The Malay Heritage Foundation‘s (MHF) Sembang Ilmu Plus (+) Series (SIP (+)) resumed, with its second session held in January 2023. SIP(+) debuted on 14th March 2020 as a spin-off from MHF’s previous event, Sembang Ilmu, it was designed as a forum organised by youths, for youths, to engage and empower them on issues related to Malay heritage, culture, and the arts. Sembang Ilmu was previously aimed at Malay youths, however, the MHF, with Andika Warisan, Temasek Foundation, is extending the outreach of this platform to youths from other ethnic groups, thus introducing the new series as SIP(+).
Saturday, 28 January 2023 – Mr. Shahril Samri of Pantunism (a Malay poetic group), began the session by welcoming the audience and speakers gathered in the Possibility Room at the National Library Building. He also read out a Pantun he wrote about community cohesion and continued to acknowledge the physically present and online audience. He briefly introduced the Sembang Ilmu Plus (+) before passing the spotlight to Mr. Jamal Mohamad, the first panelist for the session.
Jamal is currently an outgoing senior manager for programmes at the Malay Heritage Centre. He implements various activities targeting different audience segments, including underserved communities such as the elderly and youth at risk. Jamal was also the former Artistic Director of Teater Ekamatra, an ethnic minority theatre company established in 1988, and has a background in theatre and film productions.
Jamal began his presentation by sharing his experience working in the Malay Heritage Centre (MHC). He expanded on the vision and direction of the MHC and the various difficulties they faced as a “Museum” and “Custodian” of Malay heritage in Singapore. “Community” was a key theme of his presentation where he shared the difficulty of defining the boundlessness of “Malay” identity and culture. Jamal shared a key idea that Malays in Singapore do not have a singular identity, but rather consist of a multitude of diasporic groups like the Bugis, Javanese, etc.
With his rich background in theatre and film, Jamal went through the history of Bangsawan (a form of Malay operatic theatre) and Malay films in Singapore. He added that the success of these various Malay Arts was due to the cultural ecosystem he held, another key concept that he brought up. Jamal drew a parallel to his experience in MHC, where each aspect posed different avenues for improvement and change. The MHC is thus made up of varying groups of people such as donors, visitors, academics, researchers, special interest groups (silat, textiles, kris collectors), regional partners all of whom, the MHC had to engage with, balance their interest and work with harmoniously to create and sustain their programmes. In order to sustain this cultural ecosystem, it is important to have shared ownership with the public and the setting of Malay Heritage.
He also highlighted the importance of MHC in helping the Malay community in Singapore better understand themselves and appreciate the diversity in origins that are gathered here.
The next panelist, Ms. Menaka Gopalan, proceeded with her presentation. She is currently the Executive Director of the Singapore Indian Fine Arts Society (SIFAS). Menaka provided the audience with another viewpoint on cultural identity in Singapore. Her journey of defining her cultural identity only really began when she travelled to the United States for further education. The United States, where being non-white meant that you were an “outsider”, revealed to her the importance of finding her own identity when she was “displaced” in another “foreign” space. Menaka shared that identity and heritage exist in a shared space; her art practice reflects this. She utilised her talents in painting and creating in various mediums to deconstruct identity in society. The issues that the Indian Heritage Center (IHC) had to face were much akin to that of the MHC. The Indian community in Singapore comprises so many different regions and specificities, it is certainly difficult to appease everyone at the same time.
One of the projects consisted of collaborating with international schools to get students to decorate elephant sculptures (a motif significant and stereotypical to Indian culture) which were proposed to be situated around Little India. Menaka realised that these art projects had garnered their attention to explore the space of Little India, a foreign space that they were highly ignorant of. This was an epiphany for Menaka. She figured that arts was the bridge between people and culture and that through this avenue, she could capture an audience’s attention to discuss culture and heritage.
Menaka also mentioned that it was important for traditions to grow together with society in order to survive, especially with the community. She added that the multitudinous societies, organisation, people and partners that IHC had to bring together in order to sustain itself and continue being a champion for Indian Heritage.
She closed her presentation with a quote for the audience, “Art is open-ended, and it is a way to pique your interest, to pique your curiosity, it is where it starts before it becomes greater”.
