Ellen Lavilla, Stillness, 2025. Sing Lit Station.
I. Singapore Dreaming
Written by Ada Cheong
Dated 18 Dec 2025
Singapore, the city of dreams. This refrain is echoed widely amongst different migrant poets because of the promises the city holds for them: the promise of affluence and being able to support their families back home. Yet, their description of the nation-state as a place of dreams is strikingly apt in unexpected ways.
The Singapore Story begins with a nation cast adrift in 1965, its Prime Minister crying on national TV. Despite its catastrophic severance from any significant natural resources, the story goes, the small island state sees a meteoric ascent and becomes a prosperous city within a single generation. In other words, Singapore’s existence is a miracle of sorts, a success in the face of great odds. It is the stuff of dreams, both in its improbability and in the extraordinary vision required to make it possible. This narrative lives on in Singapore’s third and fourth generations of governance, with political leaders describing the nation as an “improbable story” (Chan 2024) and “tiny, improbable city state” (Balakrishnan 2023).
The city’s miraculous survival and prosperity are made possible only by flows of global finance. When then-Minister of Foreign Affairs S. Rajaratnam told the Singapore Story in a 1972 address to the Singapore Press Club, nearly a decade from the birth of the nation state, he asked, 'Why has not an independent Singapore as yet collapsed?' (1) The answer, he suggests, lies in Singapore’s status as a global city. The term, popularised by sociologist Saskia Sassen in The Global City, refers to cities which function as economic control-centres in a globalised world, hosting headquarters of MNCs and producing the legal and financial infrastructure required for such corporations to control transnational supply chains. Global cities are results of neoliberal capitalism, displaying key features of this regime: an openness to free trade and foreign investment, corporations that co-opt state apparatuses for their own interests, accumulation through financial capital, and the shrinking of social welfare structures.
In many ways, Singapore can only be a neoliberal Global City. Without natural resources to fuel its growth, it has done what sociologists Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian have described other contemporary first-world economies do: turned away from “advancing underlying ‘real economies’—the parts that produce usable goods—toward seeking profits from financial transactions” (Calhoun and Derlugian 49). In shifting away from producing goods toward making profit through services and financial activity, Singapore also operates economically and ideologically within a neoliberal regime. In order to keep its population productive and competitive, it has relied on a meritocratic educational system and fostered a culture of self-reliance and responsibility, while avoiding welfarism and state handouts. Within such a system, as media studies scholar Cherian George and sociologist Teo You Yenn have shown, individualism and inequality are inevitable.
Singapore, then, is a fragile and improbable city that continues to thrive despite great odds, a dream-come-true. The price it pays to maintain this success (isolation, the rise of mental health issues, and inequality) is deemed necessary and unavoidable. This is a legacy of Lee Kuan Yew’s iron-fisted pragmatism, forming the specific ideological horizon of neoliberal capitalism that migrant poets write within and write back to. It is perhaps best described by cultural theorist Mark Fisher as capitalist realism: “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Capitalist, chapter 1). In this cultural moment, there seems to be no alternative to the present, in which the status quo feels necessary and necessary: the hegemony of a single political party, the censorship of alternative voices in the name of national security, brutal competition of neoliberal capitalism, and the resulting pressures and exploitation.
In other words, Singapore dreaming refers to more than bold visions of skyscraping prosperity; it also refers to the ideological magic of concealing and forgetting the price of its success. Fisher uses dreamwork to describe this ideological work:
If memory disorder provides a compelling analogy for the glitches in capitalist realism, the model for its smooth functioning would be dreamwork. When we are dreaming, we forget, but immediately forget that we have done so; since the gaps and lacunae in our memories are Photoshopped out, they do not trouble or torment us. What dreamwork does is to produce a confabulated consistency which covers over anomalies and contradictions, and it is this which Wendy Brown picked up on when she argued that it was precisely dreamwork which provided the best model for understanding contemporary forms of power. (Capitalist, chapter 7)
Dreamwork, for Fisher, refers to the ways in which the contradictions and violence of capitalism are made to seem natural, necessary, or even desirable. An example of Singapore’s dreamwork in relation to migrant workers is the lorry issue. As the Migrant Death Map project has documented, despite a slew of fatal lorry accidents in the 21st century, the state has refused to ban the transportation of migrant workers on a vehicle designed for cargo. In 2019, a government working group concluded that there was no strong justification for banning lorries, citing the logistical complexities of arranging alternative forms of transport, and the costs involved for businesses. The double standard is stark when compared to the response to school bus accidents in 2006 and 2008, after which the state mandated seatbelts and provided S$35 million in subsidies to help bus companies retrofit school buses. In essence, the persistent use of a cargo vehicle to ferry migrant workers is a clear statement that Singapore values profit over the lives of poor, brown, migrant labourers. Yet, this logic is forgotten and lorry transport for migrant workers is made to seem acceptable, while all other alternatives are perceived to be impossible.
