Lemas Semangat (with annotations)- Chapter Three: Beringin
Previously published (put together by the amazing guest editors and friends, Cher Tan and Nina Chabra) in Portside Review's #6 Rocking the in 2022 with other brilliant pieces.
(These final set of annotations look at other forms of monstrous myths)
As darkness falls, it is as if a second map, a ghostly historical topography, appears on top of the familiar one, a radical disjuncture of memory and topography that is violently, temporarily conflated within the hyper-controlled surfaces of the contemporary city. The new landscapes are thus infiltrated by the ghosts of history, by familiar entreaties for memory within the unending flood of the new.
– Joshua Comaroff, Ghostly Topographies: Landscape and Biopower in Modern Singapore1
The word ‘reclamation*’ is derived from an old French word from the fourteenth century, ‘reclamer’, which means to call upon, invoke, to call back. It also sees its origins from the Latin word ‘reclamare’, which means to cry out against, contradict, appeal, and protest. Somewhere in the mid-sixteenth century, the word evolved to mean 'bring waste land into useful condition fit for cultivation'; this attested to also mean 'subdue' or 'taming for use'.
Reclaim as a verb (with object):
to bring (uncultivated areas or wasteland) into a condition for cultivation or other use.
to tame.
to claim and essentially to possess as own.
Reclaim as a verb (without object):
to protest
to object
(*Reclamation here in itself is a myth. What is at play is something more insidious and deceptive. Renaming has been a colonial strategy in erasing the prior meanings of conquered landscapes. This too can be applied to its processes. In a fucking brilliant piece Sunny Island Set in the Sea: Singapore’s Land Reclamation as a Colonial Project, the writer Charmaine Chua demystifies reclamation and replaces it with terraforming. She wrote:
“To pause over the term ‘reclamation’ for a while, one might recognize that dubbing an act of terraforming as “reclamation” designates a misnomer. In its deverbative form, reclamation suggests an act of restoration or return in which one is retrieving something that was once one’s own. This works as a fiction on two registers. First, it presupposes that the coastal sea itself acts somewhat as an aqua nullius, ‘empty’ space that has no history or value, except to be turned into the property of the state, with the corollary that reclamation is coextensive with an active dispossession from elsewhere. This naturalizes a thoroughly human process of dispossession as a form of natural right. Second, to name the process as a form of “re-claiming” centers the spatial locus of activity on the site in which land is being created, rather than from where it is being taken away. In the logic of reclamation, a state deserves to procure or cultivate a site for habitation or commerce; few questions are asked about the sites from which material has been extracted, and therefore made increasingly uninhabitable”)
At present, 22 percent of Singapore's land mass is made up of reclaimed land. In 1886, a small hill** located at Battery Road was levelled and filled into the marshes to allow for more stable ground, and which does not allow for flooding. The area, which is present day Boat Quay, was the first record of land reclamation, a crescent-shaped border fit for ships and other maritime activities. Fit for use***. For the nation to be built, the island had to grow and so it did for the next hundred or so years – it appears that largeness in a land-scarce city is of utmost importance. Bigger is always better.
(**This dependency on land reclamation continued with the flattening of hills and when that ran out, the coastal seabeds were dredged up along with them their ecosystems of rich marine life and when that too became insufficient, Singapore started purchasing sand from other countries, mainly Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam which resulted in restrictions or ban of sand exports but not before reports of “the depletion of marine life, landslides and river erosion, and the erasure of at least 24 Indonesia islands since 2005.”
Chua describes “this flow of territory as being quite distinct from other forms of territorial expansion such as war, military occupation or colonial expansion” and this legal expansion of the territorial goes unchecked because it literally moves territories instead of occupying them and “islands that one might once have been able to map with coordinates now disappear — or rather, disintegrate — into the fragmentary, fungible particles — sand from a disappearing island in Indonesia practically indistinguishable from sand from a seabed off the coast of the Philippines”.
In other words, Singapore is a fucking thief and this myth of thriving centre of trade and economy is being sustained through “a theft of territory, and a theft of land — war by other means — war by means of terraforming.” Though I won’t call it war when there is no option to fight back.
