It is easy to assume that the relationship between the queer subject in Singapore and the city-State is one marked by an irreconcilable rift, given that homosexuality is a criminal offence in Singapore and that homosexuality continues to be censored by State-controlled media. In “How to Bring Singaporeans Up Straight (1960s-1990s),” Ho terms the State’s rhetoric of queerness as one “of silence, erasure and disavowal” (31) and expounds on the ways in which the State has indoctrinated “compulsory heterosexuality” (33). Alternately effaced and demonised by the State, how do queer subjects in Singapore bear the psychological and phenomenological effects of State repression? This essay attempts to investigate this question in relation to Alfian Sa’at’s Corridor and his poetry collection, One Fierce Hour. In so doing, this essay argues that Alfian’s queer subjects remain firmly embedded within Singapore and grapple with State censure/repression in order to continue surviving as Singaporean queers.
As Ho argues, the “erasure of queer history on the part of Singapore institutions is quite deliberate” (30). Ho points out the contradiction between legalising heterosexual prostitution on the one hand, and the “bulldoz[ing]” of Bugis Street, an “iconic space” for queer sex work in Singapore on the other (31). The purpose of this targeted erasure of queerness is to at once erase queerness and to “impos[e]…compulsory heterosexuality” (33). Alfian in turn problematises the State-propagated idea that “there are no such entities as gay Singaporeans” (33) by depicting queer subjects as being ubiquitous within his text. Alfian turns State-induced heteronormative assumptions on their head by deliberately withholding the detail that the relationship portrayed in his short story, “Pillow”, is homosexual. “Pillow” is narrated through the first person narrator. It is only after more than halfway through the short story that Alfian provides an additional detail about the narrator’s identity in the line “I looked at him longer than a boy should” (Alfian, Corridor 48, emphasis mine). The innocuous way in which this detail is inserted into the text is at odds with the reader’s assumptions of queerness as a hugely taboo subject. Alfian therefore problematises the assumption of pervasive heterosexuality and the shock at queerness that it generates by demonstrating that the queer subject is still present. The State has therefore been unsuccessful in its attempt to erase queer presence from society. This problematisation is also achieved in “Project”, through the tangential inclusion of homoeroticism in the main plot. Salim “realised he did not want to see the boy’s penis” not because of a homophobic aversion towards seeing another male appendage, but rather because the appendage was not satisfactory — “He was a Chinese boy, there was foreskin on his penis” (13-14). This homoerotic moment is only obliquely relevant to the main storyline of Salim’s guilt for unkindness towards this boy. By situating the sexual Other within the short stories in a deliberately underStated manner, Alfian inscribes the queer subject within Singapore and thereby demonstrates the failure of the State’s project to eradicate queerness.
Singapore furthermore also constantly associates homosexuality with the degenerate and decadent West. In by no means ambiguous terms, Ho argues that “homosexuality in Singapore has always been seen as an invasion and corruption from the decadent West” (33) and substantiates this with politicians’ quotes drawing precisely this conclusion (32-33). This is in binary opposition to the desirable virtues that a ‘good’ Singaporean would possess. The Singaporean, being non-Western, is therefore heterosexual, family-oriented (34) and economically successful, whereas the Western homosexual is associated with “decadence, degeneration, and decline of a civilisation” (36). However, Alfian portrays queer subjects who do not look to the West to articulate queer desire but instead engage with the State to recuperate a queer place within Singapore. Robert in “Disco” actively turns away from the queer cruising space of the disco, which is simultaneously associated with “high prevalence societies” of the West and the “stereotyped…decadent” homosexual (Ho 32-33). Robert, in attempting to work out his nascent homosexual identity, is ironically awkward in the queer space. Rather than being flattered by the flirtatious exchange after ‘Jason’ gives Robert his cap, Robert’s behaviour instead is “too reserved…and thus horribly wrong” (154), and he leaves the disco replaying the encounter in his head and questioning his actions — “Why did he use that word [disco]?” (155) — a gesture that highlights his social anxiety in the queer space. Robert therefore turns away from the homonormative/Western space and attempts to come to terms with his homosexuality in his dream through the heteronormativity of the Singapore State. The woman in Robert’s dream may be interpreted as Robert’s lived experiences that he attempts to come to terms with. The woman proposes a vision