The language of our battle

It matters.

Amid the brouhaha over NLB’s banning and pulping of three books, this quote has been repeatedly echoed in agitated responses:

“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”

I've seen it in the writings of several activists of LGBT rights, including in Vincent Wijeysingha’s Facebook post.

Here’s my take: Don’t use this quote. Don’t compare censorship to lynching. Don’t posit that the destruction of three books will lead to the murder of LGBT people. This quote was written by a German poet, in response to book burning during the Spanish Inquisition. This is the National Library Board, not the Spanish Inquisition. This is Singapore in the year 2014, where 26,000 people just attended a pro-LGBT event. Singapore will not burn LGBT people.

I say all this as an ally of the LGBT community. You have done so much to raise awareness of LGBT people and LGBT issues in Singapore. A year ago nobody could not have foreseen so many speaking out so passionately for acceptance, respect, and equality. You have built up a sizable cache of popular support and gained wider acceptance in the public eye. Where it all seemed impossible only years ago with the failed repeal of Section 377A, it seems now like there is fuel for the fight.

But the project is not over yet. As you have all so vividly described in recent days, this NLB move—and the conservative minority who sparked it—shows opposition to LGBT equality is still very real and quite powerful. That is why the message of the community needs to be better. It needs to steer away from hyperbole because it’s not just the intellectuals who will see right through it. The everyday folk, unacquainted with LGBT issues, will see the hyperbole for what it is: a distortion of the truth. They know in their hearts there is no possibility of a Singapore where LGBT people are burned at the stake. If you let them hook onto one untruth, you risk letting them make it the issue. People seek excuses for their apathy; don’t give them another one.

That the realness of pain in the LGBT experience encourages such language is not lost on me. Many of you undergo the kind of drip-drip bullying that as isolated events are largely harmless but accumulate to wear away at your personhood. Many of you do not expect to ever be accepted by your loved ones. And many of you have endured or are enduring the very real physical bullying. Because the pain is so intimate, the notion that someday somebody will burn you feels at least like a figurative truth. But I ask you to recognize that the fight for LGBT rights involves persuasion. A story cannot be persuasive if it tests the boundaries of truth.

My suggestion is this: Tell your true story. Tell the story of how the physical damage to the books mirror the physical suffering you undergo. Tell the story of how the suppression of LGBT stories parallel the everyday silencing of your voices. Tell your authentic story that, I think, people will listen to. Tell these stories without omission or embellishment. Having read the memoirs of several LGBT writers, I find their stories fascinating, no matter how mundane or turbulent. If language is to be the arsenal of the fight for LGBT equality, then let it be suffused with the authenticity of experience, not hyperbolic foreboding.