Apa Itu Activist - Dr Ad Maulod

So my ten year old son

likes to begin a story out of nowhere.

He used to start his compositions

with "one day".

And until I told him,

"You know,

you need to be more creative.

Everything you write

begins with 'one day'.

You need to be more creative".

So now he starts with a dialogue.

He tells me, "I don't know how a story

should begin,

I can only write what happens".

So, reading his compositions

I know he has a bright future

writing reports

but that is another story.

But my son taught me

a useful lesson though:

How should stories begin?

Whose stories are we telling?

Who are we in the story?

Where are we telling the story from?

Wait, the arrow right or left?

[Gestures]

Oh, shit!

[Laughter]

I only know how to tell stories, yeah.

Oh, okay.

So let's consider this photograph:

One day, it was raining,

a woman sheltered

an old lady with a hijab

and someone photographed

her thoughtful gesture.

The end.

Just the way my son would write his compo.

But this picture went viral,

and the story that anchors it

tells us a lot about what multiracialism

means in Singapore.

The emphasis on the Malay hijab girl

being oh so kind

to cover the head of a random

Chinese old lady

with her tudung.

Except, the old lady was her grandmother.

Except, they didn't have an umbrella.

Except, she was the child

of a Chinese man

who married a Muslim woman

and became Muslim.

Except, why is this even a story?

[Laughter]

Sakinah would later write on her blog

that she felt like an animal on exhibit

both exposed and violated

because, as she quotes,

"People feel they have the right

to decide whether or not

she is my grandmother,

or some random Chinese lady

just based on their

yet-to-mature world view".

End quote.

Sakinah's personal story

drops the mic on racial harmony,

or any attempts to racialise harmony,

or any attempts to harmonise racism.

Like Sakinah, I, too, am an outlier,

a trans-identified, queer, Malay Muslim

with a phD.

As an outlier, depending on which

axis of privilege we intersect,

be it class, race, religion,

gender or sexuality,

the stories we tell often goes

two ways:

reshape the mainstream,

or be forgotten altogether.

What kinds of stories get remembered

in Singapore?

Okay, this way it works.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

So growing up in Singapore,

the only true Singapore stories

that I used to believe in

were by Russell Lee.

[Laughter]

Okay.

So my first lesson in multiracialism

was in understanding that

there was a Chinese hell

that was different

from a Malay hell.

[Laughter]

Okay.

That Chinese see Chinese ghosts

and Malays see Malay ghosts.

[Laughter]

And Indians, you know,

they see everything.

[Laughter]

So, it got me thinking:

"Are ghosts in Singapore

so adept at racial profiling?

What is going on here?"

So obviously for this course today,

I mean not course, um,

for this talk today

I'm going to talk about Singapore stories.

Thank you Russell Lee for that cover page.

Okay, so in 2009, I was spurred

to examine the history

and representation of the Pontianak

in Singapore for my Masters thesis.

Because of the mass anxiety

that was surrounding

something called "Nenek Keropok",

an old Malay lady who goes

door to door

specifically targeting Malay houses

begging people to buy her keropok

which is some kind of fish snack.

Okay.

So if you should refuse,

and never refuse an entrepreneurial

spirit okay?

She would unleash the Pontianak

into your house.

So in 2009,

mind you, I was writing my thesis

on the Pontianak,

so this should be a good opportunity

for me right?

I made my house,

that was,

that I was co-habitating

with my then girlfriend,

as un-Malay as possible

cause I didn't want any keropok

to come in.

So this was not difficult

given that there was no

bismillah or Arabic scripture

on my front door

and I also had a painting

of two naked women

staring at each other's naked bodies

with the caption:

"chaos in the cosmos"

so I thought that was enough

as a protection.

So I was so confident that

the Nenek Keropok would skip

my un-Malay house

until one day,

I was home alone writing my thesis

and someone knocked on the door

and said "keropok,

...keropok"

So my first instinct was

to move far away

from the door as possible.

And the second, the inevitable question:

"How she know I Malay sia?"

[Laughter]

So my reaction was best explained

by Michael Bell,

that "our sense of rightful possession

of place depends in part

upon our sense of the ghost

that possess it,

and the connections of different people

to these ghosts.

Ghosts make claims about

the territories of social life.

Ghosts are political.

Thus, the possession

of a place by a ghost

is not an immaterial phenomenon".

So this is why I took the Ponianak

very seriously,

because it represents something

that makes people feel haunted

by a presence in contemporary Singapore.

