Every Cat in History is I

“If the original calls for a complement, it is because at the origin it was not there without fault, full, complete, total, identical to itself.”
Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel”1

The Lion City

This is a story of how cats—big and small, wild and domesticated, imagined and real—have been enigmatically woven into the history of Singapore. We shall begin with the lion, from which Singapore derived its name. In Sanskrit, singa stands for “lion” and pura means “city.” It is said that some time in the thirteenth century, a Sumatran prince by the name of Sri Tri Buana (popularly known as Sang Nila Utama) arrived upon the shores of an island known as Temasek, where he spotted this mighty beast. This originary moment was recounted in the Malay Annals as such:

Subsequently, Sri Tri Buana established his kingdom on the island, which he renamed Singapura. However, lions have never been a species of cats indigenous to this part of the world. And thus the historian C.M. Turnbull proclaimed, “the very name ‘Singapura’ was a paradox. For no lion had ever set foot in this Lion City.”3 This encounter between sovereign and beast, founder and namesake, is what we would in the language of psychoanalysis refer to as the "primal scene." This refers to the moment where a child witnesses parental intercourse, a re-enactment of his or her own origin—a moment that is understandably traumatic, marked as it is by a sense of sexual agitation and violence.4 In a typical Freudian dialectic of repression and representation, this ‘sighting’ is that which is to be concealed, only to return incessantly in a disguised form on a phantasmatic screen.5

Looking again at the primal scene of Singapore, one is struck by the sudden appearance and disappearance of the beast (its “great speed”), which in turn hints at the extreme shock and trauma that accompanies this originary moment. The beast itself is a creature of fantastical or nightmarish proportions, a hallucinatory apparition—red-bodied, black-headed, white-breasted, and bigger than a male goat. Nothing in this description suggests that the creature sighted was in fact a lion. This unearthly beast needed taming and domesticating by the human act of naming, of representation. Sri Tri Buana’s aide Demang Lebar Daun, who himself had never laid eyes upon a lion, must perform this founding act of identification based on nothing but the flimsiest of hearsay. The arbitrariness of this founding act of naming could perhaps be understood as an instance of wish-fulfillment, for the lion-sighting could be nothing more than an allegorical disguise for the establishment of the Singgahasana or “lion throne,” which was one of the main symbols of Malay and Indonesian royalty. In fact, for the historian Oliver Wolters, the bodhisattva-like figure of Sri Tri Buana was a substitute for the historical figure of Iskandar Shah—a Sumatran prince exiled from Palembang, who later founded the empire of Melaka in the sixteenth century.6 For Wolters, “the definition of the lion’s three colours in the context of the adventures of a bodhisattva-sovereign is unlikely to be supplied as a picturesque detail. The genealogist probably has in mind Mahayana symbols honored in Iskandar’s court.”7 As Jacques Derrida points out, “If the original calls for a complement, it is because at the origin it was not there without fault, full, complete, total, identical to itself.”8 And so it is that the ambiguity over the feline beast at the heart of this island’s origin would perpetually return to haunt its history.

The Tiger City

Lions may be alien to the ecology of the lion city, but tigers were known to infest this little island and its surrounds. A creature much feared by the local inhabitants of the Malayan region, seldom was the tiger hailed by its proper name harimau. Instead, they referred to this terrible beast by a host of more colloquial substitute nouns—such as arimau, rimau, and rimo. These were terms that the anthropologist Peter Boomgaard described as being loose enough to encompass the sense of “big cat-like animals” such as leopards, which—like the tigers with which they were often confused, and unlike lions—were indigenous to this part of the world.9 This linguistic indistinctiveness around the word for tiger runs parallel to the ambiguous image of the creature possessed by the Malay people. In Boomgaard’s opinion, they regarded the tiger “as the embodiment of a spirit that represents fear.” Boomgaard goes on to elaborate that this was an instance of “spirit beliefs” that “were highly elaborate complexes ‘constructed’ around particularly life-threatening occasions, such as certain illnesses (cholera [collar-rer], smallpox), and particular animals, such as the tiger. There are examples in the literature of villages being struck by, for example, a cholera epidemic after a ‘tiger epidemic’. Thus the villagers experienced this as the coming of one evil spirit after another, or even the same spirit in various forms.”10

