part holds up that dichotomy between Low and High art which was all but demolished by the foremost thinkers of that same Academy in the 80s-90s. But for some, probably self-interested, reason, this idea doesn’t seem to have gained much traction— at least not in Cambridge. Television is literature, film is literature, comic books are literature, story-telling, love letters, 9GAG memes… these are ways in which we cope with our existences, and just because there’s no systematic study of these things (at ‘O’ Level, at least) doesn’t mean our humanity is suddenly absent. 

Obviously, what is largely at stake is a question of taste. 

3. I don’t in fact think, contrary to the way this debate has been framed, that the O level thing points to a sickness at the heart of SG society at all. I think the O level thing is a separate sickness of its own and is related but distinct from the sickness that everyone seems to be diagnosing w/r/t our society’s lack of cultural refinement. 

The O level thing points to a flaw in our education system, that’s clear enough, a system where things that are hard to score well in get phased out. This itself points to a grade-obsessed education system which we’re all familiar with. There’s nothing new or surprising about this, and we’ve all seen it coming. The unpleasant truth of the matter is that yes, Literature is not an easy subject. The way I was taught literature all the way up to ‘A’ level, if any of us made it out still “loving books and words,” (which is longspeak for being Arty and In-Touch with oneself) it was because, just as people can divorce sex and emotion, so had we learned to divorce Text and Story; or we simply enjoy the mathematical, deductive play at the heart of interpretation. Why we should expect more people to sign up for O level Lit is beyond my understanding. It’s really not for everyone, and I can think of much better, more edifying, uses of young people’s time than highlighting passages of Shakespeare or, god forbid, getting Literature tuition. 

There seems to be some confusion between the acts of reading books and studying books. They’re completely different things. What I want to see is statistics to do with how much Singapore’s young people are reading, how much ‘culture,’ (so called) they’re consuming [and even then, would we be satisfied if they were reading Twilight?]. The statistics are probably not encouraging, but the big misconception seems to be that taking O level literature has anything to do with this or that it’s going to make young people more refined or in touch with themselves. That’s a kind of wishful fantasy of i) those who have a stake in this enterprise called Literature and who have thus been speaking out the most: i.e. writers, artists and English teachers or ii) those who want to use the O level thing as a way to comment on the larger state of affairs w/r/t life in Singapore, which larger state of affairs is:

A lack of interest in a) ourselves, b) fine things, c) those aspects of life that aren’t related to work, wealth and the display of wealth.

Obviously what we’re getting wrong has fairly little to do with schools and has more to do with what I’ve been told by well-meaning adults throughout my youth, e.g. commenting on my wanting to study music, “yah think of playing music as a hobby, get a degree first”; and now that I have a degree and want to write for a living, “it’s good to have dreams but you’ve got to find something stable to do eventually,” “this is Singapore leh, where can find a living as a writer one?” 

Yes, this is Singapore, and the sickness at the heart of our society is one of those long-gestating, late-manifesting ones, and we all know where it came from. The question is generational, and has to do with inheritance. We’re only reaping from seeds that were planted years ago, and if there’s any debate at all, it should be about how to recover from our parents, both literal and State-analogical. 

There is no gay agenda

In recent weeks, working on my new play, I’ve been learning a lesson that seems to contradict the conventional wisdom wrt creativity and good living: i.e. trust your instincts. This opens up a larger discussion about the generally conflicted nature of most advice regarding creativity and writing, but I raise this because I’ve realised lately that sometimes my instincts are just plain wrong. Either that or, and I suspect this is the case, there’s a very fine and often imperceptible difference between instincts and fancy. Both hit you strongly in the gut and serve as a powerful motivating energy when writing/believing/speaking/acting. But Fancy is different from instinct because it’s coloured by ego, i.e. Fancy is concerned with reception, with originality, uniqueness, genius etc. Trusting fancy even as it goes against your instincts leads to shit. Thus the best situations are probably those in which fancy and instinct overlap, e.g. one’s artistic gut senses and one’s egotistical fancies overlap. In this moment, there is truth, power and genius.

I’ve been thinking even more about this in the past few days because of the whole Lawrence Khong-377(A)-Christians VS Social Progressives debacle, which is all over FB at the moment.

