I had always wanted to write a play about Singapore's most famous fugitive/detainee - Mas Selamat Kastari.
But there was a problem. Because he was detained under the Internal Security Act, rather than convicted in a normal court, one never heard directly from him. What we had instead were statements from the Ministry of Home Affairs, based on their 'intelligence-gathering'. This is of course a deviation from the usual judicial process where evidence is produced in court and a defendant is allowed to represent his views.
Everyone was speaking on Mas Selamat's behalf, from the media that reproduced verbatim the Ministry's press releases to Malay Ministers who summarily dismissed that a possible motive for Mas Selamat's actions was a sense of marginalisation. One of the biggest problems with the Internal Security Act, for me, was in the way it stifled public debate. 'Moderate Muslims' were exhorted to condemn whatever ideology that Mas Selamat supposedly espoused. But if one had no real access to what exactly his ideas were, how could one counter them effectively?
Mas Selamat stubbornly remained an enigma. There was a lot of talk about him being a member of terrorist organization Jamaah Islamiyah. But can 'fundamentalism' or 'extremism' alone explain someone's drift towards violent tactics? Did he have sociopathic tendencies? What was his personality like? Why do we examine serial killers from a psychological lens but choose an ideological lens when dealing with terrorists?
Writing this play has been cathartic for me, because it has allowed me to explore some of the dynamics operating within the darkness of preventive detention without trial. These include: trumped-up accusations, confessions made under threat and duress, and 're-programming' of the detainee.
In deciding the tone of the play, I felt that farce - a combination of absurdity and hysteria - would serve it best. The reasons for this are 'self-evident'.
– Alfian Sa'at
