AUGUST 30 — Yesterday I participated in a symposium organised by the Singapore Indian Development Organization (SINDA).
The symposium centered on the topic of Singapore and its future. And the question posed to me was: what will drive the collective Singapore identity in the future?
When I first heard the question, the immediate answer that popped into my head was just one word: Laksa!
More than any example or statement about harmony and a shared destiny nothing came more strongly to my mind than the literal melting pot of flavour that is each and every good laksa we consume.
Of the near endless variety of deliciousness available in this country, this particular dish stands out because it so obviously contains Chinese (noodles) Indian (spices) and Malay (coconut and lemongrass) elements.
It’s a one dish example of the cross pollination of cultures that is the bedrock of our identity.
Of course there’s more to our cuisine than laksa and more to our culture than cuisine but across the board I think Singaporean culture is strongest where we see a melding of the base cultures that comprise our identity.
We see this in Singlish, the Sarong Kebaya (Chinese and Indian fabrics, Malay and even Portuguese inspired design) in the temples that house Indian and Chinese gods etc.
All this mixing stems from the fact that we are an immigrant nation; in fact more so than almost any other nation. Virtually all of us have roots abroad even if it’s just over the Causeway in Malaysia. We all made the journey from somewhere to here and along the way we effectively collided with other communities with who we had to work to build a nation and a city.
This collision led to the creation of a basic Creole culture — embodied in our food, in Singlish, in the Pernankan culture of many old Singaporean families.
Personally I’ve always felt this hybridisation should have been the base of our identity — it gave us laksa, for goodness sake!
But as the nation has developed, we chose to downplay our hybrid heritage and focus on the Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others (CMIO) concept.
This was obviously somewhat of a flawed concept as people who had never seen China and couldn’t speak Chinese became classified as Chinese and the same applies for many Indians.
Allied to CMIO were “Speak good English and Mandarin” campaigns which were economically very useful but downplayed Singlish — our unifying patois.
In fact CMIO created a deeply racialised nation where every conversation contains something along the lines of, “this Malay guy did xxx” or “that Chinese girl said that.”
It always begged the question if everyone here is Indian, Chinese and Malay then who is Singaporean?
This situation has become more complex with the massive influx of new (or even newer) immigrants we’ve seen over the last two decades.
We now have “Singapore Indians” and “India Indians”, “Singapore Chinese” and “PRC Chinese” etc but by nationality many of these “PRC Chinese” and “India Indians” are also Singaporeans!
It’s all rather confusing — and while this island has always had a more established population and a new immigrant population, the scale of recent expansion means many new immigrants see little need to look beyond their own culture.
There is really little need for PRC citizens to learn to speak Singlish, or deal extensively with members of other communities because their own community and language is so prevalent. (The suppression of Chinese dialects is relevant here.)
Basically people are no longer assimilating into a Creolised base culture but living in Singapore within their own culture. All this weakened the idea of a base “Singaporean identity.”
So what’s the solution?
I can’t say I’m sure but I believe for any sort of collective Singaporean identity to survive the next 50 years the CMIO concept has to either go or be extensively revised.
This doesnt mean stop teaching Mandarin or Malay or dissolve organisations like SINDA but that we must stop using race as a marker for everything and really work to move to a world where there are Singaporeans and non-Singaporeans and perhaps also new Singaporeans.
And what then is the Singaporean identity? Again it’s not easy to say but I’d say it must involve the ability to draw from different cultures to add to our already rich hybrid base ie. to take ingredients given — which as we evolve will not just be Chinese Indian and Malay but also Nigerian, Myanmar, Korean and Uzbek (or anything else) to create the laksa of the future!
*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