For posterity, the one thing to note is that Lawrence Khong made some run-of-the-mill Churchy statements about the Gay Agenda on his profile, and social progressives have hit back. I’ve been watching from a bit of a remove as eloquent note after note, and then hilarious parody after parody (of Khong), have floated through my Facebook Feed, written, shared and liked by a community of conscientiously liberal and cosmopolitan artsy types. The general temperature on Facebook is against Khong and pro-repeal, and a lot of the ‘debate’ (if one can call it that) so far has been fairly even; snarky in places but in most senses reasonable and educated. But I still feel very uncomfortable, not in any way because of Khong’s provocations—which are puerile and stupid for the most part and full of the sweaty contradictions Christians work themselves up into when thinking on squaring contemporary life with Biblical principle— but because of my own privately-bred beliefs wrt the gay community in Singapore. I’ll get to the point again much later, but I’ll just say for now that this has led me to think very hard about the whole fancy/instinct dichotomy.

A few words before I go on, re: Khong and Christianity in general. 

I grew up in a Christian family, and my family is still Christian, and in my last church-going years, we attended Lighthouse Evangelism (LE). LE, like so many other mega-churches who operate on a system inherited from American commercial Christianity, parroted to almost perfect lexicological precision the kinds of American-fundie right-wing bullshit you hear about on The Onion, e.g. Evolution is evil, the earth is 1000 years young, gays are bad etc etc. I left because it got tiring to restrain myself from standing up mid-sermon to scream at the stupidity of such provocations as: “J.K Rowling is a Witch (look! she even looks like one!), so we must all stop reading Harry Potter” [to be fair, unlike the church of one of my cousins, LE stopped short at having a massive HP bonfire].

I raise my religious background to assure everyone that I find this brand of Evangelical political speech as stupid as the next educated person. I also raise it to suggest that I know a thing or two about Christians.

There is a kind of uncomfortable tension between commercial Christian-religiosity and Living in the World. The former requires a series of mental acrobatics: a mental framework which basically cauterizes most critical thinking functions, replacing these with the philosophical equivalent of car-decals. By this I mean that many commercial Christians walk around with a little collection of easily-applicable principles. These are principles fabricated through shoddy hermeneutics, i.e. that special alchemy between divine and mortal; literal readings of the Bible shot through with the political convictions and psychosexual struggles of head pastors. Most Christians will be able to parrot off with a freakish ease any number of commonly-held principles regarding things such as Evolution, Homosexuality and Tithe Giving.

This is all well and good within the confines of the church, but as we all know, when it comes to living in the real world, Christians don’t fare so well. Unable to doubt, unbelieve (verb) or let their hold on their principles waver, Christians tend to go through painful-to-watch contortions when having conversations about Issues with even the least gifted of non-Christian interlocutors. This becomes an issue for many Christians who want to live meaningfully in the world: i.e. have friends, be well liked etc, and so a great deal of them just stick to themselves, where their beliefs can be massaged and their political convictions strengthened by groupthink. Case in point: without failure, all my religious-Christian friends whom I encountered in university have, over a slow but noticeable 6-12 month period, drifted apart from me and my circle of critical, bitchy artsy-type friends and now hang out almost exclusively among themselves. 

I raise all this to say a few things. 1) it’s difficult for commercial Christians to live in the real world because they’re all about transcending it; 2) there’s nothing all that surprising nor truly scandalising about what Khong has said; 3) social progressives are like Christians in many respects.

Points 1 and 2 together explain my confusion about a lot of what’s happening on FB. The scandal is incomprehensible to me, as if this is the first time people have heard this decades-old polemic. The degree of seriousness to which everyone seems to be attending to the matter is also interesting: nothing we say is going to change the minds of these people. This is because these are people who think that we are living in the end-times.

