Singapore’s hidden migrant poets find their voices
IN DORMS on Singapore’s fringes or employers’ back rooms, a growing number of migrant workers are using poetry to shed light on their hidden struggles and reconnect with their roots.
The tiny Southeast Asian nation of 5.6 million counts on about 1 million migrant workers from countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, China and Myanmar to fuel its powerhouse economy, working in sectors from construction to services and home help.
Although horrific labour abuse cases are rare in the rich city-state, campaigners say migrants grapple with unpaid salaries, having their travel documents withheld and massive debts racked up in fees they pay agents to get work.
Often tucked away in dormitories for foreign workers and only seen in public on Sundays, their day off, scores of migrants are writing poetry and short stories offering a rare insight into their little-known worlds.
“When I write, I am happy. When people read our work and accept us as human beings, we are happy,” Indonesian domestic worker Deni Apriyani said.
Hailing from a sleepy village in Indonesia, 29-year-old Apriyani moved to Singapore in 2013 to become a domestic worker as she wanted to buy land for her father, a farmer, back home.
Working from dawn to dusk looking after an expatriate family, she started writing poetry on her cellphone at the end of her 14-hour work day as an outlet for her frustration as she struggled to adjust to life in the new city.
Softly-spoken Apriyani won a poetry-writing competition for migrants in 2017 and one of her poems was published in a book last year that brought together more than 60 works by Singaporean writers and migrant workers.
“You call them sluts, you call them useless, you call them shameful, but did you know the stories behind them?” she asked in the poem Murderers, which highlighted the stigma facing migrant workers who try to find love in the city.
The growing focus on writing by migrant workers began about five years ago with poetry contests organised by advocates that aimed to use literature to break down barriers between foreign workers and Singaporean society.
These competitions have now
branched out to other parts of Asia which also rely heavily on migrant workers, including Malaysia and Taiwan.
In Singapore, their poems are found in bookshops and public libraries, with Bangladeshi construction worker Md Sharif Uddin’s Stranger to Myself winning best non-fiction title at the prestigious Singapore Books Awards last year.
Stories of migrant workers are also gaining attention in other artistic formats.
A Land Imagined, an awardwinning film about low-paid migrants in Singapore, was released domestically last month, with local critics hailing it as a “historic milestone in Singapore cinema”.
Singaporean author and poet Jamal Ismail said migrants’ unique experiences and work had enriched the island’s literary scene.
“They might not write beautifully but there is an abundance of humanism in them,” he said during a workshop, where he offered guidance to a group of migrant poets.
He recounted how he was struck by a poem by a migrant domestic worker who likened her life in the city to that of a cockroach, and another who told him she had not been paid for six months.
Sales of migrant workers’ books are low compared to more mainstream writers, but local publishers said their potential was enormous.
“They really struck a chord and there was empathy,” said Ng Kah Gay from Singapore’s Ethos Books, which in 2016 published Me Migrant, the citystate’s first book by a migrant labourer, Bangladesh’s Md Mukul Hossine, with 3 000 copies sold to date.
Goh Eck Kheng from Landmark Books, which has sold 700 copies of Uddin’s award-winning Stranger to
Myself in two print runs so far, said literature gave migrant and local writers a platform to embrace each others’ work.
“In that way, literature is a social leveller,” Goh said.
Translation is the main hurdle for the work of migrant poets to flourish according to Shivaji Das, an Indian-born writer who works in Singapore and has been organising the annual migrant poetry-writing competitions since 2014.
Scribbling on cement bags or tapping on their mobile phones after nightfall, workers usually write in native languages such as Bengali, Indonesian or Chinese before their work is translated.
Fazley Elahi, a Bangladeshi worker who writes poems and set up Migrant Library Singapore a year ago, said reading and writing in his native language reconnected him to his roots after living away from home for a decade.
Manned by volunteers, the library has a collection of about 800 books in different languages that are common among migrant workers, such as Bengali, Indonesian, Tagalog and Chinese.
It also holds writing workshops for aspiring writers and runs a mobile library project that goes to workers’ dorms.
“It is the freedom of thought that we treasure,” said the 30-year-old. |