Spaces/Lines (or the things that connect and separate)

on Whose Story is This? by Rebecca Solnit

In her essay A Hero is A Disaster: Stereotypes Versus Strength in Numbers, Rebecca Solnit talks of our preoccupation with lone victors that often leads us to make light of the potency of collective action. She writes of her friend, legal expert and author Dahlia Lithwick, who was laying groundwork for a book on women lawyers who have argued and won civil rights cases against the Trump administration in the past two years. Her goal was to diffuse the spotlight from famed individuals—such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, about whom many advised her to write instead—and onto lesser known lawyers. Elsewhere in the book, in City of Women, Solnit writes of the names which we give to our built environment: The rivers, roads, statues and colleges named after prominent, often white men; generals and captains whose shadows drape over their armies. One essay over, in Monumental Change and the Power of Names, she writes of the demolition and renaming of such monuments; changes that have shifted narratives and righted histories. She declares: “Statues and names are not in themselves human rights or equal access or a substitute for them. But they are crucial parts of the built environment, ones that tell us who matters and who will be remembered.”

I live in a quaint old neighbourhood in Singapore known as the Cambridge Estate. The vicinity is made up of roads named after idyllic English counties: Kent, Dorset, Durham, Norfolk, Northumberland; all a few minutes of walk away from the Farrer Park subzone—named after Roland John Farrer, who presided over the Singapore Municipal Commission, a body tasked to oversee local urban affairs and development under the British colonial rule. My block, an old building owned by the Housing Development Board, along with the streets that surround it, have seen some construction and renovation work in the past months. As Singapore went into lockdown at the start of April (which they prefer to call Circuit Breaker, God knows why, I’d say it’s some kind of a performative attempt at benevolence), most of the work have ceased. The roadwork at the intersection of Dorset and Kent, however, continued up until a week back. I eyed the workers, many of them migrants, from behind my mask as I crossed the street. They toiled away under the blistering sun, and I was reminded that elsewhere, on the outskirts of the city, the outbreak has reached the foreign workers’ dormitories; making prisons out of their rooms.

“Singapore Seemed to Have Coronavirus Under Control, Until Cases Doubled,” read a headline on the New York Times. When the city was first hit by the pandemic, its efficiency in controlling the spread was lauded as a model response. Now, its cases total to over 8,000, the highest number reported number in Southeast Asia. The number of infections climbed rapidly as the virus reached numerous foreign workers’ dormitories across the state—housing about 300,000 people—which are notoriously overcrowded and ill-equipped. The pandemic has gone on long enough, I think, for all of us to recognise that its effects have carved our social divides deeper than ever before. “The outbreak doesn’t discriminate, but its effects do,” is a sentiment that has been widely spread across social media and news outlets, inviting incisive criticisms on an array of issues, from capitalist policies to eco-activism and celebrity culture. A dominant theme, however, runs through their veins: the far-reaching power of privilege; and how it pervades even the smallest units of our lives. As “social distancing” and “stay home” were made law, it became clear that space is a luxury few share—at least, fewer than we thought. Instructions such as “stay home” and its varieties, writes Jason DeParle for the New York Times, assumes the existence of a safe, stable and controlled environment. DeParle notes that inmates, detained immigrants, homeless families and, I would add, victims of domestic abuse, are some of the discrete groups facing a dilemma amidst such instructions. He asserts: “What they share may be little beyond poverty and one of its overlooked costs: the perils of proximity.”

Close quarter is the very calamity confronting Singapore’s foreign workers community during this outbreak. Contagion hit a record high on 20 April, with over 1,426 confirmed cases, a vast majority of which coming from numerous dormitories across the state. Since early last week, active testing has been carried out since in the dormitories—which might explain the figures—but the City had been glaringly unprepared, which made for a peculiar sight. Immediately, I found myself questioning its renowned vigilance and extraordinary prescience; qualities that I often contrast with my hometown of Jakarta and its outrageously lethargic response to the pandemic. But the dorms had always been “ticking time-bombs”, Sophie Chew writes on Rice Media, and the City had turned a deaf ear to forewarnings from activists and NGOs that went back as far as February. The dorms are overcrowded, she reports: a single dorm can house over 10,000, and up to 20 people are pushed into a space the size of a four-room flat. A resident of S11 Dormitory located in Punggol, one of the first to be gazetted as an isolation site, says he shares the same shower facilities as about 150 others. The dorms are unlivable, Chew says; detailing that they are “notoriously filthy”, and some workers told The Straits Times that toilets were not regularly disinfected. This condition makes the concept of safe distancing “laughable”, writes the NGO Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2) on their website. To Chew, it is clear that Singapore’s “celebrated, ‘gold standard’ response had a citizenship blind spot.”

