Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 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 .  On social media Singaporeans are coming out in support of justice for George Floyd and other victims of racial injustice in America. An observer speculated that some of these postings are made to sock it to American finger-wagging around the world. Some to 'prove' that Singaporean 'multiculturalism' and 'pragmatism' offer a better system of governance. However, there are others who, seeing the analogies between American and Singaporean racism, are protesting the murder of George Floyd to draw attention to problems closer to home. "Racism is a global structure," as the writer of Race Tuition Centre reminds us. The same logic that undergirded the enslavement of African Americans "currently enables the exploitation of South Asian migrant labour globally." The link between racial and economic injustice has become even clearer in this pandemic. The virus has affecte...