Magical thinking: shaping sand for our dreams

“Matter and meaning are not separate elements…Mattering is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance.”

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning 

One day, Ah Boon, his brother Hia, and Pa, went out to sea on a motorboat as they always had, and chanced upon an island they had never seen before, rising out of the sea like a “giant humpbacked monster”. The discovery felt suspect, and Pa was afraid that dark magic was involved. Only Ah Boon felt no fear, “only prickling curiosity along with a strange soft ache.” The men kept the discovery to themselves for a while, before sharing their findings with the rest of the village. When they first set out with the villagers, Pa and Ah Boon were not confident that they would be able to find the island again, and feared the other fishermen’s ridicule. However, Ah Boon found himself entering a meditative or spiritual state, and “felt himself drop into that dark, empty space where the roar of the engine receded and the motion of the waves…became a kind of heartbeat”, a “kind of loneliness he could dip in and out of whenever necessary, grip onto like a slippery rope.” He “visualise[d] the soaring white cliffs, the flat, rolling meadow” he remembered from his first encounter, which brought them to the shores of the elusive island. 

Ah Boon, Pa, and the villagers returned to the island time after time, but were confounded by its changing appearance. The very first time, they saw the island’s limestone cliffs glowing in the moonlight. The second time round, the island was flat, only slightly hilly, and bordered by a thick swathe of mangrove forest. Over the ensuing months, they discovered that this island was actually “an indeterminate, ever-changing number” of islands, “some…flat and ringed by brilliant white sands. Others jagged with limestone cliffs, like the very first island they’d found…Some were large, taking a full 20 minutes to circle with the boat, others no bigger than wide sandbars, several paces across.” As they kept going back, they continued to be mystified by the islands’ elusiveness, changing configurations and shapes. Far from the set and defined boundaries of Singapore today, these islands embodied the intermingling and porosity of boundaries between landmass and sea, fact and fiction, eliciting the coastal people’s magical thinking and willingness to be given over to mystery. 

At first, the islands brought the villagers a new prosperity. Heng captures the agency of the sea, the fish, and the islands, as the entities that called out to Ah Boon; that “threw up” fish, prawns and squid; that filled their nets with plenty; that enabled Ah Boon’s family to send him to school, pay for his sick uncle’s medical costs, and meet needs they had struggled to fulfil in the past. Through and after the Japanese invasion, while residents inland suffered, the kampung was able to live off the mysterious fishing grounds. But, the islands’ magic could also turn dark, and became a perverse reflection of the suffering, turmoil and violence felt by those on land: the changing landmasses became more sinister, and “appeared and disappeared at will…fading behind thick mists and vanishing entirely.” The sea’s bounty, too, mutated, and the nets turned up creatures that were bruised and deformed. 

Pa, who had been studying the islands, eventually realised that the shapes of the islands changed with the phases of the moon! Pa shared his discovery with Ah Boon, solving a little of their mystery. However, the codification of the shifting sands and the transmission of knowledge foreshadowed the islands’ eventual demise. Ah Boon, as an adult, would join the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), and hand over his knowledge of the islands to address the sand shortage that had been created by the Gah Men’s land reclamation projects.

The Great Reclamation is a fishing village’s story of change and loss, set against the backdrop of seminal events in Singapore’s history. It is a story that centres the material of sand, not just in its physical qualities and uses, but the psychic pull it has on our desires, for enchantment—as we see with Ah Boon and the villagers—but also growth and stability. The cost of our growth, however, has also been displaced, invisibilised, and justified. 

Singapore’s development and the process of colonisation, independence, economic progress, has been couched as inevitable to human and national ambition, need and desire. However, in The Great Reclamation, sand displayed its own desirability that exerted a pull on the novel’s human actors, shaping and compelling their desires. 

In my past semester in graduate school, I learned about new materialism in a literature class about colonialism and the environment, which gave me the language to articulate what I have felt: that matter, or the non-human, has narratives to be listened to. Serpil Oppermann, an acclaimed researcher in postmodern, material and feminist ecocriticism, wrote about matter’s “agentic, generative, active, and expressive” properties. Jane Bennett’s ontological theory of “vital materialism” depicts the relationship between humans and non-humans to show “a power present in every body.” Bodies are neither simply object nor subject, but act and are acted upon by others. In this vein, sand is not just an inert pile of grains, but, to use Bennett’s term, an “assemblage” of constituents engaged in “intra-action”.

In Singapore’s story, we can see how matter, and specifically, sand, “interacts in complex ways with the techno-social, psychic and natural environments”, including advanced capitalism’s political economy of knowledge production and a “system that profits from the new scientific understanding of codes…of all that lives,” as Rosi Braidotti, a posthumanism and new materialism theorist, put it.