So my belief is this:

the Pontianak is political.

So I spent,

um, and this picture over here

the Pontianak Awareness Programme,

that was found, I think,

in Singapore General -

no, Changi Hosp -

no, Changi Hospital.

Yup.

The old Changi Hospital.

So I spent a year between 2008

and 2009 listening to

Malay people calling into the local radio

segment called "Misteri Jam Dua Belas"

otherwise known as "Midnight Mystery".

It's still going on,

so you can tune into [pause]

89.7, I think, to listen to that radio talk show

but you got to understand Malay.

So I also went on ghost hunts,

spoke to Malays who claimed that they

could see ghosts

or have experience being haunted

or possessed.

I analysed over 60 narratives.

I found that Pontianak hauntings

revealed every day social tensions

of living in a multiracial,

and highly competitive society.

They mirror our every day realities

and ironies of social policies.

What does it mean for the Pontianak

to be alive in Singapore?

So according to the narratives

I gathered, the Pontianak

roams around the corridors,

carparks, void decks,

and staircases of public housing flats.

The standardised nature of public housing

makes it pertinent for her to make

her mark on places.

The very notion of citing:

"I saw a Pontianak there",

differentiates that space from others.

The Pontianak is also selective

of the houses she chooses to haunt.

She possesses the stock of knowledge

to enter houses Malays owned

and to avoid those that are not.

She's aware of racial quotas

with regards to re-sale flats

previously demarcated as Malay enclaves.

The ghost of a Malay flat

is passed onto the next Malay owner,

while the Pontianak already existing

in flats of Chinese or Indian occupants

lay dormant,

symbolising the lingering

residue of previous Malay occupants

and an anticipative desire for potential ones

to make her presence known.

I was told a few times that

"Hantu melayu tak kacau orang Cina"

"Malay ghosts do not disturb Chinese people"

and vice-versa.

Whatever the Chinese are afraid of

it does not affect the Malays.

Thank god, right?

Since there are 75% of you.

[Laughter]

Lai Ah Eng, in studying meanings

of multi-ethnicity in the public housing

of Singapore,

demonstrates this effect

by highlighting how the highly standardised

design of public housing

provokes residents to

personalise their homes.

So given this persuasive circumstances

of multi-ethnic living in Singapore,

most residents would find it necessary

to establish territories of self

through identity markers.

So due to this intrusiveness

of state policies,

private spaces becomes the most

controllable part of residents'

living environment.

So for the Malays who are at the

margins of Singapore's foray

into this brave new world,

the Pontianak sightings represent

forms of strategic control

over their environment.

As well as I would argue,

the creative strategy to

reframe the limitations of the environment.

So another example that I found

in my studies is that

not all kampongs are nostalgised equally.

We often hear the state leaders say:

"Bring back the kampong spirit",

you know, you see that in

Joseph Schooling right

everybody rallies to basically

throne a champion

but what does this nostalgia

for the kampong mean?

And most importantly,

whose kampong are we referring to?

So, the Pontianak is the embodiment

of the rurality.

It is an expressive energy of the

Malay kampong collective

and whose continued presence in urban Singapore

highlights the existence of a memory of place.

So this durability is a concern to the state

for whom the supposed existence

of a tightly-knit minority Malay community

often bears negative connotations

and consequences.

In 1979, Abdullah Tarmugi

issued a statement that the Malays

brought with them most of their

neighbourly attitudes from the kampong

when moving to the HDB flats.

Almost 30 years later, in June 2005,

the Straits Times ran the headline:

"Kampong Spirit Alive in Estates"

to highlight the findings of the

HDB Sample Household Survey 2005.

The findings showed that Singapore Chinese

were the least neighbourly

and had the weakest sense of belonging

and community involvement

than other ethnic groups such as

Malays and Indians.

In a survey conducted in the previous year

by The Straits Times,

Malays were also found to be

the most neighbourly

compared to other ethnic groups.

However, in July 2005,

Minister Mentor, the late Lee Kuan Yew,

professed how racial integration in neighbourhoods

has not been completely successful

because the rate of intermingling

and acceptance is faster

among certain groups than in others.

He singled out the Malay community

as an example of such a failure.

And he says, I quote,

"They've centered around the mosque

more than other social centres we got.

Not quite what we've hoped for."

You see, I leave in Selegie and right

above where I live is the RC,

Resident Community area,

and every Thursday they invite people

to come and gather and just have

a ball of time,

and I wonder, you know,

do I -

what does it feel like to participate

in such spaces?

