by Geraldine Mark
Last Tuesday (21 Oct), I attended the rather unusual Story Slam Singapore 8 – The Weirdest Stuff I’ve Seen held at Artistry Café. For those who aren’t too familiar with the story slam, it is similar to its poetry slam variant where people read or perform stories instead of poems. In a bid to keep up with the Halloween spirit, readers were required to tell non-fictional accounts of weird and strange experiences. Given the theme, one would naturally expect certain stories to be of the horror genre.
The readers regaled in their many tales of bizarre experiences in Singapore, which ranged from nasty customer service encounters to just plain weird behaviors that one cannot begin to comprehend. Others opted to share true stories of supernatural encounters with much relish, some of which were passed down by friends or family members.
What I really enjoyed about the story slam was the informal nature of its set up. The stage was open for anyone interested in sharing their story, and he or she only needed to slip his name into a black box to be randomly picked later. There was something genuine in the spontaneity and “raw-ness” of the stories, told by members of the community without any larger agenda other than the desire to share their experiences. I suppose this community-centric way of addressing literature was also emphasised in the ‘Round Robin’ session where the audience were encouraged to write sections of text which would later be stitched together to form a coherent story.
This exercise had me recalling Ricard’s notion of national literature in the sociolinguistic sense, where it remains a “collection of literary texts written in the national and the official languages, by former and present residents of the geographical space now occupied by the country”, as opposed to a gentrified notion of local literature that we might be more accustomed to seeing. This resulted in stories that were less didactic in nature and more focused on the central consciousness of the main character (usually the speaker themselves), sans the imposition of institutional models and an enforced sense of cultural consciousness.
One of the stories that stood out for me was that of a homosexual who described his paranoia following a suspicion that he was infected with HIV. The perspective in which the story was told was illuminating; I was able to relate with him as a student juggling his social life and his studies. Yet, his unique experience shed light on the scary experiences the marginalized community in our relatively conservative culture may sometimes face, trapped in their controversial predicament with little support, on top of being alienated from a heteronormative society.
As the night accumulated more stories with their fair share of laughs and shocks, I slowly realized the distinct cultural markers of our hybrid culture making their regular appearances through repeated references to the Pontianak, bomoh, local slangs and Singlish, superstitious beliefs and typified local stereotypes like the unassuming NSF, the “staunch Catholic mother with an iron faith” and the “conservative Malay family”. These references affirmed and identified our multilingualism and multiculturalism, and the local audience can very easily identify with the ‘Singaporean-ness’ of each story, even if we have not directly experienced them before.
One example was of this Malay family’s encounter with the supernatural as the youngest daughter was purportedly ‘cursed’ by her ex-lover who was jealous that she was going to get married to her new boyfriend. As the speaker brought up images of local ghosts and the bomoh and shared how the scratchy sounds one may sometimes hear in an HDB flat is that of a Pontianak walking upside down from the ceiling, I found myself stitching images of my home (I live in a flat) and memories of exchanging local ghost stories with my friends in my childhood days, complete with the key Pontianak or Toyol appearances.
As a listener, there was something that felt overly intimate about the personal nature of the stories. Yet, there was an odd sense of recognition and familiarity in the way they relate to us, as told by the different speakers who comprised of students, working professionals, and Singaporeans having come back from living overseas.
Simply put, my experience at the literary event was a timely reminder that what should ultimately be the core of local literature is its place as a product of a shared cultural experience with the community, whether through its relatable context, references, or its implicit “Singaporean-ness” that seeps through.