A Kindred State of Becoming

Editorial #11

Brandon K. Liew

My inaugural visit to Perth and Centre for Stories happened late last year. Truth be told, I was in Perth for two other reasons. I had to apply for a visa at the US embassy to deliver a paper at the largest literary conference in the world, the Modern Language Association, held in San Francisco. I remember trying to explain the ins and outs of Malaysian literary history to the immigration officer, who promptly approved my application with a raised eyebrow and a single confused reply: “Sounds complicated.” I was also in Perth in search of the late Ee Tiang Hong, a poet who emigrated here in the 70s in response to the Malaysian National Cultural Policy. I had met with a few of his acquaintances and rummaged through some old Westerlys but the trail to his estate and surviving relatives had gone cold. I needed to meet with them to discuss his inclusion in my audio-archive dubbed A Wasteland of Malaysian Poetry in English. For a whole year I travelled to meet the first-generation poets of the 50s, 60s, and 70s to interview them, record them, and exhibit their out-of-print work to the Malaysian public. I had flown straight to Perth from Kuala Lumpur, after spending months putting together a three-week exhibition of the Wasteland in Kampung Attap. I was physically and emotionally drained. I was frustrated at bearing the full weight of this material, which I had deemed so important and meaningful and worth preserving, but at the end of the day, felt was uncared for. I put an immense pressure on myself, and I still don’t fully understand why. Where am I in the work? Why am I trying to forge such a history? A tradition? A family? I remember unravelling in a room overflowing with books at the Centre for Stories and bouncing these questions across the walls. It was there that I began to think through the archive and my relation to it. I am grateful too, to have been tasked with guest editing this issue of Portside Review, which is in some ways an extension of my unravelling. It has been a meditative process curating a portfolio, or maybe a family, of writers and artists both near and far from home, existing everywhere in every space in between, from almost every generation in the past century— to read their work, visit them, and sometimes talk into the evening hours. I hope that my anxiety in bringing them together today does not diminish the strength of these works to the contexts of their individual time and place.

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Following a century of 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, and the eastern Crown colonies of North Borneo and Sarawak in 1963. Singapore would exit the Federation just two years later. A new wave of national policies took hold in this new Malaysia after the killings and riots of May 13, 1969. Among them, the National Cultural Policy (NCP) 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 NCP 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. Weaponised policies like this, the race-based New Economic Policy (NEP), and the neo-colonial Sedition Act defined a hostile environment inconducive to self-expression. It created a generation of exile. Writers had to choose between changing languages and transforming into something more state-friendly or becoming unrecognised and unsupported. Many, like Ee Tiang Hong, left the country in protest and others, like Wong Phui Nam, stopped writing altogether.

Broadly speaking, I tend to think of the historical anxieties of Malaysian writers in English as spread across three distinct periods. While several well-known white colonial writers like W. Somerset Maugham and Joseph Conrad wrote novels based on their experiences in Malaya in the early 20th Century, it is not until Wang Gungwu publishes Pulse in 1950 during the literary movement of Engmalchin that we see a conscious strive towards a methodology that attempted to address a collective Malaysian experience that did not divide across communal or ethnic lines. The decades immediately before and after independence from the British were, by all first-hands accounts given to me, exciting times that seemed so full of possibilities.

Secondly, the decades immediately following 1969, as I’ve pointed out, are affected by political turmoil and change. Shirley Geok-lin Lim left for America around this time where she received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the first woman and first Asian to do so. Ee Tiang Hong continued to wrestle with his estrangement from homeland whilst in Perth, where he passed away. Still, the writers who did stay like Lloyd Fernando and K.S. Maniam produced prolific, critical works that are now mostly out-of-print. Salleh Ben Joned notably returned from Australia and found himself challenging the status quo back home. Latif Kamaluddin and Cecil Rajendra too returned from Europe and each garnered a notorious reputation up in Penang for refusing to play by the rules.

