Annotations
Previously known as Temasek (or Tumasik), Singapura (singa means lion, pura means city) was named by the Malay prince Sang Nila Utama who founded the island in 1299. In 1819, Stamford Raffles of the British East India Company set up a trading post in Singapore, of which the island was under British administration and a crown colony between 1819 to 1959. The name Singapura was standardized to Singapore. Singapore was known as Syonan/Syonanto during the Japanese occupation between 1942 to 1945.
The word kampung means village (singular) in Malay. In Malay language plural, a word is written twice and a hyphen is used.
The sources regarding coolies in this essay derived from Singapore-based articles written in 2016 and 2017. The term is considered offensive and replaced with indentured labour. It is believed that the word derived from the Hindi term kuli. In Tamil, the word kuli means ‘hire’. Indentured labourers during the British colonial period were recorded to be of many Chinese and Indian descent, with a small number of Malay descent. Indian communities who are descendants of indentured labourers have reclaimed certain terms as a way of mitigating colonial violence embedded in the language. The meaning of the term shifts depending on who is using the term.
Source: The Statutes of the Republic of Singapore, Foreshores Act 1920, ed 2020. Published by The Law Revision Commission.
In Singapore, ‘apartment’ and ‘flat’ have different socioeconomic and class connotations; apartments are associated with luxury and privatized housing e.g condominiums, while HDB flats are subsidized public housing made affordable for the working and lower-middle class citizens. HDB flats are built by the government agency Housing & Development Board.
Source: The Straits Times, 1983
There is an ambivalence to the word great when used in colonial-capitalist context, as its function in describing vastness often is seen as a positive largeness e.g. great transformation that fails to take account of social and environmental impacts.
“Long Island” land reclamation project off East Coast Park. Source: The Straits Times, 2023
Development is a word that is associated with notions of positive progress particularly in nation-building. In Singapore the word is commonly phrased along with multiple national needs such as: benefit, economic growth, social progress, industrial productivity, securing jobs and future opportunities for the next generation.
Reclamation project in Changi area. Source: The Straits Times, 2025
Possibility of reclaiming
ancestral knowledge
on uncertain grounds
Fajrina Razak
ancestral knowledge
on uncertain grounds
Fajrina Razak
Past, present and future Singapore
In Singapura, we are constantly steered by shapeshifting, transient crossroads in the ethos of modern public culture. We witnessed the loss of kampung-kampung, the uprooting and displacement of coastal communities such as the orang laut (sea people), vestiges and remnants of attachments, traditions and belief systems.
Land reclamation practice in Singapore island began in 1822, four years after the British officially claimed Singapore as a colony. The first land reclamation project took place at the south bank of the Singapore River, where a hillock was levelled to provide earth to fill a low-lying marsh wetland. The process took about four months with about 300
Image of the first block of flats being built on Marine Parade.
Source: Housing & Development Board, Singapore, Annual Report 1972
In recent years, the government announced an 800 hectares
Long Island land reclamation project off the shores of East Coast Park consisting three tracts of land in response to threats of rising sea levels and inland flooding, expected by the end of the century, thus creating new homes, recreational needs and a new reservoir (The Straits Times, 2023). In 2025, another new reclamation project of 193 hectares is set to be carried out off the Changi area for the development of an aviation park near the Changi Airport, where a seagrass meadow area is thriving. The reclaimed area will be used “to support Singapore’s future economic growth and to meet long-term industrial land use needs”. The area to be reclaimed were surveyed and adjustments were made to cut the reclaim area to nearly one-fifth, that will benefit a seagrass area of 34 hectares (The Straits Times, 2025).
Image of the shore along East Coast Park, Singapore, January 2025. Photo: Fajrina Razak
Singapore inherited several aspects of colonial practice, one of which is language, that is used in governmental, legal, trade and commercial affairs. Singapore English became the country's lingua franca. Through the education system, we adopted English as the common working language. We are exposed to colonial-capitalist language that centres on industriousness and economic gains. The people and population are regarded as human resources for the nation’s workforce. A peculiar use of specific vocabulary in these terms are often phrased with neutralised terms such as “part of nation’s progress” or “reflects aspirations of future generations”, while masking underlying social inequalities and neglecting the non-human beings. This language puts risk for the generation born after independence, disassociating them from their immediate realities in relation to social and natural environments. When speaking of day to day struggles, the modern Malay working-class converse with common metaphors such as “duit mengalir macam air” (which means money flows rapidly like tap water) in their daily language, relating money as a resource like water that should be wisely spent. Daily language is spoken with urban economic dimensions.
Author Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o’s description of language in relation to culture resonates with Singapore’s circumstance: “The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe.” Language is central to culture and it carries a means of communicating values. Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history (Ngũgĩ, 1986). Artist Brett Bloom describes metaphors as powerful and buried deep within our language and how we relate to the world. A common saying in industrious culture is “time is money”. Quoting from Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By: “When we are living by the metaphors Labour is a Resource and Time is a Resource, as we do in our culture, we tend not to see them as metaphors at all. Both are structural metaphors that are basic to Western industrial societies” (Bloom, 2018). Can language be deindustrialised?
