#YISHREADS January 2024
By Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob
For my first column of the year, I decided I’d pay homage to First Nations people—i.e. indigenous communities across the globe. It’s especially urgent to talk about these issues, given the ongoing genocide in Palestine by the Israeli Occupation Forces—a horror in which both the US and Singapore governments are complicit.
But as always, there’s a twist. The books I picked up from my TBR list turned out not to be prototypical works of indigenous literature. All of them feature the involvement of non-indigenous voices, whether they’re allies, anthropologists, authors or informants. In the case of some subjects, like Malaysian Orang Asli rights activist Colin Nicholas, I can’t even figure out if they’re indigenous or not!
I’m not trying to redefine indigenousness here—I do categorically acknowledge Malays as the indigenous people of Singapore, and I believe it’s vital to fight for justice for the dispossessed. But I dare say it’s good to introduce these histories, myths and fictions into our discussions of indigenous issues, precisely because they disrupt a bunch of our stereotypes of unspoiled cultures and noble savages, of victims rather than agents. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang say, decolonization is supposed to be unsettling, in both senses of the word.
Gaza Unsilenced, edited by Refaat Alareer and Laila El-Haddad
Just World Books, 2015
Let’s begin with a work by a prominent Gazan intellectual, killed by an Israeli airstrike on 6 December 2023. Refaat Alareer was an activist, a poet and a professor of English literature—he earned his PhD at the Universti Putera Malaysia and considered Kuala Lumpur his second home, with loads of friends there.
This book was created when he was still a young man (he was born in 1979, just a year before me), using precious Skype time to correspond with the US-based El-Haddad: a collection of testimonies of the "2014 Gazan War", also authored by Netanyahu, known by Israelis as Operation Protective Edge and by Palestinians as the Battle of the Withered Grain.
At first, I wondered what use there could be in reading stories of a 10-year-old tragedy, when I could just go on Twitter and read live accounts by witnesses to ongoing traumas. The incidents are so damn similar: the destruction of al-Wafa Hospital echoing the recent destruction of al-Shifa, the decimation of water, farms, factories, fishing boats, ancient mosques, schools and residential blocks, calls to BDS and the institutional punishment of American academics for their support (who remembers Steven Salaita?); the use of the Internet and social media to combat Hasbara, Israel’s propaganda program.
What’s a little disorienting, on the other hand, is the realisation that social media was at this point a new weapon. Tweets from two prominent voices are included: Farah Baker (young and raw) and Dr. Belal Dabour (considered and analytical), each in the original 140-character format. These writers claimed they were winning this propaganda war, just as we say we are today. Yet the brutal Occupation continued, as the writers fear at the end; yet the genocide multiplied. Hearts and minds are changing, but who’s to say that saves lives?
Surprisingly, several Israeli voices are included—and it’s sometimes feels kinda gross when Ron Gerlitz does a both-sides’-fault for a second; when Esther Rappaport says she’s sympathetic to Jews who are offended by the comparison of the Occupation of Gaza to the Holocaust. The writers are still clinging to a hope for a two-state peace, even as they reiterate the cruelty and injustice of the 1948 Nakba. And there are further complications: anger at Egypt for enforcing their border (so soon after the hopes of the Tahrir Square Revolution); at the Palestinians living in Israel who are complicit with their oppression (though at risk of murderous violence themselves); at the PLO in the West Bank which doesn’t distribute donations to their intended targets.
But beyond horror, statistics and analysis: art. Samah Sabawi’s poem “The UN Counted the Number of Our Dead” (with its rejoinder that they know how to count themselves); the poignancy of a blurred photo of children running on the beach, its evocation of carefree joy colliding with the fact that it captures their last moments before they were shot by snipers.
Alareer’s pieces, of course, stand out. He mourns his brother, Hamada (Mohammed Alareer), a beloved actor who played a mischievous chicken in the kids’ TV show Tomorrow’s Pioneers (particularly moving when his four-year-old niece announces that she hates her father for not returning from the dead). He discusses the strangeness of teaching university students Shakespeare and Dickens, their initial hatred of the Jewish characters of Fagin and Shylock, and their eventual realisation that as powerless outcasts, they’re way more like Shylock than the Muslim Othello. (And how they joke that the university was bombed, cos it contained Poems of Mass Destruction.)
