Wandering Through Absence
Wandering Through Absence: A Psychogeographical Exploration of Three Fields
By Diana Rahim
Field #1: Keras
I have written about this field in one of my stories. It is nestled lonesomely behind my residential neighbourhood, next to a forest patch. It must have been part of that forest too. You can tell because where the forest ends and the field begins is a neat, straight line. Some time ago, a bureaucrat must have drawn that line on a map to indicate where the clearing would end. The field, I presume, is cleared for convenience in advance, ready for whatever residential project that may come along. This future has not arrived. For decades now it has remained empty land, or ‘State Land’ as the rusting metal sign would indicate. It is lonely land. Unused and barely gazed at. Not even children, the most courageous and liberated of flaneurs, have used this field for their play.
Only once, about 15 years ago, did I see my secondary schoolmates have a picnic date there, a decision I found strange. It is not a scenic field. It does not inspire the usual feelings fields usually do: a sense of expanse and serenity. The grass is a dusty, tired shade of green, as if the sun had bleached it of its true vibrancy. Unlike a field beside a nearby mosque, it is not beautiful even during the golden hour. At sunset, all I feel from it is unforgiving heat. At night, the darkness is total.
In truth, the field doesn’t feel like land that has fully surrendered to the violent hand and possession of humans. It feels half-claimed by the forest just next to it. Perhaps it is a field that still believes itself a forest. Its energy certainly suggests so. It emanates a certain potency, a sense of heaviness, deep lonesomeness, and strange as it sounds, I feel convinced the field is confident of itself as a territory rarely explored by humans.
Whenever I pass by this field, even in a cab home, something about it gives me a chilling pause. I have never stepped on the field in the 20 years I’ve lived in its proximity because of this feeling, which I take to be a paranormal warning. In colloquial Malay, when we want to describe a place that is haunted we describe it as “keras”. The word is most commonly translated to mean “hard”. Other translations include—rigid, unyielding, harsh, stubborn, wicked. I had assumed that calling a haunted place keras was a textural description of the experience in a space that denies you smooth movement. Keras, meaning—it is a place that is hard to navigate, it is giving you resistance, even hostility.
The meaning I inferred is only halfway there. A Malaysian acquaintance told me that a haunted place is described as keras because traditionally, Malays believe in the harmonious relationship between humans and nature instead of simply imposing our will on the land. There is a mutuality, a certain give-and-take that is necessary to ensure a peaceful co-existence. When the space refuses to reciprocate this mutual goodwill, it is keras. Key to all of this, of course, is the long-running animistic belief that the natural world has its own will and presence that deserves to be respected. It is not merely dead, neutral land. It is alive.
I think often about how this way of relating to nature has been deeply eroded as the modus operandi of capitalist development and extraction primes us to view nature as a resource for profit. Nature is no longer sacred. It doesn’t possess a will of any sort that would demand an equal dynamic, and therefore accountability. The only one you are accountable to is the owner of the land, whether it’s an individual, corporation, or the state, since the land is their “property”. In this concept of private ownership, the land is not seen as an entity that ought to be respected in itself.
I wonder often if people realise the degree to which they have been stolen from connecting and relating to the natural world in a deeper, enriching way; to understand that the trees, flowers, and fields are our siblings in earthly creation. They need not have a slated purpose in order to be purposeful. I am thinking here of when Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass of Native American ways of relating to the land where humans are regarded as younger siblings of creation.
“In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as “the younger brothers of Creation.” We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out.”
Of course we do not live in a world where it is natural to treat the environment as siblings in creation or the bestower of wisdom. As much of the world is gripped still by the impact of colonialism and the imposition of western frameworks of understanding, I suppose many feel that it is natural that earth’s bounties are meant for human manipulation and exploitation. After all, the trees can’t fight back. But this is a misplaced sense of power and agency that understands itself only through the ability to subjugate and harm.
