Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  Singapore Unbound is pleased to announce three awards for the best undergraduate critical essays on Singapore and other literatures this year. Each winner receives USD250 and publication in our journal  SUSPECT . The awards are generously funded by Professor Koh Tai Ann (Nanyang Technological University) We're grateful to literary scholar Weihsin Gui (University of California, Riverside) for reading the submissions and making the selection. He gives his comments below, first on all the submissions and then on the individual winners.  “The essays submitted for this award are all to be commended for the depth of their textual analyses and the breadth of their engagement with various cultural and literary theories. I can envision all eight essays, after undergoing peer review and varying degrees of revision and expansion, being published in academic journals. I encourage the authors to consider doing...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Every year, in the run-up to Singapore's National Day on August 9, we announce the results of our annual Singapore Poetry Contest. Open to everyone who is NOT a Singaporean citizen, the annual contest seeks poems that use the word “Singapore” or its variants in a creative and significant way. It is our way of building imaginative connections of all kinds—integral, tangential, plural—between Singapore and the rest of the world. This year, the connections were greatly multiplied. We received a total of 432 poems, 337 more poems than last year, so you can imagine that this year’s contest was much more competitive, with many strong entries. The poems came from 32 countries around the world, 11 more than last year. Nigeria leads with 159 entries, followed by the USA 74, India 29, the Philippines 28, the UK 23, Singapore 13, Zimbabwe 11, South Africa 9, Canada 8, Malaysia 7, Australia 5, Ireland 5, P...

Singapore Unbound's Public Statement on PAP's Attack on Alfian Sa'at. Sign up for weekly newsletter here . Singapore Unbound strongly condemns the attack by Singapore's ruling party, the People's Action Party (PAP), on Singaporean author Alfian Sa'at. In a letter published on the PAP website, Member of Parliament Dr. Tan Wu Meng cherry-picks Alfian's Facebook posts and misreads his words to depict the author falsely as unpatriotic. Most pernicious is Dr. Tan's statement: "This man grew up in Singapore. Singapore gave him his education and he earns a living here. An education and a living that is denied to many minorities in the region." The suggestion that minorities should be especially grateful to Singapore teeters on racism, if it does not tip right over. Gratitude is neither here nor there. As a commentator has it, Singaporeans do not live in a feudal state, but in a modern democracy, in which citizens hold certain obligation to the stat...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . A sociologist, a political scientist, a media studies professor, and two economists meet in a webinar to talk about Singapore beyond the pandemic. The sociologist emphasizes the social inequities surfaced by the pandemic. The political scientist urges a mindset change from profit calculation to moral reasoning in the formulation of public policy. The media studies professor warns of the dangers of fanning nationalistic rhetoric. One of the two economists argues that efficiency pursued to the detriment of social justice actually becomes inefficient. The other economist wants Singapore to change its input-based development model because it has not been working for the country for years before the present crisis. Although the webinar is not about hawker food or getting ahead in school, it attracts scores of people, partly because the speakers have strong social-media followings, and partly because it is so refr...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the Year of the Metal Rat brings some good news. In response to the cancellation of Alfian Sa'at's "Dialogue and Dissent" class by Yale-NUS last year, Yale University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Senate passed a resolution recommending "the establishment of clear criteria and procedure" to handle such episodes involving free speech and academic independence. Singapore Unbound supports the recommendation wholeheartedly, but we are disappointed that the Senate "did not express explicit regret that, due in no small measure to this flawed institutional process, the victim Alfian Sa’at was publicly pilloried, including in [the Singaporean] parliament by the minister of education," as Linda Lim, Yale alumna and professor emerita at the University of Michigan, was quoted in the Times Higher Education . You may have heard ...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  This is how Wikipedia introduces Mr. Chia Thye Poh: "Detained under the Internal Security Act of Singapore for allegedly conducting pro-communist activities against the government, he was imprisoned for 23 years without charge or trial and subsequently placed under conditions of house arrest for another nine years – in which he was first confined to the island of Sentosa and then subject to restrictions on his place of abode, employment, travel, and exercise of political rights." Appropriately for an encyclopedia, the language is objective and careful. Poetry can be care-full in another sense, by being an empathetic companion to the victims of political injustice, to walk with those who have been unfairly treated. Alfian Sa'at's poems about Mr. Chia Thye Poh, just published in the Evergreen Review, are some of the best political poems I know. In a drily laconic but deeply compassionate styl...

Weekly column written for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . The Yale Faculty Senate meets today to discuss, among other matters, the cancellation of the "dissent" learning module at Yale-NUS in Singapore. Big thanks to everyone who wrote to Yale. I hope the Senate discussion at today's meeting will not expend itself on general questions about academic freedom at Yale's satellite campus, as this Yale Daily News report did. Obviously there is academic freedom for most topics and most people at Yale-NUS. Singapore is not yet a Stalinist state. It is, however, an extremely sophisticated practitioner of the dark arts of (self-)censorship. Instead, the Senate meeting could examine the analysis of Senior Counsel Harpreet Singh Nehal, which casts serious doubts on the Yale Report on the module cancellation. The Yale Report was written without taking into account the emails and text messages between Yale-NUS and the module instructor Alfian Sa'at. The seni...