From an ecological perspective, this notion of the return of the same spirit in different forms has a structural equivalence. For example, Manuel De Landa has noted that, “contagious diseases and their hosts form complex non-linear dynamical systems with several possible states. When the population of the hosts is insufficient, or insufficiently packed, making contagion difficult for the micro-organism, the dynamical system enters an unstable state called ‘epidemic’, and the population of germs grows explosively until it burns out its human fuel.”11 Thus, the reduction of a human population after a tiger raid might be understood to have unsettled the equilibrium between the micropredators and their human hosts, leading to the outburst of an epidemic. Likewise, events such as epidemics, famines, and wars often left vast numbers of corpses buried inappropriately and thus ripe for the tigers’ pickings. This in turn would have the effect of cultivating in these fearsome creatures—which normally avoided men—a taste for human flesh.12 At the level of diagrammatic food chains, humans are a source of food common to both the large feline predators as well as to what De Landa called “micropredators”—the “diseases that ate human flesh from within.”13 For him, the biosphere can be mapped out as a continuous chain of parasitism: the foundation of any food web is its plants, which “bite”; into the stream of solar radiation, capturing some of it as sugars by means of photosynthesis. Plants are the only non-parasitic creatures in an ecosystem, its primary producers, while the animals who eat flesh (plant or animal) are mere consumers.14 Plagues, like man-eating tigers, exist in a parasitic relationship with human bio-matter. To be more precise, plagues are a form of “microparasitism” that the human body perpetually struggles against on the “inside,” while tigers constitute a form of “macroparasitism,” which characterizes the constant battle of men on the “outside.” But the most fearsome macroparasite of man has long been his fellow man. As William McNeill puts it, “one can properly think of most human lives as caught in a precarious equilibrium between the microparasitism of disease organisms and the macroparasitism of large-bodied predators, chief among which have been other human beings.”15

Tigers and Colonialism

A conqueror may be defined as the party that seizes food from those who produce it. Thus, by consuming food that he does not directly produce, the conqueror is in fact a parasite upon those who do the work. As McNeill explained:

At the same time, the conqueror would function as a type of antibody to prevent the other macroparasites from feeding off the food-producing agents. For McNeill:

In this sense, the age of colonialism can be understood as a mutation in the forms of human macroparasitism. The imperial center was siphoning surplus energy not only from the food—producing rural areas, but also from the colonized states. This form of global parasitism reached a crescendo in the nineteenth century, which Alfred Crosby characterized as the time of “the greatest wave of humanity ever to cross oceans and probably the greatest that ever will cross oceans.” This “Caucasian tsunami” began with “the starving Irish and the ambitious Germans and with the British, who never reached peaks of emigration as high as some other nationalities, but who have an inextinguishable yearning to leave home.”18

In the early years of the nineteenth century, the Javanese peasants began to sense this new form of macroparasitism, as expressed in the new ways they began to perceive the stakes involved in their rituals of staging tiger–buffalo fights. These rituals had always been an enactment of the encounter between agriculture (in the form of the buffalo) and “wild” nature (in the form of the tiger, which also held connotations as their indigenous overlord). With the expansion of British influence in Java, the tiger increasingly became identified with their new colonial masters.19 Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles—agent of the East India Company, would-be colonial “founder” of Singapore, and one-time Lieutenant-Governor of Java—was probably the first European observer to discover that there was more to tiger–buffalo fights than met the eye. As he noted, “in these entertainments the Javans are accustomed to compare the buffalo to the Javanese and the tiger to the European, and it may be readily imagined with what eagerness they look to the success of the former.”20

