The 'Democratization' of Memories of Singapore's Past - Brill
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
bki
Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 169 (2013) 431-456 brill.com/bki
The ‘Democratization’ of Memories of Singapore’s Past
Kevin Blackburn
Associate Professor, National Institute of Education,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
kevin.blackburn@nie.edu.sg
Abstract
In Singapore, there has been a ‘democratization’ of memory through heritage blogs and
Facebook, YouTube clips of reminiscences about the past, as well as the state sponsored
web-based Singapore Memory Project. Many Singaporeans are recording and making public
their own memories through the digital media. Is this material mainly nostalgia rather than
sources of the past that can give us a greater insight into what happened? Do these memo-
ries provide counter-narratives to the official version of the Singapore past, which is known
as the Singapore Story?
Keywords
Singapore, memory, blogs, YouTube, Facebook
Memory of Singapore’s past is undergoing what has been called a rapid
‘democratization’ through blogs and Facebook, videos of reminiscences
put up on YouTube, as well as web-based memory collections, such as the
Singapore Memory Project, which aims to collect five million memories of
Singapore. Ordinary Singaporeans can now much more easily record and
make public their own memories that previously would have remained
private and gradually forgotten. When the state-run Singapore Memory
Project was first announced in the Singapore Parliament on 12 March 2010,
Irene Ng Phek Hoong, historian and a member of the ruling People’s Action
Party (PAP), outlined that ‘the project must be democratic: everyone could
share their memories of Singapore’ (Irene Ng 2010:4330). During 2011 to
2012, Singapore’s major English language newspaper, the Straits Times,
when reviewing the trend of members of the Singapore public recalling
© 2013 Kevin Blackburn DOI: 10.1163/22134379-12340064
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0
Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free access432 Kevin Blackburn
the past and making public their memories indicated that there has been a
‘democratization’ of Singapore memory (Straits Times 6 and 9 August 2011, and
15 February 2012) Singapore-based sociologists Roxana Waterson and Kwok
Kian-Woon have made the case there is a ‘democratization’ of recounting
the past as it has shifted from ‘the recorded past toward the remembered
past’ (Waterson and Kwok 2012:11).
What has been happening to memory in Singapore is similar to what has
occurred in the broader international context. French historian Pierre Nora
was among the first to write in the 1990s on how memory had ‘expanded
prodigiously’ so that it has become ‘democratized’. Nora explained, ‘Nowa-
days who does not feel called upon to record his reminiscences or write his
memoirs?’ He described how ‘everyone has gotten into the act . . . The less
extraordinary the testimony, the more aptly it is taken to illustrate the aver-
age mentality’ (Nora 1996:9). Cultural writer and critic Andreas Huyssen
has also noted the growth of ‘obsessions with memory’, or ‘memory-mania’,
that has produced ‘a memory boom’ (Huyssen 1995:3, and Huyssen 1999:191).
For Huyssen and Nora, the explosion of personal memories was eclipsing
collective memory that had been formed within the ‘unifying framework
of the nation’ (Nora 1996:6). The work of the Popular Memory Group in
Britain has also shown that the frameworks for collective memory become
fractured as individual counter-memories start to emerge from subalterns
or the subordinate classes (Popular Memory Group 2011:254-60).
Huyssen and Nora attributed the ‘democratization of memory’ to the
processes of modernization and globalization. Huyssen wrote that ‘our con-
temporary obsessions with memory in the present may well be an indica-
tion that our ways of thinking and living temporality itself are undergoing
a significant shift’ (Huyssen 2003:4) In the twenty-first century, the growth
of the digital media, in which individuals can record their memories and
upload them, accelerated this trend. Andrew Hoskins, a memory studies
theorist, has commented that ‘what was once scarce and underrepresented
from the past, and in the past, has been made visible and accessible in our
emergent post-scarcity culture, for example the digitalization of memory’
(Hoskins 2011:269-280, and Hoskins 2012). He addressed the implications
for archiving digital memories in the ‘post-scarcity’ culture, drawing atten-
tion to what he called the ‘tension between the volume of material gener-
ated and our capacity to consume it’ (Hoskins 2012:1). Hoskins and other
memory studies theorists have listed a whole range of channels of the
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free accessThe ‘Democratization’ of Memories of Singapore’s Past 433
digital media that store memories, such as online collections of mementos,
uploaded digital photographs, memorial webpages, blogs, online museums,
digital video broadcasts, online archives, condolence message boards, and
many more (Garde-Hansen, Hoskins, and Reading 2009:4). It all provides a
vast memory archive that is distinct from history.
The distinction between history and memory has been carefully delin-
eated by Huyssen and Nora, who have studied the shift from history to
memory. Huyssen argued that history has given the past grand narratives
while in the ‘memory boom’ the proliferation of memory has provided a
‘memory archive’ in which there is a seductive ‘trove of stories of human
achievement and suffering’ (Huyssen 2003:5). Memories in this archive are
decontextualized with no narrative to provide them with their context and
explain the past. Nora suggests that memory blurs the boundary between
past and present while being manifestly subjective. History attempts to
narrate through analysis an incomplete reconstruction of a distant and
objective past (Nora 1996:3).
Digital memories have had implications for the notion of heritage as well
as history, according to Lisa Giaccardi, a computer scientist working on the
new social media. She has argued that personal memories uploaded on to
the new social media have ‘broken down boundaries or limits to what herit-
age can be and how it is intended’ (Giaccardi 2012:2). These personal memo-
ries have become expressions of what the individuals recording them see as
their personal heritage, such as childhood reminiscences and photographs.
Heritage critic David Lowenthal points out that heritage, like memory, is
distinct from history, as its concern is the present. Heritage uses the past to
affirm a sense of identity rather than to dissect the past. He argues, ‘History
explores and explains pasts grown ever more opaque over time; heritage
clarifies pasts so as to infuse them with present purposes’ (Lowenthal 1987,
and Lowenthal 1996:x-xi). History is about investigating the past in terms of
the historical actors being motivated by thoughts, ideas, and feelings that
are not the same as those in the present but are shaped by the historical
context of the time. Heritage links the present to the past, suggesting that
historical actors behaved and felt the same way that people do today. Is the
plethora of memories of the past that has come to the fore in Singapore
during recent years more like heritage, evoking a sense of nostalgia and
belonging, or do these memories make clearer what actually occurred in
the history of Singapore?
