The Dangers of Singular Narratives
Why communities need to build and contest their own narratives
According to Hong and Huang (2008), history is not dead. It is constructed and reconstructed, about the past but for the present. By presenting a single narrative, we risk forgetting others and being blinded to the hegemonic power that governments and its institutions hold. Memories, after all, are erased so as to mould the model citizen in the eyes of the government.
We risk forgetting other narratives because sometimes they don’t fit into the larger national narrative. Take for example how the Internal Security Act and how it was used in Operation Coldstore and how stories like the “evil deeds” of the Barisan Socialis are presented to lower secondary school students as fact.
Even when there are attempts to remember, they are still curated for the national narrative. In the Singapore Memory Project, for example, even though the government approached ordinary Singaporeans, these result in farcical attempts to co-opt their stories where only those who fit the larger story of economic progress are slotted in and published. By forgetting the perspectives of the layman or the opposition, Baildon and Afandi (2017) propose that we run risk of accepting history as “objective and factual” when history can never be truly unbiased and needs to be more critically examined.
This creation of history is often done to fuel larger objectives of national security and social harmony. When history is remembered, such as racial riots, by bringing it to citizens’ consciousness, the government can then use it to justify discriminatory policies. Recollection of events such as the Jemaah Islam bomb threat in 2002, for one, have been used to justify why Malays cannot be in sensitive military units, deprivileging them of access to economic resources and social positions. When these are the only stories being retold, it creates unnecessary stigma by painting Muslims as dangerous, fueling Islamophobia, and in a way signalling to ordinary Singaporeans that it is okay to discriminate based on such grounds. What is national can then affect the individual, which corroborates with Mills’ (1959) argument about how public issues can quickly become personal troubles, where the individual is affected by social structures such as education and the teaching of history.
All in all, we need to remember that the past is curated for the present, that histories are sometimes elevated to privilege certain communities (along the lines of ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation etc), while others are forgotten, supposedly to preserve larger national issues like security and social stability. However, promoting singular narratives often erases personal narratives and, more insidiously, end up misconstruing the stories of others.
