What brought about this blog (by Anna Salleh, 2016)

Abah and I at home at Sungai Penchala in the early 1970s

It was 1973, the year the US withdrew from Vietnam, Pink Floyd released Dark Side of the Moon, and my father returned to Malaysia after spending 10 years in Australia on a Colombo Plan scholarship. He had met my mother at the University of Adelaide and eloped to Tasmania when the in-laws threatened to deport him for 'messing around with a white girl'. When it was time to return home he took me with him. I was just 9 years old and we had tragically lost my younger sister in a car accident the year before. The next few years were a blur of exciting and challenging new things – it was the first time I experienced kampong life and the unconditional support of an extended family. I learnt Malay. And I lived the rollercoaster life of Salleh Ben Joned's daughter.

Much of my childhood was spent hanging around the University of Malaya where SBJ taught, playing games in spooky abandoned buildings where he rehearsed plays, or entertaining myself with his Ella Fitzgerald records as he sat hunched over his manual typewriter writing...writing...writing.

My father wrote anywhere anytime (photo by Annemarie Flint Bjerre)

There were a lot of social gatherings too – with people like actor Syed Alwi (I used to enjoy his great comic collection) and poet/painter Latiff Mohidin (I still have a sketch I did of him as a 10-year-old). And it was during this time that my father bought me my first guitar and let me come to a film club screening he had organised of Black Orpheus – sowing the seeds for my current love affair with Brazilian music.

Returning to work in Malaysia was payback for SBJ's scholarship, but it also seemed to meet a need he had to return to the land of his birth after years in the 'wild west'. A poem my father wrote during these heady years for my late sister Maria (he nick-named her 'Ria') expresses his desire to reconnect with his native tongue, and to salve his wounds as best he could. Here are a few lines from the poem that always bring me to tears...

A kampong childhood

Joy means your name Ria
in the tongue of your blood, 
a tongue I must learn again
to sing the mystery of our pain.

Be with me my Ria
in the sheer light
of my old sun.

What I didn't know as a child, was that my father was also using his bilingual skills to shatter taboos around race, religion and culture ­ giving the finger to the establishment and building a notorious reputation for himself in the world of Malaysian literature. Some of this rebellion was no doubt self-conscious, but I think he was trying to make sense of the contradictions he felt between the imposed strictures of the powers that be, and the sensual joy of life that he saw rooted in the culture he grew up in.

Most of his life Abah has struggled with manic depression and various treatments for it (he often challenged the bipolar diagnosis, suggesting that what people called 'mania' was just 'normal' and depression was what he experienced when he wasn't feeling creative). I'm sure he would have preferred to have lived fast and died young like James Dean, but it was not to be. He hasn't written for a long time now, yet his legacy continues to be a catalyst for expression and creativity.

Me and my father on a trip to Burma in the early 1980s

Last year, a message popped up on my Facebook from a young SBJ fan. "I don't know how to explain this," wrote Saufie Jaffar, a photographer and graphic designer from Melaka – my father's hometown. "I just wanted to know how is Mr. Salleh doing? Where is he now? ... [smile emoticon]". Saufie recalled first meeting my father at a Lat retrospective exhibition. "Inside the toilet, I was smoking with my friends and suddenly he came and said 'May I join the club?' He wanted to borrow the lighter actually [grin emoticon]." A bit later Saufie saw SBJ's brief appearance in Amir Muhammad's film The Big Durian and was able to put a name to the face of that 'jamban' intruder, and to follow up his writings. Saufie said my father's poetry had inspired him to write – and now he has his own publication coming out.  The young poet was beside himself when he managed to catch up with SBJ on a recent family trip 'balik kampong'. Saufie got his copies of Sajak Sajak Saleh and The Amok of Mat Solo autographed, although unfortunately a friend had borrowed his copy of As I Please at the time.

Saufie gets his collection of SBJ books autographed

Saufie is just one of a number of younger people who have connected with my father's writings. Students have based projects on his works, and those taught by my father's students have called for a tribute to be written for this 'icon' they've never met. Then there's young musician Emir Syazwan who paid homage to SBJ by reading one of his columns in a video posted on YouTube and the fans who lovingly describe Abah as "the Johnny Rotten of poetry in Malaysia" or "Malaysian literature's l'enfant terrible."

