"What We Mean When We Call It A Riot", Wahid Al Mamun
many agree, without contest, on the following set of truths when talking about the incidents of 8 dec 2013
at 2120h, a construction worker is run over by a charter bus. a crowd gathers. there is anger. there is grief. by induction, there are also many things in between.
at 2130h, the first police and scdf vehicles begin to arrive at the scene. at some point, the crowd responds to this development.
at some point, there is a fire.
at some point, there are reporters. from all over the world. already they are calling it a riot.¹
at 2240h, the fire is finally extinguished. there are arrests. it takes an additional hour to clear the scene.²
in the interest of telling the truth i have tried to the best of my ability to put the relevant timestamps.³ in the interest of telling the truth i have also omitted the names of anyone involved. simply because i think names only add noise to the discussion at hand.
(for example, it doesn’t matter if you believe this piece is a poem or not. i know i don’t care.)
for the truth, too, can be emboldened to lie. meander, like a tendril curled around a pipe.
above all, what interests me is – where did the accident happen? the government runs a factcheck website that says the incident happens at ‘the junction of tekka lane and race course road’.⁴ to you, this suffices as rigorous truth. corroborated with data and google maps infographic. this neglects to mention is that this was one of two designated bus boarding areas on sundays in little india.
isn’t this fascinating? to learn there are two bus boarding areas in all of little india. by rough estimation there are seventy hundred and seventy thousand foreign workers on working permits as of december 2013.⁵
i will let you do the math.
next – why was the offending vehicle a charter bus? where was this bus coming from? where was it going? by corollary – how big is singapore for a foreign worker? my guess is that singapore is three places large – dockyard, dorm, and race course road.⁶ i would want to declare an absolutism and call this the truth. except that this was not always the case. this is not always the case. my gardener shares a two-room apartment with the man who sweeps the corridors in my flat on tuesdays.⁷ this, however, is more exception than norm.
but it is easier to believe that such matters are inevitable. that truth congeals into truth because it is by nature immutable.
finally – who are the rioters?
this is a flippant question, you are thinking. of course, they are…of course, they are…
a migrant? a transient? a foreign worker? a bangla? ah neh? one of those…? on facebook (since redacted) someone uses the n-word as response to the question. we hem and haw.
on facebook on 8 dec 2013, i am angry and so i post something angry. i am told to go home. i am angry. but in a different way. like a river diverted back to its source. i am happy it is the school holidays because otherwise i feel like i might have been suspended for a week for saying something, doing something.
or maybe the question ought to be – why am i writing this poem more than five years after only the second big riot in singapore’s long and illustrious history post-independence?⁸
why hang these shrivelled truths out to dry?
as a final addendum, if one were to go to the ‘junction of tekka lane and race course road’ today, one would find a bus terminal. one of two. it is all concrete and glass and ads about calling home. the easy thing to do is to breathe a sigh of relief. in 2016 an mp in moulmein-kallang grc remarked that measures like these have been received warmly by his residents. “they now feel more comfortable as they go about in their neighbourhood. i think we are moving in the right direction.”⁹
to which i can only think –
we?
to which i want to ask him, who built the bus terminals?¹⁰