Where I Was: A memoir about forgetting and remembering

By Constance Singam

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ethos Books
• Release date: Jul 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9789811837395

Book preview

WHERE I WAS

Where I Was: A Memoir About Forgetting and Remembering

Copyright © Constance Singam, 2022

Originally published as Where I Was: A Memoir from the Margins by Select Books, 2013

ISBN 978-981-18-3013-6 (paperback)

ISBN 978-981-18-3739-5 (ebook)

Published under the imprint Ethos Books

by Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd

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Cover photo by Dana Lam

Cover design by Lee Wen-yi, with special thanks to Natasha Hassan

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First published under this imprint in 2022

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National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Name(s): Singam, Constance.

Title: Where I was : a memoir about forgetting and remembering / Constance Singam.

Description: [Revised] | Singapore : Ethos Books, 2022.

Identifier(s): ISBN 978-981-18-3013-6 (paperback)

Subject(s): LCSH: Singam, Constance--Biography. | Civil society--Singapore. | Singapore--Social conditions.

Classification: DDC 306.095957--dc23

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where i was

CONTENTS

Prologue

PART ONE: REMEMBERING

1. And So It Begins

2 . Kerala Memories

3. Daughters and Wives in the Kingdom of Men

4. The Most Colourful Town in the World

5. We Will Control the Hearts and Minds

6. The Makings of a Sunday School

7. Changing Times

8. Work and Marriage

9. The Good Times and The Bad

PART TWO: NOT FORGETTING

10. Dealing with Grief

11. The Melbourne Years

12. Home: Starting Again

13. Caged Birds

14. From the Frying Pan...

15. Into the Fire

16. I am the Feminist Mentor

17. Something Will Have To Give

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

PHOTOS

Prologue

THE MOST URGENT IMPULSE to write my memoir came in the aftermath of the AWARE (Association of Women for Action and Research) Saga in 2009. A group of women whose religious beliefs were contrary to AWARE’s secular values took over the organisation at its Annual General Meeting. The memoir was prompted by my own questions as to how I had arrived at that point in my life and got caught up in this whole ill-fated historic episode. I was president at the time of the takeover. In updating my memoir, I take stock of what has happened since.

It has been thirteen years since I looked back on those traumatic days in 2009. Those days were very painful ones for me especially since my involvement in civil society activism, through my membership at AWARE, had been one of the most enriching and satisfying phases of my life. I was left shattered, with so many questions about my sense of identity and my place in the community where I had spent more than thirty years. I am now at a calmer, even more serene phase of my life and can even look back and assert that the past is a foreign country! I no longer grieve for that old self, the AWARE activist.

But even as a child running barefoot in the sands of my mother’s village in Kerala, South India, where I had lived during the Japanese Occupation of Singapore, I knew Singapore was home. This idea had a powerful hold on me. It gave me a sense of pride—that always buried deep in my subconscious was who I am—a child born in Singapore. After several years in Kerala, I came home, and I have been, to quote Stuart Hall, coming home with a vengeance.

As an adult, in the changing social and political circumstances of Singapore, I have many questions about the nature, even about the certainty of the sense of identity. This memoir is an exploration of a struggle to belong in a society in which I feel alienated as an Indian, as a woman and as a civil society activist. An alienation from which even the majority race is not exempt. We all feel, in varying senses, marginalised and alienated from the dominant Singapore culture, the one constructed and imagined by an authoritarian government controlled by the People’s Action Party (PAP), which has been in power since independence in 1965.

The Singapore that is most recognised is the Singapore of the PAP—rich, safe, clean, authoritarian. But there is another Singapore. The Singapore of civil society where I have found my community of like-minded people has given me the connection that I need, a sense of being in my own place. This is my intellectual and ethical centre, the space open to me to realise myself as a person and as a member of my community and country. I have occupied a small part of this country with some degree of certainty, with some confidence. Yet my public identity rests on difference in relation to the dominant political narrative of Singapore; my gender and my race exclude me from the dominant structures of our society. This alternative story is connected to my civil society activism, especially at AWARE, where I have been a member since 1986. I now realise that the most enduring part of my identity is connected to my advocacy work in civil society, especially at AWARE. In tracing my life and my activism, I have learnt, and not without difficulty, that I am not a victim of circumstances, or of powerful institutions. That I have agency to construct my story and define my own identity. I have learnt that those of us in minority positions are not entirely powerless. Even our very ability to name our marginalisation has dimensions of power in it.

