Singapore Writers Festival 2024: Closing debate on plastic ends event on a high
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(From left) Jo Tan, Crispin Rodrigues, Melizarani T. Selva and Hafidz Rahman at the closing debate of Singapore Writers Festival at Victoria Theatre on Nov 17.
ST PHOTO: DESMOND WEE
SINGAPORE – Plastic is love, plastic is patriotic and, most of all, plastic is Indian.
An effervescent proposition team for the motion This House Believes That Life In Plastic Is Fantastic successfully convinced a packed Victoria Theatre of these “truths” at the raucous Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) debate on Nov 17.
The quartet that formed Team Plastic turned the crowd against the environmental cause with ease, once more proving that no earnest citation of fact will ever prevail against sophistry. Arts educator Hafidz Rahman, not averse to old-fashioned pork barrel politics, flung free plastic bags into the crowd to rile them up.
To the opponent’s statistics on single-use plastics, playwright Jo Tan engaged in primordial ethnic rhetoric – “With Asians, it’s never single use”. She then demonstrated why plastic continues to be the preferred medium of packaging for aid delivery by dropping her bottle from a height.
The annual festival debate was this year shifted to mark the event’s closing. Despite its serious motions, it is meant to be taken with buckets of salt. Debaters have traditionally used the occasion to showcase their wit and ability to stretch ideas beyond recognition.
Malaysian writer Melizarani T. Selva, later awarded best speaker, proved that there may be no one better than her at verbal swordplay.
An expert at reeling everything back to her Indian roots, she had brought up Bollywood king Shah Rukh Khan in a debate on artificial intelligence in 2023. This time, she went further, highlighting that Indians make up the largest workforce in the oil and gas industry and are also finding ways to turn discarded plastic into trademark cooking oil.
The natural conclusion? “Plastic is Indian,” she bellowed, to a house already in stitches.
The opposition’s strategy was to compare plastic to “the world’s worst boyfriend” – “great at first, but over time, we’ve come to realise that the entire relationship has been built on fraud and fakery”, according to playwright Amanda Chong, who delivered her speech in three points “like any good lawyer or secondary school kid trying to write an essay”.
The opposing team, comprising (from left) Joses Ho, Suffian Hakim, Amanda Chong and Arianna Pozzuoli, at the Singapore Writers Festival debate on Nov 17.
ST PHOTO: DESMOND WEE
Poet Joses Ho, also on the opposition and sporting an injured knee, unwittingly became the butt of low, knee-high blows when the proposition bid him embrace the inevitability of plastic, used in the treatment of his leg. He countered: “Do not be taken in by the lie that plastics might be cheap, because in the long run, we will pay.”
The final day of SWF continued to be packed with serious discussions until the closing event.
A panel titled Here Be Dragons: The Magical Beasts Of South-east Asia saw writer and researcher Ng Yi-Sheng deliver a short lecture on some of the common mythical beings in the region.
Most interesting was his inclusion of the Merlion, which he said fit South-east Asia’s tendency to imagine creatures that were half-fish, half-land-dwelling.
He was joined by the co-hosts of Philippine podcast The Gods Must Be Crazy, Anama Dimapilis-O’Reilly and Ice Lacsamana.
Dimapilis-O’Reilly spoke of how Americans during the colonial period were familiar enough with Philippine folklore to play the clicks of the Manananggal through speakers to keep people away from the Central Intelligence Agency facility.
Lacsamana said interactions with Roman Catholic missionaries sometimes led to supreme mountain gods being demoted to minor, feminine nymphs.
“That is more colonial propaganda or influence, rather than the root of our culture.”
