The (Malay) Malaysian Writer’s Dilemma (1992)

Portrait of the Writer as a Young Colombo Plan Scholar in the Land Down Under (1963)

An intelligent and morally sensitive Malaysian of Malay origin to whom self-respect and the dream of the brotherhood of man are as vital as the air he breathes is not an enviable creature in the age of NEP (New Economic Policy). The Government’s attempt to get his fellow Malays out of the “Malay dilemma” has put him in a new one – the Bumi Dilemma. Bumi is short for Bumiputera, literally, “son” or “prince” of the soil, i.e., the Malays and other natives. It can be somewhat pejorative term, at least when used by non-Bumis especially in the post NEP era.

               

The “Bumi Dilemma” afflicts only a tiny minority among the Bumiputeras. Under certain circumstances, or at its most acute, it can be in some ways almost Hamlet-like in its neurosis. To be or not to be part of a “protected species”: that is the question.  Whether it is nobler in the mind to “opt out” for the sake of necessary pride and independence and fidelity to ideas that transcend barriers of ethnicity – that, or to commit some kind of moral suicide by accepting unquestioningly those convenient pieties about ethnic survival and dominance. The Bumi afflicted with this dilemma may accept the rationale of the NEP as a time-bound historical necessity. And he may be able to see and acknowledge how, like other similar good-intentioned “correctional” policies, it can be abused. He may even be willing to admit that, though he as an individual doesn’t need the protection of such policies, directly or indirectly, whether he likes it or not, he is beneficiary. But, because of the kind of individual he is, the situation he can find himself in as a result of being a member of a “protected species” is not an enviable one. It is especially unenviable if he is a writer.

               

As I see it, the most serious problem for the Malaysian writer of Malay origin has to do with the question of fidelity or loyalty. And this question, because of its peculiar implications and of the pressure of certain stubborn ethnic realities, raises the question of a proper audience for the writer. The phrase “Malaysian writer of Malay origin” that I use here refers to a tiny, very tiny minority within a much bigger group. The majority of this group can’t be bothered with fine semantic distinctions between “Malaysian writer of Malay origin” and simply “Malay writer”. In fact, it’s a matter of pride and ideological principle with many of them the latter is used without question, just as they hardly ever question the givens of ethnicity and religion that make an innocent term like “Malay writer” bristling with divisive connotations. And what is truly, chillingly disturbing is that these givens seem to be becoming more and more set, more shrill. The shrillness is the most immediately disturbing; it’s the shrillness of ideological atavism that, I believe, is death to the creative principle.

               

The vast majority of Malaysian writers of Malay origin are, I believe, untroubled in any serious way by the question of audience. They just know who constitutes their audience, and they don’t have the slightest doubts about it. One sometimes gets the feeling that they deeply believe and rather like it that things will remain unchanged, the solidarity of their audience guaranteed, written into the Constitution as it were, which, in a sense it is. Similarly, the question of aesthetic, intellectual and moral fidelity doesn’t trouble them. Fidelity to them is mainly a question of being true to certain ethnic pieties; truths and ideals not narrowed by the myopia of race and religion don’t concern too many of them. The best way to make the problem of audience and the issue of loyalty something that can be concretely felt is for me to talk about it from my own personal experience.

               

SBJ: bright young lad from Malacca

I feel, in fact, I know in my blood and my bones that I belong to the tiny minority. Every time I sit down to write, I am bugged by these troubling questions: who am I writing for, in actual fact and ideally speaking? What am I supposed to be loyal to? In my pessimistic moments, I even wonder if I have any audience to write for; if the element of stubbornness in my notion of loyalty and fidelity have not condemned me to a no-man’s land. It’s quite easy for my conscious self, the self moved by the will and governed by intelligence, rationality and ideals of common humanity, to say that as a writer I recognize only one loyalty: loyalty to truth and beauty, justice and freedom as I perceive them with all the honesty I can muster, with an informed mind and an informed heart.

               

But in this country, “loyalty” is a very difficult business, and if, like me, you happen to be a writer somewhat alienated by your education from the dominant values of your ethnic kind, a writer who stubbornly persists in trying to see through and beyond the inherited blinkers of race and religion, what you call “loyalty to truth and beauty, justice and freedom” can be considered a betrayal. And for the Malays, this “betrayal” is a form of apostasy. People like me, bilingual and untroubled by sentimental pieties, are particularly vulnerable to the damning charge of “apostasy” – apostasy from the religion of race, which can be a worse charge than apostasy from the religion of the race.

