Ghostly topographies: landscape and biopower in modern Singapore

Ghostly topographies: landscape

and biopower in modern

Singapore

Joshua Comaroff

Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles

This paper considers the history of a single landscape in the Chinatown district of modern Singapore,

one with a complex and uneasy history. This area was formerly home to a number of female labour

collectives, bulldozed in 1969 to make way for new development that never arrived. The author

attempts to explain this site in reference to a broader politico-ecological history of landscape

construction in Singapore, in which a state landscape was constructed that would confine a number

of subjects to the fringe of the broader society. Through a number of practices and performances

involving ghosts and haunting, it is argued, these landscapes become open to powerful new forms of

contestation that evade the techniques of a regime of ‘biopower’.

Keywords: Biopower m ghosts m landscape m Singapore

Aberrations at Sago Lane

There is a fragment of landscape in the Chinatown district of downtown Singapore

with a peculiar and complicated history.

What is most striking, particularly to a visitor familiar with the high standards of

landscape execution in that city, is that it is empty. And not just empty; it is blatantly,

urgently empty. In the Singaporean context, especially in the downtown area, this

cannot but register as odd. The local ‘house style’ conveys a mania for order. Even

when a landscape has minimal flora � when canopy trees or flowering shrubs are

lacking � there is a tendency to employ a number of formal framing devices and

technologies such as furniture, paving and lighting, thereby establishing a sense that

the site has nonetheless been rendered orderly by the meticulous hand of the state.

Singapore is, after all, a ‘garden city’, and the approach to landscape is (as this implies)

one of great control, a pruning of the shaggy or unruly (see figure 1).1

But this landscape, between Sago Lane and Spring Street, on a major thoroughfare

and opposite the bustling Maxwell Street market, could not be more different. It

comprises three unkempt rectangular lawns of overgrown grass, bounded by rims of

pavement. There is no street furniture or sign of improvement, not even an attempt to

trim the turf to the authoritarian putting-green aesthetic that defines many sites in

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comparable locations. The only exceptional feature is a large rain-tree, which occupies

a broken corner plaza at the intersection of Spring Street and South Bridge Road,

bounded by some tumbledown brick walls and a rather sclerotic hedge. It remained so

for 35 years, until new construction finally began in 2006.

There is a mystery here. Why has this site been excluded, until so recently, from the

overweening project of landscape gentrification that has been undertaken throughout

the rest of the island’s public areas? An answer can only be situated within the broader

history of a peculiar Singaporean landscape ethic � one in which technology, biology,

social control and Confucian values combine to delineate an ecological metonym of the

state at large. In doing so, evidence of a contest emerges, one in which different

constitutive practices (particularly in the conception of public landscapes, and the role

of marginal or spectral subjects within them) compete over distinct visions and

alternative futures. It is a contest in which, I will argue, alternatives for agency emerge

within that matrix of state practices frequently termed ‘the biopolitical’.2

Death houses

This place, even in its current incarnation as tabula rasa , is still considered a shared

embarrassment, a dirty or polluted backwater of the national memory. For prior to

1969, the lots bounding Sago Lane and Spring Street were home to what were locally

known as ‘death houses’.3

FIGURE 1 The result of constant tending is a Singaporean landscape that appears highlyordered. This image shows group walking exercises, a variant of Chinese Qi Gong, in theSingapore Botanic Gardens. (Author’s photograph.)

57

Comaroff: Ghostly topographies



The term ‘death houses’ refers, somewhat ambiguously, to a range of structures that

housed the elderly in their later years. More importantly, however, these streets were

also populated by ‘spinster homes’ (kongsi in the hokkien dialect), the Singaporean

instance of a broader phenomenon throughout female migrant labour communities in

Southeast Asia and southern China.4 As described by anthropologist Marjorie Topley in

1959, the kongsi5 were, at root, boarding houses for unmarried women.6 They had

begun as a new institution among silk industry workers in Guangdong province, when

a boom in demand had positioned Cantonese women for the first time as wage earners

in a colonial economy. The ability to earn in a broader market had reduced the

dependency of young women upon their families for support. This helped, in part, to

propel the growth of secret anti-marriage societies, beginning in Shun Te (Shunde)

County on the Pearl River delta, that were focused upon the kongsi as an alternative to

the traditional path of matrimony and patrilocal resettlement to the husband’s family.

Members of the anti-marriage societies took vows not to wed. If forced by their families

into arranged marriages, they took vows never to cohabit with the spouses. To save

face, anti-marriage society members were often wedded to absent migrant workers in a

form of proxy marriage, in which a white rooster stood in lieu of the husband at the

nuptial ceremony (although the wife and husband frequently never met, the rooster

was taken along for family visits and other marital and filial obligations).7

The kongsi introduced an entirely new type of space � a pocket of independence

and resistance � into the life-world of Confucian Guangdong. Neither the home of

family nor that of in-laws, they were, in Topley’s description,

units of accommodation ranging from a cubicle to a number of rooms. They are mostly in tenement

buildings. Some are simple spaces in which to keep valuables, others elaborate club houses with various

connected benefit clubs and social or recreational facilities. Their main equipment consists of a few

cupboards or a row of metal lockers in which each member keeps her possessions; a stock of camp beds;

and sometimes limited cooking facilities, although they may share a communal cooking space with other

users of the building. They usually have an altar for images of deities popular with women, notably Kuan

Yin, the ‘Goddess of Mercy,’ before who anti-marriage vows were made in China.8

A downturn in silk demand in the 1930s led to a great deal of labour migration among

the women of Guangdong � and particularly among the anti-marriage groups, who

found in resettlement another means acceptably to avoid the press of matrimony.