The PAP’s “Great Reclamation”, which eventually extended Singapore’s eastern shoreline by 1,525 hectares, was a continuation of the century-long British colonial project. Since 1822, the British had been reclaiming land along the Singapore River and its estuary, filling in our marshy and swampy shore, to facilitate the trade and commercial activity that brought riches to the British Empire, and later the independent South-east Asian nation. 

This process of reclamation and growth that transformed Singapore from a “backwater” fishing village to a commercial hub has, according to Charmaine Chua, a Singaporean writer and political scientist, “altered the structure of the earth itself: leaching the water from mud, pulverising indigenous ways of life, dredging particulates, and removing wildlife from the marshes in order to lay the foundations for a port. Colonial theft through terraforming is thus at the very centre of Singapore’s story of nationhood.” 

Though we lived in the far north of Singapore, our stories of the sea were centred on the same eastern coast. Until I was 16, my parents brought us every Thursday to the Singapore Swimming Club in Tanjong Rhu, which had been a shipyard from the 1820s to 1980s. The Club had been founded by a group of Europeans in the 1890s and used to sit on the edge of Tanjong Katong Beach, where swimmers could dive right into the ocean. The Club was later reconstructed further inland (as the coastline was simultaneously extended) into what is now an enclave of private condominiums for local elites and expatriates. In my mother’s stories of the 1960s and 70s, the Club still faced the sea, and sometimes, when the sea overran its borders, her father would have to pick her up on his shoulders to cross the flooded road. By the time I was a child, in the early 2000s, looking out the gates of the Club, I could see only the large high school across the road and the swathe of shiny condominiums beyond, knowing of the beach and the ocean beyond only in my mind’s eye. 

My parents have passed down a few stories like this; there is a sense of a lost history, or a truncated personal and national story. My maternal grandparents emigrated from Guangzhou, China during world war two. All I’ve heard about their southward journey is how they had to eat sweet potatoes and yams straight from the ground during the war years, anecdotes mostly told to guilt-trip us into finishing our food. I have never been able to speak much to my grandmother, as I grew up learning Mandarin Chinese in school, rather than Cantonese, her dialect. After our family left and returned from England, the connection with my extended family felt even harder to forge. A series of family traumas distanced us from my father’s side of the family, who had been part of an earlier wave of migration from China to Malacca, Malaysia. Instead, my parents herded us towards a life of academic excellence, an upbringing in England, classical music training, and socialisation into their academic and conservative Christian circles, all of which has left me feeling untethered to any one geography or culture in particular. 

Singapore has similarly tried to distance itself from one kind of past in order to align with the image of a nation we think we should be. It wasn’t until my senior year in Yale-NUS College that I learned about the island’s history as a thriving Srivijayan maritime kingdom in the 13^th and 14^th centuries. However, that kind of story doesn’t fit into the narrative of progress that our government—insecure and desperate to claim and maintain its position on the global state—has touted. Instead, we have our inherited colonial principles of pragmatism and efficiency, taming and extracting from the natural world to support our economy. “What has been made room for through reclamation is as important as what has been erased,” said William Jamieson, a geographer. 

Jamieson depicts land reclamation as a brutal and oppressive process: “a section of sea is isolated by perimeter bund; sand and dirt are poured in. The water is squeezed out by the pressure of the fill material. To enable building on reclaimed land, the level of the settlement must be kept to a minimum; that is, the amount of water present in the composition of the soil…The importance of water changes in scale: from where there was once an entire sea to fend off, the presence of a few millimetres could now compromise the structural integrity of an entire land mass.” 

Sand’s transiency, its propensity to flow with the currents of water and air, the ability of the islands to shift with the phases of the moon, defy control. Hence the need to isolate, to enclose, and pressurise. At the same time, terraforming the coast “in their own likeness…the architecture of reasoned brutality,” as Heng wrote, was a means to curb threats to the PAP’s hegemony: Communism was rumoured to have taken hold in villages along the coast, and “the spectral threat of communists spreading dissent and slander in kampongs gave the government additional licence to relocate their residents”. What is necessary to prevent unruliness is as cruel as it is to the coast, as it is to human bodies. 

In order to meet Singapore’s construction needs and continue expanding Singapore’s coast, they needed more sand. Ah Boon had shared the secret of the islands with his colleague at the community centre on the East Coast, and eventual lover, Natalie. When she was faced with the conundrum of the sand shortage, she saw the islands as the perfect solution. 

The eventual destruction of the islands was not the result of any one of these factors in isolation—the government’s need for land; valuation of sand as a means of political and economic gain; Ah Boon’s desire for protection and legibility; the islands’ existence; sand’s properties as a construction and fill material—but the entanglement of the intra-acting “agencies” of each of these factors. This instance marked a shift in the way of knowing of the old village, to the PAP’s new technocratic regime, a relationality that enabled what Barad called the “material (re)configuring of the world”. 

