Drawing the Line

The first piece of comics scholarship I wrote back in the 1990s was on political cartooning in Singapore. Since then, I have written about comic books, graphic novels, manga but not so much on comic strips, except for The House of Cheah exhibition I curated in 2020 on Cheah Sin Ann, the comic strip artist of The House of Lim. I focused largely on Singapore and Southeast Asian comics. But things have a funny way of circling back. 

My assessment of political cartooning in Singapore back then, and unfortunately still holding true today, was that the form was stunted after the country gained independence in 1965. A new nation did not need frivolous political cartoonists to criticize its policies and to make fun of its political leaders. The new government required consensus, not cartoons, for national building. In their minds, politics was a serious business, a matter of life and death, of political survival. They had enough trouble from their political foes, economic woes and social problems. If you want to comment on political issues, you either get into the ring and run for the polls or you shut up. 

This had two long lasting effects. It determined the kind of political space and discourse that we had from the 1960s to the 1980s. Politics was only meant for the serious-minded, the elites and not for the semi-serious, the armchair critics who snip from the side. This led to a disengagement of political affairs among the young which was detrimental when the state sought renewal of its political leadership and raise civil consciousness. 

The other long lasting effect it had was on the medium of political cartooning itself. We had a strong tradition of political cartooning in the 1950s and our best caricaturist was Tan Huay Peng. His caricatures were spot on and anyone could identify the politician he was satirizing. But caricaturing a political leader was seen as disrespectful and subverting the institutions of power and authority from the 1960s onwards. The message was sent out that politics was no laughing matter and political cartoons and caricatures were a no no. 

Some editorial cartoons were allowed in the 1970s and 1980s but they were largely about foreign events and politicians. If you want to comment on local current affairs, you could reflect the policies but you could not caricature the politicians. Cartoonists should be supportive of government policies and only gentle humor was allowed. Nothing in your face, do not wield the savage pencil or hold up the mirror. It is not for you to comment on the emperor’s new clothes. To me, these are not political cartoons, they are just illustrations. 

There was no official ban on political cartoons but when editors stop stopped accepting local political cartoons for publication, the artists got the hint. 

There was some improvement in the 1990s with a change of political leadership (gracious society and the need for Singapore to be a cool city in the global economy) and we did have some political cartoon books by George Nonis, Joe Yeoh and a just returned from HK Morgan Chua. But these were older artists. The damage was done, the young cartoonists did not draw caricatures or did not have the skills to do so. A cartoon book about young Lee Kuan Yew (the first prime minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990) was quickly rushed out after the run away success of Lee’s memoirs in the late 1990s. Lee did not like to be caricatured in the 1960s and 1970s and his dislike of political cartoons became the unofficial policy. So when caricatures of Lee were ‘allowed’ to return in a cartoon book aimed at younger readers, they were some of worse cartoons drawn of Lee that I have seen. It was just badly drawn. 

The lack of caricaturing ability is debilitating. This could be seen in the case of Leslie Chew. After the 2011 general elections in Singapore, Chew started to draw political cartoons using the moniker Demoncratic on social media. Chew would be the first to admit he was not an artist but just fooling around with cartooning software to depict certain injustice he witnessed. Two years later, he got into trouble with the law for his cartoons and he was initially charged with sedition and later that was amended to contempt of court. Part of problem was that there was no subtlety in Chew’s cartoons as he did not use the tools of political cartooning in his computer generated drawings. I am not sure if he was aware of our rich history of political cartooning in the 1950s, but if he was able to draw proper caricatures and avail to himself other tools like the use of symbolism, metaphors and puns, he might not have given up drawing cartoons after his brush with the law. 

                                                                 (Anngee Neo)

Which brings us to today’s political cartoons found on online. The local newspapers still do not run many political cartoons about Singapore, much less caricatures of local politicians. One would expect more of the latter on social media since many of the cartoonists are drawing for themselves and using IG to express their opinions. But looking at the works of Anngee Neo and Highnunchicken, they do not draw caricatures much either although their political cartoons are no less hard-hitting. Both are some of the more interesting current affairs cartoonists to emerge in Singapore in recent years. Anngee, the more polemic of the two, specializes in PSA - public service announcements, especially during the period of general elections in Singapore. Highnunchicken, a collective of artists, draw in The New Yorker style of one panel cartoons, making digs at Singapore life. 

                                                                 (Highnunchicken)

I moderated them in a political cartoon panel called Where to Draw The Line for the Singapore Writers Festival 2021 and I wanted them to exchange views with an international veteran, KAL, the famed political cartoonist of The Economist. To reclaim our heritage, we need to look back and look beyond Singapore and at places where political caricatures speak truth to power. 

