Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 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 w...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . We are living in a new Age of Authoritarianism, and it is incumbent on all of us to fight its oppressive spirit wherever we find it, even when it is within us. Technology has created new tools for state surveillance, mass disinformation, and capitalist exploitation, but it has also given us new means to highlight injustice, organize resistance, and express solidarity. The Civil Disobedience Movement in Myanmar does not concern just the Burmese, but all of us. One year after the military coup against a democratically elected government, if we permit the Burmese dictatorship to legitimize itself, we reinforce the powers of totalitarianism and weaken the forces of liberty everywhere. We need to heed the voices of resistance in this vital anthology,  Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring: Witness poems and essays from Burma/Myanmar 1998 – 2021 . The voices are many and various, but they all say,...

A beguiling collection of four stories, slim but not insubstantial. The storytelling is surefooted, the whimsy is put to profound questioning of religious belief—is loyalty the same as faith, asks the dog of the camel—and a sly eye is turned on human foibles and social customs. Since so much Anglophone Singaporean writing is oriented towards the West, especially now when many younger writers study creative writing in the UK and the US, it is refreshing to read a writer so at home in the English language, but with his cultural references turned towards the Malay and Arabic worlds, towards the eclectic blending of Islamic and animistic beliefs.

Weekly column for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Last Monday I finally met a Singaporean author whom I've admired for some time. Visiting from London, she is here for a month to work in her company's NYC office. At Grand Central Oyster Bar, we had a dozen oysters each. They all had beautiful names that reminded us of where they came from. The only name I remember now is Wellfleet Massachusetts, because of the Elizabeth Bishop poem . My dining companion expressed relief at the lightness of our repast, having been troubled by the size of American portions. She loves living in London as much as I do living in New York. A reason? The seasons. This is not the shutter happiness of tourists, nor the novelty of snowfall to the tropical student. We have both lived in temperate countries for years, in fact, in each other's country, if the possessive is apt here for a pair of immigrants. The seasons mark the passing of time. The markings may be highly uncomfortable—t...

A Selected Poems, spanning 1967-1977, by the foremost Singaporean Malay poet Mohamed Latiff Mohamed, A Crackle of Flames, A Circle of Rainbow (Ethos Books) is worth the read. The poems are from two collections, the first bearing the same title, the second titled When the Butterfly Breaks its Wings . This is a fighting book of poems, passionate and plainspoken, often lambasting the New Malays for not fighting for their own dignity, culture, and history, but giving it all up instead to serve Chinese dominance in Singapore. Yet the high rhetoric often ends with a lyrical, and sometimes mysterious, image. For instance, "Poetry of Song" begins unsparingly: if what i say hurts you then that is what I intend because i like to tell stories exposing harlotry as it is right before our very eyes... and ends with: the tears of the wretched who have lost everything at dawn on the blue petals of pomegranate the call to prayers reverberates love and longing overlap and the m...

Weekly column for Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Interviewed by the online magazine Entropy, I had the opportunity to reflect on the point of setting up Gaudy Boy in 2017 as an imprint of Singapore Unbound. What are your influences, your aesthetic, your mission, the interview asked. I wrote, "We arise from, and hope to contribute to, the transnational ‘turn’ in literature and literary studies. We are interested in the various ways that writers and writings move across national boundaries to develop a circulation of influences, exchanges, and alliances. Instead of seeing the world in such dualistic terms as East versus West, North versus South, we envision the gathering of the most progressive elements everywhere, and the publication of such a gathering in our list." Big words indeed, which do not hide the fact that Gaudy Boy is very much an experiment in its infancy. We don't know if we will succeed, but we are inspired by others who have gone before us....