"The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House"
In Singapore, the youngest female politican from the opposition party lied in Parliament, claiming that she had accompanied a sexual assault victim to the police station, when in fact, she hadn’t. An inquiry happened, in the style of a one-sided cross-examination— itself an absurd format— with the ruling party questioning the opposition. The disgraced female opposition member shifted her stories, her party members dissembled on why they had dragged their feet about her untruths, and the ruling party gleefully tried to frame it all into a politically convenient narrative.
The national broadsheet covered the inquiry with witch-hunting headlines. A social media account that hawks itself as an alternative source of ‘investigative journalism’ tried to ‘balance it out’. Commenters lambasted it for not being ‘objective.’ Detractors retorted that these opinionators are unwitting supporters of the ruling party. Back and forth it went. No one is right, everyone is wrong. Both sides sneered at each other to “wake up, Singapore.”
I watch videos of the inquiry. It devolves into a badly-rehearsed skit of “he said, she said, they said”. The cross-examiner from the ruling party looks like a kindly old uncle. But he deftly wields leading questions, interjections, obvious baiting— heavy-handed language from a calm, placid veneer. He is “finding out the facts.” He is questioning someone else but it feels like he is addressing me. I feel overcrowded, stifled, like I am being drowned underwater— don’t see shadows where there are none, Miss Ong— I hit pause, and breathe. I press play— again the urgent pressure that if I opened my mouth, water would rush in with uncontrollable velocity— stop interrupting me, Miss Ong— I hit pause again. I see the leader of the opposition hold his ground, obfuscate, cover his tracks, parry wits; “You are trying to catch me in a gotcha moment. That was a good try. You are a good lawyer, but I am a good listener.”
I am neither a good lawyer, nor, it seems, a good listener— it took me multiple viewings and commentaries to even untangle the barest, frayed heck of what was going on. Language itself took on an unreal sheen; a laminate of fraudulence and futility from every mouth—what do you mean she doesn’t know what ‘substantiate’ means? So you mean they knew about her lie but didn’t do anything? References to “the lie” elided the sexual assault victims whose confidence was betrayed— why is no one talking about them?
What is going on?
The words I read and heard didn’t seem to point to anything at all. Lost among the vitriol, a user asks, “So who's lying??”— a lonely question in this confounding theater of anomie and misdirection. A political pundit says hollowly, “The difference between truth and lies is something people can understand. Except that, right now, I can’t tell what the real story is.”
— what is so difficult, Miss Ong?
A few weeks later, fatigued netizens shrug, “we are over this drama tbh nobody cares.”
Or maybe— we want to care but the discourse comes to us so distorted that we don’t know how.
The people around me do not like the national broadsheet. “Why do you still read it? It’s propaganda. It’s crap.”
I do not ask are the rest any better? I do not say, because I don’t want to get my news only from social media. I do not say, fiction seems the most truthful out of all the languages produced in this country.
I definitely do not say, I read the national broadsheet because I want to feel the tragedy of it all, because it sounds dramatic, and I don’t want to sound like the protagonist in a subpar tragicomedy.
But in the quiet of my mind, the words hold true. I read the national broadsheet as a painful reminder that my language and thinking are being shaped a certain way. I read it because I believe despair is important. It is so easy to forget that this country is ranked abysmally low on the World Press Index Freedom. It is Very Bad. It is a tragedy. We are all of us the protagonists in this story. I don’t want to forget it.
P asks, “What’s your next newsletter piece going to be about?”
“...national politics,” I say evasively.
He looks troubled, “That’s a landmine.”
“I’m writing it all kind of vaguely,” I say vaguely.
I subscribe to a local activist’s newsletter. A new law has been passed, one that is dangerous because it is nebulously phrased, thus allowing the arms of those in power to reach longer, dig deeper. The activist tells her subscribers not to panic, but wants to give us some “mental prep.” Under the new law, she might get labelled a “politically significant person,” her newsletter might be named a “proscribed online location,” and if the authorities demand a list of her paid subscribers (of which I am one), she would not be able to refuse.
What is all of this doing to our language as a nation? How are we so inarticulate? What is this helpless aphasia?
I write vaguely because I’m scared. Scared of who? Scared of what? I examine the overwhelming urge to tell my fourteen measly subscribers “not to share this piece publicly.” I worry I am not opaque enough—
— don’t play with words, Miss Ong.
Some days I imbibe discourses on subjects so varied I feel like I am afloat in an ocean.
There are so many callings to heed. So much to absorb. So many stances that demand to be taken.
I read Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? Half of the novel is in spare, declarative third-person prose, and characters are presented only through their actions. Meeting a friend has the same narrative weight as scrolling through a newsfeed. Receiving a text is on an equal plane, plot-wise, as taking off one’s shoes. As a result of this terse narrative form, the reader isn’t privy to the characters’ motivations or desires. This dissociation is jarring but feels honest: all we can ever know from others is the little they show us.
