2023

Singapore, Geylang, Casuarina Curry

Sree visits Singapore 

Sree:

I hear the waiter speak in Tamil. The menu infinites. He stares while I order.

We discuss cancel culture. #MeToo, J.K. Rowling, the consequences of offence. Singaporean literary culture had its own #MeToo, apparently—Kenny Leck, a well-known bookseller who ran the BooksActually store and Math Paper Press imprint. The social media furore resulted in his job loss and the bookstore and press shutdown. I pretend not to feel the heat.

In 2019, Alvin Pang and I stood inside BooksActually, one stop among many, a literary landmark on an island of bottomlines. Madeleine Thien had permitted a local edition of one of her works. I regularly look at Math Paper Press releases on my Melbourne bookshelf.

Nothing can invalidate trauma. Is the loss of the bookstore and press soothing compensation? Is the extralegal aspect justified, pitchforking for penance before creating case files?

My students hate J.K. Rowling deeply. I’m alarmed at the witchhunt, the vitriol. Her loss of stature among young people is disproportionate to the offence made.

What are the ways to separate the art and the artist? I think we have missed opportunities for conversation. No, we now have lost the very ability for it. My hair matts in sweat.

But the points game must continue.

Balli:

Sree and I go from BooksActually to J.K. Rowling to every other controversy we can name that involved a model of public moral reckoning. The joy of  in-person conversation is context and caveats. A bit of consideration for each other’s viewpoints, blindspots and experiences. All of those dimensions that get lost in the flattened space of social media.

I’m wary of the term ‘cancelling’. Much like the word ‘woke’ and the term ‘political correctness’, ‘cancel’ has been weaponised and turned into a bogeyman by the right to suggest absolute and immediate censorship. ‘Deplatforming’ might be a better choice of word, or redistributing our attention to other voices. Not as catchy though. ‘Minimising’? ‘Shrinking’? ‘Judging’? These are uncomfortable words as well because they circle back to a form of censoring, reducing one’s voice.

I don’t say this, though. Too many ideas are spinning around in my mind as I order my food and enjoy the flow of conversation. We are in a hole-in-the-wall roti prata restaurant with the simplest trappings—fluorescent tube lights, canteen-style tables and a flat-screen television mounted on the wall running through a playlist of Tamil hit songs. What I do add to the conversation is that the J.K. Rowling thing is complex. The BooksActually controversy was also complex. But even putting it in those words can be considered creating a false balance: ‘both-sidesing’ or making excuses for bad behaviour. If I had gone online and said “complex”, I would have been cancelled.

2024

Melbourne, Little Bourke Street, Daughter-In-Law

We are trying to write together

Sree:

I suggested the location as a collaborative space. It had seemed such a bright idea when I’d first thought of it. We were each, in some way, daughters-in-law to people not our own. I’d felt so cool at the time.

Sree: “I’m so sorry. I thought this would be a quiet place for us to write in. That’s why I suggested it.”

Balli: “You thought this would be quiet?”

She looks around. The self-declared “unauthentic Australian-Indian restaurant” is strewn with psychedelic decorations. Orange and yellow paper hangings festoon the ceilings. There is a disco ball casting everyone in party lights. Bollywood music thumps at nightclub decibels. White people appear pink under the lights as they salivate over thalis. It is self-satire.

Sree: “It really was very quiet the last time I was here, around lockdown.”

Balli: “And we are going to write about…?”

Sree: “Cultural appropriation?”

We both laugh and it grows. No points to be gained when everything  is satirically kitsch. No writing is done.

It is much later that I realise neither of us were offended.

2024 (December)

Melbourne

We are on the phone

Sree:

When Trump wins, I’m on a plane to Perth. The article I’m reading in The Monthly talks about the lack of contrition from the Democrats. Don Watson asks, “Where is the mea culpa that can grant honourable beginnings?”

Balli says “you can’t both-sides anything” in today’s discourse. It deducts points both ways. Love, love.

How to score points when the scoreboard always changes? Mea culpa or accountability is also, in a way, a telling of one’s story. How solid is my privilege, when it shifts across contexts? When I’m underprivileged as a racial minority in Malaysia but can pass as the majority due to fair skin. When my class privilege enables my entry into the Australian context, where it immediately evaporates.

Where I’m now the darker skinned, the ethnic, the suffering insufferable. Privilege, it turns out, isn’t a solid, singular, linear concept. The tribal mentality around identity politics isn’t something that can be sustained unilaterally across cultures, languages, social class or histories.

Balli:

US presidential election dates happen to coincide with the annual Singapore Writers Festival. When Trump won in 2016, there was grief and commiseration among the writers. In 2020, the year of a global pandemic, many festival events were held remotely. The world was only operational within virtual realms: screens, imaginings, fitful dreams. On Zoom, I interviewed Margaret Atwood, that prescient modern-day prophet. “You’re hopeful, aren’t you?” I asked her.

In 2024, the election hardly featured in conversations. Headlines became peripheral. There was a shift in the temperature, a widely accepted idea that defeat required soul-searching rather than finger-pointing. If you prefer to do neither, there are entire worlds built for you, in fictional narratives and TikTok reels, in going off the grid or relocating abroad, in echo chambers and carefully curated friendship groups, where escape is an option too.

• Tags: Balli Kaur Jaswal, Free to read, Issue 38, Singapore, Sreedhevi Iyer