I think we don’t often enough try to understand the peculiar psychology of the average evangelical, commercial Christian: these are people who believe, with 0 irony, that in a matter of years (starting NOW!), bible-believing Christians everywhere, even trailer-park people in the USA who have intractable views on gun-control, are going to be whisked away like an evangelical meringue by the magic of Jesusportation. Taking these people seriously is, on some level, like taking a dog who wears clothing seriously: these are people who don’t even believe that they belong in the real world. The language they use (“worldly knowledge,” “worldly pursuits” etc) is Otherworldly. They live in such an ironic, disbelieving relationship with the world that it stopped being funny to them a long time ago. The fact that they’re trying to interpolate themselves into the affairs of the real world is incidental to everything else that they believe in: i.e. that we’re all going to suffer in the after-burn of big-J’s old Jewish Harley-Davidson. When we give Christians, as many commentators have, the benefit of free speech, we are, in fact, dealing with this: these people are basically conspiracy theorists who made it big. 

It’s therefore really curious to me that we’re getting worked up over Khong at all. I’m not being complacent or lazy: I really am genuinely puzzled. The only people who are in any way going to be persuaded by Khong are people who already believe a whole basket of weird shit. These are people with whom you cannot have a reasonable conversation about anything Queer because they don’t share any educated person’s perspectives on History, Social Constructivism, Liberty and the Law. You cannot talk to these people with any kind of critical position on Gender or the Family, let alone persuade them that there is anything natural and ‘right’ about homosexuality. These are people whose fullest, most sufficient education is and always will be a set of principles that their head pastor, in quiet meditation on the scriptures and the whisperings of God, has brought down to them from the mountain. Every act of rebuttal, every note of contempt from the social progressive end is both preaching to the choir and laying a coat of cement over the fundament of commercial Christian belief: i.e. that they are right because rightness provokes resistance. 

So: on one hand, I’ve followed with interest the flabbergasted anger of so many people on Facebook. On the other, I’ve become super interested in what exactly is being preached by all these well-meaning and articulate people to the well-meaning and articulate choir.

Cf. Point 3 from above, i.e. Anti-gay Christians and Pro-Gay social progressives have a lot in common. It’s true: both walk around with a handy-dandy set of arguments, ready to shoot from the hip in a series of intellectual mixed martial arts (and metaphors). To wit: reposting on Facebook. It’s often easier to ride on someone else’s well-turned phrase, clever idea and witty provocation than to be truly reflective— the nature of Facebook allows for this to happen even more fluidly.

The triply interesting thing to me, then, is that because of the ease with which opinion is shared, assimilated and canonised, I’ve noticed that on the ‘socially progressive’ side of things, the 377(A) debate has become framed in very particular ways. Probably the biggest of these are the ideas of Love/Family and Citizenship.

The most eloquent of rebuttals to Khong frame the issue of repeal in terms of “the right to love,” the universality of Family, the specificity of the nuclear family in social history, the desire to be included etc. This is probably because Khong raised the issue first, even though I’ve noticed its recurrence for a while now. But is the question wrt 377(A) really about Love and Family? Is 377(A) really a question of the right to love? 

A great number of the gay men I meet don’t actually care very much about 377(A). The common picture that’s painted is a kind of apathetic gay scene where partying, sex and nice clothes are good enough. This is a caricature, but there are some interesting lessons to take away from this: to a large extent, gay desire is met in spite of 377(A)— gay men have not needed the State to legitimise their love in order to continue loving; gay men have not needed the State to legitimise their sex in order to continue fucking; gay men have not needed the State to legitimise their play in order to continue partying. This is because of a lot of early activism’s challenges to the State, and now that we live in this enforcement-free time of peace, the general point seems to be that gay men have it easy and are thus de-politicised. But back to the point— the question I’m asking is why the general attack on 377(A) seems to invoke love, family and desire. 377(A) has not, for a good number of years, stood in the way of these things except in one specific way. I’m talking about a set of desires related to a very specific gay social arrangement. I’m talking about marriage, which has so far lurked quietly underneath the language of family and love, but is definitely there.

This is bizarre to me.

There are obvious links between 377(A) and gay marriage, but 377(A) is not in and of itself a law that deals with the idea of marriage. It seems to my ear that the debate has been massaged in this direction: for some reason, the 377(A) debate in Singapore has become a wider question about the potential for gay families. Why else are we talking about the nuclear family at all? Why else are we talking about the ‘right to love,’ when this right isn’t even being contested except by the feeblest of legalities and the most ineffectual and stupid of social agents? (This is a speculative point, but perhaps some of the people most invested in the repeal of 377(A) are middle to upper middle class, well educated, well-installed people in their 30s: people to whom things such as marriage and starting families are important.) If I sound slightly confrontational, it’s because I think there’s something dangerous about letting questions of marriage/family dominate the debate on 377(A).

