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| Courtesy CARE's "Respect our Rights" campaign |
This sense of fear is material. It is visceral. It is embodied. It is real.
It is tied to and directly a product of the ways in which migrant work is organized in Singapore, the structures of employment in the industries that hire low-wage migrant labour, and the structures of the state institutions that regulate low-wage migrant work. Low-wage migrant work is temporary. Low-wage migrant work is constituted amidst tremendous power inequalities between the worker and the employer.
Last night, I was speaking with Jamal bhai.
We have been speaking often over the last month, his voice serving as an anchor that guides our ongoing work at the Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), the directions of our research methodology, and the processes through which we make sense of the emergent narratives. Jamal bhai centers in our conversations the strong sense of fear he feels and yet works on overcoming.
He shares that his fear is material, because if the employer finds out that he has been voicing the challenges with the living conditions, his work permit might not be renewed. He points to existing company policies about speaking up, suggesting that there are real consequences if a worker speaks up and is found out for speaking up. He shares that even if he goes to the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) to raise the challenges he has been facing, the employer is likely to find out, and this potentially might result in him losing his job.
He feels vulnerable, negotiating the risks of "being found out" as he speaks about his experiences as a low-wage migrant worker.
For Jamal bhai, the journey of "speaking up" and "speaking out" is deeply interconnected with his recognition of this visceral nature of fear. He shares, fear is human. Fear is precisely the effect that is produced by the structures of organizing of low-wage migrant work through the interpenetrating relationships between the state, state-owned capital, and private capital.
Having discussed this strong sense of fear, he shares that he speaks up in spite of it.
His act of speaking up calls for tremendous courage, courage to voice the truth, to challenge the hegemomic narratives that are continually at work to silence his voice, to bring up the everyday challenges to the fundamental human rights of workers. He is quick to point out that the things he has been pointing out, healthy accommodation, decent food, safe transportation, and consistent payment of the promised wage, are the fundamental rights of every worker.
He works through the fear he feels because he knows he speaks the truth, that there is an urgency for the truth to be told.
He shares that he finds his courage in recognizing the power of the collective, in recognizing that the shared experiences of the violations of basic labour rights of low-wage migrant workers in Singapore form the ground on which change needs to happen. He knows that when more workers speak up, the courage is distributed, and the risks are collectively shared. He also suggests that his act of speaking up works as a source of courage for other low-wage migrant workers, who speak up from the depths of their lived experiences and lived struggles.
Jamal bhai's dialogic invitation to speak up amidst fear resonates with my, and CARE's ongoing negotiations in co-creating communicative infrastructures at the global margins. Communicative infrastructures for voice at the subaltern margins threaten the very organizing logics of authoritarian neoliberalism, propped up on the communciatively inverted narratives of merit, expertise, and technological efficiency.
Although we occupy very different spaces of privilege, I share with Jamil bhai the sense of fear that occassionally creeps up when I speak out and speak up in the work of co-creating voice infrastructures. Because voice infrastructures at the subaltern margins threaten the neoliberal status quo (with universities embedded in this status quo), a wide array of techniques of manufacturing fear are deployed by those that occupy positions of power. Neoliberal universities are often complicit as structures for perpetuating these forms of fear generation to erase the infrastructures at the margins.
I share with him the sense of fear I negotiated when the structures of the regime organized the witch hunt. I share with him the sense of fear that CARE researchers negotiated as they were targeted, bullied, and harassed because the regime saw the capacity of voice infrastructures in dismantling its repressive logics.
I share with him the sense of anxiety we negotiate as a research team as we seek to dismantle Whiteness and neocolonialism, with a wide range of threatening strategies, all the way from physical abuse to running anonymous campaigns to targeting us by contacting University administration, framing our work of co-creating infrastructures as extremist.
Sometimes the attacks come from authoritarian regimes. At other times, from Zionist organizations. Yet at other times, from White supremacists hiding behind anonymous sites.
In each of these instances, the active erasure of voice infrastructures at the subaltern margins is critical to maintaining and reproducing the vastly unequal spaces. Erasure is what keeps power intact and circulates it.
How then do I, and we, as collectives of academics negotiate our own fears amidst the attacks carried out by those ensconced in positions of power?
In the work of CARE, the witnessing of courage at the "margins of the margins" is the fundamental invitation to developing courage.
We draw our collective courage by witnessing the courage of Jamal Bhai, of those at the margins of authoritarian systems of neoliberal extraction that turn to their voices to articulate their experiences. Even at the very margins of repressive regimes, those with the most to lose speak up and speak out. They don't obfuscate their fears in the fancy language of pragmatism, closed door meetings, and incremental change. They center the fear in conversations, and center the work of building courage to challenge the fear.
Our organizing work at CARE learns from these accounts of courage at the subaltern margins to re-center courage as a collective resource. Because speaking up against the structures of repression is the first step toward transformation, speaking up is the only way to change.
We recognize in culture centered interventions, in listening to the voices at the margins, that if we seek changes in the injustices we write about as academics, we must center the habit of speaking up. Speaking up amidst fear. Speaking up when we are certain that the structure will repress.
Speaking up is not an act of convenience. It is not a performance of radical fashonability. It is not an act of appearing on the scene when the space has been created by others through the placing of their "bodies on the line." Speaking up is the necessary action in the midst of the fear, amidst the knowledge that repression will be unleashed on our individual and collective bodies because we speak up. Speaking up is not framing to accommodate. Speaking up is not being strategically ambiguous. Speaking up is not toning down the message to make it fit the diktats of the power structures.
Speaking up is standing up to power in its rawness. Speaking up is seeing power and rendering it visible.
In this sense of standing up to power, it is the mobilization of courage amidst great fear. The recognition of the fear we experience in our bodies, in our collectives, in our everyday lives, is the basis for mobilizing courage.
The everyday acts of speaking up and speaking out that we cultivate in our interactions sustain the meso- and macro-level voice infrastructures at the margins. The work of speaking up by anchoring our articulations in our experiences in truth sustains courage as a collective resource. And it is through various courageous acts that defy the normative games of fear produced by the forces of oppression that we bring about change.