of the family compatible with ‘Asian’ values — “grow[ing] old with someone” (161). Significantly, this “someone” is female, as evidenced by her proposing marriage to him in the dream (160). At the same time, the woman kept “her eyes…open, trying to read his face” when they kissed in the dream, as if unconvinced by his engagement in this heterosexual exchange. The woman therefore functions as a symbol of the heteronormativity Robert is uncomfortable with yet cannot fully repudiate. By portraying queer characters that remain entrenched within Singapore and demonstrating how “the construction of a selfhood is always dependent on times and conditions of power” (Ho 29), Alfian’s short stories highlight the facile and specious nature of State rhetoric that associates queerness with the West. This point is more strongly articulated in “Singapore You Are Not My Country”. The poem, written as an embittered address to the State critiquing its contrived and discriminatory reification of national identity, includes the following verse:
Tell that to the innocent faggot looking for kicks on a
Sunday evening to end up sucking the bit-hard pistol-
muzzle of the CID, ensnared no less by his weakness for
pretty boys naked out of uniform. (Alfian, One Fierce Hour 40)
The image of the “innocent faggot” performing fellatio on the very apparatus that criminalises his identity, the phallus of State power, is a powerful testament to how queer identities live and confront the State rather than turn towards the West. The ambiguity of the syntax in “ensnared no less by his weakness for / pretty boys naked out of uniform” turns the screw even tighter. Is the “innocent faggot” the one attracted to the “pretty” CID “out of uniform” (the CID comprises plainclothes detectives not in police uniform), or is it the “CID” who, when not in his capacity as a State apparatus, has a “weakness for / pretty boys”? The syntax that deliberately obscures rather than clarifies speaks to the inability of the State to achieve the same clear demarcation between heterosexuals and homosexuals as ‘Singaporean’ and ‘Western’ respectively.
However, far from portraying a nihilistic, abject attitude towards living in Singapore as a queer, Alfian’s queer subjects show how queer bodies and consciousness have come to appropriate State rhetoric of queerness and public spaces for their own survival and even thrive. The queer is usually banned and systematically erased from public spaces. This much is evident from the State “fine [imposed] on MediaCorp…for airing an episode of Find and Design, which ‘normalises and promotes a gay lifestyle’…(MDA, 2008)” (Ho 38). However, heteronormative assumptions allow for the queer subject to pass as heterosexual, their queerness invisible. Instead of suppressing or erasing queerness, this invisibility has ironically become a fertile space for the expression of queer desire. As the narrator explains, “The Queen couldn’t imagine what two women could possibly want from each other” (91). By making this statement without explicitly focalising it through either character, this heteronormative logic is presented as shared knowledge between the lesbian characters within the story and also between the narrator and reader. It is this heteronormative logic and the cognisance of it that paradoxically facilitates the unfolding of the queer drama between May-Lin and Michelle in the very public space where their sexuality is regarded as unacceptable. As May-Lin’s last look at the signage of the female toilet indicates, the State’s normalisation of a feminine presentation of female identity (“the sharp triangle that jutted from the hips…was supposed to represent a skirt”) (99) is unable to accommodate queerness (May-Lin’s “butch” appearance) (88). In spite of this, queer eroticism and desire survives and is in fact facilitated by the State’s heteronormative “discursive and repressive power” (Ho 39), thereby throwing into sharp relief the failure of the State’s project to eliminate queerness from its borders. Although this desire is ultimately left unfulfilled, it is not a result of State repression but rather the incompatibility between the two girls. Similarly, “Plaza Singapura” recounts a sexual encounter between two men in the public space of the shopping mall (Alfian, One Fierce Hour 10). Halting end-stopped lines, which the encounter between the two men is conveyed in, are juxtaposed against the flowing enjambment of the seventh stanza that describes the heterosexual scene outside of that space. This formal demarcation thereby communicates their separation from dominant heterosexual society. Both within the content and at the level of the poem’s form, the queer is excluded from and invisible to society comprising “families…washing-machine pride of wives / And the nail-polish vanity of girlfriends.” Yet, the queer subjects adroitly navigate their symbolic exclusion and utilise public space for proliferation of queer desire instead, demonstrating the tenacity of queer subjects in dealing with the strictures of the State in their lived experiences.
