solidarity with lebanese people

If you are looking for ways to help or just do something, please consider the following.

1) There is an international petition to Save the Lebanese Civilians at http://epetitions.net/julywar/index.php that will be sent to representatives of many countries. (This website sometimes has trouble with its server, so be patient when trying to access it.) There are already over 200,000 signatures.

2) Please consider making a donation to the Sanayeh Relief Centre. I know there are many relief organizations out there and most people just give to the Red Cross or whatever, but these aren't necessarily the best organizations to give the money to. Sanayeh is a grassroots organization that is posting regular updates on its blog about the work it is doing. Perhaps more importantly, it's strongly connected to peoples' movements on the ground (unlike big-time NGOs like the Red Cross and Doctors without Borders) and is very clear about its analysis and position on the situation (again, unlike other NGOs which profess to be neutral and non-political - is that ever even possible?). For specific info on how to help, read this particular post.

out-of-bound markers

By my sketchpad

another tsunami. um..this is kinda creepy

Last night i dreamt that i was walking along a beach and was swept to sea by a gigantonormous wave.

This morning i find out:
Tsunami on Indonesia's Java coast kills 80 people
(The death toll is rising.)

stunned by Israel

Just got back from a 5-day trip to the Indonesian province of Aceh, as part of a small tsunami relief project. I have so many thoughts on the trip, but will save them for another post or two. For now, i am still reeling from what is going on in the Middle East.

Sitting on the plane on Friday evening, starved for knowledge of the world's goings-on in the last week, i was visibly grateful to the NGO doctor from Bangalore sitting next to me for sharing his copy of the Jakarta Post with me. There, splashed across the front page, was the news that Israel had attacked Lebanon.

A few pages later, still stunned, i read this excellent piece by the guy who runs the StopTheWall website, including the following lines:

The global community pleads for the release of one Israeli taken from a tank, stationed outside the Gaza ghetto, whilst Palestinians are taken from their beds and killed in the streets and half of their government and 1/3 of the Palestinian Legislative Council are taken hostage. They beg for his return whilst ignoring the 9000 Palestinians rotting in Israeli jails, over 400 of whom are children.

Global agencies confine their operations to fact-finding missions on the “Palestinian situation” speculating endlessly on humanitarian issues as if Palestine were in the throws of some natural disaster. Reeling off further UN humanitarian reports are not asked for. Palestinians don’t need to be told by the World Bank about their own poverty and they don’t need the hollow rhetorical support of governments which fail to follow up words with deeds. The facts on the ground in Palestine are there for all to see. We need action. We need political pressure on the Occupation. We need freedom.

And then this afternoon, while plugging through my 123 unread emails from the last week, i came across one that exposes a clear connection between the multi-billion dollar corporation that is Starbucks and the Zionist apartheid state that is Israel. Although the letter is a parody, it seems to be based on factual evidence that Starbucks does, in fact, help fund Israeli apartheid.

Anyway, this is totally just a rant about things most people who read my (very unimpressive and lately, much neglected) blog probably already know about, but i can't help feeling so angry and helpless about the kind of world we live in, where those who hold the reins of power can rule with an iron fist when they feel like, can bomb peoples' homes, kill innocent bodies, destroy peoples' lives, reap the benefits of war, and then get away with it.

Singapore You Are Not My Country
(For Noora)

Singapore you are not my country.
Singapore you are not a country at all.
You are surprising Singapore, statistics-starved Singapore, soulful Singapore of tourist brochures in Japanese and hourglass kebayas.
You protest, but without picketing, without rioting, without Catherine Lim,
but through your loudspeaker media, through the hypnotic eyeballs of your newscasters,
and that weather woman who I swear is working voodoo on my teevee screen.
Singapore, what are these lawsuits in my mailbox?
There are so many sheaves, I should have tipped the postman.
Singapore, I assert, you are not a country at all.
Do not raise your voice against me, I am not afraid of your anthem although the lyrics are still bleeding from the bark of my sapless heart.
Not because I sang them pigtailed pinnafored breakfasted chalkshoed in school
But because I used to watch telly till they ran out of shows.
Do not invite me to the podium and tell me to address you properly.
I am allergic to microphones and men in egosuits and pubicwigs.
And I am not a political martyr, I am a patriot who has lost his country and virginity.
Do not wave a cane at me for vandalising your propaganda with technicolour harangues,
Red Nadim semen white Mahsuri menses the colourful language of my eloquent generation.
Your words are like walls on which truth is graffiti.
This has become an island of walls.
Asylum walls, factory walls, school walls, the walls of the midnight Istana.
If I am paranoid I have learnt it from you, O my delicate orchid stalk Singapore,
Always thirsty for water, spooked by armed archipelagoes, always gasping for airspace, always running to keep ahead, running away from yourself.
Singapore why do you wail that way, demanding my IC?
Singapore stop yelling and calling me names.
How dare you call me a chauvinist, an opposition party, a liar,
a traitor, a mendicant professor, a Marxist homosexual communist
pornography banned literature chewing gum liberty smuggler?
How can you say I do not believe in
The Free Press autopsies flogging mudslinging bankruptcy
which are the five pillars of Justice?
And how can you call yourself a country, you terrible hallucination
of highways and cranes and condominiums ten minutes drive from the MRT?

