Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia

8. The Past in the Present: Memories of the 1964 'Racial Riots' in Singapore

The Past in the Present 201 201 CHAPTER 8 The Past in the Present: Memories of the 1964 ‘Racial Riots’ in Singapore Adeline Low Hwee Cheng Introduction: Processes of Social Memory and the Riots of 1964 T he 1964 racial riots are seen as the worst in Singapore’s history because of the relatively large number of casualties involved: 22 people killed and 454 injured, according to official statistics. This chapter aims to examine the riots and their impact today from the perspective of collective memories. The riots constitute an event that has been constructed and reconstructed over time. This reconstruction can be observed through a comparison of official memory with popular collective memories obtained through personal narratives. These memories will be analysed in terms of ethnicity and generations. Memories of each ethnic group are compared to determine differences in their discourse about the riots and the impact on their attitudes, thoughts and feelings on multiracialism and inter-ethnic relations in Singapore today. Personal memories become social when they are shared or transmitted across generations. Individuals in the older generation have directly experienced the riots, while the younger generation learnt of them indirectly through education or from the older generation. This study aims to determine to what extent memories of the riots are passed on from generation to generation and whether the attitudes and opinions of the older generation have any impact on the young. The implications of these memories on present-day politics are also examined. Although the riots occurred more than 40 years ago, they 202 Adeline Low Hwee Cheng have not been forgotten. The past still lives in the present because it serves a purpose. Halbwachs (1980, 1992 [1925]) postulates that memories are collective because there are social frameworks for memory (1992: 38). Individual memories exist only because they are linked to the memories of others within a social group to which one belongs. The group keeps the memory alive for the individual and in turn, individual memories support the collective memory of the group, because group memory is realized and manifested in individual memory. Therefore, there is a dialectic between individual and collective memory. Wachtel (1990: 6) adds that our personal memories are actually a network of memories corresponding to various social groups, for example, the family, ethnic group and social class. As we are members of numerous social groups, each of which has distinctive memories of its past, we will have as many collective memories as we are members of these groups and institutions . It is also because of these overlapping groups that memories may differ and become contested. Halbwachs distinguishes between historical memory and autobiographical memory. Historical memory consists of events remembered indirectly through education or from reading written records. This is further reinforced through commemoration , “traditions” (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983) and rituals. It is when the present generation participates in those commemorative events that the past is recreated within. These commemorative events hold society together within a common historical past and identity. Autobiographical memory, on the other hand, is the individual’s personally acquired memory of an experience. But the interests we have in the present affect memory, thus there is an active process of selection. Therefore memory is not fixed at a particular moment in time, nor is it constant; rather it is retrospective and fluid. Halbwachs (1980: 67) also discusses the “living bond between generations” where the generation before “leave their stamp” on the next generation, effecting a “historical continuity ” (Connerton, 1989: 37). The process of transmission between generations has been best elaborated by Mannheim (1952). In his formulation, contemporaries become socially significant only when they are involved and participate in the same historical and social circumstances. The common social location of these individuals forms the unity of a generation, based firstly on the biological rhythm in human existence and on social interaction between human beings, without which there would not be a The Past in the Present 203 social structure or historical continuity, but only the process of birth, ageing and death. These common experiences integrate the group but also limit their “range of potential experience”, pointing them to a certain definite range of “possible modes of thought, experience, feeling and action” (Mannheim, 1952: 368). They are participants in a “common destiny” and in the “characteristic social and intellectual currents of their society and period” (Mannheim, 1952: 378). Social location...