While the word tanah is defined as earth, it is also used for definitions of soil and land.
Nusantara is a Malay-Javanese term for the Indo-Malay archipelago or Maritime Southeast Asia. The archipelago consists of more than 17,000 islands and more than 300 ethnic groups and languages.
Bahasa means language e.g Bahasa Melayu or Bahasa Indonesia.
Petua is a Malay word for folkloric knowledge.
Shapeshifting is not just about material transformation of islands and coastlines but also about shifting identities and language. My thinking of shapeshifting is influenced by artist Zarina Muhammad’s work Pragmatic Prayers for the Kala at the Threshold, 2018, Singapore Art Museum.
Reclaiming and returning to the language of
ancestral wisdoms
In my text-based on batik work ways of repair / cara-cara pulih (2021-2024), I wrote “Kembali pada adat, cari mantera yang hilang”, in literal translates as “to return to tradition, seek the lost mantra/chants”. This work is my artistic intervention for a call to return to the unwritten, customary law of animism while living with existing modern infrastructures and refusing further developments. Mantera in the text refers to oral traditions and language spoken in rituals. Mantera, when spoken, does not carry industrial, colonial and capitalist language. It is a language typically spoken to (un)seen and more-than-human beings that cannot be monetised in any form. Mantera is spoken to cure (and to care). “Kembali pada adat” led me to rethink the afterlives of extracted natural resources for the land reclamation projects (land, sea, sand, soil, water). If humans speak to these natural “resources” with a caring language as we would speak to a person, would we be driven to extract them in the first place? We have to view the natural world as a kin we form relations with, rather than as materials for resources.
Tanahair / tanah air / tanah-air (pronounced as tuh-nuh uh-yer) is the Malay word for homeland. In literal translation, tanah is earth, while air is water. When unpacking meanings related to land-based and sea-based systems, tanahair is more nuanced to the Nusantara communities and its more-than-human entities. Homeland, in the Nusantara worldview(s) must include both land and water bodies to form a sense of complete rootedness. It is impossible to separate land and water bodies as two separate entities within the communities whose livelihoods rely on them. When we ‘rely’ on the earth and water, a non-hierarchical relationship is formed between us. Earth and water are not resources to be extracted, but an equal living beings that allow us access to make a livelihood.
My thoughts on the notion of tanahair led me to think in creole between English and Bahasa, to think of languages more poetically as an oral tradition and spiritual language. I recall my mother transmitting to me one petua, tanam kuku dalam tanah, which involves burying cut fingernails in the soil. This was a traditional custom back in rural Singapore, and that custom has now shapeshifted into the urban. In highly urbanised Singapore where public land is governed by the State, citizens have limited access to owning private land. Hyper development has further transformed and jeopardized traditional practices. Transmitting knowledge between the generation that lived in rural environments to the generation who are now raised in highly urbanised states becomes more difficult. Languages are now more urbanised. When the body has little access to soil, does the body remember? Many traditional practices in the Nusantara revolve around tanah (soil). Traditionally, body parts that parted from the living body, such as finger or toe-nails, hair and the placenta after childbirth would be buried in soil rather than being left in an exposed state. The act of burying is a situated ancestral knowledge that offers protection from the evil eyes casting black magic and wrongdoings by the seen and unseen beings. Here is where tanahair consists of shapeshifting qualities.
Remnants of traditions and belief systems continue to be passed down resisting industrialisation. For the urban dwellers, relearning the pre-industrial language is needed to care for the land, soil and water bodies, resisting the risk of hyper urbanisation forcing into traditional practices. Embodied rural knowledge still persists in the city, but now taking shape in a different form of embodiment that is modern and urban. Traditional customs and everyday practices that seem like the trivial relics of a superstitious knowledge are threatened with erasure, now that urban culture has dominated knowledge systems. This attitude towards oral tradition and other ephemeral knowledge is a crisis that signals a threat of intangible cultural loss. Can shapeshifting erupt the rationality of hyper urbanisation?
Potawatani botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s description of how a healthy landscape is imagined in indigenous worldviews resonates with traditional relations to land on the Nusantara: “In the indigenous worldview, a healthy landscape is understood to be whole and generous enough to be able to sustain its partners. It engages land not as a machine but as a community of respected nonhuman persons to whom we humans have a responsibility. Restoration requires renewing the capacity not only for "ecosystem services" but for "cultural services" as well. Renewal of relationships includes water that you can swim in and not be afraid to touch. Restoring relationship means that when the eagles return, it will be safe for them to eat the fish. People want that for themselves, too. Biocultural restoration raises the bar for environmental quality of the reference ecosystem, so that as we care for the land, it can once again care for us.” (Kimmerer, 2013)
Tikar as site for communal healing
The modern Singapore landscape is clustered with vertical visuals of high-rise flats and apartments, industrial complexes, skyscrapers and utopian-designed buildings. Driven by the desire to repair and reclaim notions of tanahair, my work sit(e) for negotiation to (historical) repair (2025) assembled along with a short film work documentation of the exhausted tanah air (2025-ongoing) are pursuits for resistance to the ‘verticality’ of accumulation. Sitting on a tikar (woven mat) grounds the body close to the earth. In Nusantara, practices of making and utilising tikar predates modern-western furnishings such as tables and chairs.
