Read on Twitter
singaporeans (& the govt) could go through some of these steps. instead, we had to go through the depressing experience of having the coloniser who stole our land & rights & facilitated the destruction of indigenous industries (effects felt till today) be celebrated. https://twitter.com/aiukliAfrika/status/1258047698147606534
i will never forget the wife of the village head of one of the islands who had to move into a HDB crying because she missed the island so much. they turned the islands where ppl have lived in for centuries into landfills. they make pulau ubiners pay rent.
i think it is deliberate that malay people have not been given much access into understanding our own history. because if we knew, the sadness is unbearable. older malay people carry it, we see it.
colonialism is continued, not just in re-purposed british laws but laws specifically targetting malays here. that the malay community is the poorest in our own land is not a surprise, but consistent with how indigenous communities are treated throughout the globe.
it is deliberate that multicultural liberalism makes malays see themselves first & foremost as "singaporeans" under a nationalist understanding instead of indigenous to the Malay world & part of a deeper history with our land.
i say 'malay' but this encompassing racialisation is a colonial product too. before this javanese, boyanese, malays, & other races are considered separate & it is absurd in sg that they're all to be considered under one category. it distorts the diversity of the malay peninsula.
(btw if someone tells u they are javanese or bugis or minang & not Malay, please understand it may not necessarily be internalised racism, but a recognition of their own history & a recognition that our inherited colonial racialisation is not just limited, but invalid.)
what has made me really sad about this level of dispossession is not just how the community has suffered but the intense decimation the land has suffered that can never be taken back.
97% of our primary rainforests are gone...
97% of our primary rainforests are gone...
the relationship we used to have with our land cannot be replicated at the same level. there was a healing oil in my family made with herbs that stopped at my mum's generation.. because many of the herbs can't be found anymore. we can't fully comprehend the level of loss.
so this thread that i typed in a burst put myself and my friends in a funk yesterday. as young malays in singapore, it is an indescribable, heavy emotion when you start to realise a loss that you don't even know well enough to grieve.
my wish is that younger malays not feel too guilty of their cultural disconnect, & that they don't blame themselves too much. because this disconnect is more due to deliberate state policy than it is about individual neglect.
we have not lost everything, we still have each other. learning our way out of induced historical & cultural amnesia will feel like homecoming. connecting with people & groups across the causeway & other parts of the malay world will deepen the feeling of being grounded again.
also i made a mistake lol. it's "liberal multiculturalism" not multicultural liberalism. singapore follows this form of racial relations & organising. it's a very top-down & superficial & ultimately favours the ideal of the dominant group that minorities have to assimilate to.
(also another mistake: malay archipelago (or nusantara) not malay peninsula. lol i keep making this mistake!!)
