To be clear, I don’t mean to hanker after a pre-national form of ‘Malayness’ that draws upon the rich cultural resources of the Nusantara. The desire to instead identify with some notional pan-Malay identity, and in solidarity with those based in Malaysia or Indonesia stems, I think, from some confusion as to what precisely happened when the Malayan project, of which Singapore was to partake in, failed. The door to a wider, expansive regionalism was firmly shut the moment Singapore formally separated from Malaysia and declared itself an independent country. Overnight, the Malays in Singapore found themselves reconfigured as one of four possible demographic groups. Singaporeanness, if once yoked to the Malayan project, now had to be recalibrated anew, and cruelly, as the story of migrants choosing to place roots, above planning the route for the journey onward. Smaller, transient journeys between islands became exercises in entering and leaving ports of entry. If colonialism first provided a mirror with which we could perceive some version of ourselves apparently unbroken by the line of history, Separation represented a clean, psychic break from the possibility of maturing that ‘Malayness’ with a regionalist bent. The Malays became, ironically, landlocked and had to once again adapt to significant cultural transformations—though all of this would be internal. Re-integration into the region was only possible after this new, multicultural Singaporeanness was formulated. In the preface of The Poetry of Singapore, Edwin Thumboo provided an overview of what was then a burgeoning Singaporeanness and its consequences for poetics on the island. He writes of the other communities feeling themselves adrift from their particular traditions, which were located elsewhere. For the Malays, he thought, not so much—the syair and other oral traditions were across the Causeway, but not really lost to geography like in the case of the Chinese and the Indians. He wrote, “the Malays apart, a sense of irrevocable belonging to place had yet to develop for a majority of the [other races]”. I think he was partially correct. The Malays in Singapore had slipped away from themselves in the present, and vanished, become strangely diasporic in their own homes. Maddeningly, the island and all surrounding islands remained firmly in place.
Hamid Roslan, Saya Orang Dibawah Angin, 2021