New Tests, New Thinking

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here.

"The prison sits at the nexus of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism," begins Judy Luo in her essay, a summary of her study of carcerality and freedom at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. If, like me, you need a précis of current thinking about prison abolition and its antecedents, you can do worse than read Judy's thoughtful argument about the convergences of criminality, immigration, care work, and property rights.

The American immigration system is broken, and here to cast a new and personal light on the problem is poet Jan-Henry Gray, the very first feature of the new season of our Second Saturdays Reading Series. His award-winning book Documents is rooted in the experience of living in America as a queer undocumented Filipino, and maps the byzantine journey toward citizenship through legal records and fragmented recollections. You can read more about him below and sign up for his reading (and open mic) on September 12.

The prison is very much on my mind. Singapore's democracy activist Jolovan Wham has just gone past the mid-point of his 10-day jail sentence. He is imprisoned for no greater crime than Skyping in a foreign speaker to a peaceful indoor political discussion. Jolovan's case illustrates Judy's argument very well, that imprisonment is dished out as a means to warn, and thus discipline, not just the individual body but also the body politic. Judy's essay, however, also points out that our hope of liberation lies in recognizing our mutual interdependence and acting on that recognition. Jolovan is using his jail time to learn more about prison conditions in Singapore. After his last stint in prison, he has started a website called Prison Life, a public repository of data and knowledge about what being imprisoned in Singapore is like. Jolovan's ceaseless efforts to serve others is one face of true liberation.

In addition to being a full-time student and an abolition activist, Judy is an Assistant Editor of our press Gaudy Boy. She and the whole team have been wholly supportive of the initiative to donate all sale proceeds from June through August to Black Lives Matter. This is the last weekend to buy a book by an Asian author and support the struggle against anti-black racism. Our website has been beautifully redesigned by Flora Chan, and you will enjoy browsing our short but vital list of poetry and fiction titles. Thanks again, Flora!

This week, in preparation for school reopening, I attended a series of meetings that tried to address the ills of racism and the pandemic. Both challenges have elicited a raft of new measures that rightly aim at mutual care and protection, but could also feel controlling, even punitive. As we seek the right balance between protection and coercion, it is good to remember what schooling is for. In last week's column, I shared my assumptions about teaching English at a secondary school and asked you, my readers, for yours. Helaine Smith, who writes our monthly poetry column at SP Blog, was a former colleague. She wrote back with this nugget of wisdom taught her by another teacher: "I [remember] a principle that guided much of what my first chairman taught us. It was this—that teaching time is so precious that we cannot afford to waste one moment of it, the corollaries being that no book should be taught which students would otherwise read and understand on their own, and that all tests should, in every part, require new thinking from students."

We are all facing new tests, of one kind or another. May these tests bring out new thinking from all of us.

Jee Leong Koh
August 27, 2020

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