Over the weekend, Ethos Books launched They Told Us to Move, an ambitious volume that seeks to examine—and get people talking about—the human, social and political dimensions of a housing relocation project in Dakota Crescent. To quote the synopsis: Dakota Crescent was one of Singapore’s oldest public housing estates and a rental flat neighbourhood for low-income households. In 2016, its residents—many of whom are elderly—were relocated to Cassia Crescent to make way for redevelopment. At first glance, the book’s structure boggles the mind: there are interview transcripts, volunteer reflections and academic essays seemingly talking at cross purposes. One gets the sense, too, that the editor Ng Kok Hoe bears a curious predilection for the number three. It only becomes apparent a couple of pages in that underlying the morass is an intricate layering of voices and views (not unlike a kueh lapis) that seeks to understand the complicated commingling of despair and displacement felt by the residents. A poem written by a certain Loh Guan Liang appends the conclusion like the tail of a complicated thought. What is a poem doing in a publication that professes to be more academic in nature than it is artistic? Remarkably, it was by chance that my poem found its way into They Told Us to Move. Picture a lifestyle cafe in Duxton. November 2018. Just a regular guy reading his poems on a Saturday morning. Overpriced coffee and humdrum brunch. Yuppies catching up after yoga. Nothing out of the ordinary, really. Now picture Kok Hoe attending said reading with the Ethos team in tow. At the end of the session he came up to me and said he enjoyed the poems I shared from Bitter Punch. He especially liked the pieces that commented on Singapore society. At that point I was flattered and, oddly, a tad embarrassed because I hardly get strangers telling me they appreciate my work. Then again, I hardly do poetry readings these days. Kok Hoe spent the next few minutes outlining, in painstaking detail, the book he was working on. It’s called They Told Us to Move, he said. I remember thinking: Wow that’s quite a title. Who’s “they”? The powerful and powerless. Choice. What choice do we have? Then he arrived at the point of his exposition—would I be interested in penning a poem for his book? That hit me like a left hook I didn’t see coming. Bear in mind that the poems I’ve written thus far have only appeared in poetry anthologies and my own collections. There’s a certain befitting-ness to where they are found, like eggs in a basket. Or screws in a toolbox. Poems sit together with other poems. Or so I thought. Let me get this straight: I am to craft a poem that in its own way contributes to the nascent, albeit rich, conversation about urban resettlement? That this poem is no flippant, frivolous, vainglorious stab at showing off? That it will serious? Meaningful? Thought-provoking? Well, sign me up. I started reading the interview transcripts in They Told Us to Move for ideas. I wanted to produce a poem that achieved two things: complement the labour and scholarship mustered in the volume, as well as synthesise the salient points raised by the Dakota residents. The creative power of poetry could lend them a voice. Kok Hoe’s book has had to adopt an objective stance, but my poem need not have to. Freed from the burden of reportage, I had the tools of creative writing at my disposal to carve out an imaginative space where the Dakota residents could stand strident in the face of erasure, their eyes still gleaming with hope. In my poem, the displaced wrest some modicum of dignity from their circumstances. Despair finds itself evicted, cast out like shadows in the future’s luminescence. I present to you “Shadows”: Shadows We knew this day would come, certain as the sun rising over Cassia and setting in Dakota, that we would have to go. Still, we turned away from the light, for fear that if we faced the truth of our situation, our homes might just turn to dust and ruin. So we hide. We hoard things we wish we could bring over to Cassia: our children’s glee when the playground swells into a pool after a downpour, or the trees that someone tried to take photographs of. Just the other day we saw the new block, Block 52, erect against the sky like a sundial, its ticking shadow telling us time is running out. We must decide what to pack and what to discard, fast-- even though our hearts aren’t ready yet to make space for promises we cannot keep. Our legs can’t carry us anymore. Like shadows we must bend to the sun at some point. When they say development is proof of progress and destruction is part of the process, what do we say to their upright rhetoric? The MP’s smile is but a passing cloud; the saplings at Cassia offer stingy shade. Let them bind the years that patter down our corridors with barricade tape, gag our letterboxes with HDB notices, we will not leave! Must we be confirmed for oblivion? Can’t our Dakota become stained glass histories to view the future in a new light? Our doors have always been open, if only they come in to see and listen. Yet who is this “we” we speak of? A wee footnote in the scriptof urban renewal? Who are we to speak of space when we are out of place and the sun decides whether we leave or stay? An excavator approaches: we pray our grandchildren inherit our experiences and none of our silences. They Told Us to Move is available at major bookstores in Singapore and the Ethos Books website.
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