By Jonathan Chan

Odeon: An Ode
Theophilus Kwek
Ethos Books (2026) / 108 pages / SGD 16

Theophilus Kwek has long been actively involved with the Global Migrant Festival, Migrant Cultural Show and the Migrant Writers of Singapore. He edited the autobiography Stranger to Myself: Diary of a Bangladeshi in Singapore by Md Sharif Uddin, and holds two degrees that centre the subject – a Master of Science in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from Oxford, and a Master of Public Health from King's College London with a focus on the mental health of migrant workers. He is familiar with the tensions, politics and difficulties of the space, both among writers and artists as well as externally, as he straddles civil society and the civil service.

He is also best known as a poet, having authored numerous collections of poetry, some of which touch on some of these engagements with Singapore's migrant community. What, then, could compel him to momentarily depart from poetry, to search for a different approach, for more words, to eventually settle in creative non-fiction? Odeon: An Ode is Kwek's first foray into the genre, albeit with a certain sleight-of-hand in its marketing. Its place-specific title bears similarity to his recent poetry collection Commonwealth, alluding to the history of the 20th-century cinema Odeon and its contemporary iterations as commercial spaces housing office space, retail and dining options. Odeon and its surrounding neighbourhood of the Civic and Bugis Districts, as well as Bras Basah, form the backdrop in which Kwek braids two narratives – migrant writer and community activist Fazley Elahi, better known as Rubel, and Devan Nair, a union leader, early member of the People's Action Party, one-time Secretary-General of Malaysia's Democratic Action Party and eventual President of Singapore. It is an approach that blends his close friendship with Rubel and some degree of critical fabulation with the life of Nair, which I felt to be not dissimilar to recent work by scholar and writer Philip Holden on S. Rajaratnam.

In her blurb, Braema Mathi, writer and co-founder of non-profit TWC2, which advocates for the equitable treatment of migrant workers, writes that "Kwek insinuates [that Rubel and Nair] are the bricklayers who built a constancy of care, love, hope and camaraderie." This is an elegant, if perhaps easy, way to identify similarity between these two men in the sweep of Singapore's history, not least when the key relationship between them is Kwek's personal proximity to both. Kwek turns to creative flourish and questioning to avoid the stresses of overt political critique, whether of certain policy structures or of the ruling party, often featuring statements of declaration and musing, a pattern that has followed his dance between civil society, the literary community and the civil service.

This brings to mind several key questions as I read Odeon. The first is the question of self-reflexivity. Who can or should write about migrant workers from Singapore, if at all? The workers themselves, of course, to the extent that pathways for expression and publication are available. For Kwek, this question is complicated by his personal and academic engagements, his savvy in describing Rubel's difficulties without identifying ways in which our present policy configuration would allow such situations to occur, and the permission granted by Rubel even amid Kwek's wrestling with the question itself.

The second is a question of genre. Kwek's contribution is not just to the genre of creative non-fiction, but also to an emerging corpus of writing by and about migrant writers. Creative non-fiction has been vexed as a genre of Anglophone writing in Singapore, one that has seen some resurgence but has received less widespread recognition than poetry and fiction. It is a genre that has come up against the limitations of political criticism or has perhaps been unable to hide beneath the veneers (or plausible deniability) of metaphor or fictionalisation. Among more contemporary writers, I can think of Daryl Li's The Inventors (2023), Shze-Hui Tjoa's The Story Game (2024) and Ethos peers Ng Kok Hoe's They Told Us To Move: Dakota–Cassia (2019) Kirsten Han's The Singapore I Recognise: Essays on Home, Community and Hope (2023); preceding them include Boey Kim Cheng's towering Between Stations (2009) and, by some arguments, Teo You Yenn's This Is What Inequality Looks Like (2016). (This is not to mention Singapore's perhaps best-selling non-fiction writer Lee Kuan Yew.)

Writing by migrant writers, by contrast, has seen an array of poetry collections, anthologies and memoirs, as detailed by scholar Ada Cheong in her essay 'The Dreamwork of Migrant Poetry'. Books about migrant labourers in Singapore by authors who are not migrants themselves are less common. One can think of Alex Au's The Trouble with Foreign Workers (2020), an analysis of systemic issues related to migrant labour, building on his experience as vice president of TWC2, or the academic volume Migrant Workers in Singapore: Lives and Labour in a Transient Migration Regime (2022) edited by Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Kellynn Wee and Theodora Lam. Both present a certain distance from their subjects, positioned more as analytical or academic, rather than personal or engaged. Kwek's contribution is arguably distinctive in this regard, for few writers of his milieu can claim to have had as close a friendship with a worker as he has had with Rubel, even if it does not fully resolve its own questions of the ethics of representing the story of someone from such a vastly different socioeconomic position.