Tell that to the battered housewife who thinks happiness lies at the end of a Toto Queue.
Tell that to the tourist guide whose fillings are pewter whose feelings are iron
whose courtesy is gold whose speech is silver whose handshake is a lethal yank at the jackpot machine.
Tell that to my imam who thinks we are all going to hell.
Tell that to the chao ah beng who has seven stitches a broken collarbone and three dead comradesbut who will not hesitate from thrusting his tiger ribcage into another fight
because the lanterns of his lungs have caught their own fire and there is no turning back.
Tell that to the yuppie who sits in meat-markets disguised as pubs, listening to Kenny G disguised as jazz on handphone disguised as conversation and loneliness disguised as a jukebox.
Tell that to all those exiles whose names are forgotten but who leave behind a bad taste in the thoughtful mouth, reminding us that the flapping sunned linen shelters a whiff of chloroform.
Tell that to Town Council men who feed pigeons with crumbs of arsenic.
Tell that to Maria Hertogh a.k.a Nadra who proved to us that blood spilled was thicker than water shed as she was caught pining under a stone angel in the nunnery for her husband.
Tell that to Ah Meng, who bore six hairy bastards for our nation.
Tell that to Lee Kuan Yew's squint.
Tell that to Josef Ng, who shaves my infant head amidst a shower of one-cent coins, and both of us are pure again.
Tell that to my Warrant Officer who knew I was faking.
Tell that to the unemployed man who drinks cigarettes smokes tattoos watches peanuts
unself-conscious of his gut belch debts and wife having an affair with the Salesman of Nervous Breakdowns.
Tell that to our Maya Angelou's who are screeching like witches United Nations-style poems populated by Cheena Babi Bayee Tonchet Melayu Malas Keling Geragok Mat Salleh.
Tell that to the fakirs of civil obedience, whose headphones are pounding the hooving basslines of Damyata Damyata Damyata.
Tell that to the statue of Li Po at Marina Park.
Tell that to the performance artists who need licences like drivers and doctors and dogs
when all they really need is just three percent of your love.
Tell that to the innocent faggot looking for kicks on a Sunday evening to end up sucking the bit-hard pistol-muzzle of the CID, ensnared no less by his weakness for pretty boys naked out of uniform.
Tell that to the caretaker of the grave of Radin Mas.
Tell that to Chee Soon Juan's smirk.
Tell that to the pawns of The Upgrading Empire who penetrate their phalluses into heartlands to plant Lego cineplexes Tupperware playgrounds suicidal balconies carnal parks of cardboard and condoms and before we know it we are a colony once again.
Tell that to Malaysia whose Desaru is our spittoon whose TV2 is our amusement whose Bumiputras are our threat whose outrage is our greater outrage whose turtles are weeping blind in the roaring daylight of our cameras.
Tell that to the old poets who have seen this piece of land slip their metaphors each passing year from bumboats to debris to sanitation projects to drowning attempts to barbed neon water weeds on a river with no reflections a long way off from the sea.
O Singapore your fair shores your garlands your GNP.
You are not a country you are a construction from spare parts.
You are not a campaign you are last year's posters.
You are not culture you are poems on the MRT.
You are not a song you are part swear word part lullaby.
You are not Paradise you are an island with pythons.

Singapore I am on trial.
These are the whites of my eyes and the reds of my wrists.
These are the deranged stars of my schizophrenia.
This is the milk latex gummy moon of my sedated smile.
I have lost a country to images, it is as simple as that.
Singapore you have a name on a map but no maps to your name.
This will not do; we must stand aside and let the Lion
crash through a madness of cymbals back to that dark jungle heart
when eyes were still embers waiting for a crownless Prince of Palembang.

Alfian Sa'at
One Fierce Hour
(available at MPH Bookstore)

tsunami voyeurism

Thai survivors and relief workers say they were most angered that the crew chose to re-enact the disaster _complete with dead bodies and overturned cars_ on the main road through Khao Lak that was devastated by the giant waves.

Others were upset the crew chose to put up flyers throughout the tsunami-hit region, saying victims were needed as extras.

"It was pretty tasteless. People are not happy," said Robert Reynolds, an American charity director whose Srithong Thukaoluan Foundation is supporting more than 100 children affected by the tsunami.

Finola Dwyer, the drama's producer, said she regretted the wording in the flyer. But she defended the decision to shoot in areas hit by the tsunami.

"Why not? It did happen. It's not a piece of fiction," Dwyer said.

Full story