               

When I came back to Malaysia after a decade in a foreign country, I made a conscious attempt to recover my lost cultural self. Being a man of words, the attempt naturally took the form of repossessing my mother tongue. But, as everyone who has gone through it knows, such attempts can at best be only partially successful. So was mine – and I don’t regret it. Quite frankly, I didn’t want to recover my original cultural identity in its fullness and purity. The idea of recovering something of the “purity” of Malay language itself might appeal to the poet in me, but not those values whose “purity” or “Malayness” cannot be distinguished from atavism. I am aware that I am in some ways quite Westernized, and I am not embarrassed by it. In fact there are some elements in my Westernization that I am quite happy about it, which I’d like to believe have made me a better human being and hopefully a better writer. But I also feel I am still, in some things, incorrigibly Malay. And I don’t regret that either. In fact, there are things about “Malayness” (not to be confused with “Bumiputeraness”) and in the cultural heritage of my race that I am terribly proud of it. That’s why like Lin Yutang’s unusual definition of patriotism as love for the good things one ate in one’s childhood. I am quite certain that these things, in my case sambal belacan (Malay delicacy) and cincalok (Malay delicacy), both literal and metaphorical, inform my writing, especially the poetry. Directly or indirectly, they give much of whatever energy my writing can claim to have.

               

Because this energy is inevitably life-affirming, its source cannot be “exclusively Malay.” The streams that water my being, my life, my dreams, my writings are many and various, though the central one is no doubt Malay. I am a human being as much as I am a Malay Malaysian; Malaysia is my country and so is the world. Actually, my true country is not the world, but world literature. I am told that in Tagalog, a cousin of Malay, the word “malaya” means freedom or consciousness. Well, that’s the “Malaya” I love to inhabit and feel terribly loyal to, a country that has no border with that other one – the country called World Literature.

               

An Austrian friend once gave me a poetry book called Song of Malaya by Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek. No it’s not about our country; it’s about a prostitute, for the word “malaya” means that in Swahili. When I get depressed or angry because of the atavistic fantasy of “Malaya” and “Melayu” befogging the already blinkered minds of our sasterawans (writers). I think with bitter cynicism of that Swahilli word. There are many forms of prostitution. To me, the worst is when the writer uses his talent to prostitute a collective ideal. It is made even worse by his conviction that no prostitution is involved; it’s all in the name of bangsa (race) and semangat kebangsaan (Spirit of ethnic nationalism), you see. (We must really do something about that kebangsaan word; as long as we use it to mean nationalism or nationality, we’ll continue to be trapped in the dark alley of atavism).

               

The Austrian satirist Karl Kraus (a Jew, of course) once ringingly announced his crusade as a writer by describing language as “a universal whore” which he must “turn into a virgin.” It’s a big dream, a mammoth crusade, that one. But I believe every writer worth his/her salt must commit himself/herself to it. Otherwise, he/she might as well resign from the community of writers – and of human beings. 

In other words, commit literary hara kiri.

               

1 January 1992

Salleh Ben Joned and the Art of the Pantun (by Alima Joned)

By Alima Joned

My brother Salleh and I are as different as night and day. At 5’ 11” he is tall for a Malay, with the rugged sexy looks of a Mick Jagger. In contrast, I am no Malay beauty, and I am also so short that Salleh once teased I must have stopped growing at the age of four.

We have different temperaments. And we pursued totally different career paths. He found his calling in poetry, I found a career in law.

A poet first and foremost, Salleh was also a columnist and essayist, writing the popular column ‘As I Please’ for the literary page of Malaysia’s major newspaper the New Straits Times in the 90s.

In introducing Salleh’s collection of essays and columns, Nothing is Sacred, Malaysian poet Wong Phui Nam wrote:

More than anyone else, Salleh contributed to the rapid success of the [literary] page. Readers recognised immediately his wit, ironic humour, biting criticism, the rare capacity to entertain and verbal vigour. Here was a man who had much to say and he said it in a style that made his words bring to the reader his very presence. But if it were only a matter of style, however provocative and highly entertaining As I Please was, it would, of course, have turned out to be of passing interest. What it was about would by now be passé, eight years down the road into a new century.  But the many things Salleh had to say were then, and still are, important and relevant.

Salleh lives and breathes words, while I simply use them to make a living. So while I enjoyed his columns, back then I couldn’t say the same about his poetry.

