The Deep Need for Freedom
Review of Raffles Renounced: Towards a Merdeka History, edited by Alfian Sa’at, Faris Joraimi, and Sai Siew Min (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2021)
By Niccolo Rocamora Vitug
Being Filipino, with my own postcolonial context, is, I have to admit, not much help in understanding the history of Singapore. Whereas the Philippines is an archipelago, with many indigenous communities yoked together through Spanish colonization, its feudal heritage reinforced through subsequent American subjugation, Singapore has its own difficult colonial history shaped by its geography: an island in a bay, strategically positioned to be a center for world trade. That Singapore held a massive bicentenary celebration of its so-called founding in 1819 by the British imperialist Thomas Stamford Raffles shows the strength of the colonial hold on the country.
This imperial imagination however has been contested and debated, especially in the light of the bicentennial. The text under review Raffles Renounced is one such example of contestation. Taking the form of a collection of essays, Raffles Renounced grew out of enthusiastic responses to Alfian Sa’at and Neo Hai Bin’s play Merdeka / 獨立 /சுதந்திரம் and a planned set of critiques for the journal s/pores: New Directions in Singapore Studies. It sets out deliberately to challenge the insidious colonial hold on Singapore.
The primary means of mounting that challenge is historical research. It is certainly the most direct way of filling in the erasures in the official history of Singapore. Among the book’s editors, Alfian Sa'at stands out for not being a professional historian. He is, instead, a writer of plays, stories, and poems. As for the other two editors, Faris Joraimi is a postgraduate researcher, and Sai Siew Min is a trained and well-published historian. The contributors to Raffles Renounced show themselves to be adept in the work of historicising and analyzing the archives and artifacts of (neo)colonial cultural production.
What is most attractive about this book is the usually hidden details that historical research turns up. Readers will be pleased to see in this book an unearthing of what has been repressed for the state’s political reasons. One of the loudest words heard throughout the book is “merdeka,” a Malay word that means freedom. It is key to the book’s subtitle. It was originally a rallying cry of the People's Action Party (PAP), when it was fighting against British colonialism. After expelling its leftist faction, the party moved to the right and suppressed the word “merdeka” partly due to its leftist implications. In this and other ways, the PAP has adopted a neocolonial mode of governance since independence from the British.
A central narrative propounded by the government revolves around the figure of Raffles and his supposed contributions to the establishment of Singapore. A statue of Raffles still stands prominently in the civic district in downtown Singapore. During the Bicentennial Celebration, other statues of important personages in Singapore’s history were erected beside Raffles to offer a more “diverse” interpretation of that history. To my mind, the use of statues, whether one or many, reveals a lack of appreciation of the histories behind the personages, which prevents a deeper understanding of the workings of colonization. Statues as secular icons may elicit awe, but they do not increase knowledge. They belong to what Faris Joraimi in his essay on the Bicentennial statues calls the “deeply colonial tradition of civic commemorations.”
Against the popular notion of history as consisting of a series of milestones, Raffles Renounced proposes the view of the longue duree, or long term. Milestones do not encourage questions about what happened in between. Neither do they encourage questions about what makes a milestone a milestone. It is by referring to the long term, the continuous and conflicting play of history, that gaps can be exposed and explored, gaps that power prefers to cover up.
But the long term can seem confusing, even abstract, especially when it is complicated by archival losses and political erasures. This is where the arts can play a part: they are the most powerful appeals to the affect. Recognizing this fact, Raffles Renounced includes essays on Sean Cham's performance art and Jimmy Ong's art installations, in addition to a discussion of Alfian Sa’at and Neo Hai Bin’s play Merdeka / 獨立 /சுதந்திரம். As if to give point to the longue duree, these artistic occasions, although time-specific, created openings in history for disturbance and reflection.