More generally, the exploitation of migrant workers is an ugliness that the state dreams away. The cheapness of migrant workers’ lives is a feature rather than a bug within these politics, deemed essential for the nation-state to remain business-friendly and competitive. Singapore’s migrant workers are part of a new laboring class that emerged within the neoliberal regime in the 1980s. This class of workers has come to be called the precariat, an amalgamation of precarious and proletariat (Foti, Wacquant, and Standing, in Schierup et al. 1). They are characterised by a precarity that results not only from low wages, but also compounded through policies which allow destination countries to exercise considerable control over them (Sassen, The Mobility of Labour and Capital, 47). In Singapore, as geographer Ye Junjia has shown, migrant workers very much fall within this precarious class of labourers, and are socio-politically disempowered in ways that make them distinct from other classes of migrants (including Singapore’s founding generation of migrants, as well as those who hold high-paying jobs and are colloquially known as ‘expats’ in Singapore).
Migrant workers refers to the 1.1–1.2 million low-wage work permit and manual S-Pass holders (MOM, “Foreign”) who make up over 30% of Singapore’s labour force (derived from MOM, “Summary”). Hailing from countries such as India, Bangladesh, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka, these workers perform a range of blue-collar jobs. The bulk of these male workers labour in the construction, marine, and processing (CMP) industries. They build key infrastructure (e.g. housing, MRT networks, land reclamation and transformation projects, etc.), maintain and repair ships in our maritime ports, and play a crucial role in sustaining Jurong Island. Additionally, over three hundred thousand female domestic workers care for Singapore’s aging population and children, cooking and cleaning to enable middle-class professionals to participate fully in the relentless pace of a global financial hub. Migrant workers also work in the cleaning, landscaping, F&B, and service industries.
Their precarity is a result of Singapore’s exclusivist migrant policies, labour policies, and transnational migration dynamics. By barring work permit holders from bringing dependents, and denying them pathways to permanent residence or citizenship (pathways which are open to E-Pass holders), Singapore fosters a systemic transience for the migrant precariat. These workers also have extremely limited job mobility, and are not often allowed to change jobs without their current employer’s consent. When facing undesirable conditions or the end of their contracts, they are not often able to transfer to a different company, or stay in Singapore to search for one.
Furthermore, migrant workers’ vulnerability does not only result from low wages. While they can earn as little as $400 per month (TWC2, “Learning”; TWC2, “negative”) because there is no minimum salary requirement for work permit holders (MOM, “Key”), the weak enforcement of labour laws and cross-border recruitment dynamics further compounds their precarity. The high recruitment fees that many workers pay to secure a job in Singapore, and corresponding loans they take up to afford it, create conditions of forced labour and debt bondage. Therefore, despite the protections offered by the Employment Act, Singapore’s migrant precariat are often unable to resist a range of abuses such as contract substitution, wage theft, and illegal and excessive work hours. These vulnerabilities are exacerbated by the weak enforcement of certain tenets of the Employment Act; significantly, wage theft is treated as a civil dispute to be mediated by the Tripartite Alliance of Dispute Management (TADM), rather than a criminal violation of the law.
To summarise at this point: migrant poetry in Singapore is written by a specific class of workers, the precariat, that emerged in the 1980s within a neoliberal capitalist world-economy. The poems I will examine in this critical overview are written and edited by Work Permit and S-Pass holders who have lived and worked in Singapore. But the more interesting question, perhaps, is: what does migrant poetry do?