At its heart, the gay debate is turning to one about good citizenship, and I believe this kind of talk has led, and will continue to lead, to a flattening of gay culture.

Love/family/marriage and Citizenship go hand-in-hand: the right to love, form a family etc is a specific fantasy of citizenship— good, righteous, respectable citizenship. The undercurrent of PinkDot-type advocacy for repeal is this: we gay people want to be citizens— we want to be, in fact we already ARE, good citizens. But good citizens come in specific forms: there’s no room in the model of good citizenship for civil disobedience, or radical politics or deviance in general. And if, as is the rhetorical move of PinkDot-type activism, we can defuse the deviance of homosexuality, i.e. show that love between etc etc and etc etc is no different than etc etc, then there’s no reason why gay people who are otherwise reasonably behaved, hard-working, respectable citizens, and who share with the rest of society the Singaporean values of cohesion, harmony and prosperity should be legally classified as criminals.

This is the flavour of GLBT activism in Singapore. The problem with this is that it denies a few things:

1) Gay people are deviant.

There are no two ways about it. We are deviant and our deviance is a deep-set deviance, one that stands in opposition to ALL culture as we know it. This is because the culture in which we are born, educated and raised is heteronormative culture, i.e the culture of heterosexual people. All of us are born into heteronormative culture: it informs many of our values. Heteronormative culture is more than just who you sleep with: it’s about the values surrounding family (generationality, the taboo on singlehood, monogamy etc), citizenship, gender, the law, the economy, the state etc. Like everyone else, gay people are born into heteronormativity, but by virtue of our sexual orientations, we live in a difficult relationship with it.

Contemporary arguments for gay equality that cite family, love, marriage et al actually replicate heteronormative values and dilute homosexuality’s difficult relationship with wider culture. Are there problems with heteronormative values? Yes: they’re not made for the specific cultural forms of homosexual desire. It’s like giving away a birthright. And these problems already manifest in clear and dismaying ways in Singapore.

Gay life in Singapore is dominated by people who are similarly the centre of heteronormative life: i.e. ideal citizens— successful, educated, middle-to-upper-middle-class, Chinese, masculine, English-speaking. It’s not a question of representation: this is the de facto fantasy of Singapore gay life and it corrodes everyone who sits outside of it. I see this in the mad rush amongst young gay men to acquire gym memberships, I read this in the supremacist meanings of A&F, hear it in the self-de-Racing of non-Chinese gays… the widespread femmephobia, prevailing gay male attitudes about Lesbians and women in general, materialistic, nouveau-riche behaviour etc.

There is a struggle to inch closer and closer to the centre of this gay fantasy: the expense is diversity. But that’s an easy price to pay. In order to present a valid case for citizenship, the more essentially similar, the more recognisably visible gay men are, the better. To some extent, we’re policed by our peers along these lines, made to conform or to sit at the margins.

This is called Homonormativity. 

2) HIV/AIDS.

Good citizens are clean and un-diseased. Good citizens don’t behave irresponsibly and infect others. Good citizens don’t have HIV/AIDS. The gay community doesn’t have HIV/AIDS.

The primary reason we should repeal 377(A) is because it gives a sham legal front to the institutional stupidity surrounding sex education and support for HIV/AIDS. 377(A) is connected to a larger repressive silence about sex in Singapore, and it has deadly consequences. We don’t hear enough about this in debates about 377(A), which is presented with a friendly, pink-coloured face as a question of love and family. To even begin talking about HIV/AIDS is difficult when what is being contested is the respectability and normalness of gay life. Gay life isn’t normal. 

3) There is more at stake than Love and Family and Citizenship.

When on an average basis, (Chinese) gay men in Singapore are supremely racist, misogynistic and materialistic, you know that the normalising drive of our politics has worked too well. Because of our deviance, gay men are well placed to engage society on difficult questions about Difference: gender, patriarchy, class, race etc, but the only difference that occupies our attention seems to be Straight and Gay. Where is the mobilised gay voice on injustices outside our immediate realm of interest? Where is the mobilised gay voice on injustices within our ranks?

