5 Questions with Brandon Khaw Liew
Brandon Khaw Liew is a doctoral researcher at the University of Melbourne. He has degrees in political theory, creative writing and literary criticism.
His research interests include Malaysian literary criticism, the Global Malaysian Novel and other emerging cultural productions across the Asia-Pacific. He grew up in Rawang and Seri Kembangan. His mother is from Penang.
No.1
Tell us about how you came to publish your poems in Malaysian Millennial Voices.
I was writing poetry sporadically across 2018-2019 when I was in Penang documenting literary festivals and doing research on the Hokkien clans on the island. At first, it was a way for me to keep track of my relationship to the island—my mother’s birthplace—and its history. I was also writing my way into the vibrant contemporary literary scene there, having submitted a rather large thesis on Malayan literary history earlier that year for my MA. On both counts I think I was simply navigating the past in order to make sense of the present.
Much of this material has been translated into a lecture on Malayan history that I now deliver to undergrads. The poems however, found themselves in the hands of Dr. Malachi when he was putting together Malaysian Millennial Voices last year.
No.2
What first drew you to poetry as a platform for creative expression?
I was actually trained in screenwriting and prose. In the making of poetry, at least for me, there is a distinct relationship to the page that the other two don’t have. I enjoy the process somewhat: you scrutinise every syllable, you read them out again and again and again, you detach all meaning and sense and possession from it. And then you scrunch the page and throw it away. Or rarely sometimes not. It’s not controversial to say that all serious poets are really just masochists of a kind.
No.3
There is a sense, I think, when it comes to so-called ‘non-western’ writing in English, that it is still often ultimately regarded by a western gaze. How do you navigate that in the work that you do, be it poetry or otherwise? I’ve learnt how to speak in front of people more easily.
In Australia we’re familiar with the term ‘cultural cringe’. In a similar vein, other Anglophone writers in postcolonial nations often had to wrestle with the act of writing in the language and tradition of their British colonisers. Nowadays, there is strong criticism that since Anglophone writing from the periphery needs to pass through the literary centre of London, to be validated by some sort of English prize to make its mark on the world, it is therefore compromised or exoticised from the moment it is written.
Navigating that baggage is indeed difficult as an author; criticism is fraught on all sides. I’ve seen some extreme (in my opinion) approaches where you detach that baggage altogether and focus on the formal qualities of your creative work, the words on the page as it were. But I think that is equally shallow; I think about where I’m writing from and who I’m writing to most of the time. The alternative is far worse. What is authenticity anyway?
No.4
Following on from this, one of your poems in the anthology, ‘two minds on ‘Malaysian’ writing’, attempts to explore this sensation of double-consciousness that postcolonial thinkers in the Global South tend to inhabit. Your paper on the Engmalchin movement in Malaya also delves into this more. Can you speak more to this?
With ‘two minds’ it ended up being a visual sketch of the left and right hemisphere of a brain [that wants to try] to find some common ground on what it means to produce Malaysian writing in the contemporary world. I think this confliction or dissonance is inbuilt to the tradition itself to an extent. In my paper on the short-lived Malayan literary movement Engmalchin from the 1950s, I commented on how our literary predecessors anguished over what it meant to have a language and literature of one’s own—it was not so much a matter of convenience as it was an existential right.
To quote the poet (and now distinguished scholar) Wang Gungwu (in ‘Trial and Error in Malaysian Poetry’, published in The Malayan Undergrad #9 in July 1958): “We persisted ... not so much for the art of poetry as for the ideal of the new Malayan consciousness. The emphasis in our search for ‘Malayan poetry’ was in the word ‘Malayan’”
Looking back, is this long search for a local literary consciousness a pathological one, never to be fully realised? I have two minds about it.
No.5
What do you hope the publication of Malaysian Millennial Voices will do for Malaysian literature?
I know very well that this anthology is a product of a few passionate people who have poured their lives and careers into the proliferation of contemporary Malaysian writing. I may not have met all of them but needless to say, I am thankful. Local publications like this are a testament to our local literary infrastructure (our publishers, libraries, bookshops, readers). It shows that the literary scene is not just alive and kicking, but shows promise of an exciting future. Judging by their reviews, our veteran poets seem to think so too.
Malaysian Millennial Voices (ed. Dr. Edwin Malachi) is a volume of poems by Malaysian writers aged 35 and below. It brings together 37 fresh voices in a collection of 69 poems in the second decade of the millennium. The poems touch on themes that range from everyday concerns to identity, growing up, dealing with the loss of parents and grandparents, and political satire.
Get a copy here.