A Wasteland of Malaysian Poets
Brandon K. Liew on a deafening silence
This essay is part of our 2022 collaboration with Cordite poetry review, edited by Bella Li, Cher Tan and Leah Jing McIntosh.
For this series, Liminal commissioned Asian Australian critics to respond to a work of their choice from Cordite’s Archives. As part of this collaboration, Cordite poetry review published 30 new poems by Asian Australian Poets. Read more here.
an estranged wilderness that we call home
It is close to midnight. The poet that I’ve been working with has just died, aged eighty-seven. I spent a month or so in his living room recording his entire oeuvre—around seven decades—for my Wasteland audio-exhibition of Malaysian poetry. His face next to mine reading and reading for hours on end, his voice strident, searing through one ear and into the brain, painting an eloquence of words out of syllables and silence. I have spent many years of my career (and a few university degrees) searching for these moments. This experience now feels like an illicit swan song for an audience of one. No other record exists. This poet’s legacy now lives in my laptop’s hard drive. Between deadlines, I don’t have space to think.
It is always close to midnight when I am writing. During the daytime I pretend that I do not to know how to write or read and therefore have no obligations to my editors. Sometime this evening I decided that this will be a review. A review of Malaysian poetry. I spend an hour or so scanning the digital archive of the Cordite Poetry Review for Malaysian work. I find nothing of note. The clear exception is Omar Musa, whom I met and whose poetry features in Wasteland. I watch his music video on laksa again and share it on my instagram. The Bornean woodblock print he gave me is hanging on the bedroom door. I spend an hour or so anxiously thinking about an archive of over 300 Malaysian poems that I have inadvertently created: A Wasteland of Malaysian Poetry in English.
I decided to call it a Wasteland because Malaysian poetry in English began as a response to T.S. Eliot’s work. Educated Malayan subjects in the early twentieth century were given Eliot to read in schools and universities. They quickly found little in the English Literary tradition that could genuinely express their place in the world. They started on a path thinking about what a literature of their own would look like.
Wasteland also references the barren cultural and intellectual landscape that such poets and writers found themselves in after the national policies of the seventies. My position on this has earned me a few enemies.
I have now decided that this piece I’m writing will address an absence in Cordite’s archive. I fill in the silence with the voices who are familiar to me, the words of those in whom I see myself, signing towards an estranged wilderness that we call home.
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Crimes Against Language
The closest Malaysian work that Cordite has is a special issue on Singapore published in October 2020. The poets and their translators in that issue are talented for sure (I know a few of them). Something in the editorial catches my eye.
… we apologise for any crimes against language that may have been advertently or inadvertently committed in the course of these transcreations … We are but a ragtag Babel Alliance salvaging the tools of a post-crumbling Empire—prone to producing our fair share of Hoth-like debacles—in the faint hope of occasionally firing a proton torpedo through the odd thermal exhaust port between languages. [emphasis mine]
Following a century of direct British rule and a brutal Japanese occupation, the region once known as Malaya declared its independence as a sovereign nation in 1957 and formed a new Federation of Malaysia together with Singapore, North Borneo and Sarawak in 1963. Singapore would exit the Federation just two years later and become its own independent state.
Malaysia and Singapore share a Malayan history, but their language and literary policies have diverged since. Following the killings and riots of 1969, a new wave of national policies took hold in Malaysia. The National Cultural Policy in 1971 demarcated what was and was not national art or literature, and built an institutionalised hierarchy around language, culture, and national interest. In the same act, Malay became the national language; Bahasa Melayu (Malay Language) became synonymous with Bahasa Malaysia (Malaysian Language), so much so that Bahasa (Language) is just shorthand for Malay. This much was expected and accepted by most at the time. Many were anxious to possess a culture and language that was independent from the heritage of Empire. However, the National Cultural Policy goes on to classify Malaysian Literature into two groups: ‘National Literature’, which is any literature written in Malay (or deemed otherwise suitable by the state to be incorporated into the National Culture), and ‘Sectional Literature’, which is literature written in any minor/non-national/other languages. This (political) classification had immediate and long-lasting consequences for artistic production in Malaysia. It still defines the national as of today.
The idea of committing a ‘crime against language’ in Malaysia takes on a very real context in light of weaponised policies like this and the Sedition Act. It created a generation of exile. Writers had to choose between changing languages or become unrecognised and unsupported. Many left the country in protest or stopped writing altogether.
I briefly record the testaments of such poets—Ee Tiang Hong, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, K.S. Maniam, and Wong Phui Nam—below.
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THE SILENCES AND DISQUIET OF (UN)MALAYSIAN WRITERS
Ee Tiang Hong (1933–1990) left to Perth and continued to write about the estrangement from his homeland until his passing in 1990. Looking back, he remarks,
I left Malaysia then when I could no longer accept, intellectually or emotionally, the official and Malay definition of the Malaysian nation and culture … I was convinced that I had no place in the new order of things, and not just as a writer but even as an ordinary citizen. ①
I was in Perth recently, looking at traces of his legacy in old Westerlys. I’m hoping to connect with his estate to produce a few readings. The following poem is from Ee’s posthumous collection Nearing a Horizon (1994). I teach this poem in my lectures on Malaysian history to illustrate the complexities of a Malaysian consciousness that cannot be simply divided across racial and linguistic lines.
