Singam Where I Was: A memoir about forgetting and remembering

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-981-18-3739-5
Verlag: Ethos Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 308 Seiten

Where I Was: A Memoir About Forgetting and Remembering is a rich, entertaining and compelling account of the life of an extraordinary woman. In a land of many cultures, many races, many religions; in a state where politics and public policies impinge, sometimes callously, on the daily lives of its denizens, Constance Singam is an individual marginalised many times over by her status as a woman, an Indian, a widow and a civil society activist.
Through humorous and moving accounts, Constance captures in words the images of the people, places and events that are the source of her most powerful memories. These images are connected to key turning points in her personal journey, set against or within the context of important historical events. In this reissue of her 2013 memoir, Constance reflects on current advocacy movements and on the events that led to the AWARE saga that would shape the rest of her life.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Singam, Constance

Leseproben

1
And So It Begins
I HAVE, in more recent years, looked at my life with a mixture of feelings, sometimes in a spirit of wonderment, and sometimes in a state of hopelessness as I watch the comfortable and familiar Singapore of my childhood change into a bewildering global city. My plan is to write my way to understanding, to build a bridge across this chasm of aloneness. It came to mind that the previous time I had been caught up in a morass of self-doubt and unhappiness, I had gone on a retreat. I had checked myself in at the Marymount Convent retreat house for three nights. Convents and monasteries are wonderfully silent, healing sanctuaries that are ideal spaces for meditation. But property developers had persistently closed in on the convent property such that it was no longer the quiet cloister that it had once been. Today, the Convent’s completely made way for the North-South Expressway. This continual destruction of what is part of our history, which connects us emotionally and physically to our country, places such as the Marymount Convent, Saint Theresa’s Home for the Aged, the National Library, the CHIJ Chapel, the Bukit Brown cemetery tells us something about the Singapore Government’s disregard for things sacred, for what is essential for the nourishment of the spirit, the soul and one’s sense of place and belonging. Still, I was lucky that Marymount Convent, or what was left of its grounds, was there for me when I needed a quiet sanctuary for reflection, contemplation and self-examination. A time of rest became like a door opening into a new morning. My spiritual advisor at the time suggested I write about my experiences. A year later, she asked if I had started writing but it would be two years before I would embark on this journey, before I would take the plunge. So where do I begin? My primary influences have been those from my childhood and from my early adult years when I had more control over my life. These experiences have conditioned my view of my surroundings and defined me. But I do not lie awake wondering, ‘Who am I?’ or ‘What is my identity?’ or even ‘Am I a Singaporean Indian or an Indian Singaporean?’. I do not want to be labelled. I do not like labels. My identity card labels me as a ‘Malayalee’ rather than as ‘Indian’. I am not sure how that came about unless I had used my maiden name, Constance D’Cruz, to confuse the government’s registry and thereby subvert an attempt to racially tag me. I am not what politicians tell me I am or what my passport says. My identity does not reside in how I look. None of these make me who I am. I am who I think I am. I am what I believe. I am what I do. I want to find out how I got to be what I am, to believe in what I believe and do what I do. *
In the last forty years of my life, I have been a social activist. I took an active interest in the things around me, joined other like-minded people and campaigned for change, especially in the areas relating to discrimination and injustice. To questions as to why I am so involved in ‘politics’ and what drives me, I laughingly respond, “I am a Malayalee.” There is some truth in this as Malayalees are known in local history for their activism. For instance, Malayalees headed the leading trade unions in both Malaya and Singapore. There is also some truth in how family values influence us and how life experiences, “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”, shape the way we live our lives. Within months of joining AWARE, I became keenly conscious of the importance and relevance of social activism. Sometimes, women would stop me and thank me for speaking up. On that morning The Straits Times published the interview, “How to Win a Woman’s Vote” (19 October 1991), with me, a young woman rang me at work. She worked in an office in Margaret Drive and said, “Thank you for speaking up for women like me. I am a clerk and I have two young children. I am so tired of working long hours, then going home and having to see to the housework and the children.” She repeated, “I am tired,” continuing