The other half of the novel takes the form of long, meandering emails between the two female characters. They discuss the collapsing environment, the flagging state of the contemporary novel, the pros and cons of religion, and the dismal topography of Dublin. In short, the emails are heavy with the burden of first-person subjectivity. An excerpt:
I looked at the internet for too long today and started feeling depressed. The worst thing is that I actually think people on there are generally well meaning and the impulses are right, but our political vocabulary has decayed so deeply and rapidly since the twentieth century that most attempts to make sense of our present historical moment turn out to be essentially gibberish [...] And we who have the tools refuse to do anything about it, because people who take action are criticised. Oh, that’s all very well, but then, what action do I ever take? In my defence I’m very tired and I don’t have any good ideas. Really my problem is that I’m annoyed at everyone else for not having all the answers, when I also have none.
In this inconclusive spread of subjectivity, there is no relief. Every thought contradicts itself, or doesn’t have an argument.
The narrative form of the emails isn’t particularly good company, but is a truthful one. While many of us are consummate consumers of discourse, we are not necessarily competent or articulate about what to do with the unceasing knowledge we glean from the thumbprint-smeared screens of our phones. What is the best way to be in this world? What are the risks involved in taking a stance? Is irony better than ambivalence? Are they different sides of the same coin?
Around this time, I also read Amanda Montell’s Cultish: The New Language of Fanaticism. She explores the mantras, neologisms, buzzwords, and thought-terminating clichés that charismatic leaders and adherents in cults such as Scientology or People’s Temple use or have used. But she also shows how such in-group rhetorical tactics are all around us, with less devastating consequences— in SoulCycle, 12-step groups, multi-level marketing, or the language of Instagram. “Language,” she argues, “can do so much to squash independent thinking, obscure truths, encourage confirmation bias, and emotionally charge experiences such that no other way of life seems possible.”
Montell’s prose is punchy and well-paced. Her subject is endlessly fascinating. She doesn’t write about the people susceptible to cultish language with pity or revulsion. Instead, she describes how, in the absence of structures for collective care in capitalistic societies, idealistic people who wish for a different, better world grasp at groups that promise the deliverance of a tight-knit community that understands them.
Still, I left the book feeling a strange sense of defeat. I looked around at the triumphant conviction of influencer-speak, the all-or-nothing language of fandom culture, the insane clarity of moral discourse on social media, and the acrid sense of defeat that lingered after each conversation on local politics. I wondered if participating in any form of social life means being complicit in stultifying systems of discourse. Words ceased to shimmer, seemed hopelessly enmeshed in foreclosed possibilities.
All this to say: lately I’ve been troubled by a sinking suspicion that language is not an ally. That instead it is tyrannical, hardhanded, and excessive. I second-guessed every thing I said and wrote, wondering if I was participating in some unknowing hegemonese. I wondered how anyone (mainly, I) could develop a voice that is true.
It’s not like I’m some fledgling naïf laboring under the delusion that language is pure connection without oppression. The late Joan Didion states baldly that writing is “an aggressive, even a hostile act.” She continues, “setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.” In Sonny Liew’s graphic novel, Charlie Chan Hock Chye, Singapore’s “finest comics artist” shrugs, “Is it manipulative? Sure. But that’s how you tell stories.”
But grant me this period of depression and helplessness against the homogenizing forces of language. I’ll pick up my pen tomorrow, okay?
I’ve been working on a piece about Haw Par Villa— that funny, strange place.
In an early draft I wrote, “Lately I have been plagued once again by doubts that writing is an utterly irrelevant endeavor with negligible impact, and found solace in these lonely statues people snap photos of, that tell stories a large number of people can’t interpret.”
Beng read it and backpedalled, “Wait, writing is an utterly irrelevant endeavor with negligible impact— really? But you read so many powerful things!”
It’s true. I do read so many powerful things. I hit backspace on that line.
But wait. When I wrote that, I meant my writing. Not writing writ large. I meant: “Lately I have been plagued once again by doubts that my writing is an utterly irrelevant endeavor with negligible impact...”
Parsing through all the demands and silencing of the language around me lately, perhaps I forgot myself in the mess. If there is so much discourse already out there, and the most authoritative ones are numbingly despotic, sometimes I am paralyzed with doubt: what’s the point of trying to write anything at all? Would anyone listen?
And yet. The blazingly defiant poet Audre Lorde tells us that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. That always, we must create new language to realign the discourses that threaten to suffocate us. That we make art to say and see anew the things right before our eyes.
Gather your strength, I scold myself. In the wings, the blinking cursor waits— in the valiant, flickering shape of the ‘I’.
I’d like to believe we all try, in our own ways, not to replicate dominant structures of discourse. I look at this graceless piece of writing, my fragile architecture of thought and feeling, and know that I am trying to be the first-person narrator of my life in spite of all this mistrust. I try to believe that my words are a small miracle— and the helplessness inside is quelled, just a little.