Kwek's approach personalises some of the challenges and issues that have emerged within the migrant worker community in Singapore through Rubel's account, rather than foreground any systemic critique. This is in contradistinction to Nair's own ascent as a union, then political, leader. The unifying focal point for the lives of both men is the Odeon and its environs. Kwek takes greater caution, or fidelity, in his retelling of accounts of Rubel's life, perhaps sensitive to the profound material disparities between their two positions, however mediated by the sincerity of friendship. He is genuine in his references to Rubel as his "brother", not merely in the parlance with which migrant workers are sometimes referred to by non-profit or social workers, or with the veneer of performativity that led to then Manpower Minister Tan See Leng's castigation by the poet Zakir Hossain Khokan. The affection between Kwek and Rubel is reciprocal through joint engagements in the Migrant Cultural Show and Migrant Writers of Singapore, as well as the intimacy of accounts of meals shared. In fact, Kwek reveals that when he sought Rubel's permission to share his story, he recognises that it "isn't fair", but Rubel cuts his apology, saying, "You can do it better than anyone." There is a self-reflexivity, a tension of representation that is etched into the very composition of Odeon itself, even if this questioning ultimately does not inhibit the actual writing of Rubel's story.

Kwek details Rubel's arrival in Singapore, his involvement in these creative pursuits and his higher education in Singapore, all amid the growing pressures of the pandemic. Kwek details the physical transformation of the Odeon, from its previous identity as a cinema through its passing hands between developers, as well as a backdrop for Kwek's teenage meanderings. Where this converges with Rubel lies in his decision to stay discreetly in a space on the site of the Odeon building where there is "a shower in the basement" and "other makeshift facilities" where he stores his items. It is an arrangement following the loss of his job, brought about by his diagnosis with cancer. Kwek momentarily places the reader in relation to Rubel's expertise and knowledge in construction when Rubel arrives in Kwek's new flat during "a break in his chemotherapy", where, by instinct, Rubel "pulls out a roll of blue tape, begins marking where the wall plaster needs touching up, or the new drawers won't close properly." Characteristic of Rubel, too, is his habit of "rapping the wall with two fingers" even while sitting, "going tap-tap-tap against the nearest surface". Kwek understands it as "shorthand for my brother himself: his knuckles always testing the integrity of a pillar, a door or a glass window. Feeling for cracks in the fabric of the world."

Kwek admits that "Even now, I am having trouble figuring out what these scenes add up to. Fragmentary as they are, they hardly do justice as a record of my brother's life, with big yawning gaps separating the haphazard points at which they break the surface of memory." Kwek's struggle is to not centre himself in this process of constructing a narrative of Rubel's life. Kwek's matter-of-factness does not presume to speak for Rubel's experiences as it does to document them, as plainly as it seems possible, even if the selection of "scenes" from Rubel's life is mediated by his own exposure to the "shards of his life" like "spilled rice" running through his hands.

By contrast, the book's turn to 70 years prior, in the time detailing Nair's coming into prominence, is where Kwek's imagination becomes far more pronounced. Gone is the responsibility of a kind of considered fidelity, a reduced distance between fact and description. Kwek the history student meets Kwek the prose stylist in detailing a Singapore immediately after Japanese surrender, the elation amidst the cabaret bars and the emergence of the Odeon Towers as the "seat of anti-colonial subterfuge". Alterations to the old shophouse at No. 331 North Bridge Road lead to its christening as the "'Liberty' cabaret", jostling with "brawling men" and "drink and disorder", while by day serving as the site of the Malayan Democratic Union. It brings the arrival of Nair the schoolteacher, who becomes "practiced in airy obfuscations" and remains in the mission school for "how can he dismantle the house without learning to wield the tools?" Kwek here alludes to Audre Lorde's similar proclamation in burnishing Nair's anticolonial credentials. He describes Nair being brought into the fold of the Singapore Teachers' Union by 1949, eyeing participation in the Anti-British League, providing the "shove from below" as described by George Orwell. Kwek channels the intellectual ferment and discontent among the postcolonial elites of the 1940s, disenchanted by British defeat at the hands of the Japanese, forming the basis of a nationalist movement.