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free access434 Kevin Blackburn
Blogs and Facebook Pages on Singapore’s Past
Worldwide, blogging started to take off in 1999 when the software called
Blogger was developed. Initially, academic historians from the universities
were the majority to take to blogging on history, but that soon changed.
Nick Poyntz, a well-known British blogger who started blogging on history
as a postgraduate student, discussed this transformation in 2010: ‘Academ-
ics, however, are now firmly in the minority when it comes to history blogs.
One of the blogo-sphere’s great attractions is its democratic form’. Poyntz
added, ‘Some of the most fun, stimulating and intelligent history blogs are
run by independent researchers and enthusiasts who devote their spare
time to reading and researching history—in short, people with a passion
for the past’ (Poyntz 2010:37).
Around the world, local history has been a beneficiary of blogging about
the past, as it provides a site for the storage of memories and stories about
small communities that would be not published in books or journals
(Anderson 2012:20-3). It has been very easy for many individuals to start
a free blog about the past using the most common free-of-charge hosts,
WordPress or Blogger. Blogs allow the participation of their readers, which
history books and journals do not. Access to blogs is also easier because of
the penetration of the internet. Thus, there is the potential for a greater
democratization of discussion of the past because anyone can set up a blog
and anyone can contribute their comments to the discussion.
In Singapore, blogs exert a strong influence over public opinion because
internet penetration is high. A 2011 Nielsen survey revealed that the per-
centage of the population in Singapore who access the internet regularly is
one of the highest in Asia. Two thirds of Singapore’s population above the
age of 15 uses the internet. This is much higher than the Southeast Asian
regional average of 38 percent. Internet penetration in Singapore is highest
amongst the country’s youth, with 97 percent of 15 to 19 year olds online.
This gradually drops off to 33 percent for Singaporeans aged 50 and above.
Amongst online Singaporeans, 80 percent access the internet daily, reading
blogs and Facebook.1
Blogs about the past in Singapore have tended to be set up by enthusiasts,
who are just ordinary people, not well-known academic historians. Over
1 Singaporeans can’t get enough of digital media: Nielsen, 11 July 2011,
(accessed 1 July 2013).
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free accessThe ‘Democratization’ of Memories of Singapore’s Past 435
time, these amateur enthusiasts have gathered a loyal following of many
readers. These are the type of blogs that are selected for analysis in this
study of blogs on the Singapore past. Stephanie Ho, a Singapore museum
official, was the first to conduct an academic study of these Singapore blogs
on the past in 2007 (Ho 2007:72). According to Ho, the first history blogger
in Singapore, and definitely the most well-known, is Lam Chun See with
Good Morning Yesterday. Lam was a business consultant who had a strong
interest in Singapore’s local history. Since September 2005, on Blogger, he
has devoted many of his postings to his own memories of his youth in the
1960s and 1970s—he was born in 1952. Lam has stressed the didactic pur-
pose of setting up his blog but also recording memories of his generation
for prosperity:
This site is for Singaporeans and friends of Singapore of my generation to share stories
of Singapore back in the kampong [village] days when we were kids. I started this blog
because I realized how much our country has changed in our life time, and it would be
good if our kids can visit this site and learn a bit about our past. Please feel free to share
your experiences.2
Ho, in her 2007 review of history blogs in Singapore, noticed some interest-
ing paradoxes about memories presented on blogs, such as Good Morning
Yesterday. She saw them as more about nostalgia than offering alternative
and dissenting voices to the dominant historical narrative established by
the PAP—what is called ‘the Singapore Story’. She gave as an example how
Lam and his fellow bloggers went into intricate discussion about the exact
locations of shopping malls that opened in their youth. In January 2007,
Lam and his web followers had similar debates about fast food restaurants
where they used to eat in the 1970s. What they ate and the cost if it were
major topics.3 Lam’s blog suggests Nora’s point that individual memories
are often less overtly political than collective memories because they usu-
ally concern private everyday life whereas collective memories are often
upheld by the framework of the nation (Nora 1996:5-6).
2 Good morning yesterday (accessed
1 July 2013).
3 Singapore’s first fast food restaurant (accessed 1 July 2013).
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free access436 Kevin Blackburn
‘The Singapore Story’, as the official scripted version of Singapore’s
national history, has its origins in the 1998 memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew,
Singapore’s first prime minister from 1959 to 1990, and leader of the PAP,
which has been in power since self-government in 1959 (Lee 1998). Lee enti-
tled his memoirs, The Singapore Story. His version of the past is reflected
in the textbooks of the history curriculum in Singapore schools and docu-
mentaries made by state controlled television in Singapore (Barr and Skrbis
2008:18-38).
The narrative of the Singapore Story has at its centre the PAP’s strug-
gles in the early days of independence against its political enemies, whom
it vanquished, and then led Singapore into prosperity under effective one
party rule. In this political struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, the PAP Gov-
ernment relentlessly used the Internal Security Act (ISA) to detain without
trial many of its political opponents, particularly members of the left-wing
Barisan Sosialis Party who, in the context of the Cold War, could be sim-
ply called communist because of their Marxist beliefs, and thus painted
as a security threat. The PAP Government also made heavy handed use of
the 1966 Land Acquisition Act to acquire kampong (village) land to help
the country rapidly industrialize. Many residents were reluctantly reset-
tled into high rise government flats—Housing Development Board (HDB)
apartments—that dot Singapore’s modern skyline today.
Memories presented on blogs usually skirt these contentious political
history topics and avoid interrogating the narrative given by the Singapore
Story. Ho noted that Lam, when queried by some readers why there was
little discussion of political issues of the 1960s in his blog, said, ‘it was inad-
visable to go into those areas’ because these were ‘serious issues’ and ‘rather
sensitive topics’ (Ho 2007:72). This tends to confirm historians Hong Lysa
and Huang Jianli’s observation that the Singapore Story is virtually hegem-
onic in the telling of Singapore history and counter-narratives struggle to
make their presence felt (Hong and Huang 2008:231-34).
