I was sent a copy of Singa-Pura-Pura in exchange for an honest review. This review contains spoilers. If you’d like to read the book first, it’s available for pre-order from Ethos Books at bit.ly/singapurapura from now until 3rd September. Pre-orders come with a free copy of the ebook, bonus readings from editor Nazry Bahrawi, and a limited edition sticker set for the first 100 preorders (while stocks last).
I ran a giveaway for a copy of this book on my Instagram. The winner will be announced at the end of this newsletter!
Have you heard? We’re living in Black Mirror now.
Between a global pandemic that’s forced us to move many social interactions online and government-mandated contact tracing devices, it’s not hard to see why people think so. It’s not just the pandemic. I don’t need to tell you about technology’s creeping hold over our lives. For every inch that technology takes, there’s an equal and opposite reaction against it.
Wait a minute, did I just say that technology is taking? That’s affording too much agency to the tools. The people behind the tools use them according to their goals. With global conglomerates controlling social media, commerce, and news, it’s hard not to feel uncomfortable. A 2017 New York Times piece about the return of the “techno-moral panic” explains how technophobia has evolved, and gained legitimacy, since the early Internet.
The internet of the 1990s was a perfect canvas for alarmism: hard to define, easy to misunderstand, growing rapidly but not yet vital or even familiar to those most inclined to worry about it. But the internet of 2017 is fundamentally different: both a dominant medium and a medium dominated by a few companies … they turn progress from something that manifests inevitably with the passage of time into something that is being done to us, for reasons that are out of our control but seem unnervingly and suddenly within someone else’s.
Our fears about technology are wrapped up in a fear of losing agency. If technology worked “perfectly”, nobody would complain. But it is tech’s capability to be hijacked and perverted for malicious goals that incites panic.
Singa-Pura-Pura, an anthology of Malay speculative fiction from Singapore, continues in this techno-skeptic vein. Speculative fiction asks “what if” questions. In Singa-Pura-Pura, half of these questions are about technology’s increasing integration with everyday life. The latest title from Ethos Books is a collection of 13 short stories, roughly half of them engage with the spectre of technology. What if operating systems were our caretakers? What if sentient machines replaced humans in the workforce? What if a robot could supplicate for you? Other stories riff on the supernatural, taking folkloric beliefs to real-world conclusions. What if angels lived among us? What if were-tigers were real? There are many answers to these questions, the stories we get to read are refracted through just one possibility.
In Nuraliah Norasid’s “Prayers from a Guitar”, a conservative ustaz (Islamic scholar) crosses paths with a guitar-playing angel. The beauty of their encounter highlights the ustaz’s hypocrisy and legalism. He skips his evening prayers to look for his wife’s guitar, even after personally ensuring that she quit music entirely.
He should have known. That not even the years of lessons and guidance could take the music out of his wife. Not the sermons about the trappings of ignorance, or the ways music promoted zina between man and woman.
The tension between spirituality and religiosity is also seen in Diana Rahim’s “Transgression”, an interpretation of the myth about the sea-princess who fell in love with a fisherman. The devotional ritual that commemorates this myth, Ulek Mayang, apparently predates the Islamisation of the region. In “Transgression”, the protagonist is a young woman with a rocky relationship with her father. Unbeknownst to her, she is the offspring of the myth’s pairing and is in the process of understanding her tenuous connection to the corporeal world. Her father, traumatised by the sudden loss of his partner, turns to Islam to recover from his longing. The story is a thoughtful look at belonging that successfully marries two belief systems that may not always complement each other.
The stories in Singa-Pura-Pura that are inspired by the supernatural are, on the whole, stronger than the techno-pessimist ones. The scenarios in the tech-centred stories don’t go far beyond our existing reality to make a real impact. Maybe their time-scales or the in-world prowess of technology are greatly exaggerated for effect but the underlying belief remains the same. Tech is alienating. Few of these premises are new. Both “(A)nak (I)bu” and “Mother Techno” feature a kind of robotic caretaker. Caregiving robots already exist in Japan, albeit less sophisticated than the ones described in Singa-Pura-Pura. “Gold, Paper and Bare Bones” imagines a society where “good” and “bad” behaviour is scored to determine one’s mobility in society. There are already news reports about China’s “social credit score” that apparently grades citizens based on their pro- or anti-social behaviour. “Doa.com” illustrates a future where supplications (prayers) are purchased through a service called Doa.com. The protagonist, Lukman, hits a snag and is unable to supplicate for his deceased parents when the machines are down. While e-supplication hasn’t emerged in Islamic practice (to my knowledge), electric prayer wheels have existed in Tibetan Buddhism for quite some time.