There is no gay agenda. 

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So, to route circuitously back to my opening thoughts, I wonder if the impulse that makes me think these things is instinctive of fanciful. Is my personal stake in this to write and think against the grain, just for the sake of being contrarian? Or does this come from a genuine and deeply-felt irritation at gay life in Singapore and its strategic blindnesses? I don’t know. Perhaps it is both. I’ve always sat a little uncomfortably with gay life; it has proven to me incredibly disappointing: perhaps I’m ‘taking it out’ on people by critiquing their firmly-held beliefs and politics; maybe I’m confused. Maybe I have a chip on my shoulder. Maybe I think too much about the wrong things, and read too much in the wrong direction… or maybe I don’t, in fact, think or read enough.

Hrm. 

Excerpt

Here’s an exchange that I’ve taken, probably quite conveniently, to be the sum of People, the play I’ve been working on for the past few months through a peculiar but interesting devising process. 

JEREMY         No, it was— no it was in Spring. I went in Spring last year, and I saw the most beautiful thing. Here—(he points at the canvas) you see here? 

VALERIE       Roots.

JEREMY         Roots, a tree. Beautiful. Hopeful, you know, in all this post-apocalyptic shit, a tree. Ridiculous, but beautiful. I saw these two magnificent roots holding two slabs of concrete together. Just the roots, pulling concrete slabs together. (points) See? Here and here. Desperate and stupid and impossible, but they were going at it like… like a surgeon, stitching a wound, or, like an engineer soldering metal, like a baker, pressing dough, like a carpenter joining wood, a tailor joining cloth, like lovers making love, whatever. Pressing together, holding together… 

VALERIE       Work. (reading the description) Work is the essence of the human spirit. Hold together, press together, make whole, make solid, hold together even when the world falls apart. Thus a tree is like the human spirit.

JEREMY         A metaphor.

VALERIE       Yes, but you see, even a metaphor is a metaphor: joining together one thing with another thing. Tree is to human, human is to tree. It is not the human spirit to fall apart. We hold on and make whole. You know, like holding hands. 

Sketches: 22/12/12— Boi

It is fashionable, at 25, to whinge about growing old.

It is fashionable, therefore, to deny to the world the fact that one is not getting younger by clinging on like death’s grip to all the vestiges of youth.

This is probably a general afflIction, but one with very interesting gay manifestations.

I will compile a list:

1. Doing funny things with your hair: bleaching

2. Cultivating a teen-aged eroticism: sexualised boys, impish beauty, boys with over-developed musculature; a cult which extends to language (e.g. HougangBoy87, Boyish Top, Bottom Boy) [also: Saturday Boy: Free Entry Before 12]{also: “Boi,” “Boyz,”}. When do gay men start to say “man”? When do gay men move out of the liminal state: “guy”? 

3. Following the above— Image Management: Caps— an entire vocabulary of cap-wearing; from type of cap to direction of the brim; the Singapore gay cap doesn’t evoke a slacker Dude aesthetic as much as it does a kind of cartoonishness— the kind you’d fuck. Tee Shirts. Shorts. A manicured casualness that teeters close to the province of children, exempt from questions of propriety in dress. The disturbing thing about this is that men in their 30s and onwards still dress like they’re 16. There is a silent taboo around a collared shirt: was once asked “why do you wear a shirt to a club?”. I doubt it’s all about comfort. 

4. Skin— concern with wrinkles. Obsessive skin-care.

5. Eyes— contact lenses, to counter-act the aging quality of spectacles unless said spectacles are of the presently in-vogue hipster variety, because Nerd/Geek is a subset of Boy. Nerd/Geek mashed up with Sporty gives Boy Soup.

6.  Obsessive fear of growing old— complaining about infirmity, fatigue, superannuation, i.e. general and natural symptoms of becoming an adult. A kind of affectation that begins at 20. It’s a game which makes it socially acceptable and even fashionable to comment on someone’s diminishing motor abilities. 

7. Schadenfreude in more dyspeptic subjects; to do with observing how gay men afflicted with Peter Pan syndrome force their boyhoods like sausage meat through a grinder into their 30s. 27 is the magic moment.