Why I Am Half in Love with Jolovan Wham

Weekly column for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here.

Because like most Singaporeans l have been inducted into the cult of personality. I have been indoctrinated, I mean taught, from young the history of Great Men, so I petition Parliament to preserve the shrine of Jolovan's HDB apartment, even if it's against his wishes, after he joins our Lord.

Because he is super tech savvy, as a Singaporean should be. The cops confirm it after they arrested him for holding an indoor Skype meeting with a democracy activist from Hong Kong, another tech-savvy city. The courts confirm it by convicting him of public disorder and sentencing him to 16 days in prison. See how powerful techies are!

Because every national day I am brainwashed by songs on radio, TV, and in shopping malls telling me charity begins and stays at home, and Jolovan Wham is a labor activist belonging to HOME.

Because I won't give up my Chinese privilege and two Chinese men make more privilege than one, and if you criticize my privilege, I will report you to the police for “an offence of promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion or race” under Section 298A of the Penal Code.

Because of Jolovan's boyish good looks. I will look more butch beside him.

Because he went to our highly-ranked local university, which is the best in the world, although we still send our government scholars overseas and, when they return, put them on the fast track in the civil service, where they perpetuate themselves. It's called meritocracy, people!

I am half in love with Jolovan Wham. Why am I only half in love? Because the other half of my love is for Thum Ping Tjin, who is not only smart and funny, but has also conquered the English Channel. The sea, lah, not TV.

Jee Leong Koh
February 28, 2019

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Example...
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...
Read more