There was a minor snafu before I arrived in Singapore. The flight ended up being delayed, which meant that I had to either come back the same time the next day, or hop on the next available flight. I chose the latter, because the thought of going back home and then going through the motions of leaving for the airport again would prove to be too disorienting, particularly after having gathered that much anticipation over the previous months. The airport staff shuffled all the passengers back through customs and baggage in reverse, and when I checked in again 4 hours later it was difficult to ascertain where I could possibly be.
Airports are, in my opinion, the ultimate non-space. When Marc Augé coined the term in 1992, he referred to them as “palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten.” They’re liminal spaces, a door between worlds, a place where time is simultaneously irrelevant yet omnipresent. At Tullamarine, I watched people arrive and depart until I lost track of time and space. It was a feeling akin to a psychedelic trip—there was a sense that time was passing, but I was also rooted in the same spot.
When I finally arrived in Singapore, that feeling didn’t cease to leave me. It’s a funny thing worth noting about migration: you can go about your usual business and abruptly be struck with a discombobulation that you may not be where you think you are. Some people who have left old countries think of it as longing, but I find it to be related to the search for incoherence. The more I assemble a fractured yet linear selfhood (as opposed to a completely fragmented sense of self across various cities), the more I feel as if I am able to induce metaphysical shifts just from waking up. This is on top of the fact that many global cities are starting to assume similar characters as a result of neoliberal hegemony. Or maybe I’m just cooked.
In the first 2 days I trekked around the city-state mostly solo, hoping to reorient myself in a place I used to know like the back of my hand. And despite enjoying the too-many meals I’ve been pursuing with a singular passion, I’ve been feeling like a tourist. Having had none of the alternative sociality that has shaped my life here, there was very little to contextualise myself within the culture and the location.
On the first night I met up with my good friend Nina and we talked about this, and she immediately grasped my meaning. Much like Australia, Singapore is a cultural mirage, an island stolen under the guise of discovery. There is no real sense of a sovereign self apart from trite assertions and imagery (“fair dinkum”/”why you so liddat”; shoeys/chope-ing; larrikinism/kiasuism; meat pies/chicken rice, etc) and as a result every individual person you speak to will have a different definition of what it means to be “from” that place. This can arguably be applied to all nationalist projects, or to quote Anne McClintock: “all nationalisms are invented… in the sense that they represent relations to political power and to technologies of violence.”
To a similar extent, my self in Singapore cannot exist without punk and alterity; it also cannot exist without simultaneously rejecting and embracing colonial tropes, sinophilia and exceptionalism. It’s belonging that doesn’t foreground a national identity, yet in trying to understand its resultant unbelonging acknowledges that its very rejection can rest on dominant cultural tenets.
Eventually, I made my way to see the rest of my old friends. We went to the waterfront to watch Yellow Fang, a Thai indie rock band, and then the next day I attended Freedom Film Festival, a day of film screenings and panels that attempt to highlight state control and social inequality as interconnected global problems instead of small, parochial ones. Again, moving in those spaces re-centred my corporeality: as being “from” the place, yet always existing in opposition to it.
In Rahel Aima’s “The Sintered City”, she writes about cities that arose seemingly out of nothing—entirely divorced from history, from 0 to 100 in just a few short decades. The essay is largely about Dubai, of how myth creation is integral to its existence, and how they’re further driven by the convenient elision of the city’s history before the discovery of oil. From around 1966 to the present day, and particularly after the introduction of the Jebel Air Free Zone in 1979, the unrestricted import of labour and export of capital under the veil of progress, combined with political nepotism and censorship, has resulted in the city being the neo-dystopia it is today. And Singapore has had a similar trajectory: behind its glitzy facade lies an unfettered grab for capital at the expense of migrant labour and human rights. I won’t attempt to outline them here; you can spend a significant amount of time reading about it. Juxtaposed with its reputation as a technological and business hub (not to mention tax-free haven) is a sense of futurity that has somewhat gone askew, a future that can be imagined only for those who have access. And the gap only widens by the day.
On the plane, I spent the 5-hour flight to Bali (where I had to end up transiting through to Singapore) re-reading Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return. I was reminded of the book recently, while in conversation with someone who was seeking advice regarding their own work. It’s funny how your subconscious takes you back or towards materials which inadvertently light a path, and that which act as a kind of neural algorithm. Even when you’re not paying attention to the trajectory, even when you’re grasping at straws, the map to that subconscious is always revealing itself.
In the book, Brand rejects origins as much as she is desperately trying to find it. “Too much has been made of origins,” she writes. “All origins are arbitrary.” This is the reason why I find so much of diaspora writing alienating: in the romantic search for a self “left behind” in the old country, what kinds of power are being propped up, what erasures are being perpetuated? Everyone wants to belong, but when refuge equals complicity, I’m afraid that this yearning for coherence will lead to what Brand refers to “the end of imagination”. If it’s possible to discover Home without invoking nation-states, what will that look like?