The cultural force of migrant poetry is a different variety of dreamwork than that mentioned above. The motif of dreams and modes of dreaming that recur across the diverse body of works form an antidote to Singapore’s capitalist realism. Through their verse, migrant workers perform the work of unravelling how Singapore dreams, unsettling what is made to seem natural and necessary. These writers reveal the strange and surreal nature of an improbable city, articulating the isolation of their lived realities here. The migrant precariat becomes a spectral presence within the dreamscape of their poems, alienated from the spaces they sustain, and isolated from their loved ones.
On another level, the dreamwork of migrant poets also performs what philosopher Ernst Bloch describes as the utopian function of dreaming: the human capacity to imagine the not-yet-conscious, latent possibilities for a more humane world. For Bloch, dreams and art generate wish-images (Wunschbilder) that project desire beyond the constraints of present reality, revealing the horizon of a world which is coming to be. For migrant poets in Singapore, these wish-images arise from the very act of attempting to write a better world into existence. In this sense, the migrant poet’s verse is not only a record of lived precarity but also a form of activism, unsettling the fatalism of capitalist realism by insisting that the world can, and should, be otherwise.
In short, then, their dreamwork is twofold. First, the strangeness and sensuousness of their poems are an antidote to Singapore’s capitalist realism, revealing the inequalities and contradictions that underpin it. Second, their poems have a strong utopian impulse, enacting wish-images of a future in which labour is treated with fairness and dignity.
In what follows, I will trace this dreamwork across the emergence, peak, and seeming decline of migrant poetry over the years, selectively close-reading poems to elucidate the formal qualities of this cluster of texts. I show how the aesthetics of Singapore’s migrant poetry is resonant with other forms of peripheral literatures produced within this historical moment, that contain strange, magic, and irrealist elements.
The structures of feeling that result from the appropriation of Global South communities and ecologies within a system that prioritises the pursuit of profit—and the subsequent disposability and cheapness of human and nonhuman natures—is increasingly represented through the fantastic and speculative, rather than the plausibility of realist fiction. As critics of world-literature have pointed out, “something of an elective affinity exists between the general situation(s) of peripherality and irrealist aesthetics” (WRec 68). Strange and magic realist texts by contemporary Latin American and Caribbean authors are examples of how irrealist texts articulate the absurdity and violence of life in late-capitalism, in ways that realist fiction seems unable to. More broadly, the subsumption of Global South cultures and ecologies within a world-capitalist rationality also produces irrealist forms of monstrosity, haunting and absurdity that critics like David McNally, Darko Suvin, and China Miéville have explored.
While studies of irrealism in Global South literatures has mostly focussed on fiction, the irrealist mode applies across different art forms. Michael Löwy, the cultural theorist whose work forms the foundation of world-literary studies of peripheral irrealisms, wrote that:
The critical viewpoint of these works of art is often related to the dream of another, imaginary world, either idealised or terrifying, one opposed to the gray, prosaic, disenchanted reality of modern, meaning capitalist, society. (Löwy 196)
Irrealist texts may contain elements of realism, but does not seek to reflect reality as it is, drawing instead on the speculative and fantastic to “critically illuminate aspects of reality” (Löwy 205). In this vein, the poetry of Singapore’s migrant writers defy the textures of the real in their depictions of migration and labour in Singapore. Their verses are threaded with implausible events, sensuous and spectral depictions of their loved ones, and bold dreams. The cityscape is, too, made strange and fantastical through their descriptions of its modernity and of life in lockdown. Through these aesthetics, I argue, migrant poets perform dreamwork: a form of reaching for a better future that unsettles Singapore’s capitalist realism.