Some New Perspectives
Race, language, religion, birthplace —
the categories do not satisfy;
what do they say of you and me,
the space, the silences between?
Not always negative, I am
more or less than your images,
the truth is always partly,
a few hints here and there.
That's how it is — conceptual
smithereens, in spurts
and starts, a world view,
the twentieth century's, ours.
‘Some New Perspectives’ invites us to reconstruct false dichotomies— categorisations that place us in relation to a hegemonic centre and arrest us there in a ‘negative’ state. This state is an inflection of any given centre: National/non-National, Bumiputera/non-Bumiputera, White/non-White etc. The collective self in the poem exists in both states throughout the spaces and silences, never fully centre, never free from centre. The first and second stanza inflect each other in metre and meaning (you and me/the silences between/the truth is always partly/here and there), leading to the third that opens up to possibilities. Ee inhabits a state of exile upon which identity is reconstructed from the ruins; he writes, ‘… to define oneself in context is to awake to one’s possibilities and to stake one’s freedom. For the poet it is a matter of credibility and purpose… Poet and nation do not always speak the same language.’ ②
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Shirley Geok-Lin Lim (1944—) left Malaysia for the States and won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for her first collection Crossing the Peninsula (1980), the first Asian and woman poet to do so. She became a professor of English at the University of California in Santa Barbara, which she calls her home. Shirley is an exemplar poet, and was kind enough to record a few poems with me for Wasteland. Shirley never returned to Malaysia because the language Act was, for her, ‘a more effective silencer than tanks and barbed-wire.’ ③
Her 2015 essay 'English in Malaysia' remains seminal to my understanding of how language and literature operates in Malaysia at a historical and global level. It is her critical and creative writing that has paved the road for me to operate in these spaces today. Shirley writes:
This shifting status of English over the last fifty years, as language of
instruction and in relationship to both Malay and Chinese, has a close bearing
on the status of Malaysian Anglophone literature, for, to understand the slightly
illegitimate status of this literature lingering even to the present, one has to set it
in the historical context for the neglect and suppression of English in Malaysia.
Even between 1957 and 1969, in a post-Independence hiatus of sorts, before
language controversies in Malaysia became so explosive as to render the
primacy of Bahasa Malaysia as the national language an indicted topic for public
debate in the 1970s, there had been little public support for English-language
cultural expressions, few forms of publication outlets, fewer awards and very
little social recognition. ④
This poem that we recorded, ‘Passport’, is from Walking Backwards (2010), a collection written in Hong Kong. It reminds me of the conversation we had when I confessed to her that I didn’t know what it means to call myself an ‘Asian poet’.
There were so many Hong Kong poems I wanted to include, but I found myself reading the lines in ‘Passport’ over and over: ‘no one is astonished that my passport/ Declares I am foreign, only/ Envious at my good luck’. The poem as a whole foregrounds the complexities of diaspora, but in these lines particularly I see an act of recognition. Here the passport is an outward signifier of difference, betraying a foreignness that her race does not. Still, she is acknowledged by the locals instead of received with indifference or ignorance. The recognition is returned and they become her cousins, numbering in the thousands, walking beside her.
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K.S. Maniam (born Subramaniam Krishnan, 1942—2020) was an Indian-Malaysian academic and writer of Hindu, Tamil, and working-class background. Like many other Malaysians, his grandmother migrated from India to the Malay Peninsula in the early twentieth-century. Maniam was perhaps most known for his early short stories, novels and plays including Haunting the Tiger, The Return, and The Cord respectively. Though we never met, by all accounts he was a brilliant, outspoken, and passionate writer. Maniam passed away in early 2020 with less recognition and prominence than he deserved.
I am a fan of Maniam because, like his predecessor Lloyd Fernando, he fuses his literary criticism into his stories and vice versa. An important essay, ‘The New Diaspora’ (based on a keynote paper delivered at the University of Southern Queensland in 1996) expands on his cultural framework introduced in Haunting the Tiger about the role of literature in relation to diaspora, minority culture, and assimilation in Malaysia. In an interview ten years later, he explains:
Writers using Chinese, Tamil and English are left to fend for themselves… The Chinese and Tamil writers have developed their own traditions, inspired in part by what is happening in Chinese speaking countries such as China, Taiwan, South Korea and Tamil-speaking countries such as South Indian and Mauritius.
The tradition in English, to which I belong, is almost fifty years old and only surviving, rather than flourishing… ⑤
Maniam wrote ‘The Truly Privileged’ in the last few years of his life. Below, it is voiced by Chacko Vadaketh. The recordings we made are powerful, and through his voice Chacko teases out all the emotion and critique present in the words. These later poems paint a picture of how he saw the country and what he thought the country saw in him.