Having chosen to disassociate themselves from their lineage systems, they had become

dependent upon external labour markets for support. Thus, there was a demographic

upsurge in the number of unmarried women entering Singapore during this period � as

well as a concomitant decline in comparable populations of men, as Depression-era

laws forbade the entrance of male workers,9 who were expected to depress further a

saturated labour market. Cantonese women were preferred by the local population,

both Chinese and European, as amahs (cooks, nannies and other domestic workers). A

reputation of stern discipline, thrift and competence characterized the image of the

Cantonese domestic � young Singaporeans still tell stories of childhood amahs who

used to scrub their tongues with soap, or pinch them black and blue when they refused

to behave.10

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cultural geographies 14(1)



With migration from Guangdong to Singapore, the form of the kongsi was adapted. As

amahs were often hired in pairs � as so-called ‘cook and wash amahs ’ � ‘sisters’ of the

kongsi took vows of attachment, and were distributed to local households by one of two

private placement firms, or by a bureau in the colonial Labour Department. In order to

regulate the domestic trades, and to provide support for labourers, the kongsi developed

complex institutional codes.11 Rates were set for rent and placement services.

Disciplinary rules and moral solidarities were established, for clients as well as workers:

for example, an amah was commonly expected to refuse work in a home where one of

her co-residents had been fired. During the period from the 1930s to the late 1960s, the

kongsi continued to develop as an extraordinary informal institution: a modern

alternative to the extended family, to the patriarchal clan association, even to the state.

Another side of the kongsi � and the origin of their intense association with the

‘death house’ moniker � was the provision of funeral insurance. Given that the

inhabitants had no local blood relatives and declined marriage, migrant life raised

concerns about the performance of burial rites. It was a mandatory requirement that

sacrifices of burnt paper and food offerings be made during the correct observance

times, such as the sombre Hungry Ghost festival in the seventh lunar month. Neglect to

do so would cause the victim to suffer a restless spirit, to wander without peace and to

harass the living. To end one’s life without the proper rituals was, moreover, highly

undignified. Thus, the houses began to operate as a burial collective, wherein

payments into shared funds ensured a proper interment, observances for the older

residents by the younger and so forth. They likewise assumed the functions of lineage

societies, providing a means for order and for social reproduction.

But it is not the kongsi ’s ‘morbid’ aspect alone that caused such discomfort within

Singaporean society. Despite the austere, or spinsterly, image of the Cantonese amah ,

the influx of an unmarried female population was commonly considered a volatile and

potentially destabilizing challenge to social order. The inhabitants of the ‘spinster

houses’ were widely assumed to be involved in more illicit and liminal trades �including sex work and theatre � that were considered a source of moral degradation.

Accusations of prostitution and witchcraft commonly accrue to women who seek to free

themselves from spaces of authority and controls in patriarchal societies.12 In the

Chinese context, Zhang Li has shown the longstanding Confucian association of mobility

with witchcraft, banditry and vagrancy � particularly in regard to secret societies.13 Luise

White has, likewise, described a similar phenomenon in colonial Nairobi.14 The kongsi

was, similarly, considered offensive in a society that had embraced a public ideology of

so-called ‘Asian values’, Confucian in essence if not in name, that considered families

sacred and single women a destructive vector. It was tarred, by turns, with conflicting

brushes: on the one hand, it was a threat to the Chinese family; on the other, by contrast,

the spinster houses were maligned as lesbian strongholds. Interestingly, there is not to

my knowledge any concrete historical evidence for either of these claims. Topley,

likewise, was suspicious of the assumption of lesbianism, noting that, although it was

commonly assumed, ‘there [was] no way of measuring its extent’.15

Whether or not they are historically accurate, these accusations seem beside the

point. The threatening radicalism of the kongsi had much more to do with the creation

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of new physical and social spaces of flexibility for women within the conventional

order. These were, moreover, uncomfortably modern institutions. They arose as a

contingency of translocal wage labour markets. As (proto-)civil society organizations,

they intervened between the power of the family and the power of the state; and they

acted as rule-making and price-setting bodies on behalf of their ‘stakeholders’. The

evasions of the anti-marriage societies were also modern in emphasizing a sort of

extreme contractualism in regards to marriage, whereby loopholes in the necessary

structures of kinship, dowry and suitability were exploited to avoid domestic structures.

Herein the husband was demoted to ‘rooster’, recast simply as legal entity or the

metaphor of a virility never exercised.16 The amahs embodied this rather contradictory,

uncanny cultural persona � of abnegation and personal discipline for the children, yet

at the same time fanatically wilful and strange. In a common colonial arrangement,

these women surrendered their own reproductive capacity in order to reproduce for

others. An exploitative labour relationship became, in an ambiguous compromise, a

means to escape the binds of traditional social structures.

Husbandry of the state

The fabric of Sago Lane was destroyed by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) in

1969 under the direction of the People’s Action Party (PAP). The various buildings were

bulldozed and left empty for some time. Prior to the demolition, in 1961, the newly

instituted Housing and Development Board (HDB) had made it impossible for singles,

either male or female, to buy state-subsidized housing.17 In 1972, the Straits Times

announced a relaxation of government policy, whereby an unmarried woman could

only buy or rent a flat if she joined with two or more women, and at least one was over

40 years old. Apparently, a woman of this age was, in the eyes of Singaporean law, a

‘confirmed spinster’: in the autumn of her years, and no longer a threat to the institution

of marriage. Unmarried mothers were explicitly barred from buying HDB properties. As

Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong later opined, it was a grave error to make unwed

motherhood a respectable part of society: ‘this is wrong. By removing the stigma, we

may encourage more women to have children without getting married.’18 This period

also marked the rapid decline of the Cantonese amah ; the latter were increasingly

replaced by labour migrants from Southeast and South Asia, who were no longer

allowed to live outside of their employers’ homes.

The decade of the 1970s also saw the rise of a sweeping ‘cleaning campaign’ by the

PAP, of both perceived physical and cultural pollutants. Examples of degraded, Western

or so-called ‘unhealthy’ or ‘yellow culture’ became targets of the state, as well as

bohemian trappings such as long hair and loud music.19 At the same time, low-grade or

suspect housing, as well as untended landscapes, came to be replaced by newer, tidier

constructions. This was the dawn of the Garden City concept for the island, the first

clearly realized vision of what was to become the Singaporean landscape.20 The latter

was no simple undertaking, and had to be created largely ex nihilo . When Stamford

Raffles landed in Singapore (an outpost known as Temasek) in 1819, the island was

60




predominantly covered in dipterocarp forest and surrounded by coastal mangrove.

