Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

226 COLLAGES OF BETTERMENTwe consumed, so often caught up in the present andwithout space—in minutes or in column inches—rarelyhad the ability to communicate the deeper processesafoot. When the Marcoses were flown out of the coop,I was left with little understanding about the structureof Filipino society or its politics and culture beyondleading actors and the anonymous cast of thousands.It was also in the 1980s that the Filipino struggle fordemocracy came rippling onto Singaporean shores viatheater, almost a century after Jose Rizal disembarkedand visited the Botanic Gardens before continuing onto Europe. The “training” given to Singaporean theaterpractitioners laid the foundations for several formsof theater practice, one strain of which I would laterjoin. One particular production centered on the storyof a Filipino domestic worker and was particularlycompelling for its description of issues of class, genderand transmigration. This, and several other politicalproductions, became the subject of a sociological thesisI worked on in 1988. I had wanted to understand thepower of theater but ended up describing, and thusperhaps re-inscribing, the power of the state.In the midst of the trauma that many Singaporeansfelt following the mass arrests of 1987, I spent severalyears working with working-class children in aneducational project run by non-evangelical Christians,believing that no possibilities existed for challengingthe status quo in Singapore. Then, I saw no connectionbetween welfare work with the children and thediscourse of democratization that I was, in principle atleast, committed to. Welfare work to me was sociallynecessary, perhaps even personally rewarding, but itlacked the heroism that the struggle for Democracyseemed to demand. Working with delinquent childrenwas a challenge but only in the realm of the emotionaland, at a stretch, spiritual. These were not dimensions,or modes, of being that I associated with the concept ofdemocratization. This work—serious and demandingas it was—was decidedly “private,” not “public” in theway I understood the concept.I then abandoned what seemed to be the never-endingtrials that children encounter in their daily lives (andthe community of volunteers I worked with) to becomean advocate of “intellectual discourse” through a journalcalled Commentary. We sought and courted a public thatwe believed was out there in the “mass society” createdby the People’s Action Party. We labored to extend anopening provided for in the public sphere by the newdispensation of the incoming Prime Minister.We began without fully recognizing that the culture ofwriting for a “discerning public” and, equally, the cultureof reading were limited, having been diminished by asuccessful, if authoritarian, government. Cultivatingthe voice of our writers and a strategic tone for theuniversity-based journal was central to our politics.Without telling the entire story—one not without itsown public drama—suffice it to say that I learned tothink of the political landscape as a complex territory. Ibecame grudgingly aware of the role of society, and ofsocial conservatism in particular, in the authoritarianpractices of the states that I was most familiar with.Briefly, under our editorial leadership, the journal—which had a decade before been embroiled incontroversy—took on questions of “civil society” and“politics.” These themes served as the titles for oursecond and third collections of essays and discussions. Ifthere was a perception that the journal was challengingthe establishment, the government’s hand was in allprobability stayed by a very disciplined and academictone. However, neither our judiciously ellipticallanguage nor a strategic balancing of views could save ourfourth issue. (We even ran a letter that both criticizedthe journal’s liberal outlook while welcoming us as anintellectual interlocutor to the prevailing conservativeestablishment.)The issue centered on a controversy in the arts withthe attendant proscription of forum theater andperformance art. The former was a dialogical theaterpractice conceptualized by Marxist dramatist AugustoBoal as a radical critique of agitation-propagandatheater (in which I acted) and the later an energeticpractice in which the body, in all its presence andimmediacy, becomes the stage; both appeared to thestate as un-censorable forms and this, ultimately, madethem subversive. This was coupled with the fact thatthe government had already announced its desires todevelop the arts as a new industry. It was a convergenceof competing desires in which the state was determinedto come out on top.While committed to this form of engagement, I alsoharbored contempt for “elliptical speech” as cowardly,as evidence of the intellectual’s fear of “speaking truthto power.” With the controversy at its height, I soughta principled gesture and the editorial board choseto resign. (Singaporean writer Catherine Lim latereulogized the debacle as one of many signs that the newand avowedly “friendlier” regime was in fact unwillingto give up the substance of Lee Kuan Yew’s style ofgovernance.) I now think very differently about thatchoice and of elliptical speech.Asian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows