Canceled By The State

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


Constance Singam is a towering figure in Singapore's civil society. President of the women's rights group AWARE for three separate terms, she also served as the President of the Singapore Council of Women's Organizations. Her advocacy is not limited to gender equality. She helped create the Society Against Family Violence, The Working Committee to support activism in Singapore, and a foreign workers' rights group that became Transient Workers Count Too. She is one of the lead signatories of the #READY4REPEAL petition to abolish the anti-LGBTQ law, 377A. Singapore Unbound was honored to have her judge our first writing fellowship to NYC, together with two other judges.
The launch of her newly expanded memoir Where I Was: A Memoir About Forgetting and Remembering is keenly anticipated, as it promises to bring the story of this remarkable woman up to date, including the so-called AWARE saga, in which a group of fundamentalist Christians nearly took over the organization. So surprise and outrage greeted the news yesterday that the Singapore Literature Book Bazaar, organized by the Singapore Book Publisher Association, has canceled the book launch.

It turned out that Singapore's National Arts Council (NAC), the leading state agency on the arts and the funder of the Bazaar, holds that the memoir contravenes its funding guidelines, according to a Facebook post published by Ethos Books, the book's publisher. How the memoir contravenes the funding guidelines, we don't know. Singapore Unbound urges Ethos Books to share the NAC explanation for the information of the literary and publishing community. If there isn't an explanation, we urge Ethos Books, and concerned individuals and arts organizations, to ask NAC for one.

Novelist Balli Kaur Jaswal, who is supposed to moderate the launch event, rightly called out the cancellation for what it is, an act of censorship. In its Facebook post, Ethos Books points out that "arts and culture, intellectual and moral growth, will not be enabled in such an environment. And writers and artists who have important things to say would not be supported in state-sanctioned spaces." What we need to hold accountable, to echo Ethos Books, is NAC's funding guidelines, which are phrased so broadly and vaguely that they allow the censorship of anything deemed by the government as critical of the status quo. We remain stunted in mind, heart, and spirit as long as exposure and debate are not allowed. The alternative for arts organizations is to eschew state funding in favor of independence and growth, a course that Singapore Unbound continues to pursue with all your help.

Jee Leong Koh
March 10, 2022

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