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Singapore poets have a few choice words as minister Ong Ye Kung criticises Alfian Sa’at
- Minister hits out at playwright, who was behind a controversial course on dissent at Yale-NUS College, by quoting verse he suggests shows disloyalty
- But arts community rallies around Alfian, who says the abridged quote is misleading
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Singapore’s education minister Ong Ye Kung is facing criticism from the city state’s arts and literary community – and even a leading establishment figure – after quoting a poem by Alfian Sa’at to suggest the playwright was disloyal to the country.
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Ong, during a speech in parliament on Monday, quoted parts of Alfian’s 1998 poem Singapore You Are Not My Country – filled with wry and withering observations about life in Singapore – and suggested the playwright continued “this attitude consistently in his activism”.
In response, local poets, playwrights and other supporters of Alfian took to social media on Tuesday to post the poem and his other works. Alfian urged supporters not to attack Ong personally.
“I’d like to make an appeal here for commenters to avoid making their criticisms personal. You can direct your criticisms instead at policies, programmes, agendas, [and] ideologies,” Alfian wrote on Facebook.
The minister’s remarks were part of his response over the last-minute cancellation of a university module on dissent that Alfian was convening at the Yale-NUS College, a liberal arts institution jointly run by the National University of Singapore and Yale University in the United States.
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