Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Singapore Unbound Public Statement  September 21, 2020  Singapore Unbound Urges Prime Minister's Office to Withdraw Police Complaint Singapore Unbound denounces the People's Action Party government's harassment of PJ Thum, the Managing Director of New Naratif, an independent news website reporting on Singapore and Southeast Asia. The Elections Department, Prime Minister's Office, has filed a police complaint against New Naratif, alleging that New Naratif published “paid advertisements that amounted to the illegal conduct of election activity under s83(2) of the Parliamentary Elections Act (PEA) during the recent 2020 General Election.” As New Naratif points out , the PEA is framed so broadly that almost any kind of paid public comment could be construed to run foul of it, including New Naratif's coverage of the General Elections, boosted as paid posts on Facebook. Judge for yourself: The PEA states that “…such material shall be election advertising even t...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Thank you for buying books from our imprint Gaudy Boy in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Gaudy Boy donated our sales proceeds from June through August to Voices of Community Activists & Leaders (VOCAL-NY). Together we raised $500, including two outright donations. Led by Black and brown people, VOCAL-NY is a statewide grassroots membership organization that builds power among low-income people directly impacted by HIV/AIDS, the drug war, mass incarceration, and homelessness. The organization has active chapters in New York City, Albany, Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, and Westchester County. We're pleased to support its community organizing, leadership development, advocacy, direct services, and direct action. Do check out VOCAL-NY's tremendous work for disadvantaged communities. I don't do this often but I will toot my own horn. My first hybrid work of fiction Snow at 5 PM:...

 Weekly column for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Introduction to the 2020 Singapore Literature Festival in NYC (Oct 1-3) I am haunted by the ghost of Sakthivel Kumarvelu. As an economic migrant, he found his way from India to Singapore in the hope of a better life. His dream was crushed in 2013 when he was killed by the private bus that whisked him and his fellow workers away from downtown to distant dormitories, out of the sight of Singaporeans. He died of a traffic accident, some say. It is more accurate to say that he died of a world of social and economic inequities. Or as Bangladeshi poet Muhammad Sharif Uddin, also a migrant worker in Singapore, puts it in his powerful elegy for the dead man, “Velu was trapped in a labyrinth of laws.” Velu’s death sparked off—what should we call it? The official version of events calls it a riot. We might call it something else—an uprising. Certainly the violence was caused by deep and justified grievances. A...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Singapore Unbound is holding our 4th Singapore Literature Festival from October 1-3, 2020. To be held online for the first time, this independent, biennial festival brings together Singaporean and American authors and audiences for lively conversations about literature and society. All events are free and open to everyone. The theme of this year's festival is "The Politics of Hope." Singapore Unbound wishes to respond to this fraught moment not only in Singapore and the USA but also around the world. Everywhere, democracy, human rights, and social justice are facing existential threats, and we want to provide writers and thinkers a platform to speak to the current global turmoil.   Check out the full festival program . RSVP early for the Zoom link and extras (excerpts, interviews, updates).   Festival highlights   Timely, Pertinent Topics The festival is bo...

What I missed in my education as a poet: Édouard Glissant. About the entry of a dominant culture into a fragile and composite one, such as French culture into Martinique or Anglo-American into Singapore: "Consequently, wouldn't it be best just to go along with it? Wouldn't it be a viable solution to embellish the alienation, to endure while comfortably receiving state assistance, with all the obvious guarantees implied in such a decision? This is what the technocratic elite, created for the management of decoy positions, have to talk themselves into before they convince the people of Martinique. Their task is all the less difficult since they use it to give themselves airs of conciliation, of cooperative humanism, of a realism anxious to make concrete improvements in circumstances. Not counting the pleasures of permissive consumption. Not counting the actual advantages of a special position, in which public funds (from France or Europe) serve to satisfy a rather large numb...