Through sharp rhetorical wit, Maniam rebukes the ‘rare enlightened among you calling us migrants’ and ‘those persistent we’re not indigenous’. He creates a dialogue between the ‘enlightened,’ the ‘persistent,’ and ‘us migrants’. In doing so he situates the conception of ‘us/we’ as the subject of the poem. The ‘enlightened’ and the ‘persistent’ create ‘us migrants’ through an ostensible privileged difference that the earth ‘exists only for him and his kind’. Running parallel through the poem is the counter-rhetoric ‘We’re all migrants//the earth took in//our only home’ in the second line, fourteenth line, and final line respectively. The three camps are called to coalesce into the ‘Truly Privileged,’ a people privileged in understanding that they derive from the same womb, that of the earth.
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Wong Phui Nam (1935—2022) remained in Malaysia, but openly chastised the policies as a political move to disgrace and abolish writers in English altogether: ‘they invented us as writers of a “sectional literature,” producing a literature that is, or ought to be, of interest only to Anglophiles, neo-Leavisites, suburbanites, and other bourgeoisie of the same Westernized ilk.’ ⑥ He stopped writing for two decades in response.
After May 13 [1969], the question of what language I was to write in was forcefully brought home to me. I no longer wanted to write, at least not in a language I was told was a colonial leftover . . .
The National Language Policy and other policies on national unity, culture and economics made me reassess what I was doing. I began to question the validity of the language I was writing in . . . I was despondent . . . This would make the English Language even more alien. I stopped writing. ⑦
Phui Nam remained active as a literary columnist for the New Straits Times.. In a 2006 interview, he laments the disparity between hegemonic literary centres in the West and the literary peripheries: ‘the critical writings of British and American literary figures contain nothing about us… I don’t think they care a fig about us… [Malaysia is] entirely out of orbit and is, in realistic terms, a backwater.’ To Phui Nam, writing in English is a paradox: by virtue of who we are and our use of the language, we are cut off from our country and the rest of the world. We do not belong to a native tradition, a national tradition, or an English tradition. This state of being defines his generation of writers who ‘have to start from the condition of being culturally naked.’ ⑧
Wong Phui Nam died in September this year, three weeks after I recorded his poems. Daryl Lim Wei Jie and I are working with the family on producing his recent writings and unpublished work.
This poem, ‘At Eighty-Six’, was first read on his eighty-sixth birthday last year and published on MMOJ. It is a meditation on death. Much of his work circles around mortality and the afterlife, but this one is about his own. At our last meeting, he spoke to me eagerly and at length about his coming journey across the mortal threshold. There is a line towards the middle of the poem: ‘…silence grows every louder. / At eighty-six I cannot choose but hear… / Disquiet also comes with age, / as with an urgent sense that / I am and may not ever be / ready for the journey – for its demons, / its terrifying furies that rise out of imperfect hearing’. Despite this admission, I can trace a calm contentment in our conversation derived from an understanding of death as a quotidian measure of a life’s work. I do think he was ready by the time I left.
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Archiving a Wasteland
Over the course of writing this review, I have travelled across three countries, speaking to various institutions and individuals about the archive. I have asked for advice on the very idea of an archive. While doing this work, I have not stopped recording poets. I have a recording session scheduled in the morning, right after I file this to my editor. It is still early days, and I’m not sure where this is going, but I have convinced myself that this is important, if not to anyone else, but me. And that is ok.
I’m writing about it. I’m speaking about it. I see myself in the work, in the words of others before me, in their faces and voices. I see myself in a piece of paper that I stuffed in a ballot box during our national election this year. It is a wasteland, but it is my Wasteland as much as it is everyone else’s. At some point I’m sure, by simply speaking about it, we fill in the silences that shape us, and at the end, see the whole universe in ourselves.
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Works Cited
① Ee, Tiang Hong, ‘Literature and Liberation: The Price of Freedom’, Literature and Liberation: Five Essays from Southeast Asia, edited by Edwin Thumboo, Solidaridad, 1988.
② Ee Tiang Hong, ‘Malaysian Poetry in English: Influence and Independence’, Pacific Quarterly Moana 4:1, 1979.
③ M. A. Quayum, and Peter Wicks, Malaysian Literature in English: A Critical Reader, (Pearson Education Malaysia, 2001), 299.
④ Shirley Geok-lin Lim, ‘English in Malaysia: Identity and the Market Place’, Asiatic 9:2, (2015).
⑤ K.S. Maniam, ‘The Life of Writers in Malaysia’, Nou Hach Literary Journal, 2006.
⑥ Daizal Rafeek Samad and Wong Phui Nam. ‘A Heritage of Fragments: An Interview with Wong Phui Nam’, Mānoa 11:1, 1999.
⑦ Wong Phui Nam, ‘Wong Phui Nam: A Voice in the Wilderness’, Interview by Ann Lee, (2006).
⑧ Daizal Rafeek Samad and Wong Phui Nam. ‘A Heritage of Fragments’.
Brandon K. Liew is a doctoral researcher at the University of Melbourne with an interest in Malaysian literary history, cultural policy, and the global novel. His recent publications include poetry in the anthology Malaysian Millennial Voices and a peer-reviewed article on The Unquiet Dreams of Lesser Writers. He is the curator of A Wasteland of Malaysian Poetry in English, an anthology audio-exhibition of Malaysian poetry from the 1950s to the present.