After the turn of the 21st century we see a resurgence of global interest in Malaysian literary work after the success of Rani Manicka, Tan Twan Eng, and Tash Aw in publishing abroad and listing for international prizes like the Booker. In Malaysia however, the two main publishers of Malaysian literary works in English in the previous era, Skoob Books and the Heinemann Asia series, gave way to independent grassroots publishers like Gerakbudaya, Buku Fixi, and (the now defunct) Silverfish Books. Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram provide new, mostly unregulated discursive spaces for budding authors. Many self-publish and distribute on their own terms, even the more established writers. The popularity of spoken word performances has made its was across from America and is now sweeping through the peninsula, at first in dimly lit basement cafes and now in schools and concert hall stages. Young Adult (YA) novels especially are seeing a resurgence. There is a lingering anxiety about the disconnect between authorship and authorship, between producing work about Malaysia and producing Malaysian work; the current discourse revolves around notions of authenticity, locality, and language.

As such, for this Malaysia issue of Portside Review, I have welcomed submissions without really explaining or imposing any sort of themed Malaysian-ness upon the work. The strength of Portside, in my view, is its unabashed peripherality that empowers people and their relation to each other and to place, past, present, and future. As Robbie describes it aptly in his first editorial,

“Portside Review is an attempt to create multiple senses of self-governance between and across peoples who nevertheless remain distinct as their own people reconciling themselves to each other and their own decolonised futures.”

And so, while this collection of works centres on Malaysia in place and time, each individual work simultaneously maps out its own relations and decolonised futures, on its own terms, in its own practices. The result is an issue brimming with possibility, reflecting a vibrant, pensive, eclectic, and above all, persistent community of artists who dwell and have dwelt on a conceptual homeland. Their texts point toward each other, forward in time, anchored in memory, etched with hope, critique, and promise, from the colonial era to the present post-COVID day. Our authors include professors, students, illustrators, activists, the indigenous, the emigrant, the emerging, the established, and (there is no other way to put this) elegies of and from the dead.

Malachi Edwin Vethamani unfolds the inheritance of cultural knowledge and pain of a Tamil family in his short story “Healing Power”, where the ghost of a great-grandmother lives on through stories of her miraculous Ayurvedic medicine, distilling unease in the present modernity of her descendants. I’ve included an out-of-print essay “Malaysian Poetry in English: Influence and Independence” by Ee Tiang Hong originally delivered in Adelaide in 1978, charting a manifesto for his discipline immediately after his exile. He writes,  

Poet and nation do not always speak the same language… In as much as a nation does not live by language alone… 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 had 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.