But all that changed recently after I re-read a couple of his old columns that helped me rediscover the beauty of pantuns.**

Rediscovering the beauty of pantuns

The first column, titled "Brother Henri, Honorary Malay," was on the French writer, Henri Fauconnier, whose semi-autobiographical book The Soul of Malaya, is interspersed with pantuns and Malay proverbs.

Salleh considers the book to be the best book ever written by a European about the Malays – their psyche and sensibility.

He notes in particular how Rolain, Fauconnier’s main character in the novel, ruminates on the nature of the Malays, the uniqueness of the Malay language, and the aesthetics of the pantun form.

I had already read the book some years before, but picked it up again to see what Salleh was talking about.

Growing up as a kampong girl myself, I was familiar with popular pantuns, but in Fauconnier’s book I found unfamiliar and at times naughty pantuns that drew a smile to my face.

In another column, "Salacious Pleasures of Pantuns," Salleh argues if people read a pantun properly, sensitive to the semantic and cultural resonance of key words, they would see more than the surface evocation.

For these reasons, pantuns were much beloved by the late renowned translator, poet and scholar Burton Raffel. Unfortunately, as Raffel notes in The Art of Translating Poetry, the pantun is a kind of poetic form that “has not travelled well.”
Due to the nature and the uniqueness of the Malay language, pantuns are not easy to translate.  When translating a pantun, in Raffel’s view, it is difficult for a translator to capture “the true thrill of the form’s careful, subtle variations.” Raffel seems to say the job is almost impossible, even if the translator is himself a poet with the mastery of both languages.

Yet, I think Salleh has managed to do a pretty good job at meeting this challenge. Consider two translations of the opening lines of this classic pantun:

Tanam padi di Bukit Jeram
Tanam keduduk atas batu
Macam mana hati tak geram
Menengok tetek menolak baju

In Fauconnier’s book, we are given a literal translation.

Planting rice on Jeram hill
Rhododendrons on a rock
However, could my heart keep still
Seeing her breasts move beneath her frock?

To retain the thrill of the original, Salleh translates this classic as follows:

Plant the padi with a thrust
Stroke the seedlings with dew
It drives you crazy with lust
To see the tits tilting the baju (blouse)

Salleh’s translation of the first two lines is a very free rendering of the original.

Readers who appreciate the fluidity of Salleh’s translation would forgive him for taking liberty with the translation so that the thrill and beauty of the original language can be retained.

I had so much fun reading this classic pantun after discovering it in Fauconnier's book, especially when reading it aloud to my sisters – who have become increasingly religious in recent years.

But beyond fun, Salleh argues pantuns are a way of understanding the Malay sensibility:

The central word for the pantun, hati (literally liver, but the English equivalent here would be heart), is also the key word in Malay folk physiology. The liver to the Malays is traditionally the seat of the passions. (This was also the case in ancient English belief: you can find it surviving in Shakespeare’s plays and poems.) The hati, the organ that conceals the secret of the Malay as a creature of feelings and passions, is vital to any attempt to understand the race. If you want to know what the hati is to the Malay, soak yourself in the pantuns.

Salleh’s use of the pantun form

Salleh also writes poetry in pantun form himself. Many of his pantuns are witty and playful. But they can be serious at the same time – noting unpleasant truths about his race and country. There’s a “courageous seriousness,” according to Margaret Drabble in her introduction to the first collection of Salleh’s columns, As I Please, “beneath the wit and the invective of Salleh’s writings.”

Below is Salleh’s poem in pantun form inspired by the Anwar Ibrahim imbroglio of 1998, which appears in his book Adam’s Dream:

What makes the parrot a very queer bird?
Its talent to mimic and its hooked bill.

Alima & Salleh in 1977

 

What makes the shrill patriot a cringing turd?
Because he has the brain of a mandrill.

Why does the katak love its tempurung?
It’s so cozy and good for inbreeding.
What do we always confuse right and wrong?
Because of our refined Malay upbringing.

Why do pigs really love to wallow in shit?
Because they are pigs and true to their kind.
Why do we swallow whole those affidavits?
Cause we have an ape’s mouth and a mouse’s mind.

Why do the gullible value snake vomit?
Because old superstition taught them to.
Our Anwar as seditious sodomite?
Those Front buggers swear to it; it must be true.

When is a cabinet very valuable?
When you have bits of skeletons to hide.
When does a DPM become dispensable?
When the PM says he is a Jekyll-and-Hyde.

