We can always rely on Alfian Sa’at to articulate our thoughts and feelings into perfect prose. Regarding the issue of Toggle’s I Want to be a Star and the galling blackface bit they did for yuks, the playwright wasn’t too taken aback that it happened.
In fact, Singapore’s media environment and its monolingual vernacular broadcast stations have been breeding ground for such insensitivity, he claims. Though ethnic quotas at HDB residences exist due to prevention of racial enclaves, Alfian finds that such a system doesn’t exist in the media — thus creating virtual racial enclaves on each broadcast station.
Some highlights of his enlightening Facebook post:
On the consequences of vernacular broadcast stations
“Vernacular broadcast stations exist to promote and propagate the use of our official languages. News broadcasts, for example, play the role of setting formal standards for the respective languages. On the surface, these provisions seem necessary to protect linguistic rights in a multicultural society–that one should be able to study and access media in the language of one’s choice.
But I think we’ve failed to properly deal with some of the consequences of these policies. One of which is that monolingual environments (with the exception of English) create monoethnic and monocultural worlds. It would not surprise me that those who grew up on a diet of Channel 8 (and Channel U) would have found nothing wrong with the fact that the Mediacorp New Year Countdown in 2013 heavily featured Chinese songs and actors making wishes in Mandarin. It would have been the Singapore that they recognised and knew; a Singapore they took for granted as the norm.”
On how the English language is viewed as the enemy
“These spaces have to be maintained as linguistically pure because of the idea that they are under siege from English, that global language and signifier of upward mobility. There have been too many times when I’ve been told that any plea for English to be emphasised as a main lingua franca is tantamount to asking the Chinese to ‘sacrifice’ their identity ‘for the sake of minorities’. In this formulation, minorities are seen as accomplices of a right-wing, anti-China, pro-US/UK Anglophone political elite intent on suppressing the Chinese grassroots.”
On how some filmmakers have been striving to portray a truer Singapore
“But what I can do is to keep supporting the works of our filmmakers who try to give us images of ourselves which are truer to the Singapore that we live in. Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo faced some limitations in diverse representations as he was telling the story of a Chinese family. But he had Jo Kukathas in a scenery-chewing role as a school principal. Royston Tan, in his tender and wistful short film ‘Bunga Sayang’, explored the relationship between an elderly Malay lady and a Chinese boy. And Boo Junfeng, while casting Malay leads in his harrowing ‘Apprentice’, must have grappled with the risk of producing a domestic film whose main audience might have to depend on subtitles. And yet he took that risk, and the film performed creditably at the local box office.”
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