In her 2007 assessment of Singapore history blogs, Ho concluded that in
Singapore there is ‘potential for the blogosphere to become an exciting and
more democratic arena for ordinary people’ where ‘through blogging, ordi-
nary citizens are able to present their stories’ and ‘lived experiences’. But
she noted ‘the challenge in the Singapore context will come when bloggers
venture beyond the safe arena of memory and nostalgia and create histo-
ries that are incompatible with state narratives’ (Ho 2007:77-78).
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free accessThe ‘Democratization’ of Memories of Singapore’s Past 437
In 2007, these types of alternative memories of the past were largely
absent from the Singapore blogosphere, according to Ho. Have things
changed? By 2012, a few blogs run by political activists tended to incorpo-
rate more voices of old political battles from the losing side. But many blogs
still shied away from political history and remain dominated by nostalgic
memories of the past. Many of these history blogs do offer valuable insights
into local communities, such as Lai Tuck Chong’s Growing Up in Geylang,
which started in 2008 on Blogger. These local history bloggers provide use-
ful links to other bloggers also documenting the memories of different parts
of Singapore and changing customs and practices.4
A number of blogs dealing primarily with contemporary politics have
increasingly covered memories of contentious political history. Independ-
ent film maker Martyn See’s Singapore Rebel, on Blogger, offers a broad
range of memories of political dissenters and former detainees.5 In early
2012, he included a video of Tan Wah Piow, a former radical university stu-
dent leader who has lived in exile since fleeing Singapore during 1976 after
he was convicted of stirring up industrial unrest.6 See’s blog was started in
2004, but it is only over the years that a significant amount of material from
the memories of former political dissenters has been accumulated.
On 15 April 2012, the blog That We May Dream Again, Remembering the
1987 Marxist Conspiracy was launched on WordPress with also the video
of Tan Wah Piow, who was accused of coordinating the so-called ‘Marxist
conspiracy’ of 1987 that led to detentions. This blog, too, is a mixture of
contemporary politics and representations of alternative memories of the
Singapore past. It has as its first objective an historical aim: ‘Raise aware-
ness on the misuse of the ISA in the past’. It also has the contemporary
political aims of working towards the abolition of the ISA, and ‘persuading
the government’ to ‘welcome the return of those who have been forced into
exile because of the ISA, such a move being the first step towards national
4 Growing up in Geylang (accessed 1 July
2013).
5 ‘Censors ban Martyn See’s film on Dr Lim Hock Siew’, Channel NewsAsia website.
(accessed 1 July 2013).
6 Singapore rebel (accessed 1 July 2013).
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free access438 Kevin Blackburn
reconciliation and healing for all parties’.7 The blog is the first in Singapore
to be dedicated to a single political and historical event which offers the
potential of attracting a broad range of memories and discussion of that
particular event.
Blogs tend to overshadow Facebook accounts when it comes to cap-
turing memories of Singapore’s past. Facebook pages have followed and
incorporated material from blogs. Few Facebook pages that touch on
Singapore’s history are repositories of memories of Singapore’s past. The
Singapore Heritage Society has a Facebook page with many comments
and entries but these are devoted to announcement of events and sto-
ries taken from the press.8 It tends to incorporate material from blogs
and other sources. Another Facebook page, Our Stories, Singapura Stories
nostalgically describes places, such as Kampong Glam and Geylang Serai,
the historic Malay-Muslim centres of Singapore.9 However, it has a blog
of the same name connected to it and the blog has the most material with
the stated aim of storing memories.10
The soon to be exhumed Singapore Chinese cemetery, Bukit Brown
has also several Facebook pages, but these are also compilations of sto-
ries and comments made on them, not memory collections with personal
testimony.11 The closure of the railway line to Malaysia from Singapore’s
Tanjong Pagar Railway Station also has a Facebook account, but it also does
not collect memories of the past, just presents interpretations and impres-
sions of the historic site.12 Thus, in the digital media, blogs are more numer-
ous in making personal memories of the past available to the public than
Facebook pages.
7 That we may dream again. (accessed 1 July 2013).
8 Singapore Heritage Society (accessed 1 July
2013).
9 Singapura stories. (accessed 1 July
2013).
10 Our stories, Singapura stories. (accessed 1 July 2013).
11 Bukit Brown. (accessed 1 July 2013).
12 Last train to Tanjong Pagar.
(accessed 1 July 2013).
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free accessThe ‘Democratization’ of Memories of Singapore’s Past 439
YouTube and Singapore’s Past
Just like blogs, YouTube also has been hailed as an agent of democratiza-
tion since it started in 2005 with its motto of ‘broadcast yourself’. It has
often been claimed that ‘YouTube promises to democratize the media’
(Gehl 2009:43-60). Users can easily upload their videos with a title and
description, as well as tags, which are used for searches. After this is done,
bloggers on history will find the memories of the past they are looking for
and incorporate them into their blogs.
There are a range of YouTube videos of individuals recalling Singapore’s
history during World War II. Just by searching using the tags ‘Singapore’
and ‘World War II’, will find veterans discussing their experiences. Recol-
lections of the past on YouTube can be very different from the memories
found in blogs. Bloggers tend to be enthusiasts about the past and may be
from a young generation distant from the past they are discussing. In their
narratives of the past they incorporate the memories of older people, but
the old don’t often speak for themselves. On YouTube, older people, and
people who lived through particular historical events, narrate their own
memories of the past. On YouTube, there are quite a number of Australian
and British prisoners of war from the fall of Singapore who recollect their
memories on video, such as Captain Claude Anderson of the Western Aus-
tralian 2/4th Machine Gun Battalion.13 These appear to be filmed by either
family members or interested researchers.
