The Present

AN ALTERNATIVE PRESENT haunts Boo Junfeng’s “Happy and Free”, a speculative karaoke video commemorating “a Malaysian Singapore that never came to be”, which “provoked […] a deep sense of unease, loss, longing and finally, melancholy”. Played on screen at the Penang Harmony Centre as part of the 63-65: Notes From a Separation performance workshop, Boo’s uncanny vision of a united Malaysia and Singapore was showcased alongside an artificially recreated speech by Tunku Abdul Rahman, prepared specifically for the audience. Resurrected through voice cloning technology, a digitised Tunku reads the proclamation of Singapore’s separation in Parliament. But it is still too polished and seamless, and his unrecorded emotions remain elusive.

Released from an imagined archive, these videos and other artefacts bring the one-time state from the south back into focus almost 60 years after Malaysia and Singapore parted ways. The importance of the past is ever-present, as seen from how the trauma of a botched decolonisation reverberate in fiction, film and graphic novels. Two shared years as a country keep etching themselves into national symbols and histories, against the divisions enacted through separate currencies and institutions. But is it possible to re-interpret this moment in the present, even under the weight of decades’ worth of historical narratives? Perhaps. Uncertainties remain over the past—and among the workshop’s participants, facts, anecdotes and speculations over the Separation were not easily distinguishable. Some questions remain open. What exactly do the stripes and stars on the Malaysian and Singaporean flags signify? What place do family histories occupy within national narratives?

Origins

The seeds of 63-65 were sown during the Movement Control Order. Perusing online versions of Malaysian Parliamentary Hansards from 1965, Fasyali Fadzly, a Johorean theatre practitioner and educator, juxtaposed the documents from immediately before and after 9 August, when parliamentarians of newly diminished countries continued to negotiate the details of lives apart. This research was the impetus for a series of performances with his Singaporean colleagues, Shaifulbahri Mohamad of Bahri & Co, and Nabilah Said, which explores the nuances of merger-and-separation through an assortment of documents taken from their imagined archive.

For Nabilah, the archive was an active, contested place. “A historical archive presents itself as objective, but we know there can be no one objective historical narrative—what gets captured is already a subjective selection,” she remarked.

Curating and revisiting these artefacts became an attempt to “collectively try to make meaning of and add ‘life’ to history”. But any history also invites counterfactuals. Take, for example, other possible turning points such as Penang’s vote on secession in 1949, Johor’s own short-lived secession movement on the eve of Merdeka, or the “Lima Negara” of Malaya, Singapore, Sabah, Sarawak and Brunei, commemorated on record sleeves before the Brunei Rebellion’s outbreak. Had things gone differently, national boundaries in the archipelago could have been transformed.

While a documentary theatre format featuring the “multimedia staging of documents, and the notion of theatre as a forensic activity”, could have lent itself well to interrogating the Separation, the 63–65 team went further in shifting the focus from practitioners to audience members.

The audience is the key element of any dramatic performance, and here, we co-created the session by interpreting and creatively transforming the materials provided. The most crucial aspect of 63-65 was the degree to which participants engaged with the material on hand. While stressing the session’s educational nature, Fasyali remarked on how it was an attempt to be egalitarian. Thus, their approach ran in contrast with the top-down approaches of formalising official national histories.

“Think of it like attending a history class, but with a more interactive, hands-on approach,” he remarked. By reflecting upon history as objectively and democratically as possible, Fasyali saw this as a way to “uncover and explore complex emotions and historical connections”.

Rather than to judge the decision to part ways, the session provided a collective opportunity to contextualise why the Separation unfolded the way it did—all while grappling with the emotions of the time. Snippets of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s mediated weeping on camera, regretful pantun declaimed by parliamentarians in KL, and the vague hope of some sort of future together played on screen, past emotions worked their way into present.

It was possible to reinterpret a time when Singapore’s cabinet threatened to collapse over the secret meetings that resulted in the Separation, while people such as Professor Wang Gungwu at the University of Malaya were coming to terms with the new reality of two nation-states, condemned to negotiating “the fundamental contradictions in post-colonial nation building”. But the lived effects of the Separation on the ground were just as important: Fasyali acknowledged how “people at the time of separation had to choose where to reside, facing emotional and practical challenges.”

Now, presented with copies of speeches from President Yusof Ishak and Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, each fearing for their newly independent state, the uncertainties of 1965 re-emerged.

Futures

Yet 63–65 was not entirely serious; it was also subversive and hopeful. Fragmented speeches, deliberately taken out of context, invited fresh interpretations through a blackout poetry exercise, where we read the figures of history against the grain of posterity. A sharing session allowed us to think about what possible futures looked like, even if the impacts of the Separation continued to structure daily life.

