Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  THE PROGRESSIVE HOPE On Tuesday, 33-year-old Zohran Kwame Mamdani won the Democratic nomination for the New York City mayoralty,  and he is now the firm favorite to win the election in November. Against billionaire donors and the Democratic establishment who supported the corrupt and scandal-ridden ex-NY governor Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani ran an inspiring, grassroots campaign, firmly focused on making NYC affordable for all, which won the votes not only of the young college-educated, but also of working-class neighborhoods such as Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, Dyker Heights, Sunset Park, and Brighton Beach – all areas that swung rightward in the 2024 presidential election,  according to the Guardian .  The size of his victory in November will determine how far he can overcome the city's powerful vested interests and enact his election promises of free childcare, free buses, rent stabilizatio...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . When two young women, while trying to talk to Singapore's Law and Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam about the misuse of POFMA (Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act) , were provoked to flip the bird to the cameras of his minders, the fast-and-furious criticisms of the sisters from politicians of the governing party, civil-society actors, and community leaders were telling about the rigid restrictions of political discourse in the country. As  Jom  puts it, "When we are quick to judge, to believe authority over activists, to pine for some imagined decorum in a dialogue biased by the disparity in power, we leave out much from our collective consciousness, our understanding of who we are." The sisters have given  their own version of the event , and I choose to believe them instead. If the full video were to be released, and not just the seven minutes that whistled to the ...

 I have been thinking about what it means to write "political" poems, not just "news that stays news," but also about my own positionality in relation to Singapore politics. Sometimes New York and Singapore connect, unknown to anyone else. For example, I wrote the poem below thinking of both the criticism of Singapore writers of the National Library Board's use of generative AI and my own thoughts after the AI training at my Manhattan independent school. To the Tune of “The Invisible Man” by Queen  “68 Singapore writers sign statement criticising National Library Board’s ‘uncritical endorsement’ of generative AI”— The Straits Times , January 08, 2025  We heard the miller bragging   To both the young and old, I have a wonder for a daughter  Who spins straw into gold. The King, desirous of talents,  As Lazybones of bed, Ordered the girl to spin till morning  Or off with her head! In a prison dark and musty,  The girl, limp as a leaf, For a chil...

To the Tune of “This Is Home, Truly” I am a Good Class Bungalow, You are a No Class Flat.    I live and work among the shmos, a natural aristocrat. I am a Good Class Bungalow And not a No Class Flat. I’m rich in show and hung with dough, And yet no caveat. I am a Good Class Bungalow. Don’t say, I No Class Flat. Just one slip of the tongue, you know POFMA’ed you will get. I am a Good Class Bungalow Supporting No Class Flats. That fairy tale from long ago Better believe or—SPLAT! I am your Good Class Bungalows, I am your No Class Flats. I am your River sung and flow Through zilch and ziggurats.

 This book of essays by Singaporean journalist and activist Kirsten Han is informative, clear-eyed, and nuanced. Every Singapore should read it.

A poem for the 70 individuals who walked to Singapore's Istana to deliver 140 letters to the PM on 2 Feb 2024, as part of the National Day of Solidarity with Palestine. 3 of them--Sobikun Nahar, Siti Amirah Mohamed Asrori, and Annamalai Kokila Parvathi--were ridiculously charged with disturbing public order by illegally organizing, or abetting with organizing, a public procession in a prohibited area. Walking to the Istana They do not need a head nor do they want a tail. They are all heads, all eyes, all mouths, all legs, all hands, umbrellas up against the onslaught of the sun. They are cool, and young as the crescent moon lighting up lovers' rendezvous and drinking parties and the unworldly debates of secret handshakes. They know of others who also walked such roads, when buses were divided into front and back, when a state was crossed to pick up a handful of salt. They understand they can easily be replaced by those coming up behind them, even younger, smarter, and stronger,...