Significantly, there are also local Singapore and Malaysian voices from
World War II that can be heard on YouTube. Choi Siew Hong talks about
how he and his two Raffles College classmates joined the Overseas Chinese
Anti-Japanese Volunteer Army, Dalforce, at the end of January 1942 in the
last ditch defence of Singapore.14 Lieutenant K.R. Das discusses why he
was disillusioned with the British Indian Army in its defence of Singapore
in 1942 and later joined the Indian National Army (INA), which aimed to
13 Captain Claude Anderson interview 1/4 -WWII Japanese POW- WX3464 RMO 2/4
Machine Gun Battalion (accessed 1 July
2013).
14 Last Dalforce veteran Choi Siew Hong (accessed
1 July 2013).
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free access440 Kevin Blackburn
liberate India with Japanese assistance.15 Lieutenant Rammasah Bhupalan
describes why she joined the women’s wing of the INA, the Rani of Jhansi,
to fight the British in 1943.16
For Singapore’s contentious postwar political history, YouTube has been
an emerging repository for alternative political memories, such as those of
former political detainees from the 1960s, Said Zahari and Lim Hock Siew.17
Many of these video clips have come from the efforts of independent Singa-
pore documentary maker Martyn See, who uses the name ‘Singaporerebel’
to upload material. The Said Zahari film had been banned from being pub-
licly shown in Singapore, but apparently there was no objection to it being
available on YouTube.
However, in July 2010, a 22 minute Martyn See film of former Barisan
Sosialis politician Lim Hock Siew speaking about his detention in 1963 dur-
ing Operation Cold Store was banned by the Singapore Board of Censors
as being against ‘the public interest’. The uploading of this video indicated
that the ‘democratization’ of memory in Singapore was going beyond mak-
ing public nostalgic memories of the past which did not challenge the Sin-
gapore Story. The memories of Lim were like the counter-memories that
the Popular Memory Group uncovered, which fractured and subverted
hegemonic interpretations of the past. Lim’s memories directly challenged
authority (Popular Memory Group 2010:254-60). According to the Singa-
pore Board of Censors, film footage of Lim’s address purportedly gave ‘a
distorted and misleading portrayal of Lim’s arrests and detention under the
Internal Security Act (ISA) in 1963.’ Furthermore, the authorities said they
‘will not allow individuals who have posed a security threat to Singapore’s
interests in the past, to use media platforms such as films to make baseless
accusations against the authorities’.18
15 Malaysian INA veteran originally from the British Indian Army K.R. Das (accessed 1 July 2013).
16 Rani of Jhansi veteran Rasammah Bhupalan (accessed 1 July 2013).
17 Banned in Singapore: Video of Dr Lim Hock Siew (accessed 1 July 2013), and Zahari’s 17 years (banned
in Singapore) (accessed
1 July 2013).
18 Strait Times, 13 July 2010, and Huang, 13 July 2010.
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free accessThe ‘Democratization’ of Memories of Singapore’s Past 441
Singapore’s Films Act contains highly draconian clauses regarding films
that might be deemed to have ‘political’ content. These apply to videos
uploaded on YouTube, such as See’s film of Lim. Under section 33 of the
Films Act, it is a criminal offence to make such a film, which can be pun-
ished by a fine of up to $100,000 and up to two years in prison. Even after
changes to the Act in January 2009, which appointed a new Political Films
Consultative Committee to vet such films with a view to approving some of
them, the act of making a party political film has not been decriminalized
in Singapore.
See was ordered to remove his video from YouTube or face a $100,000
fine or prison for two years. He complied; but by the time he had done so
there were viral copies of the video on YouTube. The film was of a rather
dull and turgid address by an ill Lim at a 2009 book launch. His voice was so
inaudible that it required subtitles. However, the film was viewed by more
people than it would have been simply because it was banned. Interest-
ingly, See was not asked to remove his other banned film of Said Zahari
from YouTube.
Historian Karl Hack sees this YouTube clip of Lim as offering a distinct
counter-narrative to the official Singapore Story. He cites how Lim framed
his memory of events. Hack highlights what Lim says in his clip:
The British and Lee Kuan Yew conspired and collaborated to crush the opposition
before the 1963 General Elections. The whole aim of this merger was to crush the
opposition . . . In examining their past records, they are standing on a pedestal that is
leaking with worms and vermin (Hack 2012:37).
The fate of the YouTube film of Lim Hock Siew’s 2009 address contrasts
with that of another video of him also uploaded by ‘Singaporerebel’ after a
similar address. This time, Lim spoke at an August 2011 memorial event for
fellow 1960s detainee and former Barisan Sosialis Party member Tan Jing
Quee, who had recently died. Hearing Lim’s address at the memorial was
striking. In contrast to 2009, Lim was in fine form as a speaker. Listening to
him use Marxist economics to understand the Global Financial Crisis of the
twenty-first century provided a remarkable insight into how he saw himself
and what his world view might have been as a young man. For him, Social-
ism was ‘more relevant than ever’.19 Surprisingly, ‘Singaporerebel’ chose
19 Straits Times, 21 August 2011.
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free access442 Kevin Blackburn
just to upload the last 15 minutes of his speech which only discussed his
detention and relationship with Tan Jing Quee.20
The different fates of Lim Hock Siew’s reminiscences of 2009 and 2011
reflect perhaps a changing political climate in the prelude and aftermath
of the General Election of May 2011. In December 2010, See publicly com-
plained that while his 2009 video had to be taken down from YouTube there
were now 30 political videos put up on YouTube by the PAP and the opposi-
tion Singapore Democratic Party even had 47 such films on YouTube.21
The reply from the Singapore Media Development Authority (MDA)
was that they were now much more inclined to exercise what they called
‘a “light-touch” approach with regard to the Internet and no longer man-
date that all Internet content providers (ICPs) send their uploaded films
to MDA for classification’. Authorities ‘would only direct ICPs to submit
films—for which there may be content concerns—to it for classification,
if such films are raised to its attention.’ The MDA pointedly remarked this
‘light touch’ was also ‘the case with Mr See, whose blog has several films
that have not been submitted to MDA’.22 This new ‘light touch’ offers the
prospects of more reminiscences of alternative voices being filmed and
placed on YouTube, leading to memory of Singapore history being further
‘democratized’.
