Sai Siew Min
To write the history of the Communist Underground or the
Left-wing movement in post-war Singapore demands more than simply
filling in the blanks of the existing dominant narrative with
authentic voices of erstwhile participants hitherto denied their right of
articulation by the hegemonic Singapore
state.
It also demands resisting the temptation to flip the dominant
story around, championing the cause of the so-called “losers” and
turning them into heroes who have arrived decades too late on the
historiographical scene in contemporary Singapore.
In late 2006, the memoir of Fang Zhuang Bi, who Singaporeans have come to
believe, was the Number One man in the Singapore Communist
Underground was published.
Written in Chinese, Fang’s memoir provides some clues for a
historian or any student of Singapore history on the task of
reconstructing the position of the Communist movement in post-war
Singapore. If Fang’s memoir is anything to go by, the most critical
insight that it affords is the realization that the idea of a recoverable
authentic voice from the Communist Left is a pipe
dream.
One fundamental historiographical question confronting any
scholar or student investigating this topic is not that concerned
with the recovery of untainted “facts” or ascertaining who had been
“right” or “telling the truth”.
For too long, historiography in Singapore has been dominated by
a particular genre and practice of history that idealizes and
therefore aspires to apolitical
historical truth.
The practice of history in Singapore, naturalized by the general
apoliticization of Singapore society from the 1970s
onwards, failed even to recognize how the production of ideas about
knowledge (epistemology) and power are thoroughly intertwined.
By this, I do not mean that the dominant state deliberately
produces historical falsehood in a conspiratorial fashion. Instead,
the state draws strength from demanding of itself and its
detractors nothing less than “the truth” and certainly persecutes
in the name of “truth” which it understands as decidedly
monosyllabic.
These fundamental attitudes and beliefs about epistemology,
shared by non-state agencies such as the mainstream media and the
academia in Singapore, encourage a particular understanding of the
very nature of the historiographical inquiry.
History is concerned with the search for an objective truth
about the past, and some narratives are more right than others.
Posed in this manner, scholars, students and ordinary citizens can
pretend that we may leave out the whole process by and through
which historical truth is produced in contemporary Singapore
society.
The production, practice and dissemination of historical truth
which is after all, embedded in the entire apparatus of knowledge
production in Singapore society is thereby taken out of the
Knowledge/Power grid.
Fang’s memoir does not begin as most autobiographies do with the
moment and place of his birth. Chapter one reads almost like a
preface. It is perhaps not a matter of chance that Fang begins his
memoir with an interrogative gesture. He declares himself an
“ordinary Singaporean”[1] and a “subaltern” in
Singapore society.
In an important move which should be evaluated not for its
veracity or bias but for its interrogation of Singapore
historiography, Fang names his particular perspective of history —
the narrative that he is about to present in his book “a subaltern
perspective on history” (人下人的历史观):
I live in Singapore, in the
lowest rung of its social and political life. I breathe the air of
the lowest rung of its social and political life. Therefore, I
believe I reflect the voices of those from the lowest rung of
society and politics in Singapore: “a subaltern perspective on
history”. The “subaltern” (“人下人”) refers to those who have been
oppressed or trampled on. My feelings and my perspectives will
therefore, diverge in every way from those of “Mr Elite”
(“人上人”先生).[2]
In pre-World War Two Singapore, Fang describes himself as not a
legal subject of the British colony and thus labels himself a
“Third Class Being”. After the war, Fang being Chinese-educated was
not proficient in English which was the
official language of the British government
and hence, the dominant language of colonial
society.
Although citizenship issues had emerged into the forefront of
post-war politics in Malaya and Singapore, Fang writes that he was
still living in a colonized society. He thus labels himself a
“Second Class Being”. In the struggle against the anti-colonial
movements, the British turned Fang into a “terrorist” and a
“criminal of the nation”. In social and political terms, he was
classed together with the criminals.
Even after Singapore achieved independence first in 1963 and
then again in 1965, Fang remained a “criminal” in the eyes of the
ruling People’s Action Party government, a fate he describes as
being pushed into the “nineteenth level of hell”[3]. For the next thirty years, Fang
describes himself as a “fugitive” and an “outcast from
Singapore”.[4]
I am not too concerned with Fang’s reconstruction of his “street
credentials” or how genuine they are. Rather, I am interested in
exploring what Fang’s bold assertion of “a subaltern perspective on
history” can do for the state of historiography in Singapore. I
suggest we should read the memoirs and life stories of Left-wing
historical personalities like Fang’s not because they give us an
innocent and authentic portrayal of the other side of the
story which somehow, make our knowledge of the past more
complete.