Why do snakes love so much to slither in slime?
Because that is where they get their best feed.
“Ministers get sucked” all the bloody time?
What a revealing typo that was indeed.

Why are all the sawah full of tikus?
Because the harvest’s such a miracle.
What makes our Mahashita think he’s Zeus?
Thanks to our media that’s so farcical.

katak – frog
tempurong – coconut shell
sawah – padi field
tikus - mice

Many of Salleh’s pantuns are expressions of love – for his wife Halimaton, his children and friends.

Salleh’s poetry has drawn fans and detractors alike

It is not my place to comment on his contribution to Malaysian literature but I am curious what lovers of language and poetry think about his musings on pantuns.

And, if, like me, you had no education in poetry, nor any natural talent for it, this Malay form may be the perfect starting point for gaining a better appreciation of poetry – and Malay culture.

After a decade in a foreign land, my brother came back to Malaysia anxious to recover his lost cultural self.

Being a man of words, he naturally made attempts to repossess his mother tongue and began to write prose and poetry in Malay, making innovations in the art of pantun along the way.

Some claim my brother’s work is too Westernised – to the extent that he has betrayed his race and religion, and lost his Malayness.

In some ways Salleh is quite Westernised – he acknowledges this. But he is still very much Malay and so terribly proud of it. In his column The (Malay) Malaysian Writer’s Dilemma, he writes:

I am aware that I am in some ways quite Westernised, and I am not embarrassed by it. In fact, there are elements in my Westernisation that I am quite happy about, which I’d like to believe have made me a better human being and hopefully a better writer. But I also feel I am still, in some things, incorrigibly Malay. And I don’t regret that either. In fact, there are things about 'Malayness' (not to be confused with ‘Bumiputraness’) and in the cultural heritage of my race that I am terribly proud of. That’s why I like Lin Yutang’s unusual definition of patriotism (or eating, it doesn’t really matter which) as love for the good things one ate in one’s childhood. I am quite certain that these things, in my case sambal belacan (Malay delicacy) and cencalok (Malay delicacy), both literal and metaphorical, inform my writing, especially the poetry. Directly or indirectly, they give much of whatever energy my writing can claim to have.  

My brother is also “incorrigibly” Malay as far as the pantun is concerned. In their simplicity and directness, pantuns are indeed beautiful and elegant. Through his artful and skillful translation, my brother enables native and non-native speakers of Malay, poets and non-poets, to truly appreciate the aesthetics and the beauty of classical pantuns. In writing his own pantuns, making innovations along the way, he uses the form to speak on weighty matters with lightness no one else could. Either way, my brother has made the art of pantun not only travel well, but travel further.

31 December 2018

_______

Alima Joned is a lawyer in private practice in Washington, DC. 

** The pantun is a classical Malay poetry form with four line verses, usually with the rhyming scheme of a-b-a-b. The first two lines are linked in some way to the second two. As long as the form is followed, a pantun can be on anything, from an irony of fate to words of advice to an expression of love.
 

Salleh Ben Joned ~ Testing the Parameters (by Alima Joned)

(Photo credit: James Lee)

SBJ would have turned 80 today, the 5th of July, 2021. On this occasion, we thought you might enjoy this article, newly penned by his sister Alima Joned, who was profoundly inspired by her brother’s fearless and unrelenting (but level-headed) pushing of the envelope within a face-saving, speak-no-evil cultural context.

Arguably, Malaysia has stringent censorship laws.  

The most notorious on the long list of these laws is probably the Sedition Act of 1948. The Act expands free speech limitations to cover speech that has “seditious tendency,” a term defined to include the questioning of certain politically-sensitive issues such as the national language, and the rights and privileges of Malays and the natives of Sabah and Sarawak. 

Constitutionally, a "Malay" must be a person who professes the Islamic faith, habitually speaks Malay, and conforms to Malay customs. Thus, any discussion regarding the Malays is likely to involve Islam. These two themes, the Malays and Islam, are major motifs in my late brother Salleh Ben Joned’s prose and poetry.  

It may be a mystery to some why Salleh was allowed to deal with these themes without once running foul of the Malaysian authorities. He himself didn’t feel constrained by Malaysia’s stringent censorship laws. In fact, in "Testing the Parameter" (New Straits Times, 5 June 1991), these laws were not Salleh’s main complaint.  