Significantly, the Singapore state-run National Heritage Board started in
2008 its own YouTube channel—Yesterdaysg.23 By 2013, the National Her-
itage Board had placed over 70 videos on its channel, including fascinat-
ing testimony from ‘vanishing trades’, such as street barbers and lantern
painters talking about their craft. For heritage places it created a series
called Heritage TV, which showed clips narrated by their own reporters.
The channel engaged in self-promotion with clips on their own museums
and Singapore heritage attractions for tourists. Even Lui Tuck Yew, Minis-
ter for Information, Communications and the Arts from 1 November 2010 to
20 May 2011, had his clips giving speeches in a batik costumes uploaded.
Not surprisingly, Yesterdaysg steers well clear of any controversial topics
20 Ex-ISA detainee issues challenge to Dr Tony Tan (accessed 1 July 2013).
21 Straits Times, 9 December 2010.
22 Straits Times, 16 December 2010.
23 Yesterdaysg http://www.youtube.com/user/yesterdaysg?feature=watch (accessed 1 July
2013).
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free accessThe ‘Democratization’ of Memories of Singapore’s Past 443
that bring up political history. There is no mention of the approved PAP
version of past political events.
Even Yesterdaysg’s eight minute clips with oral testimony from the some
of the men who were forced to join the army under its compulsory National
Service for 18 year old men glosses over just how contentious the introduc-
tion of National Service was in 1967. There are many comments from the
men looking back fondly on the time. Written sources from the time paint
a different picture of many men reluctant to join, others finding ways of
getting out of doing it, and other young men publicly declaring themselves
as conscientious objectors.
In 1967, the Barisan Sosialis Party opposed National Service, and 300 peo-
ple demonstrated at street marches across Singapore against registration
on the night of 27 March 196724 (Fong, 1980:183). Individuals in the Party
had historically opposed National Service going back to colonial attempts
to introduce it in 1954, opposing as well as the 1964 National Service Act
(Hussin, 2005:103-105). Barisan Sosialis leader, Lee Siew Choh’s own son
was a conscientious objector who was fined for failing to register (Straits
Times, 20 September and 12 October 1969). National Service in the late
1960s was also not popular on the University of Singapore campus with stu-
dents reported as reluctant to register and keen on getting out of it through
the various ways they could.25 These dissenters’ voices, although vocal at
the time, are never heard in reminiscences of the early days of National
Service (Lee 2008:296). There is only masculine bravado in memories of
the period.
All the dissension and contestation surrounding National Service is
white washed away in a wave of nostalgia, with the now 70 year old men
seeing National Service as a test of their manhood that they passed. Ong
Hui Pheng, 74, a former warrant officer, says: ‘It was a concern then that, as
the initial batch, we would fail’.26
Many of the videos of the Heritage TV series are indistinguishable from
similar videos promoting Singapore as a tourism location. Yesterdaysg thus
is a far cry from the ‘broadcast yourself’ ideology that YouTube promised.
It is certainly heritage manufactured by the state for the purposes of the
24 Straits Times, 28 March 1967.
25 Straits Times, 5 January 1969, and 25, 26 January, 18 June, and 28 October 1970.
26 Straits Times, 1 February 2013.
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free access444 Kevin Blackburn
state. Its hits are surprisingly low given the resources that are put into its
production—less than 1000 for most clips.
Web-Based Collections of Memories
July 2011 marked the public launch of an initiative in the mass collection of
the memories of ordinary Singaporeans—the National Library’s iremem-
berSG, or Singapore Memory Project, which ambitiously aims to collect five
million memories by 2015, the fiftieth anniversary of Singapore’s independ-
ence. These are stored online, with photographs and home videos. To add
memories to the site, members of the public can simply create an account
and then deposit, title, and tag their memories for searches.27 Memories are
arranged in clusters, such as childhood, neighbourhoods, and schooldays.28
These memories often are somewhat mundane and unrevealing, such as that
of the Yuhua neighbourhood recalled by Mariarasu s/o Arumugam Pillai:
I have lived in Yuhua from 1984 onwards. In the past, I used to take the single bus that
was available. There was only one bus service that went from Clementi to Jurong East
and back. There also weren’t a wet market but one was only built about a year after I
moved here. There used to be no car parks and community centres.29
The Singapore Memory Project also has its own Facebook and Twitter
accounts.30 Individuals recording their memories online are encouraged to
link them to their Facebook account so their friends can see them.
The scope of the Singapore Memory Project is breathtaking and goes
well beyond what had been done in Singapore before it. Singapore’s Oral
History Centre, part of the National Archives of Singapore, has since 1979
conducted 3,300 oral history interviews with 18,000 hours of testimony
recorded. At the National Institute of Education, since 1998, 2,000 teachers
27 Memento adding memories to the bank: A ‘how to’ guide (accessed 1 July 2013).
28 Memory clusters (accessed 1 July 2013).
29 Memory of: Mariarasu S/O Arumugam Pillai (accessed 1 July 2013).
30 Singapore Memory Project Facebook
(accessed, 1 July 2013) and Singapore Memory Project Twitter (accessed 1 July 2013).
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free accessThe ‘Democratization’ of Memories of Singapore’s Past 445
have been trained in oral history interview techniques, each of them doing
one interview to hone their skills.31
When interviewed on the Singapore Memory Project, officials in charge
have given different accounts of how the project began, depending upon
the audience. Gene Tan, the Director of the project, in October 2012, before
a group of academics questioning him, openly admitted its origins lay in
the bureaucracy of the state. Tan, in his own words, mentioned that he and
his fellow state ‘bureaucrats’ had at first started ‘trying to create a stage in
which all memories will come together, and you will see a grand narrative.’
He explained: ‘We started the project with a grand vision of wanting to con-
struct a version of Singapore’, but ‘at this stage of its development [October
2012], it is not about developing grand narratives of the Singapore project,
it is really about . . . capturing the messiness of it all . . . At this stage of the
project I am interested in collecting everything that is messy, everything
that means something to someone’ (Tan 2012).