Such a chimera of historical truth can only be accomplished if
we willfully ignore how Fang’s subaltern narrative is shot through
with the valance of contemporary historical discourse straining to
re-connect with a past, the logic of which is already beyond the
comprehension of Fang’s readers in present day Singapore.
Moreover, to read and evaluate Fang’s memoir merely as testimony
from an erstwhile participant who had really “been there and done
that” misses the double move he is making when he asserts from the
outset that his narrative is a reconstruction of his life story
as well as an interrogation of dominant historiography.
Giving himself different labels to mark his subaltern position
—“Third-Class Being”, “Second-Class Being”, “fugitive”, “outcast”
and “a quarter of an intellectual” (四分之一的知识分子) [5] —Fang’s self-descriptions of
subalternity re-visits the workings of the Knowledge/Power grid.
What were the forces shaping Fang’s transformation into a
subaltern? How has historiography abetted this transformation?
Fang’s challenge raises the important question of how a “subaltern
perspective on history” is produced within the Singapore
context.
What can such a “subaltern perspective on history” do for
Singapore historiography? A focus on the subaltern helps to reverse the elitist
bias of political history and the practice of elitist politics in
Singapore.
Thus far, the mainstream and dominant narrative about political
events in post-war Singapore — now rapidly transmuted into
“national history” and taught to students in Singapore schools —
has suppressed completely the
lower/under classes and their politics.
Uncannily similar to the state of South Indian historiography
prior to the intervention of the Subaltern Studies Collective in
the 1980s, post-war Singapore history depicts colonial and
nationalist elites as the primary agents of change. In fact,
Ranajit Guha’s[6] critique of Indian historiography
would be equally applicable to Singapore:
The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time
been dominated by elitism — colonialist elitism and
bourgeois-nationalist elitism…Both these varieties of elitism share
the prejudice that the making of the Indian nation and the
development of the consciousness-nationalism which confirmed this
process were exclusively or predominantly elite achievements. In
the colonialist and neo-colonialist historiographies those
achievements are credited to British colonial rulers,
administrators, policies, institutions and culture; in the
nationalist and neo-nationalist writings — to Indian elite
personalities, institutions, activities and ideas.[7]
While the archetypal subaltern in Guha’s sense is the peasant
insurgent who stood for a heterogeneous under-class in Indian
society ― peasants, low-caste communities, widows — and does not
include self-styled representatives of these groups such as the
Indian Left, conceptual debates emerging from within the Subaltern
Studies Collective connect subaltern subjectivity to the
ideological reproduction of dominance. The subaltern is not a
ready-made category cast in stone as a consequence of economic
inequalities. The subaltern in any society is an ideological
product of above all, the hegemonic order which works to secure and
naturalize the identity of dominant groups.
Thus, historians from the Subaltern Studies group read the
voluminous texts produced by dominant institutions, often the only
available evidence of subaltern activities to reconstruct, albeit
not in the manner of positivism, the “consciousness of the
subaltern”. One methodological implication of such reading for the
subaltern is not to champion the cause of the down-trodden or to
make the historical account more true and complete, but to examine
the ground, always power laden, through which historical agents
take their place in history. In the words of Shahid Amin, a member
of that research collective:
It is, I feel, quite important for any historian of the
subaltern classes to investigate the discursive practices within
which statements by the police, administrators, judges, and by the
accused themselves, are produced. This is required not in order to
discern bias, rectify it and thereby arrive at an untainted, proper
narrative of things pasts, unsullied by the context within which
such a narrative was produced: that would be to indulge in a
pointless positivist venture. It is necessitated by the fact that
most statements about the dominated are produced in
well-defined fields of power. The way out does not simply lie
in the search for new sources for new history, for the issue of
reading evidence as text is not brought to a close by the discovery
of new testimonies, new depositions. It is posed afresh with every
such discovery.[8] (my emphasis)
Following Amin, the subaltern in history is not a saviour of
truth. The subaltern appears in history as a figure who is defined
through his/her unequal relationships with the dominant order.
When Fang Zhuang Bi names himself the subaltern par
excellence in Singapore’s history, he does so self-consciously
as a counter-reaction to mainstream interpretations of post-war
history put forth by the ruling government in Singapore, in
particular, that of Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew as well as that
presented in the widely-circulated book The Tiger and the
Trojan Horse by Dennis Bloodworth. Fang’s lengthy riposte
takes up the whole of chapter one.
