MALAYSIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH:  
INFLUENCE AND INDEPENDENCE

Ee Tiang Hong

Paper presented at Writers' Week, Adelaide Festival of Arts, 25.2.78 to 4.3.78. 

First published in “Singapore and Malaysian Writing” [Special Issue] Pacific Quarterly (Moana), vol. 4, no. 1, Jan. 1979. Guest edited by Kirpal Singh. This essay was originally published alongside poems from Arthur Yap, Cecil Rajendra, Edwin Thumboo, Ee Tiang Hong, Kee Thuan Chye, Latif Kamaluddin,  Muhammad Haji Salleh, Robert Yeo, Rosaly Puthucheary and others. 

— —

I would have liked to have been able to say something in tune with the pulse of this charming city on this festive occasion, to dwell on the joy of poetry, its make-up and its inner life. Two considerations, however, prompt me to do otherwise. First, there are many others who can do this better than I can; second, my own concern about the conditions under which poetry is, or is not possible, may or may not be written. I refer to the survival of the English language in Malaysia, and my interest in it. Not for its bread-and-butter functions but as a living force that will ensure that a society may yet remain open, and so enable us to come to terms with the modern world in a diversity of ways. I have therefore chosen to see the problem of influence and independence as touching on our past, our present and what the future holds, in short, a definition of self and context. 

And 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. Unless he secures himself he has little to say to others, and writing becomes a pastime, self-abuse, therapeutic. The difficulty is in knowing just where the limits are in the no-man's land of poetry, language and politics: what is hallowed ground, which are the reservations, the jealous preserves? Though there is no question of our total response: every part of our being comes alive, feels its way towards fulfilment. 

The assertion of national independence on the other hand is not the same problem writ large. It's a different kettle of fish altogether. Poet and nation do not always speak the same language. In that situation, nationalism is no more than the bawling of a perverse child demanding that it alone be heard, or it will mess up the whole place. On another note, it is a strident voice of one communal group, drowning and disparaging other voices, certifying them dead or insane as the case may be. Its appeal is basic, the means employed at once sophisticated and simple, a repetitive chant, calling for a return to a refurbished past innocent of the deleterious influences of other cultures. 

And so, many poets, suddenly transported to the fringe of a new Romantic Revival, or a new Dark Ages, have been overwhelmed by the greatness thrust upon them. Depending on who they are, some are elated, as many put out. It's all very sad. Where once we were all in the same family, there is now a lot of bad blood. We are told who are the natural issue, the stepchildren, the foster children, the bastards. 

Those who have not put up the shutters, the stubborn bastards, seek their independence and integrity, even their peace of mind and sanity, in a commonwealth larger than their present fraternity. Or, simply, look for business elsewhere. If poetry is to be made, business flourish, there has to be a climate that enables, allowing for the risks, which are the poet's responsibility. And if I may assume that a poet is a sane and normal person, speaking to sane, ordinary people, then that responsibility is implied, almost by definition. How can a poet ever thrive, exercise his responsibility, in a climate that disables and debases? 

In as much as a nation does not live by language alone, and particularly when there are hardly any myths by which, and for which, men live and die, a poet should seek to enrich his life and that of his fellow-men by seeking whatever symbols will sustain, and if necessary, even create myths for the wilderness. And he has to be free to draw on his own inheritance, steal any fire from heaven — those traditions, myths, literatures, languages which are but surface structures of common humanity. Freedom is a basic to development, and good health, recognition but a testimony of success and approval. For what does it profit a poet if he gains national honour and loses self-respect? 

It's disconcerting enough that a Malaysian is only in the state of becoming, if not quite a nonentity. As for the English-educated, it's not even sure what some of them do want to become, or what will become of them. Consider the odds against their coming into their own, the sensitive ones, I mean. The insensitive ones are all right, they are happy, anyhow, anywhere. We start with the diffident's self-consciousness, that comes in fits, as when he is suddenly aware of turning up at a party in borrowed clothes. Will the hostess notice? And the things people will say: "Might at least have made sure they are properly washed and ironed". Next, host and guest prick their ears to catch a likely whisper of a solecism. Next, guest twitches, proof of guilt. Next, hostess raises her eyebrows — faux pas. And so on, and so forth, a comedy of manners, not really tragedy, still bearable. 