Over the course of the colonial period, it was recreated as a principally agricultural

landscape. Pineapple, coconuts, tapioca and pepper (and later rubber) were grown in

the interior, and the coastal mangrove was eradicated to create pools for prawn farming

(chiefly of Penaeus indicus).21 Various waves of increasing and diminishing demand

wrought continual change on the island ecology, but the effect on the dipterocarp

forest was lasting and permanent. By 1850, the last remaining scraps of the indigenous

landscape were around the Bukit Timah highlands, where a steep topography made

cultivation impossible. In the meantime, the broad exchange of plant species among

the British colonies, and their intentional transnational project of plant ‘acclimatization’,

had flooded Singapore with species from Southeast and South Asia, Australia and even

from Europe and Brazil. By the time the PAP set about replacing scruffy landscapes with

a tidy and consistent local style,22 virtually nothing on the island could be found as

‘heritage’ stock. As Richard Corlett has noted in his ecological history of the island,

none of the species extant in urban Singapore were there when Raffles arrived.23

This did not, however, slow the production of a ‘local’ landscape style. On the

contrary, it may have provided a condition of great freedom for the new state, which

was then in the process of inventing social structures out of available cultural and

historical fragments.24 The PAP had skilfully begun to construct national mythologies

through a surgical process, splicing together a range of cultural and geographical

traditions � coming from the Chinese, Tamil, Malay, and European communities � in

order to create social forms and symbols that were recognizably ‘Asian’ without being

considered biased toward any single cultural tradition. Thus, the government

constructed ‘Asian values’, a code of social conduct and aesthetic predisposition that

modified a Confucian ethic for a range of constituent ethnicities. The Singapore Tourist

Board created a new icon for the nation, the ‘Merlion’, by literally grafting two local

mythological figures together, the head of a lion onto the body of a mermaid.25

And so it was with landscape, as well. The HDB continued the work left to it by the

colonial Singapore Improvement Trust, entrusting the improvement of public land-

scapes to the National Parks Board (NParks, formerly the Parks and Recreation

Department).26 A broad range of exotic species � canopy trees, ground covers such as

the ubiquitous Ficus pumilla , shrubs and flowering hedges � were combined into an

entirely novel series of combinations. All were common in their ability to survive

locally, but none had previously existed together. Combinations were articulate, neatly

composed and codified into standards of landscape gardening practice for public

space. But the landscape itself, marked by an appearance of deracinated tropicality,

was new. The ‘garden model’ does not really form an ecological unity; the planting

beds of the public parks and Singapore Botanic Gardens are, generally speaking,

crypto-ecological fantasy. They are inventions, largely of the last 15 to 20 years. They

only exist, as communities, in the minds of the landscape designers who put them

there. These, like the Singaporean population, are a motley assemblage of largely

foreign species. The ‘indigenes’, both human and plant, were long ago whittled down

by successive regimes of colonial occupation. This was the new tropical landscape of

61




Singapore: recognizably a Singaporean invention, but without falling prey to pedigree,

a specificity without specifics.

It was also, by nature, a heavily interventionist landscape (see Figure 2). For these

gardens required a great deal of maintenance to keep them from falling into disarray, to

keep some exotic species from driving out weaker competitors, to prevent the natural

drift of other ‘weeds’ into the carefully crafted compositions � arrangements of plants

that, not being assembled from common ecological communities, were unlikely to exist

in prolonged stability as designed by the URA landscapers. This was a national landscape

that could not, by definition, survive without a constant gardener, the administrative care

of the larger state. Its very survival � perceptible in appearance � is a daily testament to

the competence of the state to maintain a communal order, to control destabilizing

elements and to control a dangerous fertility akin to that of the kongsi women.

In his study of landscape planning in Singapore, Edmund Waller notes that the

presence of the state in public landscape and infrastructure projects became apparent at

Lee Kuan Yew’s speech to the Singapore Press Club in August 1996. The Prime Minister

noted that this became a ‘certain subtle way’ of ‘convincing investors . . . that Singapore

was an efficient and effective place . . . This in turn suggested that the Government

could manage the place, get things done and meet the companies’ infrastructure

requirements. Similarly the Istana grounds were beautified with a miniature landscaped

Japanese garden at the entrance.’27

Curiously, through a combination of conscious decisions, cultural logics, historical

accidents and biological/technological necessities, the Singaporean government had

FIGURE 2 The Garden City is a highly interventionist landscape, requiring the constanthusbandry of the state. This image depicts routine maintenance at the Singapore BotanicGardens. (Author’s photograph.)

62




invented a landscape style that embodied, metonymically, the values, concerns,

techniques and invented social institutions that were expected to allow the nation as

a whole to function as an organic (albeit dependent) whole. It was one in which fringe

subjects and nonconformist spaces were increasingly unwelcome.

Bones of contention

However, it is in the nature of things to go wrong. Even in Singapore. Although the broader

project of reshaping the island and its society has been unnervingly successful in realizing

most objectives, certain topics and spaces remain as bones of contention. Interestingly,

one of the greatest problems facing the redesign of Singapore was the issue of death.

As Kong and Yeoh describe in their study, the battle over funereal landscapes has

been one of the great sticking-points of the Singaporean renovation, and is an ongoing

source of resentment that lies close to the surface.28 In brief, concerns about available

land, as well as hygiene, caused the state to mandate the rather un-Chinese (and

decidedly un-Muslim) alternative of cremation and columbaria as the only solution for

the island’s future. The elaborate Chinese graveyards that were scattered around large

swathes of the city were to be dug up, and all remains removed to centralized locations.

