Kiasipolitics: Sagas, Scandals and Suicides in Johann S. Lee’s Peculiar Chris

Abstract

This chapter evaluates Singapore as a ‘necrocolony’, a space of limitations and negativities, resulting in a fear to follow as well as a fear to lead. As productivity is a prime indicator of Singapore’s national development and progress, an able and healthy body that assures the effective production and reproduction of material and human products, respectively, is perceived to be instrumental in fulfilling the decrees of the authoritarian nation-state. Bodies that do not fit into this census are often sensationalized by the state media as deviating from the onus of the political economy. In Singapore, cases of adultery, racism and suicides thereby represent a negative supplement to the biopolitical governance of the populace. Made visible from an erstwhile anonymity, these happenings raise important questions as to how the everyday policing of life has become subjugated to the ‘powers of death’ and why such violent affects have become internalized by members of the population, both native and foreign. These are the imaginary affects of what Zubillaga-Pow refers to as kiasipolitics, a portmanteau of the political discourse and the deliberations over being kiasi, a Hokkien phrase meaning to be afraid of death or dying. It is used in Singapore to describe the attitude of being overly afraid or timid, and of adopting extreme means to avoid risk. Zubillaga-Pow scrutinizes how Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics stands in contrary to the communal desire to make Singapore a home to live, work and play. Through a necrographical, as opposed to biographical, approach, Zubillaga-Pow demonstrates how, in Johann S. Lee’s 1992 novel Peculiar Chris, the propensity for killing and the trepidation of dying prevail in recent times of both peace and terror.