In March 2013, before a different audience, Tan’s explanation of the ori-
gins of the Singapore Memory Project changed considerably. In a media
interview, gone were the references to the project being a creation of
the state because that would only inhibit people from recording their
memories:
The project started, I think, with my mom . . . She has the habit of telling us incessantly
of her girlhood times in Tai Seng, Lorong Tai Seng. And she was telling us about these
stories. I thought how many Singaporeans out there have stories of that time . . . when
Singapore was just becoming a nation. And this is a perfect opportunity, because we
are still a young nation, to capture a sense of Singapore when we were still growing as
a nation.32
Correcting Tan’s conflicting explanations on how the Singapore Memory
Project was created is the statement in the Singapore Parliament of Sam
Tan Chin Siong, Acting Minister for Information, Communications and the
Arts (MICA), when he first announced the project on 12 March 2010. He
said ‘that MICA will be embarking on a major national project, to capture
the collective memory of our people and institutions.’ Acting Minister Tan
elaborated on the purpose of the state-run endeavour:
31 Straits Times, 6 and 9 August 2011.
32 Singapore connect @ 6, Channel News Asia, MediaCorp, broadcast, 22 March 2013.
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free access446 Kevin Blackburn
Known as Singapore Memory, the project will capture all things Singapore. It will
include the pioneering spirit of Singaporeans past and present, the milestones in our
nation-building journey and also the creative expressions and aspirations of Singapo-
reans from all walks of life. In essence, we aim to create a ‘History of Singapore’ as seen
through the eyes and experiences of our people—you and me. This will help build up a
shared identity and also a greater sense of rootedness amongst all Singaporeans, many
of whom have witnessed tremendous changes in the physical and the social landscape
in just one single generation.
. . . besides capturing and digitising these memories, we also enable them to be
shared in a borderless way; where they can be accessed, discovered and researched at
all levels, by researchers, students, institutions or any individual interested in Singa-
pore (Sam Tan Chin Siong 2010:4332-4333).
In his speech to the Singapore Parliament, the Acting Minister was very
clear about his interest in the project, stating: ‘A key component of nation
building and national identity is our shared heritage and memories’ (Sam
Tan Chin Siong 2010:4330).
The mass collection of memories online is not unique to Singapore.
Other countries had been experimenting with similar web-based collec-
tions of memories. Between June 2003 and January 2006, the BBC asked
the British public to contribute their memories of World War Two to a
website, which resulted in an archive of 47,000 stories and 15,000 images.
The 47,000 memories were very well catalogued with categories, such as
battles, prisoner of war experience, home front topics. For example, there
were 50 entries on the topic of the fall of Singapore. The site was called
WW2 People’s War: An archive of World War Two memories—written by the
public, gathered by the BBC.33
The experience of Taiwan’s own national digital memory project offers
some striking parallels to the Singapore Memory Project. Taiwan com-
menced its digital memories project in 2002. By 2012, it had produced a
large number of digital libraries with over a million self-images and even
more text. The purpose of collecting these memories was to help build a
national identity through digitizing them and making them accessible.
Yet the project was considered by Taiwan’s digital archivists to have failed
because these images and text are completely decontextualized, thus mak-
ing it hard for ordinary people to engage with them (Jieh 2012).
33 BBCWW2peopleswar (accessed 1 July
2013).
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free accessThe ‘Democratization’ of Memories of Singapore’s Past 447
When the case of Taiwan was raised to Gene Tan in a question during
October 2012, he outlined that the Singapore Memory Project would avoid
this disengagement with the public as it was planned ‘to generate conver-
sations’. He explained that ‘for each of these people who are sharing their
memories we will be able to find two or three others who have that shared
memory, and that will grow’. He defended the approach of not providing
much context for the digital memories, saying that it gave what he called
‘specificity’ as people remembered their own very specific individual expe-
riences (Tan 2012).
The Singapore Memory Project, in contrast to similar projects elsewhere,
has since its launch had strong government support. Prime Minister Lee
Hsien Loong during his National Day Rally Speech on 14 August 2011 gave
his endorsement and highlighted two memories in his address, the Bukit Ho
Swee fire of 1961 and Singapore’s soccer win of the 1994 Malaysia Cup. He
saw these memories and others as helping bind the nation together: ‘ When
we talk about history and national education and a sense of belonging, it is
not just words and abstract concepts. It is really the stories of people, real
people, what they lived, thought, what it meant for them.’ His comments
indicated that these stories complemented the Singapore Story rather than
interrogated it: ‘ Whether it is Geylang, whether it is Little India, whether
it is events which we live through, important milestones—these are the
human stories of people, ordinary people who struggled to improve their
lives and lived through war or hardship or the turbulent early years of inde-
pendence, and they achieved extraordinary results with good leadership’
(Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, 2011).34 By the time of his address, 30,000
memories had been collected.
At a conference on the Singapore Memory Project in November 2011,
Yaacob Ibrahim, the Minister of Information, Communications and the
Arts, noted that there had been 220,000 contributions since its July launch.
Yaacob ended his speech remarking that ‘these efforts will draw us closer
34 Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong National Day Rally Speech (speech in English), Sun-
day, 14 August 2011, at the University Cultural Centre, National University of Singapore
(accessed 1 July 2013).
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free access448 Kevin Blackburn
together as a nation and leave a legacy for future generations’.35 The collec-
tion of memories in the neighbourhoods of Singapore has been facilitated
by Members of Parliament. On 17 April 2012, Dr Ng Eng Hen, Defence Minis-
ter and a Member for Parliament for the Bishan-Toa Payoh Group Represen-
tation Constituency, opened the ‘Memory Recording Studio’ for collecting
memories on Toa Payoh. At the event, Justin Zhuang, in his twenties, nos-
talgically recalled the playgrounds of his childhood in a photo essay. On
20 May 2012, at Yuhua, 200 people were encouraged to record their memo-
ries online by Grace Fu, the Member of Parliament for Yuhua.
