Having sat through three hours of a single debate on identity, one cannot help but to think about existential questions. The alternative would otherwise have been suicide, or death from sleep deprivation. Previously I asked myself about why do I do what I do, mainly because people kept bugging me that week. I never got down to answering that but let’s just jump to more fundamental questions, like who am I? where do I belong? what is my identity?
It’s a question asked by the Bat, a beast with wings. A question asked by British-born Indians, like Hanif Kureishi who wrote Buddha in Suburbia. A question asked by the Queen’s Chinese, like the protagonist Dennis Chiang in Walter Woon’s Advocate’s Devil trilogy, who spent much time in England and can’t speak Chinese when back in Singapore.
Identity boils down to common values (among a long jumble of many other things) but what happens when you have conflicting values? Like people who thread the balance between holding on to a Christian faith, and yet maintain the need to remain as a rational critical thinker. Or the people who are pro-government yet anti at the same time. Or the people who simply cannot tell if they are more of a striver, or more of a skiver — whether they are more intense than they are idle. Does one need to feel the identity to possess the identity? If I hate my identity/organisation, does that undermine by identity in any way?
Questions only lead on to more perplexing questions. I do believe one thing though — that identity isn’t given to you on a piece of paper or by other people, it is found, formed and forged by the individual. (and when you realise that the answers don’t really matter, fuck it.)
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Related post: http://findmuck.wordpress.com/2010/06/12/what-it-means-to-be-acsian/
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August 20, 2011 at 1:42 pm
a2ed
“Identity boils down to common values”
Not really mate. It would be more accurate to say that ‘identity CAN boil down to common values’. I’m not into these ‘common values’ thing as it is frequently an amalgam of that which we recognise as good, and that which we recognise as ‘normal’ because it is widely practiced – even though it might be bad.
I would break down the meaning of identity into ‘what we are’ and ‘what we can be despite what we are’. Then we can move on to determining why and when we ought to choose the former or latter given a variety of circumstances.
In order to figure this last question out, we first have to steer clear of sentiment and what we are familiar with, or what is expected of us – which goes into comprising ‘what we are’.
And in the void that is thus created, we need to figure out, not what we are, or hope to be, but what is the right thing to be.
That doesn’t mean that we give priority to thinking about these things over living. Rather, we ought to live the result of each phase of our questioning, whilst using our living it to see if the result contributes to our further development as opposed to making us more comfortable with it the longer we persist in living it.
Interesting thoughts and questions. Thought-provoking.
August 20, 2011 at 3:53 pm
a2ed
Most certainly a ‘rated-i’ site (linked beneath ‘blogger updates’ in singazine.com.) Keep up the perspectival meanderings. Good one!