03 Jun 24 Monday Briefing

Slippery fluidity

The past week was quite something, what with Trump’s 34-count conviction, Modi’s shoo-in, the ANC’s crumbling, Sheinbaum’s historic first-female-president-of-Mexico win, and the world’s defence dudes descending on Singapore’s Shangri-La. Election year, ya’ll.

There’s plenty you can read in the papers, so this week I’ll take a break from my regular format, again, and recap last week’s Datus and Nusas Workshop, organised by

Venkatesh Rao

and others.

It’s not a stretch to say that I spent the better part of two days with some of the most polymathic minds of Nusantara (maritime Southeast Asia), essentially freestyling on protocols with the wealth of embodied knowledge and experience that we all carry – and yes, trauma, largely unprocessed.

We’ve always existed on the fringes of larger, more prominent civilisations, and a time-honoured tradition of ours is remixing and marginalia, so I’ll continue that by brain dumping my notes in vaguely connected threads.

Unsaidness

If you thought that grappling with one high-context culture would be more than enough, how about the mixing of three – Malay, Indian, Chinese, and the genesis of a glorious creole – Kristang? It didn’t really surprise me to hear Zul say that Singaporeans are considered too direct, too brusque, by Malaysians or Indonesians, for whom halus (loosely translated as graciousness, but so much more than that) and sopan santun (manners, but so much more than that) influence every interaction? We Singaporeans want to get to the point, we want to get things done, we want it NOW. Such is the effect of that inexorable drive for economic advancement that has so shaped Singapore’s landscape since 1965.

With this I come to the one of the biggest elephants in the room that was thankfully addressed, that modern Singapore is an outlier in Nusantara in so many ways, and that while we did have many non-Singaporean perspectives in the workshop, we needed more input from every far flung corner of this region for this project to be as full-bodied in perspectives as it can be. Especially the indigenous ones, which are often marginalised and ostracised by official state narratives.

Unwellness

Closely linked to Unsaidness is Unwellness. So much unprocessed trauma is buried deep in Nusantara and every successive generation inherits it, and it compounds. Santosh grounded us with his constant, timely reminders about how out of touch with ourselves and the earth around us we can be.

High-context is fine, but the inherent unsaidness in such cultures does not lend itself well to healing journeys. The horrors of colonialism, invasions, occupations, massacres, and post-independence brutalisations have left deep scars that remain largely unaddressed, resulting in a kind of unwellness that contrasts with the deep spirituality in this region. Or is it complementary, given how spiritually dense this region seems to be already?

We bantered about hantus (ghosts) and traded stories about how other parts of the world, when we visited, seems so “flat” in comparison. How the line between the physical and the spiritual here can be very blurred, how gods and deities and spirits can swap ethnicities with the kind of fluidity that we expect of this slippery region. The running joke? Western horror movies tend to start with the trope of hearing something creak and a curious human starts to investigate it. Here? We run, we pray, we make offerings. Perhaps, in time, we can start to make offerings on the altar of wellness.

Ungovernableness

One of the best things about this workshop was reconnecting with old friends. I’ve known Sam for more than a decade, and our work intersect in the areas of futures and innovation. The most memorable neologism of the workshop, courtesy of Sam, was “seapunk”, and from that, “ricepunk”. If Ken Liu took a pop at silkpunk, then we can certainly show the world some of our own punk, and I think Kabesa

Kevin Martens Wong

’s Kristang lore is a perfect starting point.

Ungovernableness is more a feature and less a bug of this region, and I think we revel in it, along with mischievous compliance – kacau, as I like to say. This no doubt elicits shudders down the spines of governing bodies, but the question here is less about how to govern than what should be governed. I think it might have been

Chor Pharn

who quipped that as a “weapon of the weak”, we are very good at giving lip service to the powers that be, but also letting them know, through our subsequent actions, what we think about them / their diktats – going back to Unsaidness, about how we won’t say something directly, but you’ll definitely know by our actions how we feel about it.

If what gets made explicit gets measured, then ungovernableness as a weapon of the weak is how things remain murky, tacit and yes, slippery. Some, with their specific cultural lenses, may find that unsavoury, but as I said, this is a feature of the region, and some of us revel in it. Very catch-me-if-you-can vibes.

Undeterminableness

The long and short of it? Undeterminableness. For a start, there is no consensus of what Nusantara is. A state of mind, a cultural concept, a model of networked hope for the future. Would Nusantara survive the existential challenge of rising sea levels and other climate challenges? Or does the very nature of Nusantara mean that we can “port it over” and restart wherever we go, or is it married to our geography?

So much uncertainty remains, but I think most of us revel in it, and accept it as a fact of life.

What does all this mean for protocols? Tbd…