Online, history bloggers, such as Lai Tuck Chong, have been facilitators,
and form what is called the ‘Memory Corps’. Other members of the ‘Mem-
ory Corps’ have been interviewers. They complete an interview with an eld-
erly person and later that is uploaded to the Singapore Memory Project’s
portal. There are about 130 volunteers, mostly in their forties and fifties,
who record memories by interviewing people. Pauline Loh, a 47 year old
housewife and a member of the ‘Memory Corps’, when interviewed about
her own role in collecting memories from people who were very old and
not able to upload them on the internet themselves explained: ‘Many of
these people who have stories to tell are old or illiterate, and they don’t
have a voice . . . I want to be that voice to help them record their stories for
prosperity’.36
Yeong Chong, the online editor of the Singapore Memory Project, claimed
that he was making what he called, ‘Everyman his own Historian’.37 He
seemed unaware of the origins of this slogan with Charles Becker in his 1931
Presidential Address to the American Historical Association. Becker, while
questioning the line drawn between the narrative that historians wrote and
the story telling of ordinary people, did not suggest that the decontextual-
ized memories of the past constitute histories (Becker 2011:122-26).
People recalling the past don’t become ‘their own historians’ engaging
in contextualization, corroboration, assessing the reliability of their testi-
35 Yaacob Ibrahim, Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts at When
Nations Remember II, 28 November 2011, 9.40 am at the River Room, Asians Civilizations
Museum (accessed 1 July 2013).
36 Straits Times, 29 April 2013.
37 Memento everyman his own historian < http://www.iremember.sg/?p=1252> (accessed
1 July 2013).
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free accessThe ‘Democratization’ of Memories of Singapore’s Past 449
mony. They are seldom in an objective position to exercise these historical
skills over their own memories. Instead, they assert themselves and their
unique experiences as sources for constructing history in the future. They
reconstruct the past as they remember it, selecting certain memories and
recalling them. Giaccardi suggests that this recording of personal memories
in the digital media makes this way of engaging the past seem more like
heritage that affirms an individual or group identity online by sharing com-
mon memories (Giaccardi 2012:2).
The conditions for the exercise of historical skills in Singapore are not
easy because many of the records of the state are closed. For the release of
Singapore state records, there is no fixed period of time after which state
documents must be declassified and made available for public access. So
even for professional historians, there is much material that may never be
made public which could shed further light Singapore’s history (Loh 2010:3-
27). Even simply researching the local history of an area and how it has
changed from the 1950s to the 1980s is not possible because government
records documenting these changes remain closed.
Many local neighbourhoods of Singapore, where there is little knowl-
edge of their past, are better documented thanks to the web-based collec-
tions of memories. Josephine Chia offered her impressions of kampong or
village life before the PAP Government removed most kampong dwellers
to government housing estates in order to acquire the land they were on.
Her memories tended to reinforce the Singapore Story’s emphasis on the
country moving from backwardness to progress:
I was born and bred in Kampong Potong Pasir. The name of the kampong was derived
from the sand quarries that were there from 1910 to 1937. Hence the Malay name, ‘cut
sand’. I was born in 1951 and lived in the kampong till 1970 when the development for
HDB [Housing Development Board] flats started.
During the kampong days, we did not have running water and electricity till the late
1960s (for some). As such, we depended a lot on hurricane lamp, carbide lamp and can-
dles, which is why my eyesight is bad. Only later, did we get use generator to provide
us with electricity.
There were no flushing toilets but we had jambans or outhouses with buckets. You
even had to plan your visits to toilets well in advance. We used to depend on news-
prints as toilet-paper (When wet, it marks your bottom!).38
38 Kampong Potong Pasir from the our homes collection. (accessed 1 July 2013).
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free access450 Kevin Blackburn
The same question that Stephanie Ho had about history blogging just
a few years after it began in Singapore can be asked about the Singapore
Memory Project. The work of sociologist Chua Beng Huat and geographers
Lily Kong and Brenda Yeoh suggests that memory of the kampong days
for many people does not produce a counter-narrative of the past to that
provided by the PAP’s Singapore Story, but simply a nostalgia about a lost
carefree childhood, which is at most a critique of the stresses and fast pace
of modern living (Chua 1995:222-41, Yeoh and Kong, 1999:132-52). This sim-
ple critique could perhaps be what historian James C. Scott has called ‘the
weapons of the weak’ (Scott 1985). It could also suggest Scott’s view that
the weak have ‘hidden transcripts’ of the past that are distinct from those
of the powerful (Scott 1991:xii). However, the politics of social resistance
is completely removed from these nostalgic memories of resettlement
from the kampongs despite its documentation elsewhere in places such
as archival collections. Various academic studies done on resettlement
have been able to uncover this social protest, but it never appears in the
uploaded memories (Blackburn 2010:205-31, Gamer 1972:66-88).
Public memories of the kampong days in the Singapore Memory Project
suggest Nora’s view of the ‘democratization’ of memory, that ‘the less
extraordinary the testimony, the more aptly it is taken to illustrate the
average mentality ’ (Nora 1996:9). However, by ignoring social protest these
nostalgic mundane memories fail to realize the full potential of ‘democra-
tizing’ memory as advocated by the Popular Memory Group, which values
counter-memories from the subordinate classes that fracture the hegem-
onic interpretations of the past (Popular Memory Group 2011:254-60).
The question remains whether the overwhelming amount of nostalgia
collected by the Singapore Memory Project can allow the past to be seen
from perspectives other than the Singapore Story. To some extent, as Ho
suggested in her study of Singapore blogs in 2007, there is the potential for
offering alternative narratives in the array of memories assembled online.
But it remains unrealized. Toh Teck Bock, like many contributors to the
Singapore Memory Project, expressed a strong nostalgia in which the past
was seen in many ways as better than the present, but stopped well short of
providing an alternative view of the past:
I grew up living in a kampong near Clementi and only moved to a three-room HDB flat
with my family in the 1980s.
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free accessThe ‘Democratization’ of Memories of Singapore’s Past 451
The Kampong days I dearly miss. Compared to the flat-dwelling lifestyle, in the past
people were more open towards each other. People were more friendly, mixed with
anyone and were more conversant in the variety of local languages. Even though a
person might be Indian, he mixed well with the Chinese and Malay communities and
spoke Hokkien, Tamil, Malay and English. He learnt Malay in school and Hokkien from
his friends.