Tigers and Other Forms of Macroparasitism

When Raffles founded the British settlement of Singapore in 1819, it seemed that the island had no tigers. Tigers began to show themselves two decades later, just as the Chinese migrants began clearing the jungle for gambier and pepper plantations. These activities created a borderline zone between the dense forest and cleared grounds, producing ideal conditions for tigers to thrive. Turnbull noted, “As more plantations encroached on the virgin jungle, the danger became so acute that by the middle of the century, Singapore was famous for her tigers, which were rumoured to be carrying off an average of one victim a day. A tiger was even found in Orchard Road in 1846.”21 However, if colonialism had laid the foundations for the capitalist exploitation of the land that in turn contributed to tigers thriving, it was also at the “invisible hand” of capitalism that tigers would later perish. As the Chinese proverb goes, “A single hill cannot support two tigers.” Capitalism, a form of macroparasitism that operates on the systematic siphoning of surplus production from labor, would soon eliminate the competing strain of parasitism embodied in tigers, which feed off the flesh of laborers. By 1860, while Western trading companies were proliferating in Singapore, state and merchant funds came together to ensure that tigers—dead or alive—were subject to the same abstract system of cash exchange. This kick-started a veritable frenzy of tiger hunts, with two people even having been on record as full-time tiger hunters. In 1860, Governor Cavenagh sent out parties of convicts—“surplus humans”—to hunt for tigers in the jungles. By the turn of the century, tigers in Singapore were well on their way to extinction, although as late as 1900, the repressed large cats occasionally found the opportunity to return. In a somewhat ironic haunting of their repressors, a large tiger was reported to have appeared strategically under the billiard table of the hotel named after Raffles.22 With the Second World War, the parasitism of colonialism would give way to another form of predation in Malaya. The parallels between the microparasitism of infectious disease and the macroparasitism of warfare, as McNeill noted, “are connected by more than rhetoric and the pestilences that have so often marched with and in the wake of armies.” According to McNeill:

In 1941, the macroparasitism of war arrived in the form of the Japanese Twenty-Fifth Army, under the command of Lieutenant-General Tomoyuki Yamashita. They penetrated the length of the densely forested Malayan peninsula in just seventy days, thus producing one of the greatest military defeats ever suffered by the British. This battle earned General Yamashita the nickname “The Tiger of Malaya.”24 One reason behind the success of the Japanese was their guile and mastery of movement in the jungle. As Timothy Hall commented:

Amphibious, unpredictable, sinister, and full of guile—these qualities of the Japanese Army made them more than a handful for the British—but these were also the same qualities that had made the tiger such a feared enemy of the British.

Communism and Weretigers

The Japanese occupation of Malaya had the side effect of producing antibodies against foreign bodies, both Japanese and British. The years after the Second World War were to be marked by the battle to free Malaya from British colonization; but from within the anti-British ranks, there was yet another war to be fought—a war that put the survival of the parasitic market economy at stake. This was the class struggle waged in the name of communism. Leftist propaganda had often depicted the upper and middle classes as macroparasites feeding off the labor of the working classes, but by a political sleight of hand, the newly emerging political leaders of Singapore applied the label “tiger” to the communists instead. Commenting on their brief collaboration with the communists during the anti-colonial struggle, Lee Kuan Yew, former leader of the People’s Action Party, which has dominated Singapore since independence, said, “We were riding a tiger and we knew it.”26 And the communists, paradoxically, did become tigers when they fled into the forests to carry out a long-drawn-out guerilla struggle. Like true tigers, they had returned to the wilderness, and, like tigers, once again, they were hunted and then branded with a price on their heads. On September 6, 1951, the Malayan daily The Straits Times declared in a headline an 80,000-dollar reward for the “live” capture of Chin Peng, Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Malaya, and 60,000 dollars if he was dead upon delivery.27 By May 1, 1952, the reward for the capture of Singapore’s “Public Enemy No. 1” had risen to 250,000 dollars.28 In the Foreword to Lieutenant-Colonel A. Locke’s 1954 book The Tigers of Trengganu, the Right Honorable Malcolm MacDonald, Commissioner-General for the United Kingdom in Southeast Asia, made a curious statement conflating communists with tigers, as he recalled:

Malayan weretiger (right). Source: Peter Boomgaard, Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and People in the Malay World, 1600–1950. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001, p. 189. Originally from Walter William Skeat and Charles Otto Blagden, Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula. London: Macmillan, 1906.