  May 15, 2024: A night of readings to commemorate 76 years of the Nakba and to stand in solidarity with Palestine. Nakba Then and Now: Refuse Silence invites you to raise your voice, amplify the Palestinian struggle for freedom, and demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Nakba Day marks the devastation of the Palestinian homeland in 1948 through ethnic cleansing and expulsion of a majority of Palestinian people. Nakba Day is about resisting expulsion and erasure. Today, as we are witnessing another Nakba, the world is also rising up on every continent. This event is part of the Publishers for Palestine coalition's Exist, Resist, Return: A Week of Action for Nakba Day (May 14-21).  Reading by Aidah Masoud, Ibtisam Azem, Najla Said, Huda Fakhredinne, Maaza Mengiste, Valérie Gruhn, Mona Eltahawy, Sean Jacobs, Emna Zghal, Suha Araj, Mukoma wa Ngugi, Christina Dhanuja, Zohra Saed, Christopher Stone, Suneela Mubayi, Hafsa Kanjwal, Omar Berrada, Anna Arabindan Kesson, Jee Leong Koh,...

Weekly Column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Yesterday I was asked by a student writer of the school's newspaper to recommend a recent read for an article about students' reading habits and preferences. This was what I wrote back to her: "I just finished reading Rachel Heng's novel  The Great Reclamation , and I loved it. It is a bildungsroman, but it is also an epic. The story follows Ah Boon from boyhood in a fishing village to adulthood in the government. In the process, it also traces the trajectory of Singapore from the last days of British rule to the heady times of the country's post-independence development. What is lost in the rush to modernize? What does modernization do to one's sense of self? These are questions that the novel explores with keen sympathy and insight. And with magical islands to boot." What I could have added to modernization but did not, was the question about what is lost in the rush to statehood....

Hard on the heels of the election of former Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam to the Presidency of Singapore came the outrageous sentencing of rapper Subhas Nair to six weeks’ imprisonment for attempting to “promote ill will” between different races in Singapore. His crimes? Making four social-media posts that called attention to the different responses of the authorities and the media to wrongdoing by perpetrators of different races. Subhas is not alone in feeling angry and frustrated about systemic racism in Singapore. More than half (56.2%) of respondents in a 2021 survey on race relations felt that racism was an important problem—this was an increase of almost 10 percentage points from the 46.3% response in the 2016 survey. During his run for the Presidency, Tharman spoke about the racism he experienced while growing up as a brown child. When he returned home from sports on public buses, there were fellow commuters who would not sit beside him. It was also not uncommon that ...

 A brilliant reading of Freud's Moses and Monotheism by the late Edward Said. It originates as a talk given at the Freud Museum in London. After Said's talk, Jacqueline Rose responded, and her response was fittingly included in the Verso book. Said concludes: "Freud's uneasy relationship with the orthodoxy of his own community is very much a part of the complex of ideas so well described by Deutscher, who forgets to mention what I think is an essential component of it: its irremediably diasporic, unhoused character. This is a subject which George Steiner has celebrated with great elan for many years. But I would want to quality Deutscher by saying that this needn't be seen only as a Jewish characteristic; in our age of vast population transfers, of refugees, exiles, expatriates and immigrants, it can also be identified in the diasporic, wandering, unresolved, cosmopolitan consciousness of someone who is both inside and outside of his or her community. This is now ...

  One of the effects of  the July 2023 scandals  that hit the Singapore government is the state’s loss of control over the narrative around the upcoming Presidential Election. The Elected Presidency, an invention of the governing party, has come  under strong fire  for being a flawed institution that was created out of political maneuvering and expediency. Instead of uniting the country’s people behind a ceremonial but vital figurehead, it has been struck by the lightning of political dissent and division. On state-controlled media, the ruling party’s candidate Tharman Shanmugaratnam attempts to burnish his independent (and dare we say it, populist) credentials by describing himself as  a former student activist , an irony not lost on activists persecuted by the state. This blatant attempt to appeal to the younger and more politically conscious generation only throws up questions about Tharman’s complicity with past and present state persecution. ...

All four essays originated as lectures. Morris gives a clear and eloquent explanation of his Socialism in the essays "Useful Work versus Useless Toil" and "How I Became a Socialist." The former lays interesting stress on the wastefulness of Capitalism, a useful counterpoint to how capitalist production is often seen as as the most efficient use of resources. The essay also links the hopes of labor to the hope for a Socialist future in a rhetorically useful move.  "What is the nature of the hope which, when it is present in work, makes it worth doing?  "It is threefold, I think—hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself; and hope of these also in some abundance and of good quality; rest enough and good enough to be worth having; product worth having by one who is neither a fool nor an ascetic; pleasure enough for all of us to be conscious of it while we are at work; not a mere habit, the loss of which we shall feel as a fidgety man ...