I mention the field’s hauntedness because it feels to me that this paranormal power is one of the ways that a place can remind humans of its autonomous existence. Living in Sembawang, the area is often described as “ulu”, “kampung”, “laidback”, words that point to the supposedly quiet and natural atmosphere the area possesses compared to the rest of the island. An article on a government agency website describes Sembawang as “an escape to nature”. I have always found these rustic descriptions to be dubious and untruthful marketing. It’s not that it’s untrue per se, only that these words are capturing a time that is gone. Presently, forests and large swathes of trees have been cleared for slow-filling BTO (Built-To-Order) public flats and the area is increasingly populated. At the same time, these descriptors grate against the fact that the area is home to some of the most notoriously haunted places in the island.
Once, when I had the chance to speak with the minister of my GRC during his house visits, I expressed my despair at the amount of trees wiped out over the years. So much had gone so quickly. And the heat! The north of Singapore is supposed to be one of the cooler parts of the island but the heat is steadily building. Wiping out the trees has only made it worse. The minister provided weak affirmations of my concerns, mutely replying, “yes, yes...” as if to say “I hear you”. His entourage of aunties in polo tees and clipboards were doing the same, their heads slowly nodding in unison. I mentioned that my mother’s childhood kampung was in Sembawang and it saddened her profoundly to see how many trees had been cut down and the landscape so drastically changed. At this they gave a fervent, collective “mmm”, since they too must have had childhoods in kampung homes. Surely they must understand a little the sadness in my mother’s heart.
In any case, I felt like it was useless of me to speak because I received strange replies: that while many trees were cut down, there are in fact more trees now, it’s just not obvious because they are small and newly planted; that while the kampung days were nice, young people would not like such a life since people didn’t do anything but laze about all day; and of course, that there was no choice but to clear the land because we had to develop.
I replied to these strange rebuttals in the following way: “I don’t think so”, “I’m sure people living in kampungs worked”, and “There are open fields in the area. Could the estates not have been built there?”
I think about my reply regarding the fields often. I had thought of course about the field behind my neighbourhood. In my desire to save the trees, I had thought it more worthy of being utilised. I suppose it was my own form of value judgement, of what space is worth being sacrificed. But it is not surprising that the field was never considered. It is tucked away from main roads, distant from amenities, lacks sunlight, and as I had described, it is keras. And so it remains unused, “useless” I suppose, in that it serves nothing except a disquieting emptiness. Yet its uselessness is what protects it. Its hostility to human use seems completely understandable if it means retaining its freedom.
Field #2: Separation
The field faces a mosque and is separated from it by a narrow road. Next to the field lies a forest, untouched for now. The length of the field stretches from one edge of a separate road all the way to an industrial estate in the distance. At sunset it is lit up with the fullness of electric gold in a way you can only experience when there are no buildings to break its reach from the skin of the sun to the soil of the earth. You witness the full expanse of sky struck with the colours of fire and understand why so many painters in the past wanted to capture the golden hour as it doused clouds, fields, and the tips of trees. The glow-up is extraordinary, but temporary, before it returns to its usual mundane state.
It is a forgotten field. It has no use, nor do people desire to use it. I have never remembered it bearing any human company. Sometimes, stray dogs would bound along its edge in the evenings to head to wherever it is they are heading, my heart jumping each time they cross the road. Next to the field is a forest, and behind this patch of forest lies purpose-built workers dormitories, one that calls itself a foreign worker’s “home away from home”. You would not have known these dormitories existed unless you drove down the road that winds along and behind the forest, into the industrial estate. Like many vacant fields, its grass is nevertheless perpetually trimmed, suggesting that it is periodically cut by unseen migrant labour during the early mornings when the birds are still singing their songs alone, unbothered by the chorus of cars that would steadily disrupt their songs as the sky lightens.