Moving on to poetry, there is that public mind that unsettles, which is convinced that anything produced by a local need not be good — since it can't, anyway — and that would suggest as the final court of appeal a council of arbiters overseas, preferably England. So much for the national spirit. As for the poet's own spirit, as different from manners and sensitivity, much has been written by psychologists and sociologists about the many-cultured person. He might well end up threadbare, alienated, spiritually broken, or so we are told, and I see a scarecrow seeing great things in his field. 

It seems to me that the fundamental question is not whether the Malaysian poet writing in English should divest himself of his influences, deliver himself from the past if he could. It's a hard-earned past, I might add. I myself learnt English the hard way, beginning with the simplest sentence patterns in "I am", "I am", "I am", then going onto "I am a boy", "I am a boy", twenty times a day, at least. And so, having asserted my existence and my manhood for so long I just can't say now "I ain't". The real question in our case is: given the disjointed elements of home, neighbourhood and school, taking the maximum combinations, how may the poet articulate these elements in a coherent form? It is not a question I can answer with reference to any set of established or simply usable principles. We have to work out our own individual solutions. I can only refer to the actual attempts in poetry. Here at least one has the satisfaction of knowing that the worst is over, at least in my own judgement, not unsupported by the consensus of informed opinion at home, albeit, most likely, a minority opinion, and thanks to the occasional considered judgement overseas, in particular, England. But also Australia recently. 

The worst, if I may put it that way, was the imitation phase in Malaysian writing in English, just after World War II. It was not just wholesale adoption, however but with local substitutes wherever possible. In many poems in those days, 

Full many a bunga was born to blush unseen  

And waste its sweetness in the kaumpung air.

There were enough local bungas to replace the foreign flower, but kampung (meaning a hamlet) also had to replace desert because it's impossible to find a desert in Malaysia! Anyway, the incentive to write was the satisfaction and the merit to be gained in imbibing the sweetness and light from Chaucer up to Arnold, of course. The more prosaic were happy if their writing displayed a level of English language and a knowledge of English literature as would earn a Second Class lower at least, but preferably a Second Class Upper in the Honours examination. At any rate. The poets modelled their poems and their diction on the best that had been thought and said in anthologies, published by Oxford, Cambridge, London. 

The next phase was what I would call the nationalisation phase, or rather attempted nationalisation, since to be effective nationalisation has to go the whole hog, an exercise requiring more resources than most governments, let alone poets, can muster. The period coincided with the social and political ferment of pre-Independence. Among the poets were student leaders in the University of Malaya then situated in Singapore, who were active in the political arena. Their guiding lights showed discrimination — Wordsworth, the Spender, Auden, and Lewis of the 1930's, and, for intellectual weight, George Orwell, Christopher Caudwell, Harold Laski, and portions of Das Kapital, according to their needs. High seriousness and a distinctive note on nationalism were evident in the poems and critical prose touching on the ownership and control of the economy, production and distribution, culture and society, language and national unity. Even those not so committed were inspired to lend some support, hurl a verbal missile now and then: 

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive  

And to be young was very heaven. 

But in the best of the writing may be discerned the first authentic relevant voices of Malaysian poetry in English, conscious of their role and the need to determine a language for Malaysian poetry. It was just the weight of the ideas that tipped against the poetry as a whole. 

The last phase brings us up to the present. For a variety of reasons, in particular, the fact that there was now a body of poems to turn to, with which to compare one's efforts, relate to, extend, modify, refine, the poets who succeeded the earlier groups were able to turn their attention away from the ponderous issues, towards the more immediate and personal problems of craftmanship. In short, to concentrate on the business of writing, and so produce poems, not manifestoes or commemorative stamps. 

They were not unduly inhibited about using English, indeed used it with zest and an adventurous spirit. Here was a good tool, with which to probe, tease; here was the raw material to bend, shape, experiment with. The language itself was most amenable, if I may change the metaphor, not a stickler for rules, not fussy, not too prim nowadays, and above all, there isn't a matron to say what liberties one can or can't take with her. 

Malaysian poetry in English has more than found its feet and to that extent it vindicates the poet's determination to write in the language they are most competent in, possessed by. 

Yet when it is all said and done, I am inclined to believe that its very success is the reason for its being seen as a threat to the neo-nationalism. At every turn the sectarian nationalist seems to ask the question: "Are we not opening too many windows to let in the light?"