Many of these stories are animated by a fear of automation and alienation. There is a belief that a reliance on technology will rob us of what makes us human — the ability to care for each other, the ability to live a free life, the ability to pray and have a personal relationship with God. As “Doa.com” puts it, humans were once a “self-sufficient species” that have become “creatures enslaved by their own creation”.
As a reader, I would appreciate if these narratives were more inventive. I’m reminded of the critic Daniel Lavery’s verdict on Black Mirror: “what if phones, but too much.”
In the afterword of Singa-Pura-Pura, editor Nazry Bahrawi articulates his three goals for the anthology: (1) diversifying the genre of Anglophone SingLit spec-fic to include Malay writers who belong to an under-represented minority group, (2) to “decolonise the mind” and “subvert residues of colonial stereotypes about the Malays as the malaise” and (3) to challenge the perception that Malay literature is preoccupied with tradition and nostalgia. The editor’s notes suggest that this title is aimed at correcting course within the Singaporean literature scene. All three lofty goals are rudimentarily met through this book. This is how it reads to me though: more political project than cohesive anthology.
I’m torn because I fully believe in this political project. For decades, the Singapore literature scene has been dominated by middle-class Chinese writers, most of them men. While there is a Malay literary scene in its own right, not a lot of it has crossed over to Anglophone readers. The editor, Nazry Bahrawi, has himself translated work like Lost Nostalgia, a collection of short stories by Cultural Medallion winner Mohamed Latiff Mohamed. Singa-Pura-Pura is but one of an increasing number of opportunities for English readers to encounter the rich Malay literary scene in Singapore. But as a critic, I read for content as much as form. And this is where Singa-Pura-Pura falters. Speculative fiction does give writers the chance to comment on contemporary issues but good fiction is rarely allegory. If anything, the conceit needs to be a vehicle for good storytelling. Too many of the stories don’t say much new and rely on tired storytelling devices to propel the plot forward. While the anthology ticks all its goal boxes, it isn’t that successful as a book.
There are some good stories, they are good precisely because they are compelling stories. My three favourites are “Isolated Future #2: MacRitchie Treetops” by bani haykal and “Beginning” and “The End”, the two stories that bookend the collection, by nor. “Isolated Future” reads like a diary entry from the near-future about a community that has developed a new means of communication. It heavily references tech (and theory, there are several citations for Matteo Pasquinelli’s philosophy) but completely avoids a nihilistic read. Instead, it reimagines humans’ relationship to the environment.
The rumour I was told is that they taste the air with their tongues to decode messages. Which is such an intimate way of communicating—reach out with your tongue and taste my message.
nor’s “The End” sketches out the human race’s mass exodus from Earth to a new planet named BHUMII. nor’s prose glitters in a collection that is otherwise uneven and peppered with cliché and clunky expressions. Like bani’s story, “The End” is focused on the creative potential of the future. Both stories are especially interesting given the context of this anthology—the Malay1 people are the indigenous inhabitants of this region and, in Singapore, have waning political influence on the land. Both “Isolated Future” and “The End” give readers potential ways that can be ameliorated.
This review is less positive than I would have liked. I really wanted to love this book; unfortunately, it has flaws that I just can’t overlook. That said, it feels important to me to be honest about what I read. For reasons I explained above, the publication of an anthology of Malay writing is a significant move in Singapore’s literary eco-system. However, I feel very strongly that the burden of representation should not fall on this title alone. If this is the only Malay-centric fiction title published in the next year or two, that will be a significant failing on the publishing community’s part. Already, the Malay spec-fic torch is being carried by writers, some of whom are in the collection. Nuraliah Norasid, who wrote “Prayers from a Guitar”, published The Gatekeeper in 2017. nor is currently developing their project, which should include “Beginning” and “The End”, The Neosantara Chronicles. You should still read Singa-Pura-Pura, it’s worth the time. I also truly believe that there is a lot of good writing to come.
Giveaway!
A big congratulations to @azfarrocious! You’re the lucky winner of the Singa-Pura-Pura giveaway. Thank you to everybody who entered. If you’d like to preorder the book, you can get it here.
the term Malay is used like it is in the book reviewed. In this case, it is a simplified catchall term for a variety of ethnicities in the region.