There are some who would have found my father arrogant and disrespectful in his time, some of his works obscene. But there is no doubt his provocation has left a mark, including on a whole new generation. Friends tell me his work is as relevant to Malaysia today as it was when first written – a fact that has given birth to this blog. 

The blog contains reproductions of some of SBJ's essays and selections from his popular 1990s New Straits Times column - called As I Please, also the title of one of his books. On the full blog (you may need to view on desktop for some features) you can also find a few photos and audio recordings of SBJ and relevant commentaries by others - for more of those go to the Facebook page maintained in his honour. 

It's only right that the likes of Saufie and Emir and the countless others who may spend more time online than reading books, can access the works of the man I affectionately know as 'Abah', but who appears now to have become a national treasure.

Father & daughter in Melaka early 2016 (photo by Saufie Jaffar)

Salacious Pleasures of 'Pantuns' (1991)

LISTEN to this pantun:

Tanam padi di Bukit Jeram

Tanam keduduk atas batu

Macam mana hati tak geram

Menengok tetek menolak baju

And my translation:

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)

(Note: The first couplet is a very free rendering of the original.)

The puritan will no doubt dismiss this pantun as “obscene” and therefore unworthy of being part of the treasured heritage of the race. Unfortunately for our friend, the “offensive” pantun is included in Kumpulan Pantun Melayu (A Collection of Malay Pantuns), published by that august body, Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. I think this pantun is marvellous. Its very simplicity and directness, directness to the point of possible “vulgarity,” heightens its erotic appeal; paradoxically, there is a kind of subtlety in its stark salaciousness. What’s more, its eroticism is, in my perhaps eccentric reading, not of the limiting kind. Properly read, with the mind alert to the semantic and cultural resonance of the key words, you’ll see more than the surface evocation. In the tetek menolak baju (literally tits pushing at the blouse), much more than a lovely pair of tetek (breast) is revealed. I’d even say a whole world is seen to revolve at the tip of each tetek, on the point of each puting (nipple), or better still, mata susu (the eye of the breast). And a whole world view is suggested by geram (feel excited for, passionate for). The foreshadowing word Jeram (here the name of a hill, but literally “cataracts” or “rapids”) heightens the sense of life as rapids, and thus reminds us that one simply must seize the moment as it flies. Geram! Carpe diem! To see the tetek menolak baju in this pantun is almost like seeing a Blakean “World in a grain of sand,/And a Heaven in a wild flower,/Hold(ing) Infinity in the palm of your hand,/ And Eternity in an hour …” Absurd “Sallehcious” hyperbole? Perhaps.

Malay Girl by Irma Stern

The central word of 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 feeling and passions, is vital to any attempt to understand the race. If you want to know what the hati is to Malay, soak yourself in the pantuns. Only the hati can feel geram the way a Malay feels it, only the hati can generate it. None of the English equivalents for geram can match the fierce ambivalence of the Malay word. Geram is ambivalent because there can be an element of ferocity, even violence in the desire. The rhyming of Jeram and geram in the above pantun not only heightens the sense of carpe diem (Latin for “seize the day”), but also strengthens the ambivalent ferocity of the desire. Menolak (pushing, rejecting), is also seductively ambiguous. You can see the tetek (what’s breast, busts, tits, even bosoms compared to the alliterative disyllabic tetek?) – you see the tetek, and the nipples pushing the kebaya (the baju simply has to be a kebaya), making the tight tighter, the stretched more stretched; and at the same time you have a flashing vision of the kebaya being violently stripped, pushed away, off the body – in other words, rejected. And the first couplet, the part of the pantun known as pembayang (foreshadowing), which in the best pantuns gives you through sound and imagery the foretaste of the meaning stated in the second couplet – well, this particular pembayang, this foreshadowing couplet truly, poetically and concretely enacts the foreplay of the anticipated coupling. What more can you want? The act itself? Well…

Talk of foreshadowing couplet enacting foreplay of the coupling in the concluding couplet, listen to this:

Di mana kuang bertelur

Di atas lata di celah batu

Di mana abang nak tidur

Di celah dada di alur susu

Where does the dove lay its eggs

In the rapids between the rocks

Where may I lay my head, my love

On the chest between the breasts.