Furthermore, State demonisation of queerness results in hypervisibility, once again undermining its project of queer erasure. By focusing “Bugis” through the narrator rather than the transwoman, the reader realises the hyperawareness of queerness generated by a State rhetoric that casts sexual minorities “as freaks” (Ho 38). The narrator cannot help but notice the markers of her transgendered identity, such as the discrepancy between “her biceps and lipstick” and the affected femininity of her gestures (“her fingers are bent delicately, in defiance of its design”) (Alfian, Corridor 125). This hyperawareness is also marked by the narrator’s constant slippage between male and female pronouns. Undoubtedly, this hyperawareness is transphobic. The narrator is unable to accept the pondan’s queer transgendered identity, and ultimately regards it as a pretense — for the narrator, “pull[ing] Salmah’s tudung from her head” is akin to “pulling the wing off the pondan’s head” (128), thereby demeaning the transwoman’s expression of queer identity and reducing it to hypocrisy, just like Salmah’s hypocrisy in putting on the tudung and acting pious. Yet, it is worth noting that the transwoman exits the story completely unscathed. She even acknowledges the attention that Salmah is trying to hide, cheerily remarking, “Bye Ziana’s friend, from just now so shy!” (127) Her dignity intact and her confidence still overflowing, it is the narrator instead who is hyperaware of and thus affected by the transwoman’s identity to the extent that it becomes the proverbial last straw on the camel’s back, hence driving her to frustratedly rip Salmah’s tudung from her head. Indeed, “[i]n trying to repress homosexuality, agents of power — media, medical, legal and State — perversely magnify the ideas they seek to repress” (Ho 29). This same effect may be extrapolated to other sexual minorities and queer culture in general. The State’s demonisation of queerness ironically produces the attendant opposite of its intended erasure of queerness — hypervisibility. At once invisible and hypervisible, Alfian portrays queer subjects who make productive the slippages in the same rhetoric that seeks to oppress and efface their identity and continue living within Singapore.
The multiplicity of effects that the same State rhetoric has on lived experiences of queer Singaporeans—as both queer and Singaporean—is testament to Alfian’s complication of the State’s attempt to expunge the queer from its reality. Intransigent in his/her queer identity, the queer subject is not removed from but rather embedded within Singapore society, and works through the ramifications of the State’s exclusion of queerness. Short stories in particular may be a productive genre to work through these many varied ramifications of the interplay between State and marginalised citizens. Their short length precludes the possibility of full immersion in the world of the short story, forcing connections to be made between text and context instead. Alfian’s poetry may be seen to accomplish the same thing, for it generally enacts short and self-conscious critiques of society. These two forms are deftly employed by Alfian in order to comment on the social issues that continue to plague Singapore and contribute to building a queer culture that is uniquely Singaporean.
Works Cited
Alfian, Sa’at. One Fierce Hour. Singapore: Landmark Books, 1998. Print.
Alfian, Sa’at. Corridor. 2nd ed. Singapore: Ethos Books, 2015. Print.
Ho, Aaron K. H. “How to Bring Singaporeans Up Straight (1960s-1990s).” Queer Singapore: Illiberal
Citizenship and Mediated Cultures. Ed. Audrey Yue and Jun Zubillaga-Pow. Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, HKU, 2012. Print.