Rocking the boat

Editorial #6
Cher Tan and Nina Chabra

Alterity in Singapore has always been questioned; dissent and critical thought, even more so. To go against the grain, to rock the boat, to ‘quit’ instead of stay, to not bite the hand that feeds you; these are slogans that have persisted in the public imagination. What other worlds could there be? Don’t know, don’t care – why would one when one possesses the privilege to be from a place which boasts many firsts in the world? It’s exceptional, and if you follow a linearity you will achieve even more. Align yourself to a cookie-cutter approach of capital-L ‘learning’ with a peer-competitive mindset, don’t hang out with the ‘bad kids’, go to university, plan for your insurance and CPF (the no-opt-out pension fund). You can go even further; throw in wealth, racial privilege, an overseas university education, and that’s how you know you’ll soar. A false sense of meritocracy reigns; work hard enough and you’ll attain progress. ‘You’ll have no future,’ they said, if you didn’t follow their prescriptive codes. Circumstantially, neither of us did.

We met in 2009, a time where the world was still reeling from the repercussions of the GFC. We were starting to see the cracks. A mutual friend from across the Causeway, M, was surprised we were weirdos who both lived in such a tiny city-state and had similar interests but had yet to meet. We’ve remained friends to this day, despite having been 6,000 km apart for the last decade. The last time we saw each other in person was in 2019. Between 2009 and 2012 we solidified our friendship by participating in various artistic and activist endeavours together; we were part of a collective called Underneath the Radar, which organised film screenings that were pertinent to the shifting sociopolitical geo-realities around us. These were usually followed by a group discussion afterwards; nights were spent discussing politics at the local kopitiam (coffee shop), a youthful fervour puncturing the air. Our last collaboration – alongside a large collective of friends and peers – was through SlutWalk Singapore in 2011, where we worked to expand and shift forward discussions around feminism. We may not have been able to change the popular narrative on a grand scale, but we could enact change in our own tiny worlds.

Eleven years later, we’re proud to continue this trajectory. In this time, our selves and politics have continued to evolve and grow, and the widespread use of social media has enabled many more people like ourselves to reach across geopolitical borders and develop critical processes of thought amidst this strange co-reality that we’ve spent much of our lives in. While we are both hyper-aware that we are anglicised in our scours of knowledge, and that there is so much of ‘Singapore’ that we have yet to experience, this is a version of the reality we have inhabited for much of our lives, and it’d be disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

Curated and edited by Cher Tan and Nina Chabra, this sixth issue of Portside Review brings you alternative visions and intersectional lives nuanced with loving critique. Comprising work from artists and writers who either reside in Singapore or are of the diaspora, this issue leans into the aforementioned alterity, which can be expressed in ways that are as opaque and elliptical, as joyous and cheeky as they are explicit and incendiary.

bani haykal offers a multi-disciplinary approach through a prose poem alongside a Venn diagram and a 3D-printable object as he thinks through the idea of the ‘token’, be that through being a minoritised person in Singapore, the NFT fallacy, and the access only given to those who use government-mandated apps. Eileen Chong composes two tributes to her late grandmother, who provided her with nourishment and care in her lifetime, while Kelly Wong explores the idea of ‘authenticity’ through her Singaporean migrant parents’ renditions of Singapore-style hawker food, revelling in the joy that home cooking brings. Diana Rahim imagines a dystopia wherein secrets are withheld to maintain power. Sangeetha Thanapal pens a letter from exile, as a political dissident whose very existence is deemed a threat and a problem to the nation-state. Mysara Aljaru writes a short story about being discriminated as a Brown woman in Singapore, to which she layers an array of emotions and circumstances as her protagonist travels to neighbouring country Indonesia. ila ila charts an alternative map of Singapore as she tries to trace Native and syncretic lineages that are slowly being wiped out through false rhetoric around ‘land reclamation’ and ‘progress’; Vinita Ramani, too, does similarly, as she evokes a psychogeography through walking, especially as she traipses through areas considered ‘wild’ next to the surrounding overarching sterility. Stephanie Dogfoot wonders about Teochew-accented English and how primary school assemblies are inherently a propagandistic enterprise. Meanwhile, Vithya Subramaniam considers two films made by local independent filmmaker Vishal Daryanomel, which reflects upon the Indian identity through the continuity of migration and history, and consequently people’s places in it. Aditi Shivaramakrishnan undergoes a similar line of thought but through a conversation with her own mother, who migrated from Mumbai in the 1990s. And Sharmeen/Sifar produces a sound piece made up of newspaper headlines from 1981 – the year she was born – to 2019, where it’s evident that there is a national interest to control the popular narrative about Indian people through stereotypes. Melissa De Silva questions the state-sanctioned racial model as well, this time through her own experiences as a Eurasian person constantly marked ‘Other’ through arbitrary categories (CMIO; Chinese, Malay, Indian, Other) even if she is descended from rich and interweaving lineages. Following on from this, Andre D’Rozario, Gerald Choa and Shane Carroll create a graphic essay through their ancestors’ creole Kristang, to pay tribute to their families of whom knowledge about their Eurasian cultures and foodways were imparted. And Shane Carroll, as well, reiterates this by sharing a poem in Kristang about his Nanna whose lovingly made dishes he’s always enjoyed. Ruby Thiagarajan pens a sharp critique about the idea of home ownership as a young millennial in Singapore, where visions of ‘adulthood’ remain vastly different even amidst a global housing crisis, while Celeste Tan and Yaiza Canopoli chat via a roundtable that explores mutual aid in a country where the wealth divide gets wider by the day. Gerald Sim speaks with renowned local filmmaker Jasmine Ng Kin Kia about the legacy of her cult independent film Eating Air and how she views film culture in Singapore today. Mark Wong too speaks with another kind of renowned local filmmaker, Yeo Siew Hua, on his work to date and experimentalism in film, negotiating with regulatory bodies in an atmosphere that can feel stifling. And N Rengarajan, who has worked in Singapore for the last eight years, pens an ode – in Tamil, translated by Kokila Annamalai – to the allure of 4D (local lotto). Marylyn Tan envisions sexual politics through found poetry in Singapore-centric pornography, while Chand Chandramohan wonders if the term ‘cancel culture’ is harmful in an authoritarian society, where the state can be involved through punitive laws and capricious levers used to censor those considered vulnerable and often to no recourse.

Putting these works together in the last four months has been a great joy. As we enter another kind of reality in a pandemic world, the necessity with regard to creating alternative and critical narratives enters into sharper focus and becomes much more urgent. There is so much at stake, but we continue to imagine.