And I take a great deal of pride in Singapore diversity. The Singapore that I celebrate is a fascinating and exciting place. I love its location in Southeast Asia, a region of friendly people, rich in culture and history, influenced by three great civilisations: Islamic, Indian and Chinese. And yet the Singapore I envision is an ideal society—liberal, democratic and multicultural. This imagined community of a free people living in a democratic, socialist, multicultural and intercultural society, rooted in place and values—was zealously fostered by the early PAP itself in its heyday of democratic socialistic idealism. Many people of my own generation grew up in the heady atmosphere of tremendous enthusiasm and romance attached to the rise of a new nation under a very charismatic and brilliant leadership. Yet ‘multiculturalism’ in practice keeps us trapped in distinctive psychological and cultural ghettos. Fifty years after independence from Britain, we remain colonised in different ways.

Racism, as a result of public policies which, for years, highlighted racial differences, is now acknowledged as a serious problem. The awareness of racism has emboldened many, especially young people. They have started some difficult conversations. Their increasing participation in civil society activism, prompted by their concern about climate change, poverty, inequality and other intersectional social issues that affect the lives of Singaporeans and foreigners amongst us, is encouraging. These are very positive developments for civil society.

I see a younger generation of activists, better educated and more informed about what ails our society being strategic in resisting and overcoming the state’s oppressive policies. They are beginning to define alternative realities and identities for themselves. Women, as history has shown, have the capacity to challenge dominant norms in their struggle against patriarchal power and control: witness their continuing campaigns against the long-established traditional practice of polygamy and against domestic violence.

I see Singaporeans discovering that the state does not have the monopoly on power but people working together have power as well. I see them overcome their fear of the state apparatus and work together. And they will remember our history and not forget those who went before. I feel their passion for a more just and equal society. These are my dreams and I know I don’t dream alone. I am 85 years old now and my grey hairs have opened up a welcome space in this my multiracial home.

Constance Singam

January 2022

PART ONE

REMEMBERING

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 to babysit twenty-six years ago. When I told Zoe that I would not be seeing her for a while, her response had been, You can see me on Skype. Wherever my siblings’ children were and are—and they have moved across continents—we have remained as close as the relatives in the village where I had spent my childhood.

I remember the time I boarded a taxi at Woodlands to go home after a weekend with my sister in Johor Bahru. I chatted with the taxi driver along the way and he asked me, How many children do you have?

None, I said.

The taxi driver turned around and looked at me. No children. Why? Was he a member of PAP’s ‘Have Children Committee’? I wondered. I stared back at him but he persisted. Why you have no children? The conversation became uncomfortable and I turned away.

Some months later, in another taxi, also after a weekend, the driver asked me, You married? I steeled myself for the next question: How many children? I had already invented a story: Three, one boy and two girls.

Where are they? he asked.

At home, I said.

He turned around, looked at me and said, You leave them and go away for the weekend? Another PAP member? You can’t win with taxi drivers. Anyway, to deal with taxi drivers, I have invented a virtual family and can weave many stories about them.

*

An early Singapore memory was of my family’s return to Singapore from India, where we had lived during the war years. I have total recall of our first sighting of land. The year was 1948 and I was 12. The steamship took a week from Madras to Penang, our first port of call on the way back to Singapore. Penang was drenched in the splendour of the morning sun, a welcome introduction to my first glimpse of Malaya. In a couple of days, we would arrive in Singapore. But meanwhile, I was anxious to spot a Chinese. My geography class in middle school back in the village in Kerala had introduced me to China and its people. They were described in the textbook as yellow in colour, with slim slit eyes and straight, thick black hair that tended to stick out. So when the ship carrying us docked in Penang harbour, I wanted to see a Chinese. I tugged at my mother’s sari: Mamma! Mamma! Show me a Chinese.

There, she pointed, that is a Chinese.

I looked down and there was a man, slight in built, naked from waist up, carrying a load on his shoulder and climbing up the gangway. To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement. Is that a Chinese? I asked in disbelief. He was rather ordinary and not at all the exotic creature I imagined.

My mother was understandably exasperated. I had spent the first five years of my life in Singapore. We had a ‘black and white amah’ and we had learnt to speak in Cantonese. With a child’s easy acceptance of people and inability to see differences, I had not remembered that experience and certainly had not made the connection to the description in my geography textbook. As children, we seldom perceive difference. A 4-year-old suddenly discovers he is Indian. He asks his mother, Is Nirmala (his sister) Indian too? he wants to know. What about his friend? Well, his friend, he is told, is Chinese. What about his friend’s brother, he asks. The Chinese of my Geography textbook were exotic and presented to me as different creatures from myself, which was not the