Written in the wake of disaster, this collection paints a portrait of a Gaza reduced to ruins—yet we know, from before-and-after pics of 2023, that much of it was rebuilt. Which gives hope that this will happen again. But the book also acknowledges despair: how for the first time, the editors see waves of Gazans seeking refuge across the sea, abandoning their homes, sick of the rhetoric of their dauntless strength.
On one hand, nothing has changed. On the other, everything is changing. From the river to the sea. Dare we believe it? Dare we help to make it happen?
Flying Lizards and Other Orang Asli Legends and Tales, edited by Colin Nicholas
Center for Orang Asli Concerns, 2018
I'd thought this would be a fairly simple storybook, highlighting mythological gems from peninsular Malaysia's indigenous peoples. Turns out it's tougher going than that: what we've got is pretty much an academic survey, made up of excerpted anthropological studies across the 19th to the 20th centuries, about every ethnic group from the Batek to the Temuan, ordered by theme instead of community, so it's bloody hard to get a snapshot of what any individual culture believes in.
What we do get is some genuinely awesome stories that straddle tribal lines: numerous legends of the first humans being created only on the second or third try, as a secondary creator figure accidentally peeks at the sacred life spirit cupped in their hands and loses it; the sun furiously pursuing the moon across the sky cos the moon tricked the sun into devouring its own children (minor suns that scorched the earth) when she had only held her own kids (the stars) in her mouth without swallowing; the ape-like mawas and the serpent of Lake Chini; tales of divine punishment arising from laughing at animals (though killing them and eating them is fine!); strange variations on the Senoi tale of “The Cockroaches' Village”, wherein six brothers are seduced by beautiful women who turn out to be cockroaches that eat them down to their bones, only to be conquered by the seventh, who marries their princess and condemns them never to be able to transform into humans again; visions of the afterlife as a paradise jungle with trees brimming with durian and rambutan; the Chewong belief that ours is Earth Seven (we get magic from Earth Six); explanations for their illiteracy, namely that once, like Malays or Chinese, they had books, but after a cataclysm theirs were lost in a flood...
But also things you wouldn't expect of indigenous peoples, e.g. the wholesale borrowing of Abrahamic creation tropes (characters are literally called Adam, Hawa and Tuhan, i.e. Adam, Eve and the Lord in Malay); claims that they migrated from Sumatra or China or have genealogical roots with nobility on other islands; and stories that are so damn similar to Malay legends that I can't tell who got their inspiration from whom—weretiger tales, naga tales, tales of princesses born in bamboo stalks or rising from mounds of river foam, and Sakai variations of the tale of the mother cursing her ungrateful son's ship to turn into stone—a folktale known in Malaysia as “Si Tanggang” and in Indonesia as “Malin Kundang”—even a Semelai prophecy that the "Kafirs", the Europeans, will one day return and reclaim the land from the Malays, their contemporary oppressors! (So much for decolonisation!)
It's all a reminder that Orang Asli weren't as cut off from cosmopolitan Afro-Eurasian trade networks the same way, say, Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians and Polynesians were. Though resistant to urbanisation and kingdom-building, they were well aware of such structures and found ways to work with them, incorporating these cultures into their own cosmologies and mythologies. And maybe also a reflection of the fact that these stories are in flux, ever evolving—cos the people are still there, not locked into a museological stereotype of the past, but trying to grapple with the ecological devastations of the present.
Remains of Life, by Wu He
Translated by Michael Berry
Columbia University Press, 2017
This is a helluva work: first published in 1999 and translated by one of my old professors, it's a stream-of-consciousness-ish semiautobiographical outpouring—almost no full stops, drifting between eras and perspectives and different stories—of the journey the author made, as a Han Chinese from Taiwan living on a reservation, into discovering the colonial and neo-colonial trauma of his island's Aboriginal people.
