Dear reader,

This is Faris, taking over newsletter duties from Sudhir for the week. I’m in London wading through archives at the British Library. In the silence of the stacks, among other time-travellers, I’ve encountered some intriguing people. There’s a Tamil Muslim woman from Melaka who bequeathed her seaside home to a son, in a will dated 1783. There’s a Malay aristocrat permitting a Dutch official to sell his boat or take it sailing, in a letter from 1799. The elegant, rhythmic strokes of Jawi—the Arabic script used to write Malay, and the aesthetic influence for Jom’s logo—are sharp and vivid, as if they were written yesterday. Lampblack, the fine soot Malay scribes used as writing pigment, lasts longer than European ink, which appears faint on the English documents bound in the same volume.

These dusty sheets of cream-coloured, sweet-smelling paper also contain lists of personal objects owned by Melaka’s Arab sayyids. There are also the names of enslaved people—many still children—who were taken from distant corners of the Archipelago to serve masters in Melaka. From these names and things, incidental fragments of many lives, a world takes shape. 

It’s a strange process, this mystified quest called “going into the archives”. You are no Indiana Jones recovering a magic stone from an ancient temple. The archive serves no neat answers; there are many dead ends, information that’s useless to your interests, or non-existent for the story you want to tell. After years of unproductive, often boring trawls, historians must creatively connect the dots across a mess of sources to craft their narrative, but generally recognise the limits drawn by available evidence.

For the longest time, this meant whole swathes of humanity simply didn’t have a history. They left behind no deeds, wills, or letters, either because they were illiterate or weren’t considered important enough to be recorded. Then there are societies that produced complex oral and written histories for hundreds of years—sagas, chronicles, poetry, genealogies—only for these to be considered “unreliable” and never taken seriously. Do we just resign ourselves to the fact that not everyone survives time? But is the archive the beginning and end of all history? And what about those who are present in the archive: should they only be remembered the way the archive depicts them? 

In our essay this week, “S. Rajaratnam: race, contradiction, memory”, Philip Holden explores the ambiguity of an individual life, less settled than the official history into which it’s been scripted. It’s about Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, one of our republic’s early statesmen. Philip deploys a mode similar to what the American historian Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation”, where one writes against the limits of the archive, which enacts power by determining what gets to be recorded, and what is silenced. For Hartman, critical fabulation was a means of redress towards the “disposable lives” of countless enslaved Black people during the Transatlantic slave trade, as she explained in her 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts”.

Philip, however, goes in a slightly different direction by exploring the narrative possibilities existing between what we’ve been taught and the bits that are left out. From the sources—diaries, letters, photographs and more—we find multiple versions and paths untaken, contained in a life. They may contradict, but that’s fine: they don’t have to come together in a grand coherent narrative, leaving us with, in Philip’s words, “a sense of incompleteness, of loose threads rather than flawless finality.” 

Many in Singaporean arts and civil society need no introduction to Philip, literary scholar and fiction-writer. After 24 years as a professor of English at the National University of Singapore, Philip—who was born in Britain but lived and worked across Asia and North America—left Singapore, and academia. He wanted to do other things, including creative writing. His essay for Jom reflects this fluid roaming across scholarship and literature, as well as geographic spaces. Being in Vancouver won’t stop him from thinking about Singapore.

Fittingly, the essay begins in London, where I still have to be to access historical materials amassed from the far colonies of the old empire. Unlike Rajaratnam, I’m not plotting revolution with fellow colonial subjects from elsewhere. Though I do feel an odd camaraderie with the strangers who’ve also come from afar, also imagining new histories, in the Asian and African Studies Reading Room. 

That much of history draws on acts of imagination is also the subject of Sonny Liew’s inimitable Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye. I first met Philip Holden at an author’s session with Sonny, as an undergrad at Yale-NUS College. I remember posing a question about Malaya, if it can still mean for us today what it meant to the characters in Charlie Chan, if it still matters at all. Philip came up to me after and quoted from Wang Gungwu: “Malaya was a dream, but what a beautiful dream it was.”

Jom bayangkan,
Faris Joraimi
History editor, Jom

p.s. In “Singapore This Week”, we look at new data showing Singapore’s obscene wealth gap; almost half of Singaporeans believing the state shouldn’t be publicly criticised; trials for unconditional financial support; the acquittal of a man on death row; racial backlash towards publicity for the George Town Festival; complaints about public art; a new Singapore Literature Prize shortlist; the business competition watchdog’s concerns about Grab’s growing monopoly; and bugs in Singapore food!

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