Rather, he was most concerned about the disease of self-censorship that appeared to have afflicted Malaysian writers of his time. So insidious was this disease that even when their periok nasi (rice bowls) were not really at stake, some Malaysian writers felt themselves unable to write freely. In a situation such as this, according to Salleh, the writer’s intelligence and moral integrity are at stake. According to Salleh:

Self-censorship is a universal disease, but I believe its local manifestation is quite peculiar, very “Malaysian” in an unflattering sense of the word. And what’s more, it’s becoming quite insidious. Those infected with this disease don’t always realise it; even when they do, they try to pretend that it’s unavoidable or justifiable. One can understand the self-censorship if the “integrity” of the writer’s periok nasi (rice bowl) is really at stake. But when it isn’t and yet he still censors himself, one questions not so much his moral integrity as his intelligence. Basically, it’s a question of perception –  perception of what constitutes risks or dangers and the problem with our writers and literary middlemen… is that too many of them tend to perceive dangers too readily.    

Perceiving Dangers Too Readily

Salleh himself was at little risk of being accused of perceiving dangers too readily. Throughout his career, Salleh wrote on two taboo subjects: race and religion.  

The fact that his popular column, As I Please, appeared in an establishment newspaper indirectly controlled by the government was evidence that, handled correctly, these two themes can be a subject of public discourse. 

I, too, am trying to avoid readily perceiving dangers when expressing my opinions, notwithstanding a couple of insulting and discouraging personal experiences. I list two examples: 

In 2007, I was invited to speak at a seminar to honour the late Professor Tan Sri Ahmad Ibrahim. The host, the Institut Kefahaman Islam Malaysia, as planned, subsequently published the seminar papers in a book. My paper was excluded from the collection. Why my paper was excluded was not entirely clear to me.  

Perhaps the IKIM leadership had been troubled by my introduction, in which I described the image I had of this giant of the Malaysian legal world in the following words:

….[T]he picture of the late Professor with his songkok instantly came to mind.  Indeed, the beloved late Cambridge-educated Professor Ahmad was never seen in public without his songkok. His constant wearing of songkok coupled with Western-style attire [of shirt-and-necktie] suggested both cultural and religious significance as well as the co-existence of the secular and the religious in his mind. Regardless of what it could suggest, the image surfaces whenever I think of secularism in the Malaysian context.

Or perhaps the IKIM leadership did not like my position that, notwithstanding the claims of successive Malaysian political leaders, Malaysia was not an ‘Islamic’ country; and that no matter how we look at it, the canvas of Malaysia was one that showed a picture of the secular and Islam existing side by side. Either - or something else - might have been perceived as a threat to the periok nasi of the IKIM leadership.

My own (modest) periok nasi was certainly not threatened. Although surprised, I was not upset when told about the exclusion of my paper. The paper was easily accepted for publication by the Universiti Malaya law faculty’s journal instead.

This same journal also recently published an unsparing critique I made of a certain judgment of the Malaysian apex court. In my view, this judgment could not be supported by fundamental legal principles, and if left uncorrected would undermine the rule of law and further confuse the line between the secular and the religious in the Malaysian Constitution.

My Legal Analysis of the Bin Abdullah Case

Last February, the full panel of the Federal Court handed down its decision in Jabatan Pendaftaran Negara & Ors v A Child & Ors (Majlis Agama Islam Negeri Johor, intervener), the case commonly known as the bin Abdullah case.

Readers may recall that children’s and women’s advocates were dismayed when the Federal Court left a Muslim infant without a patronymic as is customary for the Malays in Peninsula Malaysia. 

The bin Abdullah case began when a Malay child, a boy, was born less than six months after his Malay parents’ marriage. 

Father MEMK and mother NAW subsequently registered the child’s birth. 

When the birth certificate was issued, MEMK and NAW discovered the Registrar-General of the National Registration Department had changed their child’s name. Instead of having his father’s name as the child’s patronymic (as his surname), the child was given the patronymic “bin Abdullah.”

Upset and distraught, the parents requested the Registrar-General to make the necessary corrections. The Registrar-General refused on religious grounds. 

(Apparently, the understanding of the Registrar-General was that under Islamic law, a child is illegitimate if born less than six months after the marriage of his/her parents, and thus the patronymic `bin Abdullah’ or `binti Abdullah’ - depending on the gender - should be given to that child.)

The parents applied for judicial review in the High Court.