The blatant ignorance to the livelihood of the migrant populace is inexcusable, but it is hardly a shock for anyone from the outside looking in. The racial divide is patent; and—in the case of foreign workers—the tension is heightened by a system that enables the production of precarity and abets exploitation (Chuanfei Chin from the National University of Singapore wrote a concise paper detailing the network complicit in producing the social vulnerabilities experienced by temporary foreign workers, which you can read here). Yet, when news outlets started reporting on the crisis, they had been either clinical or deeply prejudiced, and the comment section only compounds the horror. These have not only mapped public opinion, but also reiterated the value that is given to the lives of foreign workers, and delineate further their standing in the Singapore society. The lines on this map are both psychological and structural: Yong Han Poh, writing for the Southeast Asia Globe, reminds us that their dormitories are built in isolated areas far from the public view. They are, quite literally, segregated from the wider population. The kind of treatment we afford them, the lines we draw, brings to my mind a passage from Solnit’s essay Crossing Over, where she talks of territories and migration: “The idea of illegal immigrants arises from the idea of the nation as a body whose purity is defiled by foreign bodies, and of its borders as something that can and should be sealed.” The concept, when taken in a literal manner, is eerily familiar: Almost immediately after the outbreak reached the dormitories, Facebook comments became unbearable, with an alarming number of people pointing fingers at the foreign workers’ habits and personal hygiene; insinuating that the contagion rates has more to do with their insanitary culture than the ill-equipped and overcrowded dorms (of course, they would not be the first to be at the receiving end of such narrative, which has shifted throughout history to serve the interests of those in power. Pan Jie at Rice Media offers a succinct chronicle of this.) Solnit calls this the “fantasy of safety”, where “self and the other are distinct and the other can be successfully repelled.” We are seeing, right now, that fantasy wielded by those with power; one they enforce out of suspicion and out of fear of losing security and authority. But all who have been subjugated, too, understand and yearn for this fantasy: To be liberated from the constant invasion of freedom and autonomy.

It is critical to examine, Rebecca Solnit writes, who is meant by “we” in any given place. One way to do this is by looking at the lines drawn by the semantics of names and categories. The term “migrant” has come under scrutiny in recent years: What separates the group—defined as “a person who moves from one place to another, especially in order to find work or better living conditions”—from expats, for instance, could be only a matter of nationality and skin colour. As Indonesian author Intan Paramaditha states in her essay on LitHub: “We can read the map, but the map has read us first.” Further in her essay, she continues to say that these categories determines how one experiences mobility, whether one would “encounter bridges or barriers, hospitality or displacement.” Making the distinction even more severe are neoliberal policies that have turned lives into pawns and commodities and made decent livelihood a due owed and never paid (while “errant employers” is often cited as the reason for foreign workers’ exploitation and abuse, research have shown that the legal framework protecting them, while comprehensive, is flawed). This points to the central criticism against the term “worker”, which, as Yong writes in her essay, reduces them to factors of production and labour units. Recently, online platform Dear.sg, which describes themselves as a “media conglomerate steeped in culture and grounded in locality”, befouled this already murky waters: With an article titled We Need Foreign Workers More Than They Need Us—a headline that might deceive one into thinking it’s an innocent op-ed designed to galvanise empathy by tugging at one’s guilty conscience—they concluded that migrant workers are valuable because they are essential to our material needs. “Construction sites might have to be abandoned for a while and projects will take a longer time to be completed,” it says in one passage. It then implores its readers to “think of your Build-To-Order flats…the new airport terminal, street repairs and maintenance…”, and reminds them that now, “we have to wait even longer.” What is meant by “we” had never been so grossly exclusionary. The article has narrowed migrant workers into tools of prosperity, and never once suggested that they be a beneficiary (they have received a number of backlash on Instagram, and as of yesterday they are still actively deleting comments). At the end, under a heading that says Modern Slavery Or Not (sans question mark), they ask if we should start ringing the alarm on exploitation of cheap labour. Does all this leads to the so-called modern slavery, it asks, grammatical error intact. “Maybe,” it answers, aloof. “Forced contracts and bonds, who knows.”

Evidently, this pandemic is not “the great equaliser”. If anything, it has magnified privilege and heightened insecurities. Solnit offers us hope in what she calls “public love”: collective action; a sense of meaning and purpose that belongs to a community. She refers to the 1960 earthquake of San Francisco, and outlines a shared sentiment of loss among the people, that is “if I lose my home, I’m cast out among those who remain comfortable, but if we all lose our homes in the earthquake, we’re in this together.” Perhaps the nature of this pandemic bears little resemblance to a natural disaster, but we experience collective loss all the same: Much of our freedom and flexibility—to work, travel, or to socialise—have been suspended for the foreseeable future. But they are losses felt more profoundly by vulnerable groups, and let it not be forgotten that they were cast out before any disaster—the precarity of their livelihood a disaster in its own right—and they bear distress many of us are precluded from. These inequalities have been laid bare in the weeks following the outbreak in dormitories, and there had been no shortage of care from the ground: Comedian and YouTuber Preeti Nair ran a fundraising campaign to aid two NGOs, TWC2 and HealthServe, in meeting the urgent needs of migrant workers that have been put under quarantine. As of 21 April, they have raised over S$316,000—more than triple their original goal of S$100,000. There are spreadsheets detailing efforts of different organisations and how we can contribute (Yong included one at the end of her essay, and a local community library, Wares, published a Mutual Aid and Community Solidarity spreadsheet). Many Singaporeans who are able and secure have donated their Solidarity Payment to non-profit organisations working with vulnerable groups. Corporations, too, have started partnering NGOs to raise funds and distribute masks at affected dormitories. It’s not just in Singapore: Worldwide, the pandemic has fostered record numbers of philanthropic donations and vast networks of mutual aid—a new map, if you will, with unmarked territories and nameless seas. There is a growing recognition of mutual dependence, a survey by the New York Times shows, and while there is no guarantee that the shift in moral perspectives will last beyond the crisis, there is hope in knowing that we are re-examining—if not redrafting—the map that we were given.

