Again Thinking

Sixty one years after the end of the second world war, the number of those who personally lived through or fought is diminishing to vanishing point. But memories are kept alive in museums, books and films. But such memory is selective and is sometimes contested.

New challenges have risen to confront the victors - former belligerents have become allies (and some allies after having been cold war enemies have turned out rather uneasy friends). Old (Eastern) Europe has broken away from sovietization and become New Europe. Asia and Africa have been freed and the emancipation and emergence of India and China as major economic and military powers are beginning to recast international relations.

Ruminating over this raises the question : What value the sacrifices of those millions who died? What would they say to the world of today?
How do we remember them? Should we remember them or should we get on with our own lives?

Every country, town and village has its monument to the dead of its various wars. What exactly are they remembering?

I first asked this question a long time ago, when they decided to build a cenotaph in Singapore to remember those who died during the Japanese occupation. Around the acrimonious negotiations over what the Japanese should pay as reparatory contribution towards the construction of the cenotaph, much ink was spilt over war-time atrocities ( on the one hand) and the heroism (on the other).

Finally the monument was built - on land not far away from my old secondary school, The Raffles Institution, (which itself a historic monument, had to give way many years later, to the fact that for over a hundred and thirty-odd years it had occupied an economically strategic site).

The poem below was first drafted during the arguments over how much the dead were worth in reparations

Japan is among the largest foreign trading partners of my country.


Cenotaph

they have built a cenotaph
to remember that you died.
long ago heads on bamboo poles
adorned bridges, we remember
but understand memories can't be thicker
than joint projects.

we will come with abacus
to calculate among your bones
the veneration due you
in churches and mosques
you never prayed in, forgetting
that your bones are temples
you often walked in