The last panelist, Ms. Michelle Loh Wen Han asks “Who is a Malay? Who is a Chinese? Who is an Indian?”. These are concerning questions that Michelle began her presentation with. She intended to discuss Multiculturalism in Singapore. Michelle is currently a lecturer for the school of creative industries, Lasalle, College of the Arts. She has more than 15 years of experience as a bilingual arts manager and researcher in arts management and cultural policy. Michelle serves on the executive committee of the Poetry Festival Singapore and the organising committee of the biennial Singapore Literature Conference.
She projected a few charts from the population censuses from colonial-era Singapore. In her review of these population censuses, Michelle explained that the racial categories we are familiar with today originated from the systemic doings of our British colonisers, who needed an alternative way to stratify and quantify Singapore.
Her presentation expanded on the political factors that define our multiculturalism in Singapore. Michelle shared the various cultural policies the Singapore government has initiated from 1999 to the present. The earliest policies were primarily focused on intangible aspects of our culture like social cohesion, quality of life, and unifying our diverse society. Michelle highlighted that Singapore’s cultural policies do not use CMIO categorizations we are familiar with and do not specifically promote a singular ethnic identity.
She highlighted to the audience that Singapore is diverse beyond just “multiculturalism”, instead today, there are so many different branches to our identity, including but not exclusive to, gender, religion, multilingualism, diasporic, migratory patterns, and more. Globalisation and modernity have brought about new mobilities across physical as well as virtual.
Michelle brought up the concept of “super-diversity”, initially coined by Steven Vertovec in 2007. Superdiversity refers to the concept or approach which illustrates the need for a multidimensional perspective on diversity and moves beyond ethnic representations and recognises the coalescence of factors such as immigration trends, countries or origins, multilingualism, diverse religions, complexities in gender, access to employment and transnationalism and so on.
Michelle clarified that super in super diversity does not indicate its increased “power” but rather its superseding effect, which helps create new data and more details to what we know.
She acknowledged that identity is beyond definitions that we were previously used to, beyond policies, and beyond categorisation. In one of her quotes, she expounded more on the significance of super-diversity, and the utilisation of “super-diversity as a lens to understand peoples and provide the canvas to acknowledge new process”.
It was finally time for the Q&A Segment which was moderated by Ms. Shaza Ishak, MHF’s first Teman Warisan Recipient in 2021 and is currently a Managing Director at the “Teater Ekamatra“.
While guests were encouraged to post their questions on Slido, a virtual Q&A platform, or ask in person, Shaza posed the first question to the panelists. She began the segment by thanking the panelist for their illuminating presentations. Her first question was posed to Michelle. Shaza highlighted that she noticed “Europeans” were placed at the very top of the Population Census Surveys despite not being the majority, and evidently, the list was not alphabetised, she asked Michelle for her views. Michelle responded that scholars criticise this and shared that these were organised according to imperialistic stratifications and social status, with ethnic groups who were more useful and closer to the British at the top. Shaza’s next question was posed to both Menaka and Jamal about their experiences in their respective heritage centers and how they navigated the different interests of the various stakeholders in their cultural ecosystems.
Discussions were livened by other questions and posed by the audience members in person and virtually. In this, we could see how comfortable and excited everyone was to discuss their thoughts and opinions on heritage matters in Singapore.
Lastly, two groups of students present their special projects to express what it means to be CMIO. The first group including, Filbert, Qayyum, Rui En and Emily from ITE College East, shared about important Cultural monuments in Singapore and their history. This was followed by the second Group represented by Aiman, Gareth and Sam from Raffles Institution presented their idea about a podcast series titled, KITABahasa. KITABahasa is a clever junction of three words, “Kita” meaning us, “Kitab” meaning book, and “Bahasa” meaning language. These three words together intend to suggest the podcast’s intention to learn anything and everything about the “Malay” languages, together with them. Their series will focus on introducing the myriad of distinct “Malay” languages existent in the region and their history and culture in Singapore and beyond. It intends to encourage the Malay community to connect with their diverse ancestry and diasporic identities. Their first podcast will be released soon, so do keep a look-out!
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