By Naomi Neoh

Nestled in a gallery space located in Gilman Barracks, a contemporary arts cluster in Singapore, ‘Living with Myths’ is series of talks which center on “exploring Singapore’s pasts and futures”, considering various aspects of Singaporean identity through various voices and perspectives.

The third installment of the series brings into focus the relationship between myth and history, locating its exploration in a historiographical approach, entering into conversations of the SG50 initiative, which aims at consolidating the founding stories of Singapore. This relation between history and myth, seen as significant, constitutive elements of Singapore’s founding as a nation-state, is clarified through the three different approaches presented by the three speakers Huang Jianli, Seng Guo-Quan and Lee Kah-Wee. Huang Jianli’s discussion locates the specific myth of rags-to-riches as premise integral to the founding of modern day Singapore and the formation of our sense of national identity, and questions its seeming veracity as a means of shaping the early stories of Singapore. Seng Guo Quan’s segment continues on this trajectory of unravelling particular historical and mythological narratives in Singapore’s past by focussing on the construction of the historical event of Singapore’s merger as structured purely in terms of the then-present conflict between the Communists and pro-Communists. Finally, Lee Kah-Wee’s discussion brings the talk to a close by examining the Casino debates of 2005 as a protracted moment of “self-imagination of the nation” and how the state negotiates and justifies the eventual construction of the “Integrated Resort” in relation to a consolidation of its timelessness and immutability as a nation-state.

My post will be directed towards drawing links between Lee’s discussion on how the construction and re-construction of the Casino debate manifests the myth of Singapore’s developmental success story and Kuo Pao Kun’s play The Coffin Is Too Big For The Hole as a negotiation of the state’s narrative of meritocracy in practice. In a similar sense, both events can be sourced in the state’s construction of narratives in order to reshape and alter public perceptions of the state and reinforce particular aspects of the Singaporean identity.

Lee’s paper situates the 2005 Casino debate further back in history, examining the state’s position on the matter, and traces its development over the years in terms of a “re-presenting of history” that ultimately attends to a particular construction of the nation’s needs. The state’s prioritising of Singapore’s economic needs on the matter of the Casino threatens to undermine the values of consistency and timelessness, values which endorse the myth of the Singapore’s developmental success story. Thus, the impasse between sustaining economic development through the Casino and the need to project values of consistency and timelessness appears to be conveniently resolved through the state’s reshaping of particular aspects of Singapore’s history (in terms of past responses to the Casino gambling) into particularised versions that acquire mythic qualities.

Lee’s structures his argument by examining two simultaneous but distinct trajectories: how the government draws focus to “what has changed” and “what has not”. His examination reveals how this dual emphasis on both aspects of change and timelessness enable the state to maintain the projection consistent values while simultaneously launching economic growth through ‘new’ measures such as the Integrated Resort. He contextualises the measured reconstructions of the ‘Integrated Resort’ in published ‘public’ narratives such as speeches, newspapers and even in architectural plans as a follow up to a long history of the state’s deliberate reconstruction of gambling in the 1960s and 1970s. The spatial relocation and containment of gambling, as represented by the plans to build a Casino on Pulau Sejahat or the legalising ‘new’ forms of gambling by setting up Singapore Pools (Private) Limited become means by which the state resolves contradictions between the consistent prohibitions on gambling and the new, acceptable forms of gambling. When played out in the 2005 context of the plans to build the ‘Integrated Resort’, Lee reveals how the state registers its presence in public consciousness as a “large-scale development offering multiple world-class attractions…an entire complex of classy hotels, luxury shops, fancy restaurants, spectacular shows, convention centres…the gaming component will occupy no more than 3-5% of the total area of the IR developments”. In doing so, it attempts to downplay the element of gambling as the main attraction of the IR development in order to maintain the appearances in keeping with the previous prohibitions on gambling.

This need to maintain a sense of coherence and consistency in the Casino debates similarly runs through Kuo’s play The Coffin Is Too Big For The Hole. The play’s protagonist, directing the funerary process of his grandfather, meets with particularly distressing (but ultimately comic) state ‘policies’ at the site of the cemetery. The entire play depicts this spectacle arising from the absurd, almost grotesque figures of state bureaucracy, symbolised by the cemetery officials, and their insistence on maintaining the appearance of impartiality through the enforcement of standardised burial plots without obvious or genuine concern for a sense of empathy or dignity. However, plot unfolds to reveal a compromise made by the head cemetery official (he relents and grants the protagonist an extra burial plot) and how this particular instance of a shift in policy has to be reconstructed and represented by the state in the form of an award for the “Most Human Personality of the Year” in order to maintain the state’s projection of consistency, impartiality and meritocratic values. The emphasis again is on what “has not changed” while the changes are noted as glorified exceptional behaviour, thereby neatly resolving the seeming inconsistency and paradox implied by the extra burial plot granted to the protagonist.

In sum, the notion of myth, as a re-presentation of history, attends many aspects of Singapore society, and personally, it was illuminating to see how these abstract forces are at work even in lived everyday experiences and in literature, and it is hoped that being conscious of the efforts to mediate what we regard as historical truths can be re-examined and negotiated more critically.

Find out more about Living With Myths here: http://livingwithmyths.wix.com/livingwithmyths