This zone of indistinction between men and tigers in turn was an enigmatic repetition of an earlier Malayan myth, that of the weretiger. According to these myths, homeless, nomadic beggars wandering from house to house in search of alms were sometimes rumored to be weretigers, who would return in tiger form to seek revenge on those who denied them charity. As Boomgaard observed, “fear of supernatural powers of certain people seem to go hand in hand with feelings of hate, resentment, guilt and fear toward poor people.”30 Something of these unconscious feelings of hate, resentment, and guilt towards the poor no doubt re-manifested in the paranoia-infested years of the struggle against communism. For McNeill, the “reciprocity between food and parasite that has undergirded civilised history is matched by parallel reciprocities within each human body.” The white corpuscles in a human body “constitute a principal element in defenses against infection” by the ingestion of microbiological intruders.31 Intruders unable to be digested by the white corpuscles will become parasites, which in turn digest whatever they find nourishing within the human host. By analogy, communism can be viewed as a viral ideology that spreads from mind to mind, with the aim of maximum replication. The state, invested in continuation of the market system, thus takes on the role of the antibody in a process parallel to that of the human body attempting to repulse foreign bodies.

Fear of the “communist disease” led to a kind of intense hypochondria or paranoia. For Sigmund Freud, paranoia, like all pathological phenomena, is grounded in repression, a process that in turn can be split into three phases. The first phase is “fixation,” whereby an instinct that is inhibited from developing retains its regressive or infantile stage. The second is repression proper, where fixation is experienced as being in conflict with the “conscious system” of the ego and requires constant policing. The third and most important phase is the failure of policing the boundaries and the subsequent “irruption, of return of the repressed.”32 In any case, the Malaya-wide paranoia, no doubt, was intensified by the well-known communist tactic if arrested—to never admit to membership of the Party. For the paranoid state, this strategy of perpetual denial had the effect of making almost everyone equally suspect.

Cats in the Age of Late Capitalism

By 1972, the might of capitalism had eradicated the threat of the (communist) tiger. Now was a time for nation-building and economic consolidation.33 In order to sustain this booming economy, 100,000 permits were issued to foreign workers in order to meet the soaring demand for labor in Singapore—new pools of bio-matter, or flesh, to be injected into the island-state of Singapore. At the same time, the disappearance of tigers left a vacuum, which was filled by the return of another large cat, the lion. And, like the “living dead” that return from the grave in horror films, things from the past always come back a little differently. On September 15, 1972, the lion returned as a newly created national icon, the Merlion—an imaginative hybrid of a lion with the tail fin of a fish, monumentalized as an eighty-ton sculpture.

Profile of the Merlion, photograph (black and white). © 2005 Lim Tzay Chuen

In 1979 the lion returned yet again, this time in the form of a courteous beast—its teeth replaced by a grin—any traces of its wild nature dispelled by an overwhelming sense of docility. For the lion had now become Singa, the mascot of Singapore’s National Courtesy Campaign, designed to indoctrinate Singaporeans with notions of politeness. In 1991, the lion gave way to yet another feline national icon—Kucinta, the Love Cat of Singapore—as part of the Singapore Tourism Board’s (STB) worldwide promotional campaign to give Singapore a friendlier face. The STB had jumped on an American breeder’s “discovery” of a supposedly indigenous Singapore cat, the Kucinta. However, as Sarah Hartwell comments, “its ‘discovery’ was challenged and largely discredited in that same year. It was argued that its ‘discoverer’ had created the breed from Abyssinian- and Burmese-type cats taken to Singapore with her.”34 The Kucinta—as the lion of Singapore’s namesake—was never a truly indigenous species to the island-state.

