We Are Not The Enemy: The Practice Of Advocacy In Singapore

Edited by Constance Singam & Margaret Thomas

Non-fiction/Ethos Books/Paperback/296 pages/$33/Ethos Books (str.sg/mGMP)
4 stars

This contemporary survey of advocates and activists in Singapore starts off with a thesis that should really not be as subversive as it feels: that the transformative changes that Singapore has experienced as a society might not have occurred, if not for civil society activism.

Constance Singam, co-editor of this volume and grande dame of social movements in Singapore, cites the repeal of Section 377A in 2022 and requirements for domestic workers to have a weekly rest day from 2013 as the hard-earned results of persistent lobbying by groups such as Pink Dot SG and Transient Workers Count Too.

Flipping the official narrative of Government-led progress, she asserts the necessity of this stratum of the public sphere that is oft-demonised. Its individuals have been branded as troublemakers or even traitors, and doxxed and harassed by anonymous social media trolls.

Ethos Books’ We Are Not The Enemy is seminal for this reason, for it rather calmly provides a platform for some of the best known names of civil society to share their experiences, in the process reaching out to those who are curious but who may yet be reluctant to lend explicit support or show up at meetings.

There is little stridency, or at least where there is, it is usually quickly tempered with reasoned persuasion and sometimes even avuncular advice: Those who have invested so much of their time in bettering Singapore know that righteous agitation goes only so far and can even be counterproductive.

The writings are realistic and pragmatic, offering strategies that emphasise persistence and patience, specific rather than broad-brushed criticism, and community building that cannot be rushed – a “slow, messy and non-linear process that moved at the pace of relationships”.

For a digestible 300-page anthology, We Are Not The Enemy covers remarkable ground.

Each essay is just 10 to 20 pages long and includes obvious contributors like Kirsten Han and Alfian Sa’at, as well as Corinna Lim, executive director of the Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware), and Remy Choo, one of the lawyers involved in the challenges to Section 377A in 2013 and 2018.

But it also takes in those working in the more rarefied academic spheres to position a different kind of activism: journalist-turned-academic Cherian George, possessing the “dubious honour of holding the record for writing the most numerous books about Singapore politics that have made no difference to Singapore politics”; Dr Ng Kok Hoe, senior research fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, who led the first nationwide street count of homelessness; and art authority T. Sasitharan, who discusses the closure of art space, The Substation, and arm’s length funding for the arts, where monies are given to a neutral body for disbursement.

But the most energising may be the many young voices included in the volume, Singam herself finding hope in their savvy and daring.

In particular, Reetaza Chatterjee, founder of brown and queer-led mental health collective Your Head Lah!, writes movingly about turning away from the pressure of “deliverables” and centring care.

Their honesty is refreshing. Environment advocates Isaac Neo and Kristian-Marc James Paul give a frank account of youth-led SG Climate Rally’s relative failure to gain traction with delivery riders despite efforts to court them in 2021.

Four members of The Community For Advocacy and Political Education (Cape), founded in 2017 as a student organisation by Yale-NUS College and National University of Singapore law students, assess the debilitating effect of the closing of Yale-NUS College and Covid-19 to the organisation and still manage to find hope: “The closure of Yale-NUS may ultimately prove but an intermission between phases of youthful democratic energy.”

The well-trodden narrative of civil society is that its beginnings were decimated by the 1963 Operation Coldstore and 1987 Operation Spectrum, which both saw the detention of alleged communists under the Internal Security Act. 

Singam references this history in her introduction, but after that, the aggregate impression is one that looks relentlessly forward, with mistakes never self-indulgently puffed up but quickly dissected.

This polyvocal, mature state of affairs is a second wind that will only pick up further – an increasing force of social conscience to be reckoned with.

If you like this, read: Where I Was: A Memoir About Forgetting And Remembering by Constance Singam (Ethos Books, 2022, $24, Ethos Books, go to str.sg/BLZzx). Singam’s memoir includes the events that led to the Aware saga in 2009, when the organisation was briefly taken over by a Christian faction.