Undeterred by the High Court’s dismissal of their application, the parents appealed to the Court of Appeal. 

There the parents prevailed. The Court of Appeal unanimously ruled that the Registrar-General had acted outside of his statutory powers. In essence, the Court of Appeal ruled that at issue was the duty of the Registrar-General to register births in Malaysia, which was governed by a specific federal statute. This statute provided the Registrar-General no powers to change the name of any child, according to the Court of Appeal. 

The Court of Appeal was correct in my view. 

However, on further appeal by the Registrar-General, the Federal Court ruled, in a narrow majority of 4:3, that Islamic law governed in this instance.

I wrote a commentary on the Federal Court’s decision, critical of the majority opinion and once again this was published in the Universiti Malaya law faculty’s journal.

My critique was also leveled at the Registrar-General, the bureaucrat who had no business to take it upon himself to be a law enforcer (Islamic or otherwise), never mind that he was using his official time to calculate when exactly the boy was conceived. Nothing in the statute that created his office gave him power to do what he did. 

My modest success in getting the bin Abdullah commentary and the tribute to the late Prof. Ahmad Ibrahim published, leads me to conclude that it is entirely possible to initiate and engage in public discourse on the subjects of race and religion, if we do so in good faith and our views are well-grounded. 

Controversy is Good for Malaysia’s Intellectual Development

When it comes to banning books about race and religion, Malaysia’s record is mixed. Kassim Ahmad’s Hadith: Satu Penilaian Semula (Hadith: A Re-evaluation) is one book that was banned. Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad’s The Malay Dilemma was initially banned, but the ban was subsequently lifted. However, Dr. M. Bakri Musa’s The Malay Dilemma Revisited: Race Dynamics in Modern Malaysia was never banned.

There can be more than one theory to explain the mixed record. In Malaysia, controversy is likely to ensue when writing about race and religion. But people like my brother Salleh Ben Joned continued to write despite the risk of controversy. 

He was of the school of thought that understands that controversy in the form of discussing opposing views, is in fact good for Malaysia’s intellectual development. He believed such discourse should be welcomed unless it could cause a riot or bad feelings among the races. And this deeply-held belief guided Salleh in his writing career as a poet and an essayist. 

Many people were surprised that my brother was allowed to write essays and columns on taboo subjects and to do so openly in an establishment newspaper like the New Straits Times. In the Preface to As I Please, a collection of his select writings published in 1994 by Skoob Books (London), Salleh responded to this surprise:

The fact that an intelligent man and a Malay (it’s worth noting), was chief editor of the paper explains the freedom I was tacitly granted. Not a few readers praised me for my so-called ‘courage’; I personally didn’t think it was a matter of courage. Commonsense – that’s basically what’s needed. That, and a real concern for the intellectual state of the country. I was furious when V.S. Naipaul, interviewed while in Malaysia researching for his book Among the Believers, so casually said that mine was “a country without a mind.” But I knew what he meant, and if we confine that remark to the contemporary scene I couldn’t help but agree with him.

Salleh opined that if self-censorship in Malaysia was bad for the general intellectual development of Malaysia, it was worse for the development of Malaysian literature. Rather than being sentimental, emotional and unprofessional, writers – Malay writers especially – have the responsibility to use their craft to tackle these taboo subject matters, notwithstanding the discomfort or the controversy the subject may engender. 

* * *

My brother was always testing the parameters. He survived Malaysia’s stringent censorship because he was extremely well-read and a gifted writer. Using his art craftily, so to speak, and with poetic playfulness, he was able to exploit the limited freedom that existed in Malaysia while staying true to his calling. In encouraging others to also always be testing the parameters, he wrote: 

We all know that our censorship laws are very stringent. But while hoping (and fighting?) for greater liberalism, it’s not impossible to learn to live with them while we have to. You would be amazed what can be done within the existing restrictions. It’s up to writers and publishers to exploit the limited freedom that exists. In other words, to “test the parameters” – or the perimeter of the permissible.

I am not a writer. I also live abroad. But I, too, despite setbacks and insults, continue to test the parameters. In my own field of law I have been inspired by my brother’s call for all of us to care for Malaysia’s intellectual development and do our best to contribute to it. Privileged with some education, I feel a certain obligation to do so.

My brother was a champion of kebudayaan rojak (multiculturalism). He was a patriot with a vision of a united Malaysia where Bangsa Malaysia lives in peace and harmony. If we share this vision, we too should test the parameters. Together, we can help build a truly functioning democracy that would be the envy of the world. 