The tale's centred on the 1930 Musha Incident, where Mona Rudao of the Seediq slew 134 Japanese occupiers in a headhunting ritual, resulting in horrifying acts of retaliation by the colonial authorities—there's stories of women throwing their kids off cliffs in their desperate flight. But while Mona Rudao's now honoured as a Taiwanese nationalist hero, Wu specifically doesn't want to perpetuate the myth of the noble savage, leaning into debates over whether the headhunting had any political agenda (Mona Rudao had cooperated with the Japanese before, even travelling to Japan), the perverse horror of headhunting, the fact that some Seediq are pretty cosmopolitan (he hears Chopin from his neighbour's piano every night; one man has a half-Latina daughter).
And more controversially, the fact that the Seediq don't live very noble lives today. The most memorable character is Girl, a descendant of Mona Rudao and former city sex worker who still has sex with numerous men—sometimes through coercion, sometimes with unclear power dynamics, but without feeling sorry for herself—while there are others who worship Japanese bushido culture, who drink themselves senseless or drift around on their scooters recalling the days when they could still earn money as construction workers before the Southeast Asian migrants came in. The men recall that there was a time when bravery was a virtue, but it isn't anymore. And they're reluctant to talk about the old days, they've forgotten traditional hunting techniques (one guy goes electro-fishing), and even visitors look at their houses with disdain—not anything bucolic but a weird imitation of multiple generations of Taiwanese and Japanese architectural styles, left to weather in the forest.
Basically, an affirmation that these are people, not objects, not relics, sacred guardians of the land. They f*ck up and get f*cked over, but they're still there.
I am of course longing to read a work by an Aboriginal Taiwanese writer (I see Columbia University Press has an anthology![i]), but before we dismiss this work as majority-race appropriation, bear in mind that it’s iconic in itself: it won loads of prizes, and reintroduced discussion of the Musha Incident into popular culture, inspiring music albums, a film, a rock opera.
As for how the Seediq themselves feel about their portrayal... that's something else I don't know. That's literature: you try and educate yourself and just end up with a billion more questions.
Brani: Memories of an Island, by Nur Hazimah binte Abdul Halim, Nur Muhammad bin Mohammad Thahiruddin and Nurulhuda binte Suhaimi
Self-published, 2016
This book was created under the aegis of the Singapore Memory Project, recording the memories of former inhabitants of Pulau Brani—one of Singapore’s southern islands, literally “island of the brave” in Malay, home to a tin-smelting company (producing magnets, “besi brani”) until the 1970s, when the island was cleared for naval redevelopment.
The writers interviewed 23 former islanders for the project: Malay and Chinese, though Indians and Brits lived there too in the four tiny kampungs. All have idyllic memories of the place, where you could just cast your fishing line out of the house to catch dinner; where you had to balance on the titi (the plank walkways) on your way to school, where you might sneak into the open-air cinema with someone’s used tickets (the public one; not the British-exclusive one run by the Royal Army Service Corps); where there was a Chinese hairdresser, electricity in some homes, inter-island soccer matches, pasar malams and Hari Raya visiting and a Christmas carnival; where you’d go to sleep to the sound of the waves and wake to tiny crabs crawling through the floorboards.
And though the book steers clear of political criticism, it does once again piss me off to think about why the government destroyed communities like this to live distinctly less pleasurable lives, forcing families with nine kids into three-room HDBs. We talk about colonialism and indigeneity as a racialised identity politics thing, but there’s a like trauma, regardless of race, regardless of whether you share the flag of your oppressors, when you’re uprooted from your home for the sake of building a military base.
Or is this just accentuated because it’s on an island? Isn’t a lot of the history of Singapore’s urbanization violently neocolonial? Or am I just viewing this through nostalgia goggles, overlooking the strides we’ve made in terms of health and wealth, putting way too much weight on people’s memories of being happy without development?
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Penguin Books, 2021
I'd heard a bunch of buzz about this book, principally based on the fact that it upends a linear narrative of early history—evidence shows that plenty of cultures didn't always "progress" from nomadic tribes to sedentary villages to cities, but went back and forth, even seasonally.
But now that I've read the whole thing, damn! It really is the kind of paradigm-shifting work you usually only get to read in university, one that upends all your assumptions about "civilisation" as we know it.