Why are there only Chinese people

in such spaces?

Well, it's not really hard

to, um, to kind of deduce

because every time,

and each time I visit the RC,

you only hear Chinese karaoke songs

being played.

And I don't think any Malay or Indian person

would want to waste their precious time

belting out to tunes that they

are not really familiar with.

So that is why mosques became a successful

magnet to attract certain groups

of Malays in Singapore.

So Lee's statement reveals the

discursive formation of the

kampong spirit,

you know, as a space of Malayness

that was to be regarded

as less than complete

space of successful assimilation

into a multicultural society.

So, let you bring the kampong spirit.

If it's Chineseness,

that's what we welcome

but if it's anything else,

any minority representation

becomes suspicious.

On September 2007, at Mendaki's

25th anniversary dinner,

Lee Hsien Loong recalled that the government

and the Malay community leaders

were not sure whether the Malay community

could really cope with meritocracy

and compete with other Singaporeans.

Okay, in Singapore,

the stories that get remembered

are the ones that are constantly repeated.

Repetition begets its own reality.

On that dinner, PM Lee's narrative of

the Malays was no different than any other

state narratives of the Malay community.

It begins with the long arduous task

for the Malays to get here,

because we are from "there" right?

Um, the significant progress

that they have made in education,

increasing social mobility,

and then boom,

dysfunctional families,

unmarried pregnancies,

broken families, proverty,

et cetera.

But not to worry:

Malays should keep working hard

because the government is confident

that Malays can make it

the Singapore way.

So, in Singapore,

stress has been justified as a necessity

for the people to stay on the competitive

edge in order for the nation

to survive in a brave new world.

Yet, this acknowledgement

of stress onto various groups

in Singapore are not equally regarded.

The government's politicisation

of stress makes it difficult

for certain groups of Singaporeans

to articulate how stressful they are

without being labelled as "incapable"

or undeserving of assistance,

or relief.

For under privileged minorities,

stress is personalised as individual failure

or lack of resilience

while stress for the privileged

is validated as productive

and a badge of diligence.

It is worthwhile to note that the bulk

of the narratives that describe encounters

with the Pontianak

also profess the sentiments such as

"I was possessed

because I might have been tired from work"

or, "I had to stay in school until late"

or "come back from work late"

interestingly, in some of the narratives,

contributors also describe

feeling feverish and ill

after encountering the Pontianak.

Such symptoms of illness warrants

a day off from school or work

to cope with the trauma

of their frightening encounters.

This latent imagery of being exhausted

from school or work,

coupled with this haunting experience

of the Pontianak,

of being possessed

may describe the anxieties of being

in a stressful environment,

a common experience among Singaporeans.

Moreover, from my research,

the visibility of the Pontianak

in areas of high Malay numerical

sorry,

high Malay numerical populated areas

corresponding with medial

to low income housing areas

demonstrates cultural anxieties to survive

in a competitive capitalist economy.

In this manner, the Pontianak

may exist as a vehicle for the Malay

individual to express his or her anxieties

in a common space,

but private and secret enough,

and intimate enough,

that it escapes the scrutiny of the state.

Because any news of Malays

publicly complaining of Singapore's

highly stressed environment

may almost certainly invite

criticisms from the state

or even local Malay agencies

that the Malays possess some form of

cultural deficit.

We are easily contented lot,

or lazy as compared to the other races.

This culture of haunting reminds us

that the distinction between

conformity and resistance

in relation to the dominant Singapore story

of multi-racialism is hardly clear-cut.

On one hand,

stories that I hear reveals how pervaisve

the CMIO model is

and on the other, it reveals the ways in which

people reappropriate the limiting

structures that they are embedded in.

It reminds us that most of the times,

strategies to trouble mainstream narratives

are not always for or against power.

On the contrary, as activists,

the important lesson here

is that every day stories capture

new nuances in which people

find meaning in working

in and on dominant ideologies.

Maybe sometimes it is best

that stories begin out of nowhere

because not all characters

share the same beginning.

Searching for people's history

thus requires a return to a contested beginning.

Not of how the same story is told,

but rather, the point of which

another interpretation,

memory,

experience,

history,

was about to be forgotten,

and that we rescue it.

This is our intervention as Singaporeans.

To remember who we are

in the stories that we tell

and where and how a story is told.

Is it from a prison?

Or from a palace?

That is the key to harnessing power.

To fuck with it

so that everyone can have a piece of it.

Thank you so much.

[Applause]