This was widely resisted � along political, geomantic and other lines of struggle � but

the state won most battles, relocating the majority of cemeteries to peripheral

columbaria in Mount Vernon and Mandai.29

But attachments to places die hard, and attachments to places of dying die harder. A

popular form of exception to the state’s arrogation of death can be seen in the Hungry

Ghost festivals in the years after the relocation. Elaborate offerings to the dead � paper

houses, paper money, even paper BMWs � appear at nightfall, burning on curbs and

corners, in parking garage spirals and food courts.30 The offerings appeared on the sites of

former burial grounds long since gentrified, in Tiong Bahru, downtown, and particularly

in Chinatown. In addition to homes and places of business, these are placed on the

original sites of burial; that is, the sites of exhumation.31 The effect is extraordinarily

moving to the observer. As darkness falls, it is as if a second map, a ghostly historical

topography, appears on top of the familiar one, a radical disjuncture of memory and

topography that is violently, temporarily conflatedwithin thehyper-controlled surfaces of

the contemporary city. The new landscapes are thus infiltrated by the ghosts of history, by

familiar entreaties for memory within the unending flood of the new.

Indeed, many sources make claims for Singapore as ‘the most haunted city on earth’.

Even amid the generally haunted quality of contemporary cities described by Steve Pile,

Karen Till, and others, this place seems uniquely possessed by the subject.32 Ghost

stories circulate widely in and across social circles, naming both general and specific

site of ‘visitation’. Famous public areas, empty community spaces, and ‘void decks’ or

the HDB housing slabs are commonly described as haunted.33 A series of ghost-tale

compendia by author Russell Lee (and his ‘team of ghost writers’, those members of the

general populace who submit their narratives to him) quickly rose to become the

highest-selling publication in Singaporean history.34 A group named Singapore

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Paranormal Investigations leads popular and technically elaborate tours of haunted

sites for an avid fan base.

But ghostly activities also serve other purposes: for one, they seem to militate against

the unfettered production of new spaces and landscapes in place of the old. Visitations

are the nemesis of the Singaporean property developer, for instance, frequently halting

construction on a chic new block of flats. In 2005, for instance, construction was

brought to an abrupt stop on a highly experimental new tower of maisonettes behind

Orchard Road. On the site was an old bungalow, a so-called colonial ‘black-and-white’

in the process of being taken down. One room, empty but for the photo of a young

Eurasian woman on one of the walls, seemed to refuse demolition. All attempts left the

bulldozer drivers and construction workers with an odd malady ‘like the effects of

radiation sickness’.35 Those who entered the room left similarly disturbed. At the time

of writing, this situation had degenerated into a standstill, with the contractors

threatening to default and the feng shui consultants being called in. This haunting

produces a double danger for the developer. Not only does haunting halt construction

and reduce time-dependent profits; if the ghost story becomes widely known, the value

of the property will almost certainly be diminished.36

Within this context, then, the Chinatown death house sites are an intensified focus of

spiritual remembrance. Numerous offerings are made yearly; among them, for the

amahs who wanted remembrance. This land remains an uncomfortable urban wound, a

sort of achoria . Although half of the original site is now underneath a large HDB housing

complex, the remainder of the site has been left (until recently) as a temporary funereal

landscape. Burial tents are erected, meals are served, visits and wakes are enacted �which, presumably, only further increases the spiritual activity of the site during the

Ghost Month. In 2005, the block between Sago Lane and Spring Street became the site for

a new temple to house a relic of the Buddha’s tooth: as such, it is a sort of ready

compromise between the demands of tourism and spirituality. The URA Masterplan

earmarks the remaining land for mixed residential-commercial use, as part of the future

reconstruction of the neighbourhood.37 In the meantime, however, the funerals

continue. For now, the Singapore Tourism Board (concerned with the neo-liberal fetish

of ‘heritage industries’) has decided to make Hungry Ghost month a tourist event, with

permanent plaques that spookily eclipse the kongsi and the funeral parlour: describing

the former as ramshackle collectives in which abandoned spinsters waited to die.38

Death and the politics of life

These hauntings suggest an interesting lesson for the politics of the present. Singapore

is perhaps a singular site of so-called ‘biopower’, that repertoire of governmental

techniques that would render the physical self under the control of state sovereignty.

However one might feel about the over generalization (and perhaps the banalization)

of this notion in current analysis, it seems pertinent in the Singaporean case. This is,

after all, the state in which the establishment of regimes of biophysical discipline has

seen a major investment of governmental energies. Famously, the PAP government has

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included campaigns against spitting and disorderly walking, in its general concept of

the production of a ‘First World’39 Asian nation. An older slogan, ‘long hair, long wait’,

was displayed on signs in island businesses � making clear that those with hippie

trappings would not be served, and perhaps also threatening the delay of a late-arriving

modernity. Most recently, the Romancing Singapore campaign employed (among a

congeries of techniques) foreign perfumers to create a signature fragrance to

reintroduce amorous zest into the notoriously pragmatic society � and thus increase

the island’s population to 6.6 million in the second decade of the new millennium.40

The campaign was launched, oddly enough, with a his-and-hers blood drive intended

to benefit patients at Tan Tock Seng Hospital. Advertising posters displayed an

attractive woman above the slogan, ‘Are you my type?’41

Indeed, the ‘politics of comfort’, wherein such elements as air-conditioning play an

important role in the production and control of space, would seem to place island

society beyond the realm of politics altogether. We might conclude, following Slavoj

Zizek, that only ‘post-political’ vestiges remain. It would seem that nothing continues

apart from the soft-authoritarian practices of ‘administration’: meticulous micro-

management of choice, of behaviour and of corporeal life.42

Given this, the phantasmagorical politics of haunting might come as a surprise.

