Sim Chi Yin, Remnants #1, from “Some Day We’ll Understand,” 2016
Pigment print, 110.5 x 110.5 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Zilberman Gallery Berlin, Istanbul
Artist’s Website, Instagram
Whenever they talk about the Emergency—
by which they mean the Malayan Emergency,
because the answer to insurrection is the question
what is a state of emergency? like some colonial game
of Jeopardy, and by they I mean of course
the British Colonial Office, which folded up
in 1948 the settlements of Penang and Malacca, folded
into federation with a mat of other states
while leaving Singapore as its own Crown
colony, producing a strange map with strange colours,
so many colours, two dots and a hole
in the middle, united only in the sense
that a ball of twine holds together until untied,
which it did become, did come undone—
when they talk about the Emergency they never talk
about how the comrades emerged
from the jungle, shrouded in morning mist
not like ghosts but only to trade with locals,
or how the Underground ran communications
through young men and women in the villages,
so well-known that one Lt. Gen. Briggs
had to intern half a million Chinese in camps
they called the New Villages, trying to stem
the transmission of insurgency, in turn fuelling
said insurgency, till eventually the Communists,
my aunt amongst them, had to retreat across the border,
not so much defeated as petered out, and gradually
no one talked about the Emergency any more—