Much has been written about Singapore’s migrant poets, both by cultural critics and academics in adjacent fields in the humanities like geography, sociology, and anthropology. While the bulk of this critical work focuses on the socio-political force of migrant poetry, few critics have delved into the formal and aesthetic qualities of these works. Singlit writers, editors and organisers such as Joshua Ip, Cyril Wong, Alvin Pang, Poh Yong Han, and Theophilus Kwek have commented on the significance of publishing and circulating migrant poetry in the forewords and afterwords of different migrant poetry collections. In the “Migrants in Singapore Spotlight series” by the Harvard Kennedy School, Kwek and Poh have also elaborated on how migrant poetry points towards a more inclusive politics of nationhood by being an “act of citizenship” (Poh 2021) or “social membership” (Karens in Kwek 2021). Similarly, Rifat Mahbub has talked about how Bangladeshi migrant poets create a “shared narrative of empathy and resistance” (53) in the face of how a state polices and disempowers migrant labourers.
Some critics have touched on the literary qualities of such poems. Mahbub’s exploration of poetic resistance touches on common themes and an overarching sense of absurdity articulated within Bangladeshi poems. In exploring the way in which migrant poetry is a subversive force despite Singapore’s restrictions on political activity, Sherwin Mendoza also elucidates a “shared migrant worker aesthetic” (11) within the poetry of Shromik Monir and Rolinda O. Espanola. Additionally, Angus Richard Whitehead has paid attention to the formal qualities of migrant poetry over the years: “the emotional range, quality, and resonance” of Migrant Tales and the “folk” nature of Española’s voice in No CindeRella?.
This essay builds on the interpretive work already done, conducting a more sustained, robust analysis of the aesthetics of migrant poetry in Singapore in the 21st century.Two academics who have performed similarly panoramic analyses of migrant poetry are worth mentioning in slightly greater detail here: Luka Lei Zhang and Nur Amali Ibrahim. First, while Zhang situates these poems within a wider tradition of working-class literature, I historicise migrant workers more specifically as a precarious class of labourers that emerged in the 1980s. Interpreting their works in this light, as I will show, provides slightly richer analysis as they can be read to resonate with other irrealist works that emerge around the same time. Second, Ibrahim’s chapter on migrant poetry in his forthcoming monograph Border Care shows how such poets can “make new worlds for migrant workers” by exposing the injustices they face, and transforming their audiences so that they “feel compelled to do something about it”. Here, I explore the utopian thrust of these writers in ways that align closely with Ibrahim’s conclusions. If Ibrahim, adopting the word from migrant poet Zakir Hossain Khokan, sees them as wordsmiths, I figure these writers as dreamers, close-reading a wider corpus to elucidate the aesthetic force of these works.
Lastly, it is worth noting at this point that this essay deals exclusively with the English translations of these works, even though many were initially written in the poets’ first languages, including Bengali, Bahasa Indonesia, Tagalog, or Mandarin, before being translated or transcreated into English. As many of the editors and academics above have pointed out, the processes of translation and transcreation shape the circulation and consumption of these texts in significant ways. At best, like with the Migrant Tales collection, the poet’s work becomes accessible to Anglophone audiences, although their original voices might have been filtered through the work of a translator. At worst, such translators and transcreators function as “cultural intermediaries” (Zhang, “Migrant” 357), who select and package migrant poems for circulation and consumption by a bourgeois Anglophone audience (Zhang, Modes 109).
Throughout this essay, I navigate these socio-political dynamics while choosing to close-read the English versions of these works, for three main reasons. The first two are rather pragmatic limitations. Many of the original texts are difficult to source as they are not always presented alongside their English versions. This applies to the bulk of the anthologies close-read here.Furthermore, I am not familiar with many of the languages in which the original poems were written. The continued labour of studying migrant poetry in Singapore would benefit from the attention of multilingual critics like Wahid Al Mamun, who can better engage with these texts as works-in-translation. The last reason is that these poets engage with literary platforms and communities which are extremely heterogenous, and their writing is underpinned by an intention or awareness of engaging an anglophone audience. From the Migrant Worker Poetry Competition to the Call and Response anthologies and Migrant Writers of Singapore community, their voices become legible to others in their community and beyond, when translated into English. Doing so also lends their work the relative ‘prestige’ that English-language poetry enjoys in Singapore. The choice to engage only with the translated versions of these works is not to dismiss the uneven power dynamics that can be produced through the processes of translation and transcreation. Rather, much of my reading is concerned with the cultural force of these works, necessarily involving versions which are circulated with a wider Anglophone audience—while paying attention to the inequalities that produce, and are produced by, these processes.