Principally, they suggest a possible opening in the somewhat airless Foucauldian

narrative of biopower: the politics of life, they suggest, are perhaps not so effective in

controlling the politics of death. This is shown, as we have seen, in Kong and Yeoh’s

account of the struggles over funeral landscapes. These were, more than others, the

front along which clan organizations and other atrophying organs of civil society felt

able to resist the seizure of death by the state.43 Particular grave sites remain areas of

debate over the value of redevelopment; one that remains in the Bukit Timah area has

been particularly troublesome.44 The Hungry Ghost festival presents similar opportu-

nities. The reinsertion of death into the realm of the living likewise provides an

occasion for heckling the state from the penumbra of the sacred, with the authority of

those beyond its reach. To use former burial spaces as sites of remembrance is to assert

the presence of an older landscape that persists, in memory, beneath the new � it is,

perhaps, ‘the return of the re-possessed’. It exists, most importantly, in a space beyond

the administrative authority of the PAP. The carnivalesque character of ghosts, their

ephemeral and disruptive visitations, evade the continual tending of the disciplinary

state. They come and go. Most importantly, they have no bodies upon which pressure

can be applied, or against which ‘law-preserving’ violence can be threatened. As

powerful as the Singaporean machine may purport to be, it is made weak by the paper

houses of memory, which are burned only to return, improbably, year after year. For

the paper goods are commodities, invested with both spiritual and material worth,

emerging annually in larger numbers. Destruction releases their power � value is

sacrificed in order to keep faith with the dead, and in doing so there comes into being a

momentary bridge between the landscapes (and land uses) of past and present, of

worldly and otherworldly. With every dollar that is burnt, a ghost appears. Like the

women of the kongsi , the broader Singaporean populace has thus rediscovered a way

to forge connections by means other than those of kinship, lineage or bureaucracy.

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Here, everyday political acts tap into a storied metaphysical tradition, one that is

ineffable to the logic of the modern state, and those who would take modernity’s

conceits, too literally, at face value. Singaporean Chinese communities have a long

history of living actively among ghosts, and are acutely aware of the power that spectres

can wield. Moreover, a tradition of maintaining relations with those in the afterlife had

long allowed means of manipulating the legal controls of the state: Topley details, in a

1955 study, the practice of marriage among ghosts (and between the living and the dead)

as a means of rectifying problems of kinship and inheritance.45 Death has long proved to

be a lively economy, and provides a mature fons for politico-cultural agency in the

present. In Singapore, politics may be dead; through ghosts, ironically, they return to

life. In this diaphanous form they are not so easy to dispel. The reinscription of the Ghost

Month within the safe circle of tourist fare may well serve to turn a profit from the necro-

political � for a brief moment, the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board might achieve the

reversal of the burnt sacrifice: death may be congealed into value, converted back into

paper. However, this strategy is unlikely to capture the dead within a politics designed to

control life. While the state may carefully arrange, control and tend to life in the manner

of a gardener, ghosts, by their nature (or lack thereof), will not be subjected to the same

treatment. And among the ranks of the unquiet dead, those such as the women of the

kongsi are particularly disruptive and powerful. For they are multiply dislocated: in real

space, in the gendered order of social categories and in the historical frame of lineage.

Of all ghosts, these are the most potent and unruly. They exist within zones of freedom

and amorphous creativity � it seems no coincidence, then, that the figure of the

‘footloose’ female migrant so frequently appears in Singaporean ghost fiction, as with

Kelvin Tong’s 2005 horror-blockbuster The Maid .46

However, the relationship of death to biopower is not peculiar to the Singaporean

case. It is not, moreover, to be explained simply by the fact that this culture maintains an

intense relationship with the afterlife. If anything, Singapore represents the most

aggressively modern of states � it was, after all, willing to take an uncommon gamble in

razing the graveyards. The PAP attempted to banish the culture of death to hygienic and

remote columbaria. But as Marx, among others, has famously observed, there is

something deeply haunted about Western modernity itself.47 Despite a powerful focus

on the politics of life, and the relegation of death to the sphere of religion, would-be

secular modernity is continually subject to rumblings from the afterlife. Vide past

fascinations with seances and Mesmerism, with capturing fairies on film or with

Houdini’s promise to escape from the grave. Existing theories of state power and

biopower ignore these, only to mirror the conceit of modernity that eschatology has been

thoroughly exiled. Foucault’s narrative neglects death,48 as well as the fact that the state is

unable to control it. It would seem, after all, that there are limits to the fixation on life.49

Postscript

The character of ghosts, particularly historical ones, is that they have a vexatious moral

insistence � haunting the living (and, by doing so, exposing guilt) is what they do.50

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The site of the kongsi was chosen in 2004 by Theatreworks, a local experimental

theatre company, as the site of an original play that would attempt to re-enact the

experiences of their residents. Director Low Kee Hong had vivid memories of being

walked hastily past Sago Lane and Spring Street, often on the other side of the street, by

his mother in early childhood. Low had subsequently heard stories, as have most

Singaporeans, of the peculiar residents, and had wondered about daily life within. After

several years of mulling over the possibility of a performance, he commissioned

Kaylene Tan and Paul Rae to write a script in which the former residents returned as

ghosts, to tell narratives of life on the fringes of island society. The resulting

performance was entitled ‘Ma:Moment’ � the ‘Ma’ (in addition to its obvious

connotations of ‘mother’ and amah) being a term for a liminal zone in Japanese,

one of the traditional performance spaces of the Noh genre.

The stage was a recreation of one of the old interior lanes of the kongsi blocks

between Spring Street and Sago Lane.51 It was enclosed within a pavilion designed to

resemble a paper ‘ghost house’, a sort of public funeral offering, and was erected

during the Ghost Month festival. This pavilion was intentionally visible from the top

floor offices of the URA bureaucratic headquarters, two blocks away, as a sort of

provocation. The alley, a sort of ‘Ma’ space (and one that is analogous to the bridge, or

hashigakari , of the Noh play’s tripartite stage), was enclosed in a fabric scrim to define

its edges in three dimensions, a formerly negative urban space rendered ‘positive’ (see

Figures 3 and 4). The audience seating areas, as well as the green room, were located in

areas of the lawn that were formerly ‘within’ the interiors of the death houses.

The performance, set in this newly designed landscape, was very public. During the

brief week during which it took place, the complex history of the ‘death houses’ was

brought back sharply into public discourse. In Rae and Tan’s script a series of ghosts,

including a former escort named Precious Pig and her aborted daughter, Phantom

Foetus, materialize in the alley to relate the unsettled moments of their Chinatown lives.