Nabilah saw the Separation’s legacies etched into the very fact of Singapore’s independence, with its discourse of survival and self-sufficiency. “Merger and separation as points of history can definitely feel esoteric—even academic—but it continues to shape Malaysia–Singapore relations and identities in ways we don’t always have space to talk about.”

Hailing from the south, Fasyali saw the Separation not as finality, but as an ongoing negotiation of the links between the island and mainland. “As a Johorean, I’ve always felt that we have a unique relationship with Singapore and its people compared to the rest of Malaysia. I’ve never felt separated from Singapore, either geographically or mentally.” These linkages played out in the geography of his childhood kampung, where Singapore’s water supply was channelled from its river over the Causeway to where several family members worked, dimming only when he moved to KL.

Thus, 63–65 offers not only a chance to engage with history, but also the broader process of memory. Like a stage play, remembrance is performed differently each time, distorting as much as it preserves.

Having already performed in Singapore, the team envisioned a three-year project that would culminate with the 60th anniversary of Separation in 2025. Depending on resources, they could stage a documentary theatre performance or work in collaboration with not just audiences, but also historians, politicians and artistic practitioners. To this end, the need for grants and arts funding was crucial to keep having such conversations.

Returning to Wang Gungwu, perhaps of greater importance than history is the future—he imagined that “the future country was a question mark whose answer depended on those who actively worked to shape it”. Even today, ideas of nations are always open to reconstruction, in line with Nabilah’s observation that 63–65 was never just an engagement with the past alone: “[W]e also want to speculate about the future—so it’s not only about looking back.”

Footnotes:

[1] Lim, Daryl, Melizarani Selva, and Hamid Roslan. (2023). “A Conversation.”. In D. Lim, M. Selva, Hamid Roslan, & W. L. Tham (Eds.), The Second Link: An Anthology of Malaysian & Singaporean Writing (pp. 9–16). Marshall Cavendish International Asia, pp. 9-10.

[2] Watson, Jini Kim. (2021). Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization. Duke University Press.

[3] Singapore’s government had briefly viewed history as inimical to national interests before coopting the discipline for nation-building purposes. Meanwhile, contestations over textbook narratives have erupted in Malaysia. See Loh, Kah Seng. (1998). Within The Singapore Story: The Use and Narrative of History in Singapore.” Crossroads, 12(2), pp. 1–21; and Ting, Helen M.H. (2009), Malaysian History Textbooks and the Discourse of Ketuanan Melayu. In Daniel Goh et al. (eds.), Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore, edited by Daniel Goh et al., pp. 36-52. Routledge.

[4] Koay Su Lyn. (2022.) “Reassessment of Penang’s industrialisation and economic transformation: From chief ministers Wong Pow Nee to Lim Chong Eu, 1960s–1980s”, MA thesis, NUS, pp. 26-29. See also her two-part article for Penang Monthly, “Penang: The Rebel State”, in September and October 2016.

[5] Harper, Timothy. (1999) The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya, Cambridge University Press, p. 330-1. According to Caleb Goh of the Nam Hoe Brickfields, the Persatuan Kebangsaan Melayu Johor, which capitalised on the Sultan’s dissatisfaction with the prospect of independence and his loss of sovereignty, had initially done well before dwindling to ten members by mid-1957.

[6] Augustin, Paul, and Ng, Jocelyn Marcia. (2023). From the Archives: Music and the Formation of Malaysia. In D. Lim, M. Selva, Hamid Roslan, & W. L. Tham (eds.), The Second Link: An Anthology of Malaysian & Singaporean Writing (pp. 78–89). Marshall Cavendish International Asia.

[7] Zilliacus, C. (1972). Documentary Drama: Form and Content. Comparative Drama 6(3), 223- 253. https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.1972.0018, p. 224

[8] Kosidowski, P. (2003). Thinking Through the Audience. Theatre Topics 13(1), 83-86. https://doi. org/10.1353/tt.2003.0010.

[9] Thum, Ping Tjin. Nationalism and Decolonisation in Singapore: The Malayan Generation, 1953–1963. Routledge, pp.1-2.

[10] Wang, Gungwu and Margaret Wang. Home Is Where We Are. NUS Press, 2021, P. 241.

[11] Bertens, Laura M.F. (2020). “Doing” memory: performativity and cultural memory in Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Alter Bahnhof Video Walk. Holocaust Studies, 26(2), pp. 181-197.

[12] Wang, op. cit., pp. 10-11.