The Singapore Writers Festival has always represented a gathering of minds, not only celebrating the best of the best in the literary world, both internationally and regionally, but also a time for readers and writers to assemble, to exchange ideas and to immerse in writing of all genres. Under this year’s theme of Plot Twist, the suite of programmes often encouraged audience members to expect the unexpected, to dare try new things they’d otherwise never consider, and quite simply, to open one’s minds to perspectives from here and beyond.

This edition of the festival also marked Pooja Nansi’s final stint as Festival Director, before handing over the torch to writer Yong Shu Hoong for the 2024 edition of the festival. At the opening ceremony held at Victoria Theatre, Pooja delivered an opening address that focused on the importance of celebrating difference and diversity, which she believed the festival encompassed.

“There’s been a lot of talk about diversity and inclusion in my tenure, but the truth is difference is difficult. Difference can feel uneasy, because it is unfamiliar. It requires stepping outside of ourselves, our comfort zones. And sometimes when a thing is complicated or messy, our very efficient Singaporean instinct is to push for a resolution quickly and neatly,” she said. “But literature resists simple solutions, it demands that we learn to become comfortable with discomfort, with our differences. That we somehow learn to speak across them.”

Also in attendance at the opening was guest-of-honour Ms Jane Ittogi, wife of President Tharman, who echoed Pooja’s thoughts: “We know that when literature has its space, it expands experience, and so too expands what we know of ourselves and others. It not only creates a window into different lives and new worlds. It also allows us to see through the eyes of others, and hence too, creates that window to look differently into our own lives. That is why the diversity within the Festival matters. One of the key strengths of the Festival is its ability to create windows between cultures. Writers from diverse backgrounds gather in our cultural oasis in Singapore for dialogue and exchange of ideas.”

The SWF’s opening night was marked by its signature Opening Debate, surrounding the motion ‘This House Believes AI is the Better Writer’. Moderated by Shamini Flint, both sides of the debate fought hard for their respective arguments, in an evening filled with equal amounts of laughter, intellectual war, and plenty to think about. As moderator, Shamini has always treaded a deliciously dangerous line, but manages to make even the most caustic of burns palatable, while raising important observations on global issues and politics along the way.

On the proposition side, Colin Goh opened in character, pretending to have been “possessed” by an AI, relegating his work to an AI-generated voice to deliver his remarks via video. Despite some initial tech difficulties, it effectively summed up the potential future of having AI overlords. This was however, eloquently countered by Arianna Pozzuoli, who utilised her natural penchant for rhyme and rhythm to deliver a killer rebuttal on the limitations of AI, and the sheer emotion imbued into words that only a human could do.

Next up on the proposition, Nessa Anwar focused on the potential profits that AI can derive, where it could potentially find the happy medium for all using machine intelligence, and provide a form of equality for those who cannot conform to the norm. Marc Nair on the other hand, delivered a passionate anecdote about the joy of creation from one’s own mind, where he shared a memory teaching students to find and create poetry from everyday objects.

Melizarani T. Selva delivered what was perhaps the most fascinating and dramatic argument of the night, referencing AI’s use in the dating world and its ability to put out better profiles and even churn out surprisingly eloquent poetry (based off Shah Rukh Khan movies, of course). It turns out that Melizarani is eventually awarded best speaker of the night – well-deserved, as her argument is also backed up by the foundation that AI is the better reader than any of us will be, indiscriminate and always hunger to expand its knowledge base. Poet/pro-wrestler and scientist Joses Ho then countered with a speech about the tendency towards the extraneous for AI, and how much trash it will undoubtedly end up spewing, and the ethics of it all.

With a quickfire Q&A session with the audience, the attacks came fast and furious, but both sides of the debate were able to answer succinctly and effectively, proving their knowledge of the subject. But it was in their final round that both sides gave it their all, with the opposition summing up their argument with Oniatta Effendi, speaking on each and every one of the opposition as she pushed for cutting through all the noise and coming back to the fundamentals – that writing is and always will be a key part of the human experience. Her opponent? ChatGPT itself, as Joshua Ip fed prompts to the programme and read the responses out loud, clearly having fun as he mimicked Cookie Monster to Confucius.

