David Marshall: A Bittersweet Remembrance

I can’t write a ticker. Reading the Straits Times, after the budget hot air, Singapore seems to have gone placid, flat, even flaccid. That is not true. Go out into the heartland streets and the shady corners of downtown, and one could tune into the energies of a people, their faces and eyes giving off dreams, hopes, fears, fantasies, joys interspersed with moments of ennui. The people, ever complex, ever changing, almost struggling to break free of a humdrum existence: Trying to make ends meet, you’re a slave to money then you die. But the cobblestones of a numbing colonialism of the mind disrupt the melody shine. Something is really wrong when the press and all the other intellectual organs of our society do not quite resonate with the body politic.

There was something in the news the week before that got me hooked on a feeling that rocked between blue, red and white this week, and I have been playing the Verve non-stop. A symposium was held to honor the late David Marshall’s birth centennial, and the President paid his tribute, “In our early years, under colonial domination, he made us, in Singapore, aware of who we are and made us dream of independence. He was a giant of a man in that he sought to inspire in us a sense of hope and what we needed to be”. There were the usual platitudes, of course, from appropriating his Jewishness to affirm skin-deep multiracialism to depicting him as a towering and flamboyant national hero, and the long and wide shadow of Mentor Lee as Marshall is remembered for crediting Lee’s leadership just as Lee honors Marshall, saying that the Singapore government is indebted to Marshall for life (see ST 13/3/08).

The Singapore government?! Somehow, along the way, it seems that the people have been forgotten, as though this dance of ours for the past fifty years of becoming the nation has been a tango between the Party and individuals. Well, not really, somehow we have forgotten we are the people, allowing ourselves to be consumed, our action engineered into the great big machine of the Party. In an interview with lawyer Dharmendra Yadev in 1994, a year before he died, when asked how young Singaporeans have changed, Marshall said, “What has changed? The self-confidence of our people has grown immensely, and that is good to see. Our pragmatic abilities have grown magnificently, and that is good to see. Very good to see! You are very able. You’re ambitious, and the government has heroic plans for the future. It hasn’t finished”.

I can almost feel his piercing gaze on me, with his deep, wizened voice challenging me on my destiny, your destiny. It hasn’t finished, with me, with you. I see my very body, the shape of its heroic plans, past and future, from national service to annuities. I see my very thoughts, the wiring of its heroic plans, as I come to accept the boundaries and alternatives set out for me, always followed by hallucinations of carrots and the pleasurable apprehension of the stick. I see my very emotions, the echo of its heroic plans, from the desires of suckling to the anxieties of separation into the fantasies of security. I am able, I am ambitious, I am the government’s heroic plan.

But I’m here in my mold, I am here in my mold. From one day to the next. And I’m a million different people from one day to the next.

I remember Marshall, on a hot weekday morning, walking practically unannounced into my classroom, an old boy visiting his alma mater and meeting the youths that were being fashioned in another time. I remember my eyes lighting up to this strange man that seemed to have stepped out of the time machine and my history textbook, the first Chief Minister who boarded the plane to safari-jacket London for merdeka, the lawyer who marched through the workers’ streets with a hammer in his hand, now the ambassador to France, his body and posture tamed by the tactical cooptation of repressive honors. But there was that burning fire in his eyes, as he looked personably at us boys too shocked to know what to ask, while our teachers stood by red-faced by our pensive silence. He broke into a smile and obliged us a short speech. The eloquence was implacable, but there was a moment when his heart poured into a quick sequence of words, challenging us on our destiny, “don’t let anyone deaden your passion and courage; you are Singapore”.

I am Singapore. These words sunk into the deepest recess of my consciousness that hot morning and took root in my being. The values of passion, courage and independence have guided me since. But there is a certain discomfort that lingers on, as though Marshall is still prodding me, “It hasn’t finished.” After all, this is what the Party has been nurturing in the new century, the new Singaporean, with self-absorbed stories and glossy images of passionate heroes, courageous mountain-climbers and independent entrepreneurs, where even the mercurial Marshall, critical to a fault, is run through the “lapdog” media mill, installed in the pantheon of national saints so that litanies of platitudes can be sung and the congregation transfigured. “We have become good bourgeois seeking comfort, security”, said Marshall in 1994. In the turn of irony, he is now inducted into the creation of good post-revolutionaries seeking attention, publicity. Not Guevera, but Che emblazoned in a million tee shirts. Marshall remembered for his colorful flamboyance not his uncompromising spirit of human freedom and dignity.

But his voice, his challenge continues to loom large. “I take off my hat to the pragmatic ability of our government but there is no soul in our conduct. It is a difficult thing to speak of because it is difficult to put in a computer, and the youth of Singapore is accustomed to computer fault. There is no longer the intellectual ferment, the passionate argument for a better civilization. … Tell me I’m wrong, come on”. What is soul when we lie no longer lie in “crystal coffins stuck with certificates of your pragmatic abilities”, as Marshall described in 1994, but in colorful pods papered with acclamations of awards and narcissistic displays of self-worth?