For this reason alone, Fang’s subaltern perspective on history
cannot be read literally for what it reveals about the genuine
voice of “the other” in Singapore history. Fang’s deliberate
positioning as a subaltern only makes sense in relation to the
mainstream interpretation of post-war history he now challenges.
Speaking in the voice of the subaltern enables Fang to pierce
through existing historical accounts from which he has been exiled.
Taking on the subject positioning of the subaltern in retelling his
story enables Fang to speak from his current position as “a
fugitive” and “outcast” of Singapore society.
Fang’s description of how he was politicized and chose to go
Left illustrates perfectly how the subaltern is defined through
his/her unequal relationships with the dominant.
According to Fang, his political awakening took
definite form only at the precise moment when he felt the sheer
force of detention without trial enacted by Emergency
laws.
Fang shatters a couple of Singaporean historical myths when the
Number One Communist in Singapore recounts his years in school.
Fang remembers his days in
Chinese High School, surprisingly as years he spent
outside the political circle.
He was not politicized
through the usual channels of student organizations and study
groups in Chinese High, attributing his
absence from student activism to the dire economic straits his
family was in. Driven by the need to earn a living and study at the
same time, Fang was fleeting in and out of school. Student politics
was a luxury he could ill afford.
Also surprising is the time he spent in an English-medium school
i.e. Saint Andrew’s School (after he graduated from Chinese High
and was teaching at a Chinese-medium primary school) where, Fang
reveals, he once managed to top the class in “Scripture”! Fang
recounts these years in school as time he spent drifting, and
without a definite direction in life.
Fang muses that had he not been subjected to a classic
Kafka-like detention one day by the Special Branch on the prowl for
Communists and their sympathizers, which then triggered off an
existential crisis in him, he would have continued with his studies
at Saint Andrew’s School, ending up half-English-educated and maybe
even realize his ambition of becoming a civil engineer:
For how long was I detained, there is no way to be sure, about
ten days to half a month! Life’s hardships, psychological
struggles, physical pain do not have too huge an impact on me. I
have always been able to be at ease in my surroundings and adapt
myself to circumstances. I was young and full of vigour. I had huge
reserves of energy and an appetite for life. I was driven by the
will to succeed in life. Yet, it was precisely at such
a difficult moment, my body locked away in a prison cell that I was
terrified to realize I did not have a definite direction in life at
all! Where was my future? What should I do next? How should I move
on? I simply had no answers to these questions. … It was precisely
that dark and dingy prison cell, precisely the air that stank of
animals crowded into terrible living conditions, precisely that
kind of hopeless situation where one’s fate was in the hands of
another, that finally pushed me, and there within me the search for
a new direction in life was awakened.[9]
Fang’s subaltern perspective on history throws up a blind spot
in Singapore historiography i.e. the character of Singapore’s
anti-colonial movement. Fang argues that between the 1950s and
1960s have been so sorely misrepresented in the dominant narrative
as a clash between “the Communists” and “the non-Communists” it was
as if the anti-colonial movement never really happened. Such a
characterization transforms the anti-colonial movement into a power
struggle between the Communists/Left and the “non-Communists”, to
whom the British chose to transfer power, leaving the latter’s
interests and legacy in post-war Singapore completely
un-problematized:
Was the anti-colonial struggle by the people of Singapore merely
a matter of mutual killing amongst the Communists, the Left-wing
and a couple of socialists? All that had nothing to do with the
British Empire and the British colonial authority? Were the British
Empire and the British colonial authority innocent
by-standers?[10]
Who were the real enemies of the anti-colonial movement? What
were the objectives of Singapore’s anti-colonial movement? What
were the Communists, the Left and the non-Communists fighting for?
Fang’s critique points to the need to move beyond partial accounts
of Singapore’s anti-colonial history offered by self-professed
“non-Communist” protagonists.
His critique points to the
marked absence of the Communist and Left-wing movement in
Singapore’s anti-colonial history that the British colonial
authority was so anxious to suppress and to which, the
“non-Communists” owed the raison de’tre for their political
existence. Against the backdrop of the Cold
War and coercive Emergency laws, the label “non-Communist” is
itself revealing of the real need to define a political stance
vis-à-vis “the Communist” for a particular audience.