Ultimately, Ah Boon came to think like the government machinery and was buoyed by the belief in human ability to wrestle the natural world into its place: “the water was harmless; he could see that now. It could be corralled and commanded, directed into trenches, pushed back or removed entirely when it did not serve one’s needs. All that was required was the right machinery, willing hands, and a firm resolve.”

Before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, I had been working for a Singaporean family office to make grants across South-east Asia. While driving in Cambodia between Phnom Penh and Kampong Speu to visit a water and sanitation organisation, we passed a range of mountains that had been blasted and mined for sand. Not just the mountains, but the riverbeds too, including the great Mekong River that flows from China, through Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, out into the Mekong Delta. Some of the sand had been mined for Cambodia’s own infrastructure development, but a lot of it has been exported to Singapore, which, despite its small size, is one of the world’s biggest importers of sand.

Joshua Comaroff, a social scientist who has written about the architecture, urbanism and politics of Singapore, called this bottomless appetite for sand the “original debt” for the survival of Singapore: “for the territorial state to survive, land must continually be introduced…This translates into a de facto transfer of territory from other countries.” After turning our own island inside out, we looked to our neighbours—Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Cambodia—who have all imposed (ineffectual) bans on sand exports following the environmental degradation that ensued. However, the bans merely displace the destruction. Singapore’s appetite for growth means that it will simply look elsewhere.

In 2019, I travelled to Long Xuyên, in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, to learn more about the vulnerabilities of young school children to human trafficking. In addition to economic vulnerabilities and ethnic marginalisation, the loss of livelihoods due to sand mining has also driven families to take their children out of school. Many of them make a living from growing rice or catching sea creatures. But, sand mining has intensified coastal erosion and saltwater encroachment, drastically changing the habitats that have sustained agriculture and aquaculture, driving families to other means of survival. Eroded river banks and entire houses are collapsing into the river, forcing people to relocate and rebuild. Some families knowingly sell off their children for work, but in the majority of situations, they simply need more income, and the children venture to bigger cities such as Ho Chi Minh City to find work in tourism, entertainment, garment factories etc. Some of them make their way to Singapore as sex workers or Vietnamese brides.

Looking closely at sand has helped me to draw the links between lives and livelihoods across nations, to connect Singapore’s prosperity with the devastation of livelihoods and lives on sand-containing habitats along the Mekong, in Indonesia, and elsewhere.

The sources and processes of land reclamation are set out on the periphery, and further obscured by a nebulous web of supplier-foreign contractor-government relationships that keeps the sources of sand confidential. Using the language of new materialism, obfuscation too, is part of what Barad termed the “iterative intra-activity of the world in its becoming”, and can be wielded by the ruling elites in their process of world-making. Doing so allows another kind of magical thinking, wherein the conjuring of land from the sea can be apolitical, neutral, and absolved of responsibility. 

But thinking about sand means that we should think about our histories, the legacies of destruction and (re)construction, the knowledges we value and how we use them, and the vantage points from which we see, read and live. In the preface to Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad wrote, “Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating…The material entanglements that we are all a part of, and intra-acting with(in) are also an ethical call that is embodied in the very worlding of the world.” There isn’t room for the kind of magical thinking that obfuscates responsibility when my existence is predicated on the destruction of another’s. 

I grew up in Singapore feeling profoundly disconnected, with no relationship to the land, no ancestral wisdom to hold on to, and little connection to family. But my love for the sea and the shores I have stood on have brought me into intra-action with the grains of sand that constitute my island’s borders and borderlessness, and the past and present stories that are written and told to us about sand that shape how matter matters to us in the world in its becoming. We don’t stop, however, at remembering and reclaiming the past. Though remembrance is, according to Barad, “a recognition of a relationship between the body/mind and the external world that is not only determined by internal forces”, what is required is “an enlivening and reconfiguring of past and future that is larger than any individual.” 

When I started writing this essay in graduate school, I was in the throes of my first winter in the Midwest, feeling homesick for a sense of home I didn’t have. When I read Heng’s novel, I felt a kind of grief, a hankering for something that is lost that I do not know and will never know. Our landscapes have been fracked, dredged, blasted, mined, reclaimed and poldered. One weekend, I travelled to Chicago and stood on the shore of Lake Michigan, a freshwater lake. But still, it had the familiar smell of decaying algae, salty like the ocean. Listening to the sound of waves crashing into its sandy shore, I thought, this sound is home, and sand, sand is the thing that connects it all. The beach that held Ah Boon’s memories no longer exists. But there is no stasis in the existence, formation, movement and usage of sand. It is always in a state of flux and intra-action with the world, which means that this is not where it ends.

Aleithia Low is a Singaporean peace studies graduate student. She is currently in Colombia researching restorative justice, environmental justice and trauma healing in the country’s post-Peace Accords context.

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Note: an earlier version mentioned a "PAP community centre" on the East Coast. This has been corrected to "community centre".