Yet I still find evidence of a divide: I have heard more and more that we need not need to worry; most of the cases are from the dorms, I hear, there are less in the community, I hear, directly from the official WhatsApp updates, and I recognise once more the gulf that has yet to be bridged. Between the lines, I find the seeds of amnesia, which—Solnit writes in her essay Long Distance—holds us “vulnerable to experiencing the present as inevitable, unchangeable, or just inexplicable.” She talks then of the term “shifting baselines”, coined by marine biologist Daniel Pauly, and stresses the importance of a baseline; a stable point from which we can measure systemic transformation before it was dramatically altered. This pandemic, one can hope, will alter how dormitories are managed and equipped for the better. Beyond this pandemic, Manpower Minister Josephine Teo said in a statement in early April, “there’s no question” that standards in foreign worker dormitories should be raised, and appealed for increased cooperation from employers. Meanwhile, measures taken to manage this crisis—particularly with the issue of overcrowding and hygiene—have been widely criticised; prompting authorities to move residents of the dormitories to vacant Housing Board flats, military camps and floating hotels to reduce crowding. The Prime Minister further addressed these measures in a live address to the nation yesterday—in which he also announced the 4-week extension of the Circuit Breaker—promising stricter safe distancing measures, increased on-site medical resources, closer monitoring of older workers, and distribution of pre-dawn and break fast meals for Muslim workers who will start fasting on Friday. “The clusters in the dorms have remained largely contained,” he says, and pledges their best effort to keep it that way. When this crisis is over, I tell myself, we must not forget the baseline of their predicament, or be too quick to acquit those in power from any wrongdoing—if only to preserve a benchmark of assessment. Without a recollection of the past, Solnit warns us, change becomes imperceptible, and we might slip to “…mistake today’s peculiarities for external verities.” Nevertheless, the Prime Minister sounded assured. He even wore a blue shirt—that must have meant something. I, for one, am hopeful, as I always try to be. There’s still much reason to be.

I stopped at the traffic light at the intersection of Dorset and Kent. I glanced at the street sign, green as they’ll ever be. Solnit writes: “Pity the land that thinks it needs a hero, or doesn’t know it has lots and what they look like.” Indeed, we do not know it. I wondered then if the crisp white paint will ever spell a different name. For all the transformations construction workers have made to our built environment, will there ever be a monument in their name, like the kind we have bestowed our tycoons and presidents and—oh God, I groaned as I realised this—counties of former occupants? In a few weeks’ time, this intersection will be vacant once more; the deafening drill and temporary fences suddenly vanishing from sight. Their mark will go undetectable and nameless; swallowed whole by the scorching sun and the picturesque imagination of the Dorset and Kent of another continent. The lights turned green. As I crossed the street, I remember Solnit saying that the truest lines on this map are only those between land and water. “The other lines on the map are arbitrary,” she says, they have changed many times and will change again. One can hope.

Postscript
As I am finishing this essay, I wonder how big of a role I play in this equation, and if I tip the scale further towards inequality. I realise how small we all are; how powerless we might all be without the aid of top-down political action. I am not under the delusion that individual responsibility counts a great deal in this narrative (David Wallace-Wells calls accusations of personal responsibility a “weaponised red herring”), but I also refuse to trivialise the weight of our own actions (the great Gloria Steinem reminds us that “a movement is only people moving”). This being so, you will find below some spreadsheets and relevant, verified fundraising campaigns where you can extend your care. Every dollar counts, and every hand has the power to soothe.

Fundraising Campaigns

Preetipls x UTOPIA for Migrant Workers NGOs

Support migrant workers through Covid-19 and beyond, a campaign by Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics (HOME)

Vulnerable Women’s Fund by AWARE

Donate Your Solidarity Payment. Funds will be channelled to Boys’ Town, Hagar Singapore, Singapore Red Cross, AWARE and HOME

Entrepreneur First supports The Food Bank - Feed the City #Covid-19. Funds will be channelled to the Food Bank. You can also donate food to Food Bank Boxes available island-wide.

Spreadsheets

Mutual Aid and Community Solidarity – Coordination by Wares Infoshop Library

COVID-19 | Needs in the migrant community as included in Yong Han Poh’s essay