The Cats Return

In 2003, cats once again surfaced in media headlines in Singapore. The island-state was in the midst of a SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak, which not only killed thirty-one people and infected 206, but also committed the cardinal sin of negatively affecting Singapore’s economy. In April 2003 it was announced that figures relating to the tourism industry in Singapore fell by 67 percent from the previous year, and the government had to slash its economic-growth forecast from an initial 2–5 percent to an unacceptable 0.5–2.5 percent.35 Sparked by reports that strains of the SARS virus had been found in civet cats (which are from the same family as the mongoose and only distantly related to the stray cats found in Singapore),36stray cats became the subject of an island-wide witch-hunt that was uncannily reminiscent of the state’s paranoia during the anti-communist years. This time round, the state declared war on the 80,000 stray cats that roamed the island of 4 million people. On May 24, 2003, officials began the crackdown, and fifty-five cats were culled in the first two days of the campaign.37 The claim of a connection between SARS and stray cats was eventually proven to be inconclusive, but this was no obstacle for the war effort already declared on stray cats. Eventually, the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority of Singapore admitted that the culling of cats had had nothing to do with the possibility that cats were transmitting the SARS virus; instead, “it was part of the ‘Singapore’s OK’ program to clean up the surroundings and improve public hygiene.”38 The culling was a bid to repair the damage SARS had done to Singapore’s image as the antiseptic city of cleanliness par excellence. In other words, faced with the invisibility of a microbiological enemy, the authorities reacted by producing a tangible enemy. Most unfortunate for cats in Singapore was that this anxiety over the nation’s unseen enemies came in the wake of the September 11 attacks, and became conflated with the global fear of the borderless and invisible threat of terrorism. As Dr Tony Tan, then-Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Security and Defence proclaimed, “Terrorism and SARS are similar because they respect no borders. […] Just as the fight to root out terrorism will have to be long and sustained, so too will the fight against the SARS virus.”39 Because they were both “borderless” threats, SARS and terrorism triggered an unprecedented paranoia capable of destabilizing any established dichotomy between the “inside” and the “outside.” In this sense, Singapore’s stray cats were sacrificial offering in the ritualistic renewal of nationhood.40 As René Girard put it, “Thanks to the victim, such as it appears to come out of the community and as the community appears to come out of it, there can exist for the first time something like an inside and an outside, a before and an after, a community and the sacred.”41

The culling was literally a show, or more precisely, a show-of-force, an attempt by the state symbolically to purge itself of its own (unwanted) insides. Again, in the words of Girard, “The victim must be the first object of non-instinctual attention, and he or she provides a good starting point for the creation of sign systems because the ritual imperative consists in a demand for substitute victims, thus introducing the practice of substitution that is the basis of all symbolisations.”42 In other words, culling the stray cats served as a kind of symbolic return to order—an order that it was imperative to stabilize by the renewal of rigid demarcation between what is “good” and what is “bad,” what is “inside” and what is “outside.”43 Hence the double threat of virus and virulent ideology was projected onto the “scapegoats”—the stray cats. Projection, according to Freud, takes place when “an internal perception is suppressed, and, instead, its content, after undergoing a certain kind of distortion, enters consciousness in the form of an external perception.”44 For Singapore’s ruling political party, paranoid projection was the order of the day. Likening the SARS virus to a biological attack carried out by terrorists, Dr Tan declared that “only the paranoid survive.”45

This essay was first printed in: Lucy Davis (ed.), FOCAS Forum on Contemporary Art & Society, Volume 6. The Substation Singapore/documenta 12 Magazines Project, 2007, pp. 150–68.