(***Here another myth is born from unfamiliarity and discomfort of the tropics, that of the abject monstrous mangrove. In the British colony reports, these temperate dependent penjajahanam white man commonly used descriptors such as backwater, swamp, muddy, mosquito infested, polluted are common in vilifying these vital connective systems between land and sea. We return to terraforming, a term coined in 1940s in a science fiction text by Jack Williamson to describe terra or land and forming as molding or shaping. “That concept itself is an extrapolation of colonial violence; to remake immense stretches of terrain to suit the lifestyle of another continent inevitably entailed to the undermining and elimination of the ways of life of those who had inhabited those lands for many thousand of years2”
The mangroves that have existed since prehistoric times dating back Paleocene period more than 60 million years ago are crucial carbon sinks; able to absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, two to four times greater than in mature tropical forests. In a study carried out in 2014, it was found “that mangroves occupy just 960 hectares or less than 1 percent of the land area in Singapore, but store disproportionately high levels of carbon − 450,571.7 tonnes to be exact, or 3.7 percent of Singapore’s national carbon emissions in 2010. Additionally, mangroves are able to absorb heavy metals, metalloids and certain pollutants from the air, thus hampering the flow of toxins into the food chain.” In other words, mangroves are the MVPs, divine custodians of both the lands and seas’ flora and fauna.
And yet, “it is estimated that the island was home to 75 sq km of mangrove forests two centuries ago compared to the minuscule 7.35 sq km found today”. Imagine that? And the ironic but unsurprising twist of all this, you guess it…Singapore’s restoration and rehabilitation of the mangroves. These efforts are crucial in mitigating Singapore’s high carbon emissions and climate change. Here’s one big one you might want to read about…I don’t know but “…. engagement and outreach programmes will be introduced following the opening of OCBC Mangrove Park in 2026, providing additional recreational opportunities for Singaporeans” to draw in more folks feels like a performed spectacle of 🎵roll over the ocean, roll over the sea, roll over the ocean in the deep blue sea, roll over the ocean, roll over the sea, go and do your part to build community🎵
Anyhoos I can go on and on about this but here’s a quote by a white academic whose making amends for his ancestors erroneous ways (jokes, coughs) by saying this:
3Assoc Prof Friess: Mangroves are harder to restore than many other types of forests, because the sea is a very tough place to live. Only a few tree species around the world have evolved to tolerate some level of tidal flooding, waves and high salinity. So, mangrove restoration means more than just planting, it means fixing the local environment so that mangroves are in the right conditions to grow.
Mangrove deforestation can substantially change the physical environment, so restoration often requires a degree of engineering. Hence, it is much more cost-effective to protect mangroves that we have, rather than try to replace the ones we have lost.)
Through reclamation, the island's borders grew from its other parts, flattened and stretched until it too became thin and transparent, the lucent island, the ghost island that is forgetful, that is forgotten. To be a land-scarce city is to have all land marked out, accounted for, and regulated. The Land Acquisition Act**** expedited the process of land possession by the government for public purposes. With an increase in acquired land parcels, the government became the biggest landowner by 1985. At the time, the government owned 76.2 percent of the land in Singapore compared with 31 percent in 19494. Today, 90 percent of that land is publicly owned; this means it is owned by the government for public purposes. In the name of the public's good.
(****My research of keramats and shrines, through newspapers as an archival source, have led me to the Land Acquisition Act several times. The making of the Singapore dream of affordable housing, a stable family unit and economic security is the biggest most formidable myth of them all. However at the start, this myth too was a ghost of sorts, flimsy and fragile in its making. One of my favourite newspaper report, titled Land Acquisition Act: What you need to know, dated 26th August 1995, begins with:
“Robin Hood or highway robber? With the overriding powers endowed by the Land Acquisition Act, the Government has been called both whenever it acquires private land to build homes. schools, factories as well as to meet other national needs such as defence and more vaguely general development…”
Haha the good old days when media wasn’t just the state’s mouth pieces and drone lackeys.)
And here we return full circle; my partner and I, new flat owners on Jalan Tenteram with a lease arrangement made less ridiculous because land is so expensive that this is the only choice that makes the most financial sense. The public too, much like the reclaimed city, has been shaped and tamed into submission. One catches whispers of burning kampungs**** and people forced out of their homes, out of their land and elevated into dreams 12 storeys from the ground. Tanah, too soft or insufficient at times to hold this promise, required us, the public, to steal buy land elsewhere in the form of sand5. The promise of a better future is always amplified; it is hard to hear anything else. To know anything else. As the city-state builds higher and higher, 30, 40 floors above ground to contain this growth, the land itself has grown stranger and far away. Lemah dolat, lemas semangat.
(****I’m sure y’all heard of Bukit Ho Swee’s infamous fire that displaced 16,000 occupants but here’s how it was reported on 24th May 2021 in the Straits Times. Here are some super disgusting excerpts:
“Sixty years on, it is seen as a pivotal moment in Singapore's leap into modernity, tied to the inexorable rise of Housing Board flats in which about 80 per cent of residents today live.
Within nine months of the fire, all the victims had been housed in flats across the country - a previously unheard of feat that bolstered the People's Action Party-led Government's credibility at the polls.
Just six years after the fire, 12,000 flats were also erected at the site and its adjacent areas.
Historian Loh Kah Seng, who has spoken to 100 survivors, describes the blaze as a decisive moment that turned "squatters into citizens".
