Loss without nostalgia

Kit Chan has retired, and I wonder if people are starting to feel she has been around for too long. She is a great singer but I guess its here that sentiments fail to cling and loss is often without nostalgia. It is like a theatre sometimes, where repetition makes everything seem so unreal, and people just leave life like an dead dumb audience.

People are driven to theorize by a sense of displacement, need to make sense of a world that suddenly appears out of joint. It is the acceptance of finitude and recognizing the human condition, and that the will to change arises. Suppression may be causation for the lack of a form political will. This somewhat translates into a sense of helplessness and fatalism. Hopelessly nostalgic in the romantic extreme may not be what is exactly desirable. But that should obscure our senses, or erase the spirit to change, to idealize and to strive.

Nostalgia need not be a pathology of reaction. It could sometimes be the only legitimate way of being in the world. And furthermore so, writers and artist here deserves the nation's pang of nostalgia, for a creative past. Kit Chan will be missed not as a singer, but as a voice, unique of Singapore.


The Last Kampung
Alfian Sa'at

Everybody heard that pause
in the middle of the azan
when the muezzin tried
to recover his voice.

It was easy to imagine
cocks crooning mournful,
cats becoming more affectionate,
trees throwing their shadows
at earlier hours,
lost birds, a new map in the sky -

as if everything knew.

One last look
as rooms reclaimed their echoes:
at trees unmarked by the number
of times they have borne fruit,
at muddy alleys criss-crossed by
the prints of many-sized Japanese slippers,
at neighbours, masseurs, bread-sellers,
healers, gossips, debtors.....

What is there
to look foward to
but nostalgia?
On the last evening in the last kampung
a mother rocked her baby
in the embryo of its buaian
singing its lullabies over and over
for fear the child owuld forget.

The well has already forgotten.
Its stupefied mouth gapes wide,
as if in the middle of a sentence,

speechless with the memory of a drowned moon.