My favorite part of the book, aside from the short anthology of historical accounts, lyrics, speeches, and other materials that accompanied the performance of Merdeka / 獨立 /சுதந்திரம் as a companion volume, comes from Alfian Sa’at’s interview of Jimmy Ong. The excerpt below highlights the visceral impact of colonialism on colonized bodies, and the necessity for a kind of counter-violence to free oneself from the impact. The interlocutors are speaking about the toppling of the statues of imperialists and slave-owners occurring around the world.
Alfian: In a lot of the toppling of statues, people are saying, “You don’t have to destroy it.” You can get a crane to come and remove it properly, and to store it somewhere. But for me the act of destruction, the iconoclasm, is cathartic. It’ll be a kind of exorcism in the presence of witnesses.
Jimmy: And performance could help to do that.
Alfian: Yes, so maybe there’s something you can read on site, with music brought to the place. If there is the ritual of let’s say, the signing ceremony of 1819, what is that anti-ritual or film negative of that ritual? So this is my point. If we have this Raffles statue in Singapore, and we know of Raffles’ own history and reputation in Java, what is the film negative of the Raffles statue that we can imagine in Java? What is that opposite? Should it be an opposite?
Jimmy: I’m not sure if it can be clearly an opposite. I think what you’ve suggested would be violent. I think for it to happen, it has to be something that you willingly do. It cannot be empty or mechanical. You have to destroy it wholeheartedly.
I grew up liking only boyfriends who were white men. It changed because I had a painful experience with that relationship. And my recovery from that relationship happened in a brown community. I also had a lover who helped me recover. But I also realise I’m changing one person for another. If I liked white men previously, now I like brown men. It’s still exoticism of an Other. Either in servitude to the other person, or else to overpower the other person, in a possessive manner.
The interview presents honestly the difficulties of queer sexuality in a paternalistic culture molded by British colonialism and, possibly, the neo-Confucian dictates of the Singapore state. In addition, the interview also shows how challenging decolonizing is because the most intimate desires are mediated by power structures. Choosing the opposite will not do; it is still immured in the colonial exercise of exoticisation and possession.
I wish that desire as expressed in queer subversion of power relations—ranging from the corporeal to the structural—is confronted more squarely in the book. After all, you only renounce what you first desire deeply. The pieces in Raffles Renounced are mostly academic assessments. The interview with Ong is memorable, because although it is informed by ideas, it is focused on the sharing of experience. Getting to know an artist’s work by getting to know the artist reveals more richly the multifarious and transgressive responses to colonial power.
And so I wonder if more ethnographic studies would spring forth from the worthy explorations of Raffles Renounced. Studies not of what was or what should be, but of what is. Emic description must form the basis of genuine change; description is the first step of change. This book has left room for such studies on various and specific aspects of Singapore’s neocolonial culture.
Raffles Renounced grapples with weighty, important questions and makes insightful critiques of neocolonial narratives. However, after reading it, I wonder who the audience for the book is. The academic vocabulary and frames of thought used in it necessarily limit its audience to a particular class.
I had the chance to listen to Alfian Sa’at in a webinar on the role of the arts in political activism. As someone who aspires to find fruitful intersections between the two, I think of Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere as utilized by Charles Taylor in conceptualizing modern social imaginaries. In brief, Taylor theorizes that social imaginaries are processual, created as individuals engage with communities and surrounding environs. They therefore enable the proliferation, recreation, and adjustment of common narratives and beliefs. To build and alter these social imaginaries requires various forms of capital—such as education.
I wonder if the academic specialization that undergirts this book in turn demands high levels of capital from readers. In other words, whom is the book talking to? Will talking to what is likely a small group of people be helpful in the call for reform that springs from understanding? Might more be done to introduce the subject to people who do not understand the framing of academic theory? I think it right to say that such questions are some of the many issues in the longue duree that Singaporeans, and all of us, will need to consider.
Niccolo Rocamora Vitug is a poet. His book of poems, Enter Deeply, is forthcoming from the University of the Philippines Press. He is also a teacher at the University of Santo Tomas, an editorial staff member of UNITAS Journal, and a PhD Music student at the University of the Philippines.
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