In no uncertain terms � and often making use of vulgarities only available in Cantonese

� the ghosts of the kongsi returned to cajole and lambast the community, the residents

overlooking the sites from the HDB flats and the orderly landscapes beyond.

These orderly landscapes cannot control spectral figures � they seem undermined by

uncanny presences, by the amahs , and perhaps by contemporary migrant domestics

from Sri Lanka and the Philippines. As fringe figures, often dislocated with respect to

the hierarchies of kith and kin, they are perpetually out of place in the Singaporean

garden, dangerous and creative. Perhaps, then, we might answer author Jonathan Lim

when he pointedly asks, ‘Might the old ghosts become part of the ecological balance?’52

Acknowledgements

This paper is a small portion of a doctoral dissertation about spiritual life and political

landscape in Singapore, currently being written in the Department of Geography at the

University of California, Los Angeles. This project continues to benefit greatly from the

guidance of Denis Cosgrove, J. Nicholas Entrikin, John Agnew and Anthony Vidler. I

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FIGURE 3 View of the former death houses site, with the ‘Ma: Moment,’ stage pavilion in place.The entral space, created by vertical scrims, recalls the form and location of the demolishedalleyway. (Author’s photograph.)

FIGURE 4 Interior of the ‘Ma: Moment,’ set during the performance. The actors in red, playingghosts, haunt the space of the former alleyway. (Author’s photograph.)

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would also like to thank Philip Crang for his encouragement and insight in the

preparation of this work for publication. I was also lucky to receive very helpful

commentary from two additional anonymous readers. In particular, I would like to

thank Ong Ker-Shing, my partner in the exploration of Sago Lane.

Biographical note

Joshua Comaroff is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at the

University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses upon new forms of religious

and spiritual life in Singapore, and how these come into contact with the practices and

aesthetics of state power. He is also an architect and landscape architect practising on

that ‘small island’. He can be contacted at: [email protected].

Notes1 The official approach is described in G.-L. Ooi, Environment and the city: sharing Singapore’s

experiences and future challenges (Singapore, Institute of Policy Studies, 1995), pp. 129ff.

Another helpful account is given in E. Waller, Landscape planning in Singapore (Singapore,

Singapore University Press, 2001). For another good statement of government planning

macro-strategy, see K. Sandhu and P. Wheatley, Management of success: the moulding of

modern Singapore (Singapore, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989).2 I refer here to the body of literature surrounding Foucault’s famous concept, as discussed in a

series of works including Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison (London, Vintage,

1995). As I argue later in this text, the Singaporean state (by contrast with many others) can

properly be described as a site of ‘biopower’ � that is, there are attempts by the state to instil

social policy at a micro-level of instinctive action. Public campaigns run continually to enforce

good behaviour. Recent examples include the Singapore Kindness Movement (overseen since

1994 by the Singapore Courtesy Council) and, not; more recently, the Smile Singapore

Campaign. Information about these can be found at http://www.singaporekindness.org.sg, as

well as http://www.gov.sg. Attempts to promote public order are, I believe, not; to be found

within numerous, imbricate levels of Singaporean life, from government media to disciplinary

practices and beyond.3 The area was known as Sei Yan Kai (lit. ‘dead person’s road’) in Cantonese � however, it is

important to note that Sago Lane and surrounds were not merely a stretch of funeral homes

and hospices. It is precisely in this singular characterization that the more lively, and

contested, nature of this area is lost.4 An interesting 1971 memoir of visits to elderly housing can be found at http://www.alicia-

patterson.org/APF001971/Skerly/Skerly10/Skerly10.html. The author recalls: ‘Old age was, of

course, something else. But to prepare for it, the ladies devised an ingenious institution called

the kongi [sic], a kind of amah sorority house. They rented rooms above a shop where they

could spend their days off and later live permanently in retirement. They pledged to remain

single, and to contribute regularly to the support of aged members. The kongis are dying out

and lack fresh reinforcements. Amah -ship doesn’t appeal to the young Straits-born Chinese, as

indigenous Singaporeans are called. They opt for factory or bar jobs � and marriage. Finding an

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old-time kongi and its fabled members was a fascinating adventure. A Cantonese-born,

multilingual sleuth and I spent a rainy afternoon poking around old tailor and curio shops.’5 Kongsi is a term which, as it has been used variously and ambiguously, needs some definition.

Kongsi is the Hokkien equivalent of the Mandarin gongsi , which is commonly taken to mean

‘business’ or ‘company.’ In the Singaporean context, however, this term has come to be

multiply translated (according to social context) and to carry a number of meanings. Firstly,

kongsi has been used to describe so-called ’secret societies’, such as the infamous Ghee Hin

and Tsung Sin Kongsi . The latter were associated, from the early to middle 19th century, with

’revenue farming’ (quasi-formalized tax collection) and fees collected on the trade of opium,

gambier, pepper, and other commodities. As such, the word carries with it popular

associations of mystery and violence. This is well documented in Irene Lim’s Secret Societies

in Singapore (Singapore, National Heritage Board, 1999). However, the term is also used more

generally to mean Chinese ’self-help societies’*civil society groups that provided labor

organization and other social services. A brief history of these is given in Carl Trocki,

Singapore: Wealth, Power, and the Culture of Control (London, Routledge, 2006). Thus, it is

not surprising that the system which organized the lives of the Cantonese domestic laborers

would be termed kongsi as well. The latter provided many similar services, including wage-

setting and punishment of bad employers. They also, as argued, stood between the

infrastructural power of the formal state and the family or clan, and as such in a murky

spectrum of legality. While Trocki’s is an excellent general study, I have yet to find a

comprehensive history of these various forms of kongsi , one that describes them in relation to

the formal government of the island from the colonial period to the PAP takeover.6 See M. Topley, ‘Immigrant Chinese female servants and their hostels in Singapore’, Man 59

(1959), p. 214.7 Ibid.8 Ibid .9 Ibid, p. 213.