Daily household activities involving tikar include eating, resting and napping. For communal gatherings and special occasions such as a kenduri, a bunch of tikar would be spread out across the floors to feast the guests. Before disposable utensils were available, foods and drinks were served on washable plates and glasses. Forget the fork and spoon, the people of Nusantara eat with our hands. Often guests would offer to prepare food and cook together with the hosts, and wash the dishes after the feast is served. This concept of offering an extra hand during special occasions is called rewang. Here, tikar is a symbol for communal healing that collectively resists hyper modernity. Thinking with tikar grounds me back to the core of traditional and ancestral knowledge.
documentation of the exhausted tanah air, Fajrina Razak, Film still, 2025-ongoing. Presented at Goldsmiths’ MA Art & Ecology Degree Show 2025.
Image of the first block of flats being built on Marine Parade. Source: Annual Report 1972, Housing & Development Board, Singapore.
Screengrab of Foreshores Act 1920 clause 4. Source: The Statutes of the Republic of Singapore, Ed 2020. Published by The Law Revision Commission.
“The great land reclamation at East Coast”. Screengrab of digitized copy of article from national newspaper The Straits Times, printed in 1983.
Image of the shore along East Coast Park, Singapore, January 2025. Photo by Fajrina Razak.
193ha of land off Changi to be reclaimed for aviation park; area reduced to save seagrass meadows. Source: screengrab of online article from The Straits TImes, 2025.
ways of repair / cara-cara pulih, Fajrina Razak, batik on silk-viscose fabric, 2021-2024, presented in Jendela, Esplanade. Image courtesy of Esplanade Theatres on the Bay, Singapore.
Image snippet from film still ways of repair / cara-cara pulih (2025), Fajrina Razak.
2 photos from the family archive of Fajrina Razak, 1990.
sit(e) for negotiation to (historical) repair, Fajrina Razak, Installation view and performance documentation, presented at Goldsmiths’ MA Art & Ecology Degree Show 2025. Photo by Yeeun Kim.
Housing & Development Board (HDB), 1976, A Home Of Our Own. Produced by Cathay Film Services Ltd for the Housing and Development Board (HDB). Available at National Archives Singapore: https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/audiovisual_records/record-details/6790d226-1164-11e3-83d5-0050568939ad (Accessed 11 November 2025)
Lim Tin Seng, Land from Sand, 2017. Available at: https://biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg/vol-13/issue-1/apr-jun-2017/land-from-sand/ (Accessed 1 June 2025)
Thulaja, Naidu Ratnala, Chinese coolies, 2016. Available at: https://www.nlb.gov.sg/main/article-detail?cmsuuid=1934198c-b5bf-4980-abc7-0aeb29ed39c9 (Accessed 21 November 2025)
Housing & Development Board, Singapore, Annual Report 1972. Available at: https://www.nlb.gov.sg/main/book-detail?cmsuuid=22f3bb2e-1260-4ab4-90a0-97ac533b3d52 (Accessed 25 November 2025)
The Statutes of the Republic of Singapore, Foreshores Act 1920, ed 2020. Available at https://sso.agc.gov.sg/Act/FA1920 (Accessed 21 January 2025)
The great land reclamation at East Coast, The Straits Times, November 21, 1983. Available at: https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/page/straitstimes19831121-1.1.7 (Accessed 11 November 2025)
Qing, Ang, 193ha of land off Changi to be reclaimed for aviation park; area reduced to save seagrass meadow, 2025. Available at: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/environment/193ha-of-land-off-changi-to-be-reclaimed-for-aviation-park-area-reduced-to-save-seagrass-meadow (Accessed 1 June 2025)
Ng Keng Gene, and Shabana Begum, Long Island to be reclaimed off East Coast could add 800ha of land, create Singapore’s 18th reservoir, The Straits Times, 29 November 2023. Available at:https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/long-island-to-be-reclaimed-off-east-coast-could-add-800ha-of-land-and-singapore-s-18th-reservoir (Accessed 24 November 2025)
Begum, Shabana, Reclaimed from the sea: How East Coast and Marine Parade came to be, The Straits Times, 28 November 2023. Available at:https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/reclaimed-from-the-sea-how-east-coast-and-marine-parade-came-to-be (Accessed 21 November 2025)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, Decolonising the Mind : The Politics of Language in African Literature (James Currey, 1986)
Bloom, Brett, Petro-Subjectivity: De-Industrializing Our Sense of Self (Breakdown Break Down Press, 2015)
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press, 2003)
Zarina Muhammad on Spirit Histories, Shape-shifting Spaces and The Cultural Biographies of Things, Object Lessons Space, 2018. Available at: https://objectlessons.space/Zarina-Muhammad-on-Spirit-Histories-Shape-shifting-Spaces-and-The (accessed 20 February 2025)
Kimmerer, Robin Wall, Braiding Sweetgrass : Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2013)