Graeber and Wengrow, an anthropologist (deceased, alas) and an archaeologist, say they wrote this book cos they kept struggling with their fields' facile assumptions about how we got to our current state—either a Hobbesian self-congratulatory claim that life has vastly improved from barbarism to late capitalism, or a Rousseau-ish fable about falling from innocence into a state of exploitation, inevitable as soon as long as people start living in large communities—kings, property, patriarchy, agriculture, slavery, tech; it's a package.
And they're showing that it's not. Our ancestors carried out incredibly varied experiments in social organisation, as documented from the Stone Age to 20th century studies of hunter-gatherers—often changing their culture just to be different from their neighbours (they call it "schismogenesis", cf. Athens vs. Sparta), often safeguarding substantially more equality, leisure time and freedom than what we enjoy. (Sure, folks in democracies say they're free, but are they free to freely migrate, to escape authorities they dislike?) Even vast, well-known ancient cities like Çatalhöyük, Mohenjo-daro, Teotihuacán, are conspicuously lacking in palaces and royal tombs... and somehow no-one wants to suggest that the Minoans, who portrayed women as goddesslike and men as naked twinks, could've been ruled by women.
And perhaps most intriguingly, a new proposed native history of North America, where the egalitarian Hopewell Culture (100 BCE to 500 CE), with its mud mounds of impressively mathematical engineering and vast networks of ritual exchange, laid the groundwork for the huge Mississippian city of Cahokia (1050-1350)... followed by a systematic abandonment of that city in favour of smaller freer tribes, leaving legends of peacemaking and anti-authoritarianism in its wake (e.g. Hiawatha and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy)...
Which manifested, after European colonisation, in the figure of Kandiaronk (c. 1649-1701), Chief of the Wendat, a diplomat and orator whose skills in debate astounded settlers, to the extent that his arguments against European cultural superiority (he'd been to Paris and seen the squalor) were recorded in Baron de Lahontan's New Voyages to North America (1703). The authors argue that he and other Native American intellectuals, whose contrarian ideas went viral in Europe, were instrumental in inspiring the Enlightenment belief that freedom was actually a good thing—the very principles modern democracy is based on.
Huge if true! (Even the authors admit this is still up for debate.)
As for the question of how we got stuck under our current tyranny of the nation-state, the authors suggest that a lot of culture, rather than being instrumental, comes from play and religious ritual—they give evidence that agriculture emerged from ornamental gardening and farming of narcotics rather than grains; that kings first emerged as festival lords and cult figures of the deceased before having real, permanent power.
What they don't say—but which I think they know every reader has on their mind—is the question of how we can get unstuck. Not whether, but how; this can't be the end of history; we can't be so much less imaginative than the ancients. It's a ray of hope amidst hegemony—of course another world is possible. It happened before. It'll happen again.
(Btw, bonus links to my original Facebook post,[ii] where friends testified to Graeber’s legacy as a professor and activist, and to a Smithsonian article about Wengrow clapping back at Benjamin Netanyahu’s bigotry in 2019.[iii])
Endnotes
[i] Indigenous Writers of Taiwan: An Anthology of Stories, Essays, and Poems, edited by John Balcom and Yingtish Balcom. Translated with an introduction by John Balcom. Columbia University Press, 2005.
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/indigenous-writers-of-taiwan/9780231136501
[ii] Ng Yi-Sheng. “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity…” Facebook, 17 January 2023.
https://www.facebook.com/ng.yisheng.9/posts/pfbid0dfcYNdx82nQUckXLFrtTpiQwTZtSHjCeyBDNTBZTu1fYTwagBryywiFpbELz7jZBl
[iii] Megan Gannon. “When Ancient DNA Gets Politicized.” Smithsonian Magazine. 12 July 2019. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-ancient-dna-gets-politicized-180972639/?fbclid=IwAR0YFVlonyZlaqFJyuVS9e8hz9FDoTGCrIrKggHHlMG3z72L1AmZkfaZ844
Ng Yi-Sheng (he/him) is a Singaporean writer, researcher and LGBT+ activist. His books include the short-story collection Lion City and the poetry collection last boy (both winners of the Singapore Literature Prize), the non-fiction work SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, the spoken word collection Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience, and the performance lecture compilation Black Waters, Pink Sands. He recently edited A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok and EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. Check out his website at ngyisheng.com.
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