Abstract
Good People, by Singaporean playwright Haresh Sharma, unmasks racial and religious tensions between Singapore’s increasingly diverse racial groups and the attendant ramifications on the healthcare ecosystem and the doctor-patient relationship. Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, this paper argues that, in Good People, Sharma employs theater as a site of resistance by calling into question state and medical authority. First, state authority is challenged through the play’s scrutiny of the ideological principle of multiculturalism and its usefulness in fostering meaningful cross-cultural exchanges and acceptance of different cultural and religious beliefs in the clinic. Second, the play destabilizes medical authority by surfacing the complex relationship between the doctor’s unconscious biases, racial and religious prejudice, and clinical judgment, thereby casting doubt on medicine’s claims of objectivity. In doing so, this paper argues, the play resists simplistic binary categorizations of the behaviors and motivations of the characters into good/bad or right/wrong, instead raising questions about power, knowledge, and contesting truths within the confines of the cultural space of a hospice.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Associate Professor Graham Matthews for his guidance and support in writing this article. I am grateful to the editor, Professor Bernice L. Hausman, and to Dr. Roberta C. Andrade for their valuable comments and feedback.
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Endnotes
1Out of a survey of more than 30 English-language Singaporean illness plays, Good People is the only one that explicitly tackles issues concerning race and religion in medical institutions.
2The cast consists of Filipino actor Rody Vera, who plays Miguel, Malaysian Indian actress Sukania Venugopal, who takes on the role of Radha, and Singaporean Malay actress Siti Khalijah Zainal, who performs as Yati.
3The population of present-day Singapore is composed of 74.2 percent Chinese, 13.7 percent Malays, 8.9 percent Indians, and 3.2 percent Others (Department of Statistics 2021). As of 2020, 31.1 percent of the population stated Buddhism as their religion, 18.9 percent practiced Christianity, 15.6 percent practiced Islam, 15.6 percent practiced Hinduism, 8.8 percent practiced Taoism, 5 percent stated “other religions,” and 20 percent did not have any religious affiliations (Department of Statistics 2020).
4Other critical works examining the racial politics of Singapore have also exposed the systemic marginalization of the racial minority groups: Malays and Indians (Chua 2003, 2009, 2010; Goh 2008; Rocha 2011; Velayutham 2009, 2017).
5In the past two years alone, a host of racist and culturally insensitive incidents have taken place in Singapore (see Ang and Das 2022; Wong 2022; Tham 2022; Alkhatib 2022, 2021; Ang 2021; Chelvan 2021; Iau 2021; Sarah 2021; Low 2020).
6In “‘Hare Krishna vs. Shiva Shiva’: Swami Agehananda Bharati, Drugs, and the Mystical State in Hinduism,” Christopher Helton explains that in rural India, the consumption of cannabis is practiced regularly according to the Hindu religious calendar while urban, educated Hindus “would shrink in horror” at the thought of using drug substance to achieve the “mystical state” (Helton 2016, 35). Similarly, the two movement branches of Hinduism—Hare Krishna and Shiva Shiva—have different interpretations of the tenet.
7In Hinduism, moksha refers to freedom from samsara—the cycle of death and rebirth—and this emancipation is a sacred stage that all Hindus aim to achieve.
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Aung, A.T. Theater as a Site of Resistance in Haresh Sharma’s Good People: Questioning Authorities and Contesting Truths in the Clinic. J Med Humanit 44, 327–345 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-023-09793-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-023-09793-2