Nair's imprisonment on St John's Island as a result follows the eviction of the Teachers' Union from the first floor of the Liberty Cabaret by Kwek's dramatisation. It is prefaced by an ominous depiction of the chaplain of St Andrew's who declares "Of that day and hour knoweth no man", to which Kwek adds that "an ember begins to blaze in the deepest corner of [Nair's] mind". His subsequent arrest for his "anti-colonial activities" places him alongside "socialists, anarchists and religionists of different stripes", though Kwek invokes Nair's account that the island was "St John's University", where "the detainees school themselves on Dostoyevsky and Tagore". I came across this account on a recent trip I'd been on to the island, learning about its past role as a place for political detainees, between its former role as a place for quarantining the ill and its current position for leisure and maritime research. Kwek describes it as a "halfway house to banishment", costing the British Administration "less than exile, both politically and financially". Kwek's historical imagination kicks in when describing a monsoon in 1952 during Nair's detainment:

St John's Island is hit especially hard: its ramshackle buildings, hastily expanded to take in the detainees, can barely withstand the tropical gales. On the worst days they have no reprieve from their cells, for the mess and yard are both flooded. He misses the snuff-dry comfort of the school hall at St Andrew's, the drumming of rain on the sloped roof that makes it seem all the more cavernous in a storm. In his mind's eye he sees once again the villagers of Potong Pasir crowding in from the trunk road, pursued all the way to the school's entrance by the rising brown wash of the Kallang River.

The description hinges on the contrast between material comfort and the flooding of the island's facilities, imagining Nair's recollections of his past environs and communities. Kwek uses multiclausal sentences to illustrate the sweep of the storm's damage, as well as the approximation of Nair's imagination of his distant home.

This underscores the curious history of many of Singapore's founding politicians, mediated through Kwek's eye. "What is the point of all this history?" he asks rhetorically. "To think with" is Kwek's response to himself, to encounter the facts that "have embedded themselves in the sinews of the city". A long-established position in anthropology and the social sciences, the ends of such thought beyond musing are not always evident. As with his recent collection Commonwealth, place is the binding agent on which the palimpsest of individual stories, fragments, narratives has been laid across. Following his release, the schoolteacher is invited by "a lawyer whom he has gotten to know on his many visits to St John's" who is starting "a new political party". Kwek describes how something "about the salt and sea air has welded their fates together, fast as a chain-link fence", the metaphor of enclosure referring to bonds of affection and solidarity. Without naming the PAP, Kwek conjures the vast sweep of time:

He does not know this yet but in time they will build a country together, the lawyer and he. Many will come from afar to aid, and then learn from the miracle of its success, such as the Dutch economist who becomes a bosom friend to both. Others, like Rubel, arrive to cement its growth in brick and mortar, and are swept up unawares in the pages of that story.

Albert Winsemius, too unnamed, enters the triangle of relations alongside Nair and Lee within Kwek's schema. The quick jump of 70 years folds the years of export-led industrialisation, modernisation and urbanisation, definitive of the story of Singapore's material uplift and its construction boom. Kwek suggests that arriving workers such as Rubel "are swept up unawares in the pages of that story", implying a sort of passivity, if not powerlessness, the disparity baked into this model of economic ambition and implementation.

Odeon's final act serves as Kwek's synthesis of these two narrative threads, catapulting the reader to the present. These are to mournful ends, bringing the reader directly to the consequences and afterlives of both men beyond death. It features one of Rubel's final appearances at the Migrant Cultural Show, attended by well-wishers from the Ministry of Manpower, NGOs, the Indonesian Embassy and those who have seen a documentary about him on Channel NewsAsia. Such is the deterioration of his physical condition that Kwek describes him as "Gaunt", as well as the gasps when he rises from his seat, "kurta flapping loosely about his waist", yet his face "radiant" and smile "set off brilliantly by the patterned blue cloth". In the days following Rubel's death comes Kwek's most direct engagement with grief, and the language is among the book's most moving, and perhaps least detached:

For days the city is marked by a strange hollowness, its walls and buildings less solid than they seem. I am unable to describe it even to my closest friends, except by saying it is the effect of having focused so single-mindedly on the show in the weeks before my brother's departure, an emptiness I know others familiar with these performances will understand.