"It marked the transformation of a society, from a group of people who were unruly or very independent-minded, who were not always gainfully employed and who were involved in crime or gangsterism, into citizens who lived in HDB flats, the foundation of citizenship which changed other aspects of their lives," he said.
"They became full-time employees who paid regular rent, raised families and helped to build Singapore as we know it today. In that way, the fire is like an act of God, allowing the Government to build houses in a critical area without taking the blame for eviction."
So why this random coverage of Bukit Ho Swee you ask? Why in 2021? Well sometimes the myth grows weak and it’s had to be fed to grow strong again. Here’s a different report on July 1st of the same year: HDB resale prices rise 5.9% in first half of 2021, with new high expected in second half of year and then in 3rd January 2022 HDB resale prices rose 12.5% in 2021, highest annual growth since 2010: Flash estimates. So yeah, if y’all had blocked the pandemic out of your minds, BTO’s construction had to be put on hold and it inflated the resale market prices which made it unaffordable for lower income citizens to get housing that was supposed to be affordable to every fucking body. I guess it’s another act of God huh but this time for our ‘AnNuAL GRoWth’.)
In an article6 written in 1987 in Berita Harian, the residents of the demolished kampung in Kallang describe a force that keeps attracting them to revisit their old living grounds. Many have been moved to newly built HDB flats, in the New Towns of Jurong, Tampines, and Marine Parade, yet the distance did not deter their return. These residents would gather near the keramat site of another elusive figure, Siti Maryam, whose shrine sits under the Pokok Beringin, a Banyan tree, with 60 other gravesites, some of whom were her family members. Siti Maryam was said to possess healing powers, the protector of coastal communities and bringer of good fortune. Her family was also said to have spread the teachings of Islam to the Orang Kallang[12], one of the indigenous inhabitants of Singapore. Layer upon layer upon layer, always with no way of tracing the source but somehow it almost always results in a painfully predictable end. Her shrine and the other graves were exhumed and removed in 2010.
There are the same geographical patterns too, to these shrines and sites. Trees, elevated grounds such as hills and mounds or bodies of water seem to be recurring markers and companions to these sites. Maybe this is where the semangat saturates and gathers. I wonder if the residents of Kallang still feel this draw given that the shrine and the tree are no longer there in their physical form. Consider the manifold loss; starting from the land itself, the shrine and the tree, the residents and custodians, Siti Maryam and her history and the Orang Kallang7 and theirs. Multiply that to all the others which have been whittled down to strands and dead ends that snag against the thinly stretched skin of this ghost island. We can see through these layers sometimes.
The protests (of the dead, the dying dead, the uninvited hantu and the adopted tuhan, the trees that bled enough to break machines, the silted river, the tired hands of custodians picking leaves from tanah that is not allowed to have roots, the strong magic, semangat that's splintered across, that breathes from mulut ke mulut, bisik-bisik) are mere echoes. But who is left listening? How do we perceive what we can hear?
I find myself thinking of the residents of that kampung and their beringin tree. The word ‘ingin’ attached to the tree, as though it bears our dreams and desires. Maybe it is this that endures, beneath all these layers; it is this that remains incessant and sustained through time. The pulsating force of the collective dreaming, from the dreams and desires which the city demands of its people but does not want to is not able to provide. That's how some of these spaces have survived this long. There is loss and pain in the dreaming (*****) but there is refusal in accepting these feelings of heartache. Maybe there is a desire for us to gather and remember, to kuatkan semangat, and grieve.
*****I’m ending with this tweet from a gen alpha no less on their family’s experiences of displacement, a story among many, many others. So yeah that marks the end of this three-part piece on my ongoing research. Thank you reading my loves. Keep dreaming your stories, keep sharing your </3. Let’s reclaim our narratives, let them grow strong enough to break these monstrous myths. Till next time.
Joshua Comaroff, ‘Ghostly topographies: landscape and biopower in modern Singapore’, Cultural Geographies, Vol. 14, No.1 (January 2007), pp. 56-73, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44243681
Taken from Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables For a Planet in Crisis Chapter 4: Terraforming.
https://news.nus.edu.sg/assoc-prof-dan-friess-saving-our-mangroves-for-planet-saving-payoffs/
Land Acquisition Act is Enforced’, 17 June 1967, https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/history/events/1f669eff-bc82-49d1-a27c-2624e4cab8c6
Robert John and William Jamieson, ‘Singapore’s Scentless Growth is Built on the Brutal Extraction of Cambodian Sand and Imported Labour’, Failed Architecture, 3 March 2020, https://failedarchitecture.com/singapores-scentless-growth-is-built-on-the-brutal-extraction-of-cambodian-sand-and-imported-labour/