‘Strawberry’ names the point of injury – the bruising, the breaking of skin. A strawberry blooming on a child’s knee. A group of enlarged blood vessels under the skin causing redness or a bumpy appearance is called a strawberry haemangioma. Sometimes it isn’t a strawberry, sometimes it’s deeper under the skin where it can block your breathing or vision, or on your organs where you can’t see it and may not even be aware of its benign existence. Sometimes it shows up years later on your mum’s x-ray and you imagine you’ve always shared a secret bond. Sometimes they administer steroids to suppress its growth, but as a result your whole body fails to grow. Failed growth in the first quarter. The father of Singaporean paediatrics diagnoses you with Down’s syndrome. Your own father says years later, a mongoloid, you looked spastic. He reaches quickly for your face, imagining himself the surgeon, see, they would just flip the whole skin back and cut it out, like this. Going by the first letter of your last name, you should be standing at the back, but you, the smallest in your cohort, are first in every line.
To be first in every line, to become synecdochal. The first head in ‘head count’. A little body, glasses, checkered pink uniform, ankles crowned with white frilled socks, hand in one pocket secretly clutching a leaky cone of fruit jelly: the kindergarten graduate.
To be first in every line, a national obsession in a febrile young country. The first party, the first election, the first public housing, the first man-made Southeast Asian post-independence local syllabus party man woman bestseller skyscraper museum road president prime minister constitution. What if we got it all wrong? What if instead of the word museum, we said fire hydrant, angsana or joy? Or murder?
Kiasu, eh? But you’re no champion. They look at you and tsk with distant, helpless pity, like when you see food go to waste after a party. Or when you see the frozen crouched figures of a devastating earthquake in the 5th Century that wiped out a whole village. Frightened by their concern, touched by a stranger’s interest, you cry every time and don’t know why.
To be first: to pre-empt, to distract, to lead away, to defuse. Before anything is said, you smile, ‘Oh do I have something on my face? ’ Laughter. A theft’s occurred at the heart of things.
To risk everything, to raise the alarm, to defuse. Being the first in every line you live in the transcendent time of infinite possibility, time of the beforehand, but a line – why a line – is never sufficient to tell your exact story. You dwell in ifs, maybes, shoulds, if onlys, and you watch with mute horror as you appear to bring order to the chaos of the other history. To be first in every line is a psycho-temporal-linguistic burden.
The lines are there, fully formed. But no one is to know. There’s too much injustice to bear. You cry when forced to break your silence. You start to count obsessively. One two three four, one two three, you say in your head. You mouth it quickly, furtively, noiselessly. One two three four, one two three, or you die. When you trip and break your mouth on the marble floor, when you are caned, when your teacher makes you stand on the table in front of the whole class with both arms fully stretched above your head, it’s because you didn’t count, or you didn’t count enough, or you didn’t count correctly. Finally, Mother’s lashings break you. ‘Oh thank you very much, Miss Winter!’ They cried. Hot with humiliation you struggle against saying the line that breaks against its utterance. One two three four. One two three. Or I’ll die. Alarmed your mother stops mid-beating there’s no need to cry just stop counting all right okay now go and wash your face.
A strawberry huller is a tool used to take the top off a strawberry. Some hullers go further, coring the berry from the inside, removing its stem in one motion. ‘Lightning fast’, ‘precise’, the ads say. Afterwards, the berry still looks like a berry.
Put a fruit and a gadget together and you get a 60s psychedelic rock band. Is Strawberry countercultural? The Cuban Mexican film Fresa y Chocolate, Strawberry and Chocolate, depicting gay sex is banned somewhere. The 1970 protest film directed by Stuart Hagmann, The Strawberry Statement, is also banned somewhere. During the military junta in Greece, The Strawberry Statement, Fraoula kai Aima, strawberries and blood, was banned. Why – because it has its seeds on the outside? Because its insides are on the outside?
Strawberry: a site of cultural identity formation at its most contested and paradigmatic. The image is speciously whole.
Category: things that are red. Red Scare. The visuality of alarm. ‘O blood, blood, blood.’ Othello cries. The Strawberry Alarm Clock. The steady clink of saga seeds dropping into a tall clean jar. An inveterate petty vindictiveness that can be executed over lifetimes and generations, defeated sourness, the tamed vengeance of trivial sabotage, poisonous innuendo, withheld intimacy, defensive secrecy: psychological terrorism. The Little Red Dot. A local myth every child knows: A long time ago a small coastal village lived under constant siege by swordfish as they swam to shore. A boy from the village saved everyone with his idea of erecting a protective fence of banana stalks along the coast to trap the fish. The village celebrated and ate swordfish for months. Then the jealous king ordered his men, armed with kris, to murder the child hero while he slept in his hut at the top of a hill. The hill, steeped in the boy’s blood, turned red and was henceforth known as Bukit Merah, Red Hill. In variations they tell children today, a mysterious old woman appears as the men creep up the hill with murderous intent. She chants and causes the hill to run with blood, scaring off the men and saving the boy. The point, nevertheless, has been made.
Some are secret and some are known by everyone.
