Last year, with the launch of Mynah Magazine's fourth and final issue, it seemed a good time to begin stocking select titles for sale at the infoshop. It ended up taking half a year to pick and order a few other books as well as make changes to the space. You can read more about this in an email and Patreon update sent last week to friends, visitors, and supporters. Part of it accounts for those few months of online inactivity as the bulk of this work happened, unseen and entangled in demoralisation, while other portions sketch out plans, threads, hopes, and challenges for the project.
We purchased a few copies with the combined intentions of supporting Mynah, exploring more varied encounters through the infoshop, and creating additional ways of sustaining it. Having also been added to our library, this cosy little space is likely now one of the few places where you could find and read all four issues.
Although it might not seem like an immediate fit with wares, since its inception and through its years of evolution, Mynah has given us a glimpse at a wonderful example of just what's possible in both form and content, here. Uncovering often hidden aspects of so-called Singapore through diverse and divergent lenses, featuring equally thoughtful attention in design, and crucially, produced through open pitches and full community funding, it's a remarkable (and physical) staking of counter-narratives in a place so used to threatening the destruction of any autonomy. With its (forced) demise, what might come next, growing from seeds it had helped spread?
We'd love to see other self-organised assemblies of considered art and writing in and around this city, in the long-form, the short story, the poetic, the irreverent, the multivalent… and to be in conversation rather than just churning out ever more products for consumption and “vibrancy”, propping up nationalist, statist, capitalist logics. Of course, our preference points towards that which is focused by principles and ethos, grounded in lived realities, rooted to the worlds of ungovernable freedom struggling – becoming – against this one, but that's still vast with potential.
“Mynah is an annual print magazine about Singapore, Singaporeans and Singaporeanness. We aim to critically and creatively examine the facets of this country that either don’t get enough time in mainstream media, or haven't been discussed in broad ways.“
“What's in Mynah #4?
– An analysis of rap and its uneasy relation to the state, from the viral MDA video to the antiviral SAR-Vivor rap
– A conversation between drag and burlesque artists worms and Steph Dogfoot on physicality, sexuality, gender, and craft on stage
– An essay on the passive-aggressive public signs that Singaporeans write one another, and what it says about community and 'bao toh' culture
– An interview series with Singaporeans who moved overseas and their reasons why
– A photo essay on the soon-to-be-vacated Golden Mile Complex and the communities that call it home
– An original satirical tabletop role-playing game, "Paper Trails", where points are awarded for SES, heteronormativity, and more, and the aim is to accumulate as much paper as you can!
And more!
We pride ourselves on being a magazine with a diversity of voices, and in Mynah #4 we're proud to feature friends of the magazine like Faris Joraimi and Joy Ho as well as contributors who are new to us like Varsha Sivaram and Alif Ibrahim.”
There's a sizeable backlog of things to show and talk about, but in waiting, waiting for the right time, it's only grown larger – some of these pictures were shot almost a whole year ago. It feels wrong to do anything that doesn't directly aid the urgencies of the moment, and these horrific moments are themselves overlapping and overwhelming.
Where is this coming from? How do we think about attention, modulated through the algorithmic spectacle, and how has it shaped how we approach action and change? Are we using the tools or are they determining our decisions? It feels like things are in competition, being placed in competition, imagination limited and interventions uncreative.
There are fundamental disconnects that should be evident. We're trapped in work, everything seemingly going about as “normal”; crisis normal forms the baseline. How is it we've gone on keeping everything running when we know the gravity of the situations? Don't we wish we could indeed put our bodies upon the gears? We're already torn by the punishing hold of capitalist time, isolated and tired, bombarded with competing offers of “interests” and “activities” to fill up “free time” and made to feel like shit if you have none. Some even believe themselves to already be free, that they're trying to “free others”. No, we aren't free. Continued belief in “independence” and individualist “solutions” tells us as much. That's what the slogans actually mean when they say liberation is interconnected and that none of us are free until all of us are free. It's saying there are multiple struggles against oppression, not just the ones affecting us personally, and we have to connect them, we have to enact material solidarities. And in there, a path is illuminated. We go on, not with averted gazes but because it's the only way to do anything about it; not escapism, but preparation. How to break that hold? How to generalise its unworking? How to cheer with each small instance of its rupture?
We gather, we study, we learn, we form and nurture relationships, find affinities and build capacities, with care and danger, act together, and create those new worlds.