with, “If I could stop work, I would. But I can’t afford to stop work.” I felt so helpless. I put down the phone and cried. Her gratitude at just that simple act of speaking up and the reactions from other women would be major sources of inspiration and strength whenever I started to doubt myself and the work done by AWARE. At other times, at the supermarket or in libraries, women would come over to chat and then ask, “Haven’t you been threatened? Has the government warned you? You are very brave.” Brave? Not at all, just moved by injustice. I remember one evening when AWARE was hosting a farewell tea for Noeleen Heyzer, who was leaving for New York to take up her appointment as head of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). The event was held at the AWARE Centre in Race Course Road, not a very big room and packed with Noeleen’s friends and AWARE members. Just before the start of tea, a friend urgently whispered, “I need to tell you something” and pulled me aside into the kitchen. She said that there had been a message from her boss that she had been told to pass on to me. The message was: “Be careful. The Prime Minister’s Office is watching AWARE. Tone down.” As I began to speak (I was president then) in front of the room full of people, congratulating Noeleen and wishing her the best in her new job, I had to choke back tears of indignation to be coherent. It was a moment of powerlessness and anger. AWARE, through the late 1980s and early 1990s, lobbied for equal benefits for women in the civil service. In the 1993 parliamentary debates, then Finance Minister Richard Hu declared that the government would continue to withhold equal medical benefits because in the Asian family structure, it was the husband’s responsibility to look after the family’s needs. This rejection of our appeal, we were told, was not based on economics. The government had the money but they were not going to give it to the women. In other words, the government was being ‘obdurate’. I am delighted to at last have found use for this word! But that was in the past. Those hectic stressful days are long gone. My life has changed. These days, as I settle down for the night, my last thought is of the steaming mug of coffee, deliciously sweetened with Milkmaid condensed milk, which I will enjoy the first thing the next morning. With that mug in hand, I will sit back in bed against a pile of pillows and spend the next hour reading the newspapers. On the day when the newspapers fail to provide any decent reading, I will pick up my current reading material, which could be a journal or a book. I find this a delightful way of starting the day. The time to write my story is now. “The past,” Virginia Woolf wrote in A Sketch of the Past, “only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past, but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye. But to feel the present sliding over the depths of the past, peace is necessary.” That time of peace has come for me. What delight now, in what is referred to as the autumn (or is it winter) of one’s years, to not rush into the day, so different from the days and years of hard work and responsibility of the last four decades. In fact, my late husband used to call me a “dilettante”. I suppose I was and would have liked to remain so. But then events forced me to change and I ended up learning to make my own living and becoming this hardworking passionate social activist. What path led me here? I was never ambitious. My principal, Sister Helen, was ambitious for me; so were some of my teachers and most certainly my parents. But as for me, there was never any focus to be this or that. Once I thought I would be a teacher. But then my application to study Literature was rejected and I was accepted into the law faculty. Well then, I could become a lawyer, I thought, but so many of the subjects, except for constitutional law, bored me and I wound up failing. I did not want to be a burden on my parents anymore, so I joined a newspaper and within a few months, got married. So really, my working life was more like a series of side steps, much like the movements of the ronggeng. But there was one thing I was certain of, and that was that I would be a wife and mother. I was going to have a few children. The number was indeterminate and changed at various stages of my life. I think three had been the ideal number. I dreamt of living in a beautiful house with a garden filled with trees and flowers. I would have a swing in the backyard under the shade of a tree, where I would have my morning coffee and read the newspapers. I would cut flowers from my garden to decorate my house. I did not become a mother, which saddened me for many years till I accepted the inevitable. But there have always been children around me whom I could love and care for as if they are my own. My younger sister, Caroline, or “Caddy”, as we call her, is eighteen years younger. I have sung and read nursery rhymes and watched Bob the Builder and Thomas and Friends with three generations of children in the family. Just recently, I watched Aladdin with my grandnephews Mathew, 7, William, 5, their sister Grace, the baby of the extended family, and my 3-year-old grandniece Zoe, whose father and uncle I used...