In my village, there were about 30 to 40 families and we depended a lot on each
other. As such, we also knew more about our neighbours in those days unlike how it
is when you live in flats, where people mind their own business and keep their doors
shut. Race and religion wasn’t an obstacle. In those days, I liked playing soccer with
peers amongst my neighbours and friends in an open field.
My local favourite national sportsman is Fandi Ahmad!39
The above is as critical as memories get of the PAP government’s Singapore
Story in the Singapore Memory Project. Individuals recording their memo-
ries in the government sponsored Singapore Memory Project shy away from
discussing political history or offering critiques of past government actions.
The critique offered by Ho in 2007 of Singapore history bloggers, such as
Lam, seems appropriate criticism of the Singapore Memory Project.
By August 2012, the rapid collection of nostalgic memories seemed to
have reached its peak at 300,000, the level at which it remained for much of
2012. After a year, the project had reached only six per cent of its target of
five million by 2015. Many memories recorded had few readers, and offered
limited insights into Singapore’s national history. Gene Tan later publicly
acknowledged this situation when he spoke of perhaps improving the ‘qual-
ity’ of the memories being gathered by getting more evocative accounts
that connected with readers and obtaining memories in areas that may
shed more light on the national past.40 Throughout 2012 into 2013, interest
in the posted memories of the Singapore Memory Project paled in compari-
son to the over 54,000 hits of Lim Hock Siew’s 2009 YouTube clip on Sin-
gapore opposition politics in the 1960s. Even nostalgia buffs seemed to be
tiring of reading impressions that appeared to many as prosaic and trivial
or divorced from Singapore’s national history, such as material put up on
country music in Singapore. Many memories had a considerable personal
39 Open doors, a welcome understood from the our homes collection (accessed
1 July 2103).
40 Straits Times, 1 June 2013.
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free access452 Kevin Blackburn
significance to the individual posting them or a small group of people who
shared a common interest, but beyond that there were few connections to
events that affected the lives of most people in the history of Singapore.
Memories of the tumultuous and contentious political events of the 1950s
and 1960s are entirely absent. There are no memories on the 1955 Hock Lee
Bus Riots, politics in the Chinese middle schools, the 1964 racial riots, the
merger of Singapore with Malaysia. Even memories of the birth of Singa-
pore as an independent nation on 9 August 1965 when it left the Malaysian
Federation are few. Perhaps this phenomenon of many important missing
moments of Singapore history not mentioned in anyone’s recollections is
far from surprising given the hegemonic nature of Lee Kuan Yew’s Singa-
pore Story as Hong and Huang describe it (Hong and Huang 2008).
In the later part of 2012, Gene Tan admitted that the web based accounts
set up for the public to deposit their memories were attracting little inter-
est, although other channels set up for storing memories were doing well
because they were more accessible, such as the Singapore Memory Project’s
Facebook page (Tan 2012). It is likely that Gene Tan’s and his fellow bureau-
crats’ initial assumption that people would rush to sign up to the website as
instructed failed to take account of a widespread mistrust as to the uses to
which their contributions might be put in a state-run archive if they were
controversial or counter-memories (Blackburn 2009).
By late 2012, officials in charge of the Singapore Memory Project were
concerned about the drop in interest and began thinking of new ways of
encouraging people to record their memories, such as having ‘memory col-
lection points’ at local branches of the National Library.41 The Prime Min-
ister of Singapore was brought into the picture again to rouse the populace
to participate. At the August 2012 National Day Rally Address, Prime Min-
ister Lee Hsien Loong again brought up the Singapore Memory Project.
He reasserted:
These memories come together to define the Singapore Story for all of us. Individually,
these are our life’s experiences. Collectively, these bind together to become the soul
of the nation. We must cherish them, and build upon them . . . Our drive to keep the
Singapore Story vital and fresh for all of us must never falter.42
41 Straits Times, 13 August and 6 September 2012.
42 Straits Times, 27 August 2012.
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free accessThe ‘Democratization’ of Memories of Singapore’s Past 453
Judging from the Prime Minister’s statement, the PAP Government’s Singa-
pore Story seems ever adaptable in incorporating memories outside of it.
While Nora believed that collective memory would be undermined by the
proliferation of individual memories, the Singapore Prime Minister believes
that these ‘collected memories’ will only complement the Singapore Story,
not undermine it. So far, the memories in the Singapore Memory Project
have not directly challenged the PAP’s Singapore Story.
In Singapore, blogs, Facebook, YouTube, and the Singapore Memory
Project are part of the process that Nora has called the ‘democratization’ of
memory, in which anyone and everyone can record their reminiscences for
public consumption. By April 2013, the Singapore Memory Project seemed
to be back on track with an astounding 830,000 memories recorded,
according to its officials.43 The sheer quantity of digital memories that has
emerged in Singapore since the advent of the new social media platforms is
similar to what has happened in other countries. What Huyssen has called
the ‘memory boom’ and Hoskins the ‘post-scarcity culture’ are a worldwide
phenomenon. In Singapore, several years on from Stephanie Ho’s origi-
nal 2007 assessment of what the new social media was producing about
the past, her comments on the predominance of nostalgia and the shying
away of Singaporeans from talking about Singapore’s political history still
resonate. The process of ordinary people recording their own memories in
Singapore has not produced the kind of the memories the Popular Mem-
ory Group sought to uncover in Britain, whereby the subordinate classes
brought forward memories that challenged and fractured the hegemonic
interpretations of the past.
What has happened in Singapore during its ‘democratization’ of
memory is closer to Giaccardi’s interpretation that says that individuals
uploading their memories to the new social media are producing a form
of personal heritage. The quest for a more searching critical history of
counter-memories questioning the hegemonic narrative of the Singapore
Story might have to wait a bit longer yet. Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect
the Singapore Memory Project to get beyond heritage to actual history?
There may exist for a transitional period of time two separate arenas, one
in which personal memories are recalled and another in which state history
43 Straits Times, 29 April 2013.
Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:48:25PM
via free accessYou can also read