Weekly column written for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . I wrote to Yale's president after Alfian Sa'at shared his version of events about the cancellation of his "dissent" module at Yale-NUS in Singapore. Please consider writing to Yale's president to ask for the re-opening of the inquiry with an unbiased representative, now that there is fresh and convincing evidence that the Yale report is wrong. His email is president@yale.edu. Please feel free to share my letter with friends and media contacts.  Dear Yale President Peter Salovey: I hope it has come to your attention that the narrative and analysis of the Yale report on the cancellation of the Yale-NUS learning module "Dialogue and Dissent in Singapore" has been refuted by the instructor concerned, playwright Alfian Sa'at. According to the administrative leadership of Yale-NUS, the learning module was cancelled because of (1) insufficient academic rigor and (2) the legal ri...

Weekly column written for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . In a previous column in this newsletter, I asked readers to write to the President of Yale University to support a fact-finding mission regarding the cancellation of a learning module titled "Dialogue and Dissent in Singapore" at Yale-NUS College. The Yale report, published on September 29, finds that "the decision to cancel the module was made internally and without government interference in the academic independence of the College.... [And] the evidence does not suggest any violations of academic freedom or open inquiry." However, the instructor of the module, playwright Alfian Sa'at, in a Facebook note published yesterday, charged that some members of Yale-NUS College "have been lying." He has "detailed emails and Whatsapp messages that will definitively prove that the allegations [of defiance, recklessness, and incompetence against him] are false and defamatory." He...

Weekly column written for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  An advertisement created to encourage e-payment in Singapore featured a Chinese actor in brownface, dressed up variously as an Indian man with a curly wig and a Malay woman in a headscarf. It was widely, and rightly, condemned as racist. Mediacorp, the agency responsible for the advertisement, gave a half-hearted apology and withdrew it. When comedian Preeti Nair, known as Preetipls, and her brother, rapper Subhas Nair, released a rap video criticizing the advertisement, however, they were judged by the Law Minister to have crossed a line in attacking the dominant Chinese majority in Singapore and the artistes were subjected to a police investigation. The state's action is not only heavy-handed but also unfair, because it is patently clear from the video that the duo are not attacking Chinese Singaporeans per se, but Chinese racists for their racism. Although the refrain goes, "Chinese people always o...

A whirlwind of events these past two weeks. First, AWP at Portland, Oregon, (March 28-30), where I tabled for Gaudy Boy, and all three of our authors—Alfian Sa'at, Lawrence Ypil, and Jenifer Park—signed books, and read at an off-site event. Alfian also participated in panel titled "Innovations in Southeast Asia" with Gina Apostol and Laurel Fantauzzo, moderated by Larry Ypil. I read at Literaoke at Chopsticks Karaoke Lounge and Bar, and that was quite fun. Then the New York launch of Larry and Jenifer's books at the Asian American Writers' Workshop on Thursday, April 4. The launch went really well. The house was full and the books—15 copies per author—were sold out. Larry and Jenifer read very well and were full of thoughtful and memorable reflections during the Q&A. As Judy Luo remarked, our poets have personalities! And then the Second Saturdays gathering on April 6, hosted by C and M at their Harlem home. About 35 people came. Potluck, mingling, drinkin...

At this year's Singapore Theatre Festival, organized by W!ld Rice, besides "Press Gang," I also watched "Supervision" written by Thomas Ng and directed by Glen Goei, a full-dress rehearsal of "An Actress Prepares" written by Alfian Sa'at, directed by Aidli 'Alin" Mosbit, and starring Siti Khalijah, and "One Metre Square: Voices from Sungei Road" co-created by San Mu and Zelda Tatiana Ng, and directed by Zelda Tatiana Ng.

2nd Singapore Lit Fest ended on a high note on Saturday, with scholarly and passionate talks about Sonny Liew's The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye . I hope the panel is the first of many, many to come because the graphic novel rewards close analysis and open discussion. A favorite moment was when two panelists, Ying Sze Pek and Matt Humphreys, disagreed with one another. Is the depiction of Lim Chin Siong and Lee Kuan Yew as hero and villian an instance of the novel's oversimplification of complex people, or is it part of the novel's sentimentalist structure? Is it, in other words, a fault or a a strength? Another favorite moment in the festival is less of a clash and more of a clarification, when Alfian Sa'at asks Jason Koo whether he means "mean as fuck" or "mean ASS fuck" in a discussion about the depiction of race and sexuality in literature. Ha, ha, literature is full of double entendres. Then there was that awkward moment in the "Fictionali...