But the feeling is more akin to the glassiness, the blankness one gets when confronted by a tall and featureless tower, the inescapable symmetry and flatness of its surfaces. All but the shallowest contours of the city seem to have been levelled away, leaving only the impersonal outlines of its street markings and directions.

Where Singapore's built environment was formerly evidence of the unrecognised labour of its migrant workers, through Kwek's eyes this becomes entwined with the severity of loss, a consuming and deadening grief from the passing of a dear friend who was also part of these labours. There is the lapsing of attention, the drudgery of an environment drained of life.

In the case of Nair, his instantiation in the present is mediated through Kwek's encounters with his son, former literary scholar and journalist Janadas Devan, now Senior Advisor (Government Communications) of MDDI and the Prime Minister's Office, as well as director of the Institute of Policy Studies. In archival work at the National Library Board, he comes across a photo of Nair with his son and his daughter-in-law Geraldine Heng, an influential literary scholar of medieval literature and pathbreaking poet in Singapore. Kwek is "transfixed by this photograph, its presence startling and incongruous among the pages of heady prose celebrating the schoolteacher's political achievements." Kwek jumps to a lecture he attended at the Treasury building given by Devan, termed "the schoolteacher's son", among a crowd of civil servants who are "Earnest, scholarly bent, members of the 'cocktail circuit'". One senses here a slight tentativeness in Kwek's tone, not inclined to provide a value judgment, but to enfold that within the act of description and embellishment. This is perhaps a reflection of his managing the tension of being both a civil servant and a writer. Kwek relates its proximity to "his father's old classroom at St Joseph's and the union offices at the Liberty Cabaret only a stone's throw away."

In this lecture, Kwek describes Devan's longing "to bring these questions" of his father's activism "within the sphere of personal proximity, breathe life into them with what he knew of his father" and of when his father was in prison. Kwek sidesteps, neatly, the ignominious end of Nair's presidency, while also reducing Nair's role as the founding Secretary-General of Malaysia's Democratic Action Party to a passing mention, perhaps an acknowledgement that to do so would be to veer near an out-of-bounds marker. In Kwek's retelling of Devan's speech, there is little mention of its substance, for one assumes that it is much similar to the life of Nair that has just been recounted. Against the backdrop of Nair's anticolonial activity come lines from Winston Churchill, during his period as wartime Prime Minister of Britain:

"History, with its flickering lamp," he reads, as the quote comes up on the screen, "stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passions of former days."

Unbidden, Churchill's next words ring in his mind: What, indeed, is the worth of all this?

"The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions," says the embattled Prime Minister, himself long past the scenes and passions of his youth. "We are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour."

Churchill's speech, delivered in the House of Commons in 1940, was, curiously, a tribute to the then recently passed Neville Chamberlain, remembered now for his policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany. It is a generous eulogy to a former political foe, attempting to situate, graciously, decisions that Churchill opposed. Brought here into Devan's speech about his father, it morphs, not into an exoneration of the past and his father's actions and decisions, it seems, but a plea to understand him in his contemporary contexts and situations, the clarity of his intentions, and "the rectitude and sincerity of his actions". Perhaps Kwek's assessment is that Nair's public image had already been tarnished enough and did not need rehashing.

Kwek's concluding portion does not resolve with a focus on either man, but returns to the physical site of the Odeon itself, having lived as a cinema, a neighbour to the Liberty Cabaret, and later the makeshift home of an ailing Rubel. It is the building that "seems to remember my brother best, that carries his sleeping shape in the crook of its basement". Earlier in the book, Kwek questions:

How many lives like my brother's, I am tempted to ask, are threaded through this sliver of land, pushed deeper into the soil each time a new edifice is erected on the old foundations? Yet something in my mind resists the question: I am not ready for his story to recede into the thick mass of time, not yet.

I recall Brecht's lines from 'A Worker Reads History':

The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?

Kwek seems to act against this by dedicating an entire book to a subject who might have otherwise been relegated in the annals of history. The final scene of the book is of an unnamed figure who has passed through the doors of the cabaret, in the atrium watching "soft gold rays slip easily through glass", the mystery of "how light falls here, and is free, and is found". Foregrounded here, momentarily, is a physical place, containing the passage of memories and pains and fateful decisions. It is a fitting conclusion for a book whose prose has turned away from polemic and settled on the ambiguity of the poetic.

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