The winner takes all, and in their matching Baju by Oniatta outfits, the opposition were found victorious, much to the relief of both sides, as the audience was convinced by the need for humans to continue existing such that all the writers on both sides could not simply be replaced by a machine. While certainly deviating from the topic in all kinds of ways, the opening debate once again proved fertile ground for the imagination and for exploration, mixing logos, ethos and pathos and of course, plenty of humour for a cohesive argument from both sides. Perhaps most of all, amidst the fun, the opening debate also acted as a tribute to the late Adrian Tan, who was a mainstay on the panel at previous editions, and in this battle of man against machine, his memory lives on.

Elsewhere over opening weekend, the SWF also welcomed Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen to deliver the festival’s keynote speech. Hot on the heels of the release of his new work, a memoir titled A Man of Two Faces that charts his journey growing up as a Vietnamese-American son of refugees, Viet’s speech wove personal anecdote with painful memories of his parents running a supermarket, the violence they faced and the trauma that stayed with them. Viet’s speech segued into the importance of having a voice, fighting against the idea that there were the voiceless, and that what it takes is to survive and thrive. Pushing back against the American canon erasing minorities, he spoke of his classes under Maxine Hong Kingston, of generating the desire to crawl into the voice of writers, and the subtly white supremacist-thinking of the English-speaking world, where we have never quite moved on from the colonial past.

To listen and to engage then becomes a form of resistance, and to simply have minority voices existing amidst the tyranny of the majority, to claim America and American-ness against the standard American dream and mythos. He speaks of storytelling as an act of love and betrayal, to tell the secrets his mother told him to store away, and breaking the idea of the model minority, that writing is both fighting and grieving such pains accumulated over the years. All this is expanded upon the next day as well, at Projector X’s No Spoilers Bar, with an intimate gathering to facilitate a Q&A with him, where Viet shares even more about his personal life and journey, about The Sympathizer being specifically written in an episodic format and its transition to HBO series. What is clear is that Viet walks the talk, and to have him speak at the SWF is an absolute privilege.

Even beyond Viet, elsewhere over this edition of the SWF were more examples of decolonisation, of the mind and a need to expand one’s understanding of the importance of diversity and difference, particularly with invited speaker Gayatri Spivak. Best known for her seminal essay Can The Subaltern Speak?, the Sunday morning spent at the Victoria Theatre saw her speaking on how she became an activist, and how she had to actively carve out a space for herself to constantly speak up and speak out, pushing back against all the forces threatening to engulf and snuff her out. One cannot adopt a holier than thou attitude, and instead learns to see what is needed in order to truly help a community.

As a ‘celebrity academic’, Gayatri uses her voice to champion the need for the humanities amidst STEM subjects, as a means to acquire knowledge and find the freedom to explore and utilise that knowledge, using it as a means to problem solve and as intellectual labour to break down ideas and build curiosity. Lamenting the loss of the humanities globally, she mourns the death of creativity, found even in the most unexpected of areas such as theory. She speaks of the need to constantly unlearn and learn again, to go beyond mere class consciousness and to truly understand the state of the world as it is. She really is the badass Asian aunt with no filter, tells things like it is, and speaks truth with every word.

Finally, the SWF also featured multi-disciplinary performance There’s No Cause For Grief: Reading Goh Poh Seng in 2023, as contemporary poets Ang Kia Yee, Cyril Wong and Zeha read literary pioneer Goh Poh Seng’s unpublished poems set to music by pianist, organist and composer Chok Kerong and his band. Inspired by Bistro Toulouse-Lautrec, a jazz and poetry club Goh Poh Seng ran in the 1980s, the evening took us into a lilting, meandering realm of of words, as his words live on, in the spiritual, the terrestrial, and the absurd. Ranging from plunging sadness to possessing a gripping verve for life, there is indeed no cause for grief, as we learn to feel as much as Goh did, in all the booze and writing and experiences, reminding us of what life is for – living it to the fullest.

“To be clear, I am under no illusion that a literary festival can solve the world’s problems,” says Pooja. “But in a world that is in turmoil, it certainly has the potential to model a space where we can come together to examine the combination of our collective triumphs and failures and attempt a more complete understanding of our humanity.”

Image Credits: Arts House Limited

Singapore Writers Festival 2023 ran from 17th to 26th November 2023, and will return in 2024. More information available here