Singapore Writers Festival 2024: Stories hold power to open spaces for alternative voices

The Straits Times reported from the closing day of the Singapore Writers Festival, where two panels found unexpected synchronicity in advocating alternative narratives.

At Ink And Equality: The Role Of Female Empowerment In Modern Literature, held at Victoria Theatre on 17 November, authors Cat Bohannon and Sarah Malik spoke about women-centred stories in a panel moderated by Dr. Loretta Chen.

Malik, whose 2022 memoir Desi Girl came out of growing up in a white-dominated 1990s Australia, described engaging deeply with books and newspapers despite never seeing herself in them, because she instinctively knew the importance of narratives. September 11 was the spark: “I suddenly saw my identity and who I was reflected back to me in sometimes caricatured, grotesque ways… I wanted to be part of it, not as its subject, but as the creator.”

Bohannon, author of Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years Of Human Evolution, read the same moment as a collective rupture that only later transforms into how a society tells the story of itself. Both writers acknowledged the risk in it — Malik recalling the fear of being disowned, Bohannon noting that the act of speaking is always offensive — and both argued that ground gained cannot be taken for granted.

The second panel, Echoes Of The Straits: Unearthing Singapore’s Indigenous Legacy, brought Cultural Medallion recipient Isa Kamari together with Orang Laut SG founder Firdaus Sani on reasserting indigenous voices in a national narrative that has long neglected pre-colonial histories.