How Kurt Vonnegut is helping migrants find their voice [Singapore]

“By law, domestic workers in Singapore are entitled to one day off per week. Many spend it at church, or with friends. On Sundays East Coast Park, a long, narrow stretch of greenery by the Singapore Strait, is crowded with women laughing and picnicking together. But some forego the outdoors, and take a cramped, rickety lift in an unremarkable office building in an unfashionable corner of the city to spend their afternoon in a fluorescent-lit classroom.

Since last September, a group called Voice of Singaporeโ€™s Invisible Hands has been offering creative-writing classes for Singaporeโ€™s migrant workers (the countryโ€™s โ€œinvisible handsโ€). Another group, Singlit Station, organises poetry workshops. And for the past three years, Shivaji Das, a high-flying consultant with Frost & Sullivan who also writes art and travel books (his latest, โ€œAngels by the Murky River,โ€ came out in March), has staged poetry contests for Singaporeโ€™s millions of migrant workers. …”

 

Read the full report by Jon Fasman on the Economist’s 1843 magazine.

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