As for the characterization that the Communist movement was a
“terrorist” movement, Fang rejects this as language the British had
used deliberately to discredit the Communist movement. He was
particularly upset that the label “ex-Communist Terrorist” was
still imposed on him in independent Singapore, way after
Singapore’s anti-colonial struggle was over:
On 25th September 1995, in two letters the Home
Affairs Ministry had issued me, my comrades and I were labeled
three times as “ex-Communist Terrorists”. Readers can imagine my
indignation. If the British colonial authority called us “Communist
Terrorists”, so be it. They were the enemies and nothing good would
come out from their mouths. But if the People’s Action Party
government calls us “Communist Terrorists”, it would be
intolerable. If I had accepted this label, it would be tantamount
to admitting that opposing British colonization, opposing the
Japanese invasion, fighting for national independence and the
glorious and great liberation of the people constituted “terrorist
activity”.[11]
In the end, after writing to the Singapore government, Fang
managed to get the Home Affairs Ministry to re-issue the letters,
dropping the label “Communist Terrorist” and using in its place,
the more accurate term “Communist Member”.
In Fang’s subaltern perspective, the anti-colonial movement was
an unequivocal political struggle between the Communists, the
Left-wing and the people on one side, and the British Empire on the
other. The “three-cornered fight” featured in the dominant
narrative between the Communists/the Left, the British and the
“non-Communists” who inherited power from the British only
demonstrates in retrospect to Fang the extent to which the
anti-colonial struggle had been hampered by enemies from within and
without.
Fang’s revelations about the inner workings of the Communist
movement when it operated underground in Singapore underscored what
a mammoth task it was fighting the colonial machinery, especially
its capacity for capture, persecution and punishment, incidentally
a point Chin Peng’s memoir also brings across.
The grand conspiracy of Communist subversion certainly sounded
more plausible in the British “prose of counter insurgency” than in
the memoirs of these two Communist leaders. Fang, for example,
seems to have spent a great deal of time dodging arrest or trying
to figure ways of printing and disseminating Communist propaganda
under arduous circumstances.
It would be easy to dismiss Fang Zhuang Bi’s memoir as the voice
of a disgruntled loser if we read him simply as an erstwhile
participant of events in the 1950s and 1960s in Singapore. It would
be far more difficult, however, to dismiss his interrogative
gesture directed at the state of post-war Singapore historiography.
Fang’s subaltern subjectivity, ever sensitive to the implication of
power in the production of history, raises a different set of
issues than “the search for an objective truth” sanctioned by the
practice of positivist historiography. The subaltern has written
back.
Notes
[1] All quotes from Fang’s memoir are
my translations from the original Chinese text. Fang Zhuang Bi,
“The Plen From the MCP”: Fang Zhuang Bi’s Memoir (“Ma Gong Quan
Quan Dai Biao”: Fang Zhuang Bi Hui Yi Lu) (Selangor: Strategic
Information and Research Development Centre, 2006) p. 2.
[2] Ibid.
[3] According to popular Chinese
religious beliefs in Singapore, there are only eighteen levels of
hell.
[4] Fang, “The Plen From the MCP”:
Fang Zhuang Bi’s Memoir, pp. 2-3.
[5] Ibid., p.3.
[6] Ranajit Guha is a historian and one
of the founding members of the Subaltern Studies Collective in
India.
[7] This quote is taken from a
sixteen-point critique on Indian historiography by Guha. It
combines the first 2 points of Guha’s critique. Ranajit Guha, “On
Some Aspects of the Indian Historiography of Colonial India”
re-produced in Vinayak Chaturvedi ed. Mapping Subaltern Studies
and the Postcolonial (London and New York: Verso Press, 2000)
p. 1.
[8] Shahid Amin, “Approver’s Testimony,
Judicial Discourse: The Case of Chauri Chaura” in Ranajit Guha eds.
Subaltern Studies V (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987)
p. 167.
[9] Fang Zhuang Bi, “Ma Gong Quan Quan
Dai Biao”: Fang Zhuang Bi Hui Yi Lu (Selangor: Strategic
Information and Reseach Development Centre, 2006), pp. 64-65.
[10] Ibid., p.19
[11] Fang, p. 13.
Sai Siew Min is Assistant Professor at the
Department of History, National University of Singapore, where she
teaches courses on history in Singapore, Indonesia as well as
gender history in Asia.
http://s-pores.com/2007/04/subaltern/
