EBOOK
About
Singaporean-Canadian author Joanne Leow sheds blinding light on the dark underbelly of Singapore's history and the human cost behind its glittering façade.
"What unknowable chemical? How slow was this damage, this violence? . . . How might any of us stay uncontaminated by all that was built around us?"
Sleek and verdant, the city-state of Singapore has long been admired on the global stage as a lush utopia, a well-connected trade port and the jewel of Southeast Asia. Yet this carefully pruned exterior conceals the country's crude construction-oil, dirty and cruel, is the blood that's run through Singapore's hidden veins for decades, and the upkeep of this sanitized public image has relied crucially on the forced obedience of its body politic.
Years after her departure to Canada, Joanne Leow continues to live with Singapore's authoritarian policies embedded within her skin. "An assembly which was not unlawful when it assembled may subsequently become an unlawful assembly"; eugenics is merely a logical measure to ensure that the "quality" of the Singaporean population matches its soaring technological advancements-these and many more incontrovertible rules of governance, kept deliberately from the gaze of the West, have been endlessly reproduced by Singapore's self-policing populace, a well-oiled machine in which Joanne served as a crucial cog for years. With unflinching clarity, she examines her work as a journalist for the state-controlled media, the daily hypervigilance required to produce this propaganda and her deadening of any thoughts, behaviours and dreams that could be deemed unsafe or dissident. In the years since her departure, ones in which she dealt also with the volatile advances of a brain tumour, Joanne reflects upon the various ways in which this oppression continues to exist in her bones, a slow poisoning only truth-telling can expunge.
In searing yet lyrically gorgeous prose, Exhumations catalogues the many things that are produced under pressure. Bit by bit, Joanne exposes the petrofiction at the heart of Singapore's being and traces the unruliness of thought daily growing within her, difficult to ignore and impossible to repress. JOANNE LEOW is Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests lie at the intersections of spatial theory, decolonial theory, postcolonial studies, transnational and diasporic texts, and the environmental humanities. Her essays, fiction, and poetry have been published in Brick, Catapult, Evergreen Review, The Goose, Isle, The Kindling, The Town Crier, QLRS, and Ricepaper Magazine. Her first academic monograph is Counter-Cartographies: Reading Singapore Otherwise (Liverpool University Press, 2024), and her debut collection of poetry is Seas Move Away (Turnstone Press, 2022). Joanne grew up in Singapore and currently lives in Vancouver.
"What unknowable chemical? How slow was this damage, this violence? . . . How might any of us stay uncontaminated by all that was built around us?"
Sleek and verdant, the city-state of Singapore has long been admired on the global stage as a lush utopia, a well-connected trade port and the jewel of Southeast Asia. Yet this carefully pruned exterior conceals the country's crude construction-oil, dirty and cruel, is the blood that's run through Singapore's hidden veins for decades, and the upkeep of this sanitized public image has relied crucially on the forced obedience of its body politic.
Years after her departure to Canada, Joanne Leow continues to live with Singapore's authoritarian policies embedded within her skin. "An assembly which was not unlawful when it assembled may subsequently become an unlawful assembly"; eugenics is merely a logical measure to ensure that the "quality" of the Singaporean population matches its soaring technological advancements-these and many more incontrovertible rules of governance, kept deliberately from the gaze of the West, have been endlessly reproduced by Singapore's self-policing populace, a well-oiled machine in which Joanne served as a crucial cog for years. With unflinching clarity, she examines her work as a journalist for the state-controlled media, the daily hypervigilance required to produce this propaganda and her deadening of any thoughts, behaviours and dreams that could be deemed unsafe or dissident. In the years since her departure, ones in which she dealt also with the volatile advances of a brain tumour, Joanne reflects upon the various ways in which this oppression continues to exist in her bones, a slow poisoning only truth-telling can expunge.
In searing yet lyrically gorgeous prose, Exhumations catalogues the many things that are produced under pressure. Bit by bit, Joanne exposes the petrofiction at the heart of Singapore's being and traces the unruliness of thought daily growing within her, difficult to ignore and impossible to repress. JOANNE LEOW is Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests lie at the intersections of spatial theory, decolonial theory, postcolonial studies, transnational and diasporic texts, and the environmental humanities. Her essays, fiction, and poetry have been published in Brick, Catapult, Evergreen Review, The Goose, Isle, The Kindling, The Town Crier, QLRS, and Ricepaper Magazine. Her first academic monograph is Counter-Cartographies: Reading Singapore Otherwise (Liverpool University Press, 2024), and her debut collection of poetry is Seas Move Away (Turnstone Press, 2022). Joanne grew up in Singapore and currently lives in Vancouver.