(Translation)

(Note: kuang is actually pheasant; I’m sorry to have sacrifice it for reason of poetic necessity.)

There is one well-known saying: ikut hati mati; ikut rasa binasa (to give rein to one’s passion means death; to give rein to one’s feelings means destruction). Here too my manic mind can detect a hidden ambivalence. This saying is usually taken as a stern warning against listening to the dictates of the heart, of the liver. In a sense, and on the surface, yes; but if you listen to the hidden hati of the saying, to the surging of the ancient blood in the subterranean veins of its meaning, you’ll hear ancestral voices prophesying spiritual and metaphorical bodily death to the race if it keeps on denying its instincts for life, freedom and joy. Hang Jebat knew that; he heard the ancestral voices in his hati and did what he felt he had to do. His hati simply refused to mati (die), even at the expense of the body. Tepuk dada tanya selera (tap your chest and ask what your appetite is like.) That’s what Jebat would say, taking the saying in his characteristic individual way.

In my reading, which I imagine Jebat would endorse, the saying doesn’t necessarily mean “look before you leap,” as it is normally taken to mean. This common interpretation is, I believe, another instance of life-avoiding caution insidiously supplanting the original dare in the psyche of the race over the centuries of historical development. The insidiousness of this silent contagion of the spirit was such that the modern Malay can only hear the tone of caution in the saying. The other tone, its opposite, which is “hedonistic” (for this saying is actually ambiguous), is to me much stronger. I can imagine Jebat saying it with a ringing voice, his clenched fist beating against his burning breast. Note that dada, literally breast, can also be a synonym for hati, and selera, literally appetite, can also mean zest for life (selera in the hikayat is sometimes a poetical name for the body).

But then even the most defiant line can be emasculated. The emasculated is someone whose hati has become atrophied. The puritan is an example of a person whose hati has become atrophied; for in order to become a true liver, meaning open to the marvellous possibilities of life, your hati (liver, remember) has to be alive. Always looking before you leap can be dangerous for the spirit. Jebat knew that. And never listening to your hati when it’s sakit (sick), always ignoring the complaints of the liver, can be fatal for the liver. Jebat knew that too. Sakit hati (literally “sickness of the liver”) is always associated with the amok and the lover blighted in love. Remember that. And remember too that the amok is not always a mad zombie who runs amok without rhyme or reason. Don’t ignore your hati when it’s sakit. Don’t repress or betray the cries of your instincts, your body, your spirit. If you do that, you might run amok or, if there’s nothing left in the liver to fuel an amok, you’ll just die in life and become a liver without a living liver.

Only the living liver can feel the kind of passion expressed in this marvellous and powerful pantun:

Kerengga di dalam buluh

Serahi berisi air mawar

Datang hasrat di dalam tubuh

Tuan seorang jadi penawar.

Red ants crawling in bamboo shaft

Vessel brimming with rose water

When my body’s possessed by lust

Only you can be the appeaser.

                                                (Translation)

A race that can produce a pantun so passionately compact as this, coupling the crimson ferocity of sheer lust, embodied by the image of the red ants in the bamboo shaft, with the lovely tenderness of diaphanous desire, suggested by the fluid vowels, the assonance, as well as the imagery of serahi berisi air mawar (serahi, vessel, and berisi, filled) so sensuously, seductively flowing into the unspoken berahi, lust, desire – this race cannot be a stranger to sexual hedonism, however you define that word.

If it is true that hedonism was part of the essential nature of the race, what has happened to it? If in fact it is no longer a determining force in his being, it is still lurking in the subconscious, kept suppressed here by some bigger alien force? By way of suggesting possible answers, I’ll give you a parting pantun:

Ke Teluk sudah, ke Siam sudah

Ke Mekah saja aku yang belum

Berpeluk sudah, bercium sudah

Bernikah saja aku yang belum.

I’ve been to Thailand, to the Gulf too

Only to Mecca I haven’t been

Kissed them I have, and known them too

Without going through the wedding scene.

                                                (Translation)

 29 May 1991