Alima Joned is a lawyer in private practice in Washington, DC. 

Introduction to 'As I Please' by Margaret Drabble (1994)

Dame Margaret Drabble CBE (portrait by Ruth Corney)

Anybody who wants to understand cultural politics today should read this book. Anybody who wants to understand Malaysia today should read this book. And anybody who wants an insight into confrontations of East and West, of Islam and the secular or Christian world, should read this book.

Salleh Ben Joned, poet and journalist, is an excellent guide through the minefields of misunderstanding that await the traveller at home or abroad. The articles and essays cover a wide range of issues, from the question of the National Language (and National Literature) of Malaysia to the death of Lorca, from the soporific dullness of hot Sunday afternoons in Kuala Lumpur to the Rushdie Affair, from erotic verse to the implications of the Fall of Granada in 1492.  Salleh is a joker and a satirist, and he can make one laugh aloud, but beneath the wit and invective is a courageous seriousness. Ridenten dicere verum quid vetat?  As Horace said – or “Who says I can’t joke while telling the truth?” - Salleh’s jokes are often very near the bone, as are those of the best jesters, and he probably annoys his friends as often as his critics.

He writes in a political climate which is, to say the least, challenging. Malaysia should be grateful to him for communicating to outsiders so clearly and enjoyable its condition as it approaches the Millennium – though I suppose gratitude is what it always feels. After reading these essays, one has much more understanding of what is actually happening in a country whose relationship with Britain has recently been very vexed.

One can even pick up, from this volume, a few words of the language – it was Salleh himself in Kuala Lumpur who taught me the provenance of the word “amok”, and from these essays I have now learned that in Malay, breasts are tetek, a word which he lovingly describes as completely expressive of itself, and more evocative than any English version, literary or vulgar. His translations of Malayan pantuns, sayings and terms of abuse also make one long to know of the language. It is clearly a fine tongue for invective.

Born in Malacca, Salleh had a Western education in Australia and Tasmania, and is now widely travelled, but he remains a Malaysian and a Muslim. He is uniquely well placed to explore what has recently become a dominant cultural conflict of our time. Like Rushdie, he has lived, day by day, and tried to make sense of it.  His responses are instant, off the cuff, sometimes hasty – and that is one of the virtues of this volume of occasional pieces. It has a great immediacy. The debate is with society, and he shows us a mind unable to censor itself. He explores the Quran and the Hadith, finding there mercy and compassion: he challenges the dictators of religious orthodoxy on their ground, pleading for a tolerance which he assures us has scriptural authority.

This is a brave agenda. The word “blasphemy” and “sacrilege” and apostasy understandably haunt him, and he says that his typewriter has a curious habit of producing the word “scared” instead of “sacred.” His courage in trying to interpret one side of his heritage to the other, and hence to us, is exhilarating. 

Salleh is bilingual, and writes in English and Malay:  he supports strongly the right to write (and teach and be taught) in English, but he also has a strong feeling for Malay. His games with words in both tongues reveal his knowledge of James Joyce, of whom he here writes with admiration – making, incidentally some interesting comparisons between Irish nationalism and Malaysian nationalism. He is sensitive to the grey area where religion fades in which literature itself can be co-opted, abused and misinterpreted. He votes for multi-culturalism, but he also understands its dangers. 

Exhilarating, too, is the infectious enthusiasm with which he writes about writing. His friends and heroes, ranging from the Australian poet and trickster James McAuley to Octavio Paz, Ibsen, Chairil Anwar (“the first and probably the only true bohemian and rebel the Malay literary world has produced”) and journalist and novelist Isako San, are celebrated with generosity.

Above all, he arouses our curiosity. He makes us want to understand. For this alone Malaysia should give him a few medals. Who would have thought I would find myself reading an article on a Bumi writer’s dilemma with such interest? Until I came across Salleh Ben Joned, I never even knew what a Bumi writer was. This book challenges us all to find out

Margaret Drabble

May 1994

Margaret Drabble is a novelist and critic. Her first book A Summer Birdcage, was published in 1962 to be followed by several others, including The Garrick Year (1964) The Needle’s Eye (1972) and The Radiant Way (1987). Her book The Millstone (1966) won the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize. She is editor of The Genius of Thomas Hardy (1976) and the Fifth Edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (1985) and author of a critical biography of Angus Wilson. She was awarded a CBE in 1980.