Singapore Writers Festival 2024: Stories hold power to open spaces for alternative voices

SINGAPORE – Two panels on the closing day of the Singapore Writers Festival found unexpected synchronicity in advocating alternative narratives. 

At Ink And Equality: The Role Of Female Empowerment In Modern Literature at Victoria Theatre on Nov 17, writers Cat Bohannon and Sarah Malik connected over women-centred stories. 

Australian Malik kicked things off by recalling how her childhood sparked her ambition to be a journalist and later led her to write her 2022 debut memoir Desi Girl: On Feminism, Race, Faith And Belonging. “I grew up in the 1990s in Australia. It was a very white-dominated world.

“I loved books, I loved newspapers and media. Even though I didn’t really see myself reflected in that media, I just engaged with it so deeply because I instinctively knew the importance of stories and the importance of narratives.”

9/11 was the spark that ignited her first book: “I suddenly saw my identity and who I was reflected back to me in sometimes caricatured, grotesque ways. I realised that the media was very powerful, and I wanted to be part of it, not as its subject, but as the creator, as the person who was making those narratives.” 

Bohannon, the American author of the best-selling Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years Of Human Evolution (2023), noted that 9/11 was also a global moment of trauma that drove other stories:  “You have this kind of rupture and a collective consciousness that only later transforms into how we tell the story of ourselves.” 

For both women, telling the stories of themselves also challenged traditionally male-centric narratives. This is not without risk, as Malik said of writing Desi Girl. “It was really, really scary. You think ‘I’m going to be disowned by my family, by society.’ Maybe I should be silent, it’s safer.” 

Bohannon noted: “The act of speaking is always offensive.” 

But she reiterated that there is reason to remain hopeful about change for good, because the evidence of human evolution in deep time shows homo sapiens evolving to become more gender-equal as early male hominids’ teeth and skeletal structures have shrunk and females’ have grown.

Malik pointed out that cultural and social changes are not linear, and people need to defend ground that has been gained and not take advancement for granted. 

These themes of opening up and holding space by offering alternative voices and narratives were also raised at another panel, Echoes Of The Straits: Unearthing Singapore’s Indigenous Legacy. Cultural Medallion recipient Isa Kamari and founder of Orang Laut SG Firdaus Sani spoke about reasserting indigenous voices in a national narrative that has long neglected pre-colonial histories. 

Isa’s 2013 book Rawa told the stories of three generations of Orang Seletar, sea nomads who were displaced from their island homes in the wake of Singapore’s independence. Firdaus is a fourth-generation orang laut and said that his work was sparked by “a poster that described Pulau Semakau as an award-winning landfill. I wanted to reclaim this narrative”. 

Both men spoke about the distinctive belief system of the people of the southern islands. Firdaus shared mantras, chants that the orang laut passed through oral tradition over the years, which asked for blessings and protection from natural forces.

Acknowledging that these were “seen as un-Islamic”, Firdaus added: “The islanders were Muslim, but they embraced these beliefs. For me, it’s looking at these as an art form.” 

Isa concluded: “Storytellers like us should do the job of telling a different narrative – a narrative from the ground up, not a narrative from the top. That’s how we grow the new mindset for us together as a people.”