There is a migrant poet who must have stayed and worked there once, if he is not there still. We are Facebook friends, and several times I have seen him post pictures of the same beautiful sunsets, although from where he is, the forest filters the light. During a pre-pandemic Eid, he posted a photo of Muslim workers on their Eid morning prayer, rows of them packed together in the square, right up to the very edges of the metal fences. We live just a few blocks, a field, and a small patch of forest away, but how much further the distance is.
It is apparent to me that the small patch of forest serves as a barrier that visually and experientially separates the workers’ dormitories from the HDB residential neighbourhoods. Their living quarters located smack in the middle of an industrial estate in itself reveals how the boundaries between life and work for them are razor thin, all the better to ensure the efficiency of extracting their labour. In 2010, Yeo Gwat Kuang who was a Member of Parliament and a National Trade Union Congress (NTUC) official, had stated it quite crudely that:
“When we look at the migrant workers’ issue, we are not looking at it from the perspective of human rights. We are looking at it on a need basis. […] Like it or not, we need to sustain and grow an economy that is able to generate an annual per capita [GDP] of US$35,000. At the end of the day, whatever factors would be able to help us to sustain the growth of the economy for the benefit of our countrymen, for the benefit of our country, we will definitely go for it.”
And so it is with the rhetoric of the ruling class, always pitting the needs of low-wage, exploited migrant labour against the needs of citizens. It’s a rhetorical trick laced with the toxic flourish of nationalistic “love”. It is for my benefit, a Singaporean, that issues pertaining to migrant workers are not viewed from the lens of human rights but of profit. That is not something that I agreed to of course, but seems to have been decided for me.
Of course plenty of citizens have accepted, even enabled this separation, if only because it is the dominant narrative that our well-being is unconnected. And even if we are connected at all, it is apparently only through scarcity—the survival and well-being of one depends on the impoverishment of the other. Is this the only model there is for us?
The dedication to maintaining this separation is deep. When Covid-19 infections exploded, the neat separation of cases in worker dormitories from those that happened in the “community” seemed more than just a convenient statistical categorisation. I had watched as people absurdly celebrated low numbers in the “community” even as cases in dormitories climbed in the hundreds and even over a thousand a day. Any claims that Singapore has handled Covid-19 “successfully” will have to account for the fact that 93% of the infected were low-wage migrant workers, and that new data shows that 152,000 workers were infected, about half of the total population. It would have to account for the fact that we had a humanitarian disaster.
When I was a child, the housing unit in front of my parents’ place was home to a number of Chinese construction workers. There must have been more HDB units that were rented out to migrant workers, until 2006, when HDB “[forbade] flat owners from subletting their properties to foreign construction workers unless they were Malaysians, amidst complaints from residents,” A sweeping rule change such as this shows separation in its unbridled, obviously discriminatory form. But the treatment and arrangement of human movement and living on land is more insidious and unseen.
When I am in the bus and turning into the street that will take me along the field, the forest patch, and into the industrial estate, the field is the first feature of distance—an extension of the ever-dividing line that we have made between those who have been labelled as “countrymen” and their foreign labourers, the community and those outside of it.
The field, like the sea, or the sky—these wide spaces are often seen as natural expanses that are democratically accessible and enjoyed. As a common aphorism goes, “we all look under the same sky”. It would be wonderful to think that this were true. Yet I think of Migrant poet MD Shariff Uddin who had written in a poem:
“Lying on bunk, see nothing but a piece of sky boxed up by the window. I store all my troubles in that bit of sky. I am afraid that it will shatter when I can no longer bear the burdens of my suffering!”
When I think about the beauty of it when it is struck with light, I know on the other side, workers see the golden hour differently.
Field #3: Desire Lines
This is the first field you see when you get off the MRT station. Unlike the other two fields, it has seen some use throughout the years. Night markets and temporary showrooms for condos have been set up over it, migrant workers have played cricket there, getai shows staged, and there is now even a huge permanent court surrounded with a metal cage the size of multiple basketball courts where youths play soccer and basketball, or have dance practices.