 From "A Morality Based on Misfortune: The Plague " (1947): Camus's example shows how one may start out from a revolt-based morality and slide back quickly into a depressed one. This is because a morality founded upon passion, upon an irreducible part of ourselves, is often accompanied by bad conscience: how are we to avoid feeling guilty, certain as we are that we are concealing the face of Caligula within ourselves? No one is in any doubt, the power associated with the unleashing of passion is a fearsome danger for possible life . What is ordinarily missed is that the even is not then the product of passion, but of power. Even in Caligula one could not say that the evil was profound, since his capricious acts rapidly destroy his power—and he knows it. Evil is what is done by the SS in the concentration camps; it is what acquires power by killing and, by killing, increases the power of the regime it serves. One cannot even say exactly that evil lies in power (otherwise t...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .   In Capital, Volume One , Karl Marx shows that capitalism is the thief of time. In pursuit of ever-greater profits, capitalism increases either the working hours or the productivity of those hours in order to cream off the surplus value from the wages paid to workers for maintaining bare life. Individual capitalists cannot help doing so if their business is to stay afloat in the market competition. Since capitalism is pretty much the global mode of production now, national economies cannot escape the logic either. If they cannot exploit their own citizens due to labor laws, they will exploit vulnerable migrant children .  Written in the 1950s, when the American postwar economy was supposedly booming, the play A Raisin in the Sun , by Lorraine Hansberry, revolves ostensibly around a Black family's difficulties in purchasing and owning a house in a white Chicago neighborhood. Yet, to put the emphasi...

 One of those books that made me wish that I had discovered them earlier in my own education. Walter Rodney's Decolonial Marxism is descriptively subtitled "Essays from the Pan-African Revolution." For once the publisher's blurb on the back cover describes the book's contents accurately:  Early in life, Walter Rodney became a major revolutionary figure in a dizzying range of locales that traversed the breadth of the Black diaspora: in North America and Europe, in the Caribbean, and in Africa. He not only witnessed a Pan-African and socialist internationalism; in his efforts to build mass organisations, catalyse rebellious ferment, and theorize an anti-colonial path to self-emancipation, he can be counted among its prime authors. Decolonial Marxism records such a life by collecting previously unbound essays written during the world-turning days of Black revolution. In drawing together pieces in which Rodney elaborates on the nexus of race and class, offers his ref...

 Column written for the weekly Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . I dreamt that 377A, Singapore's law against private, consensual sex between men, was repealed. That families of all kinds, LGBTQ+, blended, single-parent, were cherished and supported. Workplace discrimination against one's sexual orientation and gender identity was outlawed. Full housing and medical rights, benefits, and protections were extended to queer people and their loved ones. Schoolchildren were taught to love and respect themselves and others who were different from them. I dreamt that economic benefits were redistributed more evenly and fairly. No one would go hungry, homeless, or without an education. The young learned to look out for those not in their families, those supposed strangers, the poor, and to challenge the winner-take-all, zero-sum-game mentality. Secure and independent in their old age, the elderly did not have to clean tables in the hawker centers or the bathrooms in the gleam...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Message “SINGAPORE, STOP THE KILLINGS” projected by  The Illuminator  onto the building  housing Singapore’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations on November 2, 2022.  The NYC-based Singaporean organizer explained, “The goal is to name and shame on the international arena,  to increase awareness outside of Singapore and show our support for those in Singapore fighting for justice."   The  shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs  last Saturday, killing five people and wounding 17 others, was a tragedy. The repercussions of the shooting will live on, not only for the wounded and the families of the dead, but also for the LGBTQ community everywhere, who are reminded, once again, that they are not safe even in what is supposed to be a "safe space." Tragic in a different manner is the Singapore state's judicial murder of prisoners on death row. State-...