10 From interviews with Singaporeans between the ages of 24 and 31, 2005.11 Topley notes that kongsi formed the major competition for formalized labour unions;

‘Immigrant Chinese female servants’ p. 213. ‘These organizations, then, approach a primitive

[sic ] form of ‘‘craft’’ guild in their facilities and objectives, although no inter-organizational

arrangements have developed whereby members of different kongsi can meet to fix more

general conditions of service. Rivalry (usually of a friendly nature) exists between kongsi in the

same street on some of the social occasions which they mark in common’, p. 215.12 For a powerful instance of this in literature, see Toni Morrison’s Paradise (New York, Plume

(Penguin), 1999).13 See L. Zhang, Strangers in the city: reconfigurations of space, power, and social networks

within China’s floating population (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 33.14 See L. White, Comforts of home: prostitution in colonial Nairobi (Chicago, University of

Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 5ff.15 Topley, ‘Immigrant Chinese female servants’, p. 214.16 Ibid. Topley points out that the couples united by the ‘curious form’ of rooster marriage

frequently never met.17 For an excellent discussion of this and many other issues in the construction of the

Singaporean notion of nation, as well as its varied spaces, see L. Kong and B. Yeoh, The

politics of landscapes in Singapore: constructions of ‘nation’ (Syracuse, NY, Syracuse

University Press, 2003), p. 112.18 Straits Times (22 Aug. 1994).

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19 Long hair was associated, generally, with counterculture � anything might be part of a political

counterculture. In this period, communism was a particular threat.20 See Waller, Landscape planning in Singapore , p. 48.21 R. Corlett, ‘The ecological transformation of Singapore, 1819�1990’, Journal of biogeography

19 (1992), p. 413.22 In a chapter entitled ‘Landscape planning since independence’, Waller places the development

of government policy in three phases. The first takes place between 1959 and 1971, in which a

‘neatening’ ethic (as well as the ambition toward a Garden City concept) emerged (p. 47). A

second phase is defined by the years 1971�91, in which larger-scale projects and an increase

of available resources led to the marriage of landscape planning, ‘social engineering’ and the

creation of themed natural environments such as ‘vest pocket’ parks, the Jurong Bird Park and

Singapore Zoo (p. 53).23 See Corlett, ‘Ecological transformation’, p. 418.24 See C.J. W.-L.Wee, ‘Staging the Asian modern: cultural fragments, the Singaporean eunuch, and

the Asian Lear’, Critical inquiry 30 (2004), pp. 771�99. Also E. Tan, ‘Re-engaging Chineseness:

political, economic, and cultural imperatives of nation-building in Singapore’, China quarterly

(2003), pp. 751�74.25 For a clear micro-history of this peculiar beast, see Kong and Yeo, Politics of landscapes in

Singapore , pp. 152ff.26 Again, Edmund Waller’s history in his Landscape planning in Singapore is useful here.27 Ibid . p. 53. The name Istana refers to the residence of Singapore’s President.28 This history also engages the larger question of the changing role of clan and religious

organizations vis-a-vis the state. Death was one of those realms of social existence where these

bodies maintained a great deal of authority � again, Topley provides some suggestive detail in

‘The emergence and social function of Chinese religious associations in Singapore’,

Comparative studies in society and history 3 (1961), pp. 289�314.29 Kong and Yeo, The politics of landscapes in Singapore , p. 74.30 The material and symbolic complexity of the ghost paper economy is very great, and is a

central topic of my forthcoming study. The production of paper commodities follows stringent

rules of representation and exchange, and continual innovation builds upon Chinese ancestral

traditions. A clear sense of this was communicated in a recent interview with Yu Yin Ho, a

paper artist working in Hong Kong (IdN magazine 13 (2006), no. 3, ‘Paper: the magic

material!’). A complex terminology describes the relationship between the paper figures that

are made and their object of representation, comprising four major categories. Ji zhao (‘direct

reflection’) describes the paper objects that a recently deceased person ‘is thought to need

with him/her in heaven � everything from money and small trinkets to a house and a car’, (p.

29). Other terms, such as shou kou and hua pao , are used to describe the representation of

animals, flowers, lamps and other objects (artists who work in the paper medium also produce

artworks for Lion Dances and other festivals). Yu notes change in the medium: ‘in the past, ‘‘ji

zhao’’ had less variety. Nowadays, whatever a person owned in real life can be replicated in

paper for the funeral.’ He adds, ‘the key to making Chinese paper artwork is to catch the spirit

of the objects you want to copy’ (p. 30, emphasis added). A short documentary segment about

Yu Yin Ho can be found in the DVD issued with the magazine.31 I have found it interesting to note Singaporeans’ continuing cognizance in regards to the

geographical specificity of former burial sites. These are remembered with a great deal of

unease � this author’s father-in-law, for one, was in the habit of avoiding the otherwise

convenient Pan Island Expressway because a site of disinterment of his paternal line of the

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Ong clan exists along its length. The lingering discontent with the issue of death repeatedly

confirms Kong and Yeoh’s description of this process.32 S. Pile, Real cities (London, Sage, 2005) and K. Till, The new Berlin: memory, politics, place

(Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Pile’s work, in particular, provides a very

good introduction to the topic. However, I believe that further analysis of the Singaporean case

remains to be done � for all the great insight of Real cities , there are factors that make

Singaporean haunting distinct from that in New Orleans or Johannesburg. Pile’s work (perhaps

under the inevitably generalizing tendency of social psychology) makes comparisons where

this author might choose to find distinctions more instructive. Ghosts certainly represent the

return of the repressed, but they do so at the most general level: they also return in particular

forms, and within the subtle matrices of political context. And while Pile’s story of Chang Kat

(Real cities , p. 147) correctly identifies the subterranean force of the disinterred burial plot, the

political history of the latter seems of great importance. It also seems relevant to note that

ghosts seem to be conjured as political actors when the spectral, in particular, is a useful

stratagem � I, for one, do not think that they solely represent a psychology of urban loss and

alienation.33 See J. Lim, Between gods and ghosts: our supernatural skyline (Singapore, Marshall Cavendish

