“A delicate pellet of dust”: Dissident flash fictions from contemporary Singapore

Abstract

The city state of Singapore is predicated on comprehensive urban planning, beginning with colonial rule in 1819 and continuing to the present day with the 2014 Master Plan – an urban planning map that is hyperlinked down to the smallest plot of land. This plan manifests the state’s pragmatic cartographies of power, which continually produce and fix Singapore’s spaces in a teleological capitalist matrix, regulating how they are experienced and consumed. Singaporean writers such as Alfian Sa’at have recently attempted to conceive of the city beyond the ever intensifying spectacle of pragmatic capitalism. Their work experiments with alternative ways of imagining and inhabiting the city through unconventional literary forms and focalizations. This article looks specifically at Alfian’s “flash fictions” Malay Sketches (2013) – very brief short stories that depict minority Malay life in Singapore. The reading foregrounds the agency of the fictional in the production of social space in the city, and the way it runs counter to the planned and overdetermined spaces of the Singapore state. Close readings, drawing on spatial theory, demonstrate how this dissident text resists the blueprint of Singapore as global capitalist success by reclaiming the affective, the indeterminate and the unquantifiable.

Keywords:

• Alfian Sa’at
• Malay Sketches
• Singapore
• flash fiction
• social space
• urban planning

Notes

1. Alfian will be referred to by his first name in subsequent mentions because “Sa’at” is a patronym.

2. Indeed, since colonial times, the community has also been subject to racial stereotyping from both the colonial authorities and the Chinese majority, which attributes their lack of economic and educational success to “traits of complacency, indolence, apathy, infused with a love of leisure and an absence of motivation and discipline” (Rahim 1998, 9). Beginning in the 1980s, the increasing number of government policies encouraging the Sinicization of the population, with an emphasis on Confucian values, further marginalized the non-Chinese minorities in the country.

3. According to Singapore’s Housing Development Board (2015), “The Ethnic Integration Policy (EIP) is implemented to promote racial integration and harmony. The policy also aims to prevent the formation of racial enclaves by ensuring a balanced ethnic mix among the various ethnic communities living in public housing estates” (para. 1). In colonial Singapore, the earliest 1822 Jackson Plan made provision to segregate the indigenous Malay population from the Europeans, immigrant Chinese and Indian communities. While attempting to balance the ethnic ratios in the public housing estates, the Singapore government still relies on colonial categories of race to formulate its spatial policies.

4. With this polyphonic form, I believe that Alfian is drawing from his most recent work for the stage: Cooling-Off Day (Sa’at 2011) and Cook a Pot of Curry (Performed by Wild Rice Theatre Company in 2013) – plays that rely on the techniques of verbatim theatre, based on testimonies gathered from a series of personal interviews with a wide range of Singaporean residents.

5. Alfian includes a glossary at the end of the text that translates the Malay words baju kurung as “Traditional Malay attire for women consisting of a knee-length blouse worn over a long skirt” (2012, 224) and songket as “A hand-woven fabric in silk or cotton, and intricately patterned with gold or silver threads” (224).

6. Bersanding literally means “enthronement” or “sitting in state”. Sylva Frisk (2009) describes the ceremony as an occasion when “the bride and groom are presented as a royal couple. They are seated on a dais, elevated above the rest of those present” (144).

7. Inter-ethnic marriages between Malay women and Chinese men are rare in the country. According to the Singapore Department of Statistics (2014), only 137 out of almost 6000 inter-ethnic marriages between Malays and non-Malays in 2012 were of this configuration (calculated using both inter-ethnic marriages under the Women’s Charter and Muslim Law).

8. Chua Beng Huat (2003) points out that “Malay ethnicity still haunts domestic race relations, most notably in relation to Malay participation in Singapore’s armed forces” (65). According to Lee Kuan Yew, prime minister from 1959 to 1990, “it would be a very tricky business for the SAF [Singapore Armed Forces] to put a Malay officer who was very religious and who had family ties in Malaysia, in charge of a machine-gun unit” (quoted in Chua 2003, 65).

9. Singapore citizens’ identity cards are pink while permanent residents’ are blue. John Clammer (1982) argues for the particular significance of the racial classification category on the card and its links to bureaucratic control in the country.

11. An Amnesty International report notes that more than 400 people have been hanged in Singapore since 1991, “giving the small city-state possibly the highest execution rate in the world relative to its population of just over four million people” (see Amnesty International 2004).

12. Loh Kah Seng’s (2009) comprehensive study on the widespread clearance of the kampongs to build new public housing flats shows that the entire process was mired in complex politicking, suspicious cases of possible arson and the loss of “the semi-autonomous urban kampong population” which was “progressively being socialised into becoming citizens of the new nation-state” (642).

13. There has been some press coverage of Malay families camping and leading nomadic lifestyles because of their inability to meet mortgage payments. See Jiang (2008).