But these days, it is difficult to know where to draw the lines. As much as the state still makes the call of what is permissible such as the recent banning of Red Lines, ironically a book about political cartoons and the struggle against censorship, cancel culture is also a threat to what political cartoonists can or cannot draw. Anngee is being realistic when she said there are some topics she would not touch because she knows there will be a shit storm if she goes there. She was not referring to government sanctions. The people can easily turn on you.

There are more political satire and humor in Singapore now as seen in theatre and social media. Maybe we need not be so hung up about the lack of political cartoons and caricatures. But the space afforded to political cartoons by the politicians and the people says very much of the kind of society we live in. Can we laugh at ourselves? Do we know how to after so long? 

Check out Anngee Neo, Highnunchicken and KAL on Where to Draw The Line, happening on 13 Nov, 2.30 - 3.30 pm. 

https://www.singaporewritersfestival.com/programme-details/conversations/where-to-draw-the-line

SWF 2021 - Year of the Rabbit by Tian Veasna

The thing I like about the Singapore Writers Festival is that it exposes me to new writers and new books. I tried to keep up but there are so many books out there that sometimes you just need that push to read that book that is under your radar.

I have heard good things about Tian Veasna’s Year of the Rabbit (Drawn & Quarterly, 2020) but never got the chance to explore it. Until I got to moderate a panel related to Southeast Asian comics for SWF 2021. I proposed the panel and Tian’s name came up, so why not? Any gentle nudge to read a new book is good. 

And I am glad I did as Year of the Rabbit is one of the best books I have read this year. Tian was born three days after the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia in 1975 and this book detailed his family eventual escape to the Thai border in 1979. It is a harrowing story told with much of the actual violence taken place off panel (intentional of Tian). He is not the ‘hero’ of the story as he was only a baby between 1975 and 1979, but this family story of running, hiding and the years of living dangerously had a big impact on him and his psyche. I have always wondered how people live their lives during wartime and in long periods of chaos and instability. It is to be in a constant state of stress but the human mind is an amazing thing - you adapt and you adjust. I realized that after visiting cartoonist friends in Jakarta in 2000, just two years after the riots and the physical city was still recovering from the violence. 

What struck me about the Year of the Rabbit is why this book had taken off. I am revealing my vintage, but stories of Indochinese refugees have been in my cinematic consciousness since the 1980s. From Hong Kong, we have Ann Hui’s The Story of Woo Viet (1981) and Boat People (1982). The actual events of Khmer Rouge’s Year Zero were explored in The Killing Fields (1984), the Oscar winning film. In recent years, the experiences of Vietnamese refugees have been documented in GB Tran’s Vietamerica (2010) and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (2017). Online, there is also Matt Huynh’s interactive comic, The Boat (2015). 

For what happened in Cambodia, Tian is not the first comic artist to mine his family history. French-Cambodian comic artist, Sera is probably the first to do so. He is older than Tian and could remember entering the French embassy with his French national mother in 1975 but his Cambodian father could not enter the compound. His father did not survive and for years he was angry with the French for letting his father die. We invited Sera for SWF in 2017 and we had beer and makan at Newton Circus. Benjamin Dix, who wrote the graphic novel, Vanni, about the Sri Lanka civil war and refugee crisis, was also a guest of SWF in 2017.

So, in my mind, what happened in Cambodia was not that remote or unfamiliar. I was teaching Southeast Asian history in the late 1990s and saw together with my students history unfolding in front of us - the final defeat of the Khmer Rouge by Hun Sen, the death of Pol Pot and the arrest and trial of the Khmer Rouge leaders. 

During our discussion, I asked Tian have the people really forgotten about the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields. He shared that that was one of the reasons he did this book. Other than to find out more about his own family history and to make sense of who and where he came from, from his visits to Cambodia, he had realized that many of the young people in Cambodia did not know about this tragic past. He felt that such stories need to be told and retold and every generation should be reminded of what happened in 1975. It was not a story with lessons confined to Southeast Asia but it has parallels to similar events in Serbia, Croatia and Rwanda. I am reminded of my own trip to Cambodia many years ago. I saw many young people and old folks but the in-betweens I was told by a local guide were killed. The person i spoke to is the only survivor in his family. I looked at the young people in the streets of Phnom Penh and they were just hanging around, doing the things young people all over the world do, and I wondered if they knew. 

Tian’s answer is that many of them don’t. And thus the Year of the Rabbit. To me, the book testifies to the power of comics in telling stories, in communicating, in putting us in communion with the past and learning about ourselves and our failings. There are still many stories to tell - the Rohingya crisis and what is happening in Myanmar now. I wondered how the political cartoonists I met in Yangon are doing. 

Tian will be featured in this SWF panel on 10 Nov, 7-8 pm.

https://www.singaporewritersfestival.com/programme-details/conversations/from-disposable-to-desirable-talking-trash-about-comics