Commenting on the centennial commemoration to Marshall’s wife, his daughter said, “Oh mum, can’t you just hear dad’s snort and chuckle, and his ha ha do they feel it safe to do it now that I’m safely dead?” When asked about how young Singaporeans have changed, his first words were “The role of youths! Ha!” His safari jacket insulted the sensibilities of London and inspired a minister’s wearing of sandals to the legislature as a mark of anti-colonial protest. Soul is irreverence. In the age when everyone demands respect and respect is the main currency of power, this is how I remember the prescient Marshall, an intellectually fermenting, passionately arguing, but most of all, an irreverent Marshall. The President is right, but wrong in using the past tense, Marshall makes us, in Singapore, aware of who we are and makes us dream of independence.

I can change, I can change, ‘cause its a bittersweet symphony this life.

Ethnosophy #2: Rac(ial)ist Children and Ghosts

I’ve been thinking for quite a while now about what a senior grassroots leader told me some time ago at a racial harmony education event. He was an old guard who worked the ground when the PAP was still a left-wing party campaigning to build a nation out of disparate communal groups wrecked by racial politics; July 21, 1964, after all, came in the wake of the PAP-UMNO electoral battle that was fought over the kind of multiracialism for the new nation. He seemed eager to talk to me about the past, probably because he found me a young chap who was as eager to hear about the period that formed the nation I was then born into. Almost as though he couldn’t quite point to contemporary institutional rac(ial)isms, he picked on what I bemusedly and amusedly thought was a superficial rac(ial)ism: the everyday Hokkien terms for non-Chinese Singaporeans. But I was deeply impressed, and I didn’t know why, am I a rac(ial)ist?

Plausibly. He thought huan kia, which literary means child of the wilderness or savage child, to be simply racist, and preferred ma lai tong pao (Malay comrade in Mandarin). He thought kek leng kia to be an onomatopoeic word derived from the sound of the chains attached to the Indian convicts that build the original Singapore settlement in the early years after Raffles did his deed by the River. He thought bang ka li to to not only inaccurate in representing Sikhs as coming from Bengali but also downright derogatory. He also thought sek kia ni to be a term said with a certain derisive tone of people with Eurasian heritage. I knew of these terms and have used them myself, very innocuously, when talking to the older generation. Suddenly I became very conscious when I spoke in Teochew or Hokkien.

Perhaps. As I went up about my business of reading books, searching archives, surfing websites and talking to people, I began to discover the historical facts behind the terms, almost all accidentally. The term huan kia was probably coined by the second wave of Chinese immigrants to Malaya in the nineteenth century and not the long established and acculturated Peranakans, as a term that associated the Malays with the dangers of the jungle that they had to tackle as they work their living in the mines and plantations deep in the heart of darkness. The term kek leng kia came from the term kling or keling that was already in usage before the founding of Singapore and probably referred to people from Kalinga, which was a kingdom with a maritime empire that extended its reach into Southeast Asia before the arrival of the East India Companies. The term sek kia ni came from the Malay term serani which was derived from the Arabic nasrani, which means Nazarene or Christian.

Possibly. In the age of speak-mandarin political correctness, everything Hokkien seems derogatory. Sure, these terms have been used in blatantly racist ways, yesterday, today and most likely tomorrow too. As my fellow sociologist, Lai Ah Eng, wrote a while back in a Straits Times article calling for Singaporeans to improve their “cultural quotient”, add a kui (ghost) to the term and it becomes a weapon for racial strife. By all means, increase our culture quotient, but this shouldn’t be equated with political correctness, which does not correct the misguided or misinformed, but only send them underground to proliferate our cultural soil with libidinal racisms. That is why racist jokes remain so funny and racial wounds fester at the slightest touch, afflicting even the most sane and rational citizens who overreact with a certain pleasurable vehemence to issues such as complaints against dogs in taxis and blanket Halal food restrictions in school canteens – unreason or reason, either way, we can discover the other in ourselves and ourselves in the other with a simple gesture of “lai lai lai, lim kopi” (come, let’s drink coffee). That’s the cultural quotient of Mr Satwant Singh, vice-president of the Young Sikh Association, on how he handles obviously Hokkien-speaking Singaporeans who call him “babu singh” (Straits Times 17/3/08, p.H6) – by explaining in cordial terms his culture and religion to the misguided and misinformed, who at the end of the kopi will call him singh kor (Sikh big brother).

Probably. I would much prefer singh hia di (Sikh brother). But before we reach that level of mutual respect and appreciation, where all would naturally call each other hia di and ce muay (sister), I reject the superficiality of political correctness and see the people’s wisdom in the everyday usage of huan kia, kek leng kia and sek kia ni. For in these terms are captured the historical richness of the evolution of racial relations in Malaya, with all the collaboration, competition, unity and strife that comes with it. In each term contains the germ of racial respect, for the noble warrior of the rich Malay jungles, the imperious trader who hail from the great subcontinent and the pious hybrid who possesses progressive learning, all interacting with the diligent migrants who seek to make a living in an alien land. In each term also contains the germ of racist potential, the denigration of savages, impurity and laziness that shows up the Chinese as incorrigibly prejudiced.

Absolutely. I am a rac(ial)ist, containing the two contradictory tendencies in my habits and urges of thought and tongue. But I am a recovering rac(ial)ist, and so are you and we, and it is only by admitting thus that we begin on the path of acquiring cultural quotient to deal with our ghosts, our kui, so that we can all be kia of a common humanity. Cut the politically correct mandarin pretense so that we can all lim kopi.