"Death Penalty for Cutie", Lune Loh
CW: death, misogyny, drugs, bodily harm, sexual + domestic violence
Solidarity on Facebook? Apparently, people get together to rehearse the scientific truth of Law and Order. Death to criminals, to the disenfranchised, to the margins. I felt, I thought, I wished: how nice it would be to be able to relate to someone, but I cannot touch another's hand while they find safety in being faceless, safety via misreading the violence done to all of us.
20 SGD for a sci-fi book – tense between its pages are use and exchange value, both past-bound and future-trapped. South-East Asian studies retain both use and exchange value, like the postcolonial States of South-East Asia. Someone traffics a quantified, numerical, definite SGD/gram; each life hung is both a blank and infinite value, but the cost, the cost remains.
A tweeted reply: "it's punishing someone who knew this consequence was likely for his crime. he deserves it", like we deserve it all, for all our inherent darkness that is punishable. Like we deserve work that saps our lives, like we deserve to fail, to have no shelter or place to drink. To be punished for the harshness and necessity of living, while living. We don't deserve to speak to one another. We haven't spoken and seen a stranger's eyes, searching for the textures and memories in their eyes, for a while now. My hijabi sister explains to me how the Islamic clergy is conflated with divine justice, how morality is conflated with divine justice. I remember how there is no morality when I think of the strangers in my head, no "ought" or "should", but the bare necessities that are scars, pigments, and marks, relations between words onto skin, knife onto skin, rope around skin. But I do want her to be okay. In the UK, she came down with COVID. Oh kind stranger who I do not know. Whose eyes I still need to see, just so I can tell the day or weather, and to remember the material presence of a person.
It was due time that Mom asked: shouldn't someone be punished; say, this person raped your loved one? I spent more time recalling than answering her. Thought experiment, hypothetical, loved one. But survivors are no hypotheticals, neither is the continued violence of the Police, which survivors have relied on, out of sufficiency, structure. Law and Punishment is now a science, are cosmic facts-of-matter, dark laws that have the galaxies turn and Singapore safe. Science always sees hypotheticals, based on the controls, the status quo of survivors, generations and generations of them. I couldn't shout and scream at her like I did in Hong Lim Park, voice hoarse from berating the State's own hypotheticals on drug enforcement – whispering, all I could do was to listen to the survivor. Let them call the Police, since nothing else has replaced them.
Signs, symbols, representation, images: "DANGER - KEEP OUT!", "Please do not talk"... Signs of this country, the country itself a sign for every hypothetical and real crisis, the impossible nation. Where it was almost impossible to unlearn punitive justice, meritocracy, capitalism, the black-and-white symbol of Harry Lee Kuan Yew. But not today, even with pasts erased, futures lost. Not today. Today I listen to, not symbolize, the life of a person. History, scars, bodily habits, a long story.
And people ask me: "How were you courageous?" in front of me, eyes glossy; others ask "How come you Ah Gua protest but not punished, locked up, beaten in prison?" thinking I don't hear their vile anonymity corroding the servers that hosted them. Same answer to either: my Father beat me because girls were easy to bully, I don't remember what I did wrong, just pain flashing, flashing, breaking – stop.
Oh little Mynahs in gangs, and your incomprehensible gang songs. Not even we can form independent groups like you. Payment and cost are the difference. Let me be like you, moored like a Fairprice supermarket trolley outside the bounds of Fairprice, if it means that change has arrived, and not stubborn in the closet. The red lightning has struck once; the winds will not allow it to harm once more. Some nights to seize, storm where appropriate. Some nights, the eyes of another stranger so close.
/ Lune Loh is a core member of /S@BER, a Singaporean writing collective. She is currently doing an MA in Creative Writing (Poetic Practice) at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her works have been published in PANK Magazine, Evergreen Review, SOFTBLOW, Cordite, Cha, among others. Find her waxing at lune.city.
/ COMMENTARY
“How do you write a poem about feelings / issues / matrix of interconnected things so huge and expansive and frustrating even the idea of trying to capture a fraction of it in poem is almost a mockery of the thing itself? This poem is a good example and I really appreciate the poet’s use of the zuhitsu form to hold a mirror to everyday absurdity and injustice and the utter frustration and despair of trying to do activism in Singapore.”