Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia

5. Textual Construction of a Nation: The Use of Merger and Separation

Textual Construction of a Nation 125 125 CHAPTER 5 Textual Construction of a Nation: The Use of Merger and Separation Dayang Istiaisyah bte Hussin Introduction I n 1996, the Singapore government became alarmed by the growing number of younger Singaporeans who were ignorant of their own country’s history. They might know who the ‘founding father’ of Singapore was, or the country’s first President, but many were unsure about the causes of the 1950 Hock Lee bus riots and knew nothing about the State of Emergency that had prevailed in Singapore from 1948 to 1960. These were the startling results of a survey of 2,525 students conducted by the Ministry of Education. Here we can already see that history is the prerogative of the state, insofar as the state has the capacity to ‘authorize’ which events are selected as significant, and which version of the past is to prevail as legitimate or correct. The obvious reason for the concern over historical apathy among the younger generation is that history, as perceived by Singapore’s political leaders, serves as a cultural-symbolic construction of the Singapore nation. History, or to be more precise, that version of it selected by the state, is perceived as the source of Singaporean identity. That is why the Deputy Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, regarded the status quo as an indication of a “serious gap” in the people’s education (The Straits Times, 22 July 1996). Later in the same year, the history syllabus in secondary schools was modified. Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong unveiled the National Education Programme (NEP), which aimed to instill in young Singaporeans a shared sense of nationhood through recurrent themes in Singapore’s history: constraints and vulnerabilities; crisis and survival. 126 Dayang Istiaisyah bte Hussin These themes were neatly conceptualized into “The Singapore Story: Overcoming the Odds”, a National Education Exhibition on the history of Singapore held at Suntec City in 1998.1 The period highlighted was “merger and separation” (1963–65), and the events during this period were regarded as major symbolic texts in pioneering the ethos of national ideology. The primary objective of this chapter is to show how the Singapore ‘nation’ is discursively constructed through the continued focus on ‘key’ events such as the racial riots which occurred during the 1963–65 period of merger between Singapore and the Federation of Malaya. The 1964 Sino-Malay racial riot is continually invoked to sanctify the policy of multiculturalism, one of the founding myths in the construction of the Singapore nation. My point of departure from other works lies in the methodology employed — using newspaper texts to examine how the construction process has been sustained. Empirical studies have yet to be developed to demonstrate the process of articulation of history in the political discourse of the construction of a nation, even though the relationship between history and nation-building is very obvious in the context of nation-states. In the case of newspapers, their familiarity as a source of information often means that they are taken for granted by their readers. ‘Defamiliarizing’ the familiar through textual analysis will reveal the ideological messages that contribute to the construction of the imaginary community called ‘Singaporeans’. “Imagined Community”, Ideology and Historical Discourse: The Nation as an Imaginary Community Anthony Smith (1996) defines a nation as “a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and memories, a mass, public culture, a single economy and common rights and duties for all members”. He clearly elucidates the concept of nation as a social, cultural and territorial community with a shared history. The elements of commonality and shared entities represent the essentialist characteristics of a nation. Members of the population need not all experience the same events to acquire a form of collective memory, and hence a common identity. Commonality can be constructed and ‘universalized’ through the process of repetition. Repetitiveness engenders continuity with the past (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1989: 1), which furnishes the community with a sentiment that can command allegiance and solidarity (Smith, 1964: 233). Repeated presentation of the past in narrative Textual Construction of a Nation 127 form produces the discursive formation of the nation, because the narrative space functions as the site for self-construction (Miller, 1994: 160) through the mediation of language. Narrative history is thus an ideological tool in the discourse of the construction of the nation. The word ‘nation’ comes from...