International Asia, 2005), p. 91.34 I refer here to Russell Lee’s The almost complete collection of true Singapore ghost stories series,

published by Angsana Books in Singapore from 1989 onwards. Volume 7 is on its 23rd edition

at the time of writing; it has sold over 115,000 copies. The Straits Times and Singapore Press

Holdings have also joined this bonanza, publishing own Singapore urban legends: myths and

mysteries (Singapore, their Straits Times , 2005).35 From an interview with an architect participating in the construction management of this

condominium project, 2005. Jonathan Lim also observes in Between gods and ghosts (‘Sick of

ghosts?’, p. 53) that hauntings are often locally manifested in the form of sicknesses diagnosed

by bomoh , or spirit media. There is a close symbolic association between ghosts and a sort of

spiritual malaise.36 Indeed, hauntings often seem to dramatize juxtapositions of different systems of value. Quite

frequently, ghosts appear to reassert social values in the overweening presence of material

ones: these include the observation of ritual, the respect of ancestral place and other forms of

social authority outside the purview of the state.37 In the Singapore 1998 and 2003 masterplans, these sites (part of block 386b) are labelled as

‘residential with commercial on first floor’.38 Sunday Times (Perth) (15 Aug. 2004), ‘Singapore gets retro to find soul’.39 To use the ‘official’ government definition.40 See C. Hudson, ‘Romancing Singapore: economies of love in a shrinking population’, paper

presented to the 15th biennial conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia in

Canberra, 29 June 2004.41 As reported by the International Red Cross, the campaign was marketed as a romantic

opportunity for couples in particular, who were invited to donate in the context of a date. As

reported, ‘couples who make a blood donation . . . will also have a photo taken together as a

memento of their noble act of giving the ‘‘Gift-of-Life’’ together’ (6 Feb. 2004), http://

www.redcross.org.sg/press_bdrp_6Feb2004.htm42 For a concise statement of this position, see http://www.egs.edu/main/videolectures.html.43 Kong and Yeoh, The politics of landscapes in Singapore , p. 74.44 This grave, which contains the remains of an early Chinese settler known as Qiu Zheng Zhi and

his wife, Madam Li Ci Shu, has been the subject of petitioning by a group of private-sector

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heritage enthusiasts. The tomb lies in the way of plans by the National Parks Board (NParks) to

create new horticultural displays for the Singapore Botanic Gardens. At the time of writing, the

NParks proposal has beenput onholdpending evaluationof the petition. The issuewas reported

in the Straits Times (Saturday, 19 Aug. 2006), H1, ‘Race to Save oldest Chinese tombs here’.45 See M. Topley, ‘Ghost marriages among the Singapore Chinese’, Man 55 (1955), p. 29.46 Migrants and ghosts seem indeed to have a special affinity, as both are, in an important sense,

spectral figures within Singaporean society. As Derrida observes in Specters of Marx (New

York, Routledge, 1994), the spectral � as the word implies � contains a meaning of

periodicity; ghosts come and go, making brief but disruptive appearances. I would argue that

mobile domestic labour carries a similar frisson , and perhaps it this perception of the maid’s

role as disruptive that has lead to the draconian legal constraints on their lives in the island

nation. For more on the position of migrants in Singapore, see B. Yeoh, S. Huang and J.

Gonzalez, ‘Migrant female domestic workers: debating the economic, social and political

impacts in Singapore’, International migration review 33 (1999), pp. 114�36.47 This is also discussed thoroughly in Pile’s Real cities , in part through the work of Michael Bell

(p. 136).48 Foucault’s discussion of death, particularly in Birth of the clinic , involves the encounter with

death as one stage in a process towards an ever-rationalizing medico-disciplinary science.

Death, for Foucault, is a means to power; it is not, to my knowledge, considered as a site of

resistance, despite ethnographic evidence to the contrary.49 The contentious character of hallowed ground is, moreover, not solely a Singaporean issue �

this is, worldwide, a rather unsettled type of landscape. Many Americans will recall the

difficulties that arrived, quite literally, at the doorstep of the US General Services Adminis-

tration as a result of the 1989 discovery of an African burial ground beneath present-day City

Hall Park in Manhattan. Similar problems befell the Washington State Department of

Transportation on the discovery of Tze-whit-zen , an extensive pre-Columbian village, during

construction of a marine facility to support the Hood Canal Bridge. See Times (Seattle) Lynda

C. Mapes ‘Ancient village, graveyard torn apart by bridge project’, (21 Nov. 2004). This type of

contentious issue was fictionalized in Sunshine State , a film by director John Sayles, wherein

modern development is brought to an abrupt halt by the discovery of a Native American

graveyard. The issue of death lies, symbolically, just beneath the surface; it would be the rock

upon which ‘progress’ founders.50 Indeed, retribution is one of the major forces embodied (or dis-embodied) in the figure of the

vengeful ghost. We see this theme return constantly in the Singaporean ghost-story genre, and

particularly in Russell Lee’s book series. While the historical proximity of disturbed graves is a

major factor, there are also inexplicable crimes that are redressed by the appearance of

spectres. One amazing example is retold by Jonathan Lim (Between gods and ghosts ), in which

a murdered Singapore Airlines flight attendant (the modern equivalent of the footloose female

migrant, perhaps) returns to destroy SIA flight 006 on takeoff from Taipei, on 31 Oct. 2000. The

logic of righting inexplicable wrongs � or at least of explaining them through an empirical

method � is here reminiscent of discussion in James Siegel’s Naming the witch (Stanford, CA,

Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 3ff. Here, Siegel presents witchcraft allegations as a

‘negative’ form of Marcel Mauss’s famous gift-structure: as a means of explaining unwarranted

violence and tragedy within social worlds.51 This set was designed by architect Ong Ker-Shing and by the author, along with Mark Wee of

DP Architects.52 Lim, Between gods and ghosts , p. 64.

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Ghostly topographies: landscape and biopower in modern Singapore

Documents