Lee Kok Liang’s stories “The Pei-pa”, “ami to fu”, and “Just a Girl” appear here exactly as they did in 1950, 1951, and 1952 respectively in the student-run Melbourne University Magazine. Written during his time as an undergraduate arts student, he illustrates the dissonance between an old Malaya and a new decolonising one, where Malayans struggle to retain a sense of self in a rapidly modernising world. Select poems from Cecil Rajendra ranging from Refugees & Other Despairs (1980) to the forthcoming Limericks from a Lockdown speak of the poet’s connection to the prerogative of his craft in Borgesian dialogue, “always striving / after meaning” as a vole in “The Immortality of Nothing” and marking contempt for impotent cliché in “Instructions to 'True' Poets”. Anna Salleh’s interview with Wong Phui Nam about his thoughts on her father, Salleh Ben Joned, reveals a shared reverence from two outwardly opposite personalities for the integrity of the written word in an unamiable socio-political environment.  To add, Salleh Ben Joned’s included verses and recordings voice the contradictions of his position as a Malay poet in English in the late 20th century; in “Haram Scarum” he posits “so long as we hate pigs and pray, / we’ll remain Moslem and Malay.” I’ve tried to show the equivalent sentiment from Wong Phui Nam on the estrangement of being a poet in English by including all twelve verses of Against the Wilderness (2000) with the accompanying recordings that we made a few weeks before his sudden passing in September last year. Jack Malik’s poems from his recent zine Gampang are listed as a wistful reminisce to his hometown of Ipoh up north and they too are presented with the melodious recordings we made a few months ago. Curated photographs of and paintings from Anoora, an indigenous Temuan woman near Kuala Kubu Bharu, narrate a luminous connection between language, land, and lineage. Select pieces of Latif Kamaluddin’s so-called “word-art” are chronicled here together with his self-portraits that originally served as front and back book covers, containing brutal shapes and concrete mantras constructed from the “communicative thickness” of typography; out of this also, a visual ode to friend Salleh Ben Joned. Mohan Ambikaipaker, now based in Houston, Texas, gives us a series titled “Leavings” that includes four translations (English, Tamil, Chinese, Malay) of the harrowing poem “Killing Ganapathy”, written after the death of A. Ganapathy, a cow milk trader, who was beaten in Malaysia two years ago whilst in police custody and died one month later in the ICU. A short story titled “The Stadium” from Wan Phing Lim describes a chilling encounter with a two-faced predator during an illegal drag race, that spirals into an entangled familial tale of corruption and moral deceit. Dano Chow underscores the dichotomous irony of postcolonial man in a neo-liberal world in his poem “the world is not masculine” and gestures toward a framework of being that is free from such patrimonious enslavement. Similarly, Yee Heng Yeh muses on the intimate legacy of language in his series “Thoughts on our Tongues” that paints our Malaysian-English as both gift and maladious curse, foregrounding the language-games[i] that we both lose and trace ourselves in through the hyphen. Sarawakian-born Angelina Bong entwines historical allegory with memoir in her illustrated poem “The Rainforest Calls” that depicts an entropic ecosystem of emblems in territorial cohabitation. Adib Faiz hands in a magic realist ‘language autobiography’ assignment titled “Coconut Candy” at the last minute with the guidance of Salleh Ben Joned (I’m happy to report that he passed). Anthropologist Nurul Huda Mohd. Razif inhabits her research on the Malay concept of pre-destined love, jodoh, in an autobiographical tale of contemporary romance set in Japan that led to an Islamic marriage with a Jewish man. Sook Jin Ong amalgamates code-switching and remonstration in her poem “kami yang kekal” after Usman Awang’s “Kambing Hitam” and GE15,[ii]  and David Tneh dwells on the affect of childhood memory as they fade into lingering dreams in his Orchard series. Judith Huang peers beyond the borders and labels of nation into the realpolitik of loving another in the whirlwind romance of “Love across the Causeway”. William Tham responds to artist Hoo Fan Chon’s 2022 film “I Enjoy Being a Girl”, an intimate tale of Ava and Anita, their triumphs and struggles to exist in their chosen lives as women in pre-independence Penang, told through once-lost photographs and a final interview. In “The Language Lesson”, Ray Langenbach reconstitutes an early video installation, orignally presented in Penang in 1989, as a linguistic ritual for our webpage; accompanying the lesson is an audio composition placed outside the human auditory frequency range. Leow Puay Tin offers us insight into her 1996 play Family that has since been staged around the world (Singapore, Malaysia, Berlin, Australia, Japan), through her original playwright’s note for the directors, a critical summary by Chloe Ho, and an excerpt of the scene “Nine Widows” along with corresponding video clips of the Malaysian staging of the play (Kirshen Jit & Wong Hoy Cheong) recorded by Ray Langenbach.

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I am immensely thankful for the trust and support of the Portside Review team, whose hard work has made this issue possible: Robert Wood, Logan Griffiths, Abbey Carson, Syarisa Yasin, Caitlin Barrow, and Asley Saito-Abdullahi.

Author’s note:

[i] See Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical concept of language-games and family resemblance. 

[ii] Malaysia’s 15th General Election in November 2022.

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This issue of Portside Review is funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Australian Government and Creative Australia (formerly Australia Council for the Arts).