This field is rectangular and crowded on all sides. On one side is the train station, on the other the mall, and on its remaining two sides are roads with a healthy amount of traffic. Still, walking upon it never fails to bring me some sense of peace and distance, and all the sounds emanating from the roads, the train tracks, the bus station—somehow they sound a little further away. Children playing in the caged courts sound like the chittering of birds and the birds that fly above in the evening sound like the sea in movement.
I have walked across this field many times on my way to dinner. There is a small path that has been paved with concrete, a detail I appreciate, for the path began as a desire line; an organic path that was naturally established over time through human traffic. Desire lines are often the most efficient path to get from point A to point B, and I often see them in fields. But in a country where so much is regulated and planned, setting a path over a desire line is surprising, if only because it is the more democratic way that is not pre-regulated. It is an acknowledgement that public space is used by the masses, and proof that we can co-create the way it is shaped. This is a form of reciprocity too, one that does not require a belief in the existence of a place’s spirit or will, but simply in the right of the public to determine how their spaces are shaped and navigated.
We live in a time when the commons are threatened by private ownership under capitalism. The greed and exploitation of a select few powerful corporations and people decide the fate of our planet and hasten the deaths of billions of people through the destruction of their land, the pollution of their waters and air, the erosion of their soil. The vitality of the land that these corporations and individuals destroy has been sacrificed for something as fleeting as money. What a poor exchange! One would think that those obsessed with wealth would know these are poor returns. Yet what would they know, bloated as they are with wealth and death.
To me, this field shows the possibility of peaceful co-existence. At present, environmental movements are not sufficiently centering Indigenous ways of relating to nature, but instead propagate the belief that nature can only be protected by strictly reducing or even removing human activity and presence completely. This approach is a depressing admission that humans are inherently opposed to nature, so much so that it is better to consign us as perpetual sources of harm and death to the natural world. We know this not to be true. Humans have co-existed for millenia with the natural world, participating as part of the ecological environment, as protectors, nurturers and dependents of the land.
Syarifah Nadhirah had written in Recalling Forgotten Tastes of how the Orang Asli Indigenous ethos was one where “they depend on the renewability of natural resources to provide food, water, shelter [...] Their values remain at not taking more than they should, as to ensure lasting sustainability of resources. By taking less, one is promised more.”
Perhaps because at present to take has always been through violence, we cannot imagine that there is a form of taking that does not damage, that does not diminish but instead enriches the natural world.
I wonder often about the next time a minister would stand at my door to conduct their rote door visits. Have you ever lived here? I would ask. Have you seen, as I have, the way the Pulai trees have grown in the past two decades, and how their flowering stuns us all to slowing down in our walks? Have you stood in boredom in the train, protected from the afternoon heat, and taken comfort in how the last 2 minutes of the journey is accompanied by a rush of green on either side of the windows? When all of this was brought down, do you not realise that you are pulling up the root of my very memories, leaving them no anchor?
I would ask—and this field, this field, and that other one, have you stood there and seen the way the sunset can unfurl upon even a blade of its grass? Have you passed by it as a teen in the bus ride to school in the mornings, and seen how the fog blankets itself and made you feel as if you were floating, just knowing that a sight so beautiful was available to you every day? Have you stood an inch away from it and felt a perturbing terror?
In Mark Strand’s Keeping Things Whole, there is a line that goes: “In a field/ I am the absence/ of field”. When I stand in a field, I am hit with the inevitable image of emptiness and obliteration. We may never be one, the field and I, nature and humans, even you and I. Still the tenuous balance to keep things whole is the dance that we must continuously conduct, in full belief of its value, in full enjoyment of its magic. When I stand in this field, I feel lit with possibility and wish that it may never be lost.
Diana Rahim is currently a community worker who dreams of autonomy and decentralized futures. She is editor of Beyond the Hijab, an online platform sharing stories and perspectives of Muslim women in Singapore. Her current visual work explores the politics of public space.