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.
 

Apostates of the World, Rejoice! (1992)

James Joyce (1882-1941)

The Sunday before last (February 2) was the birthday of the great Irish novelist James Joyce (born 1882). I’d like to use the occasion to talk about him, to celebrate him as an example of a certain kind of writer caught in a certain kind of situation. Joyce is a perfect example of the writer fully attuned to “the other voice” of his art. The voice that, to echo the words of the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, is stubbornly and intractably heterodox, whose loves have always ended in divorce, whose conversions, in apostasy. Joyce is, in fact, the prototype of the modern artist as apostate. His apostasy, both literal and symbolic, cultural, political as well as religious, was inseparable from the integrity of his vision, and the freedom of his art. It led him into self-exile; almost his entire adult life was spent wandering from one European country to another. He died and was buried in Zurich on January 13, 1941.

Like all true writers who felt compelled to revolt, Joyce’s apostasy and self-exile were, ironically, his means of affirming his essential “Irishness”, of being true to the real heritage of his race. But his fidelity was totally unlike that of the blinkered and puritanical nationalists. It was open to life in all its richness and contradictions, embracing with the human breadth of its art the Irish and the non-Irish, the local and the universal, the vulgar and the refined, the profane and the sacred.  Joyce had to say No (and No, in thunder) in order to truly rejoice in the saying of Yes – the great yes of Molly Bloom as she sits on the chamber-pot at the end of Ulysses. And, to quote one of the sharpest early commentators on Joyce, he, by means of his art, “proves himself most truly a Catholic, even if he could only exhibit the Catholic temper by rejecting the Catholic faith, as he knew it.”

While still a young man, Joyce made himself the champion in Ireland of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, then an old man with his last play, When We Dead Awaken, already behind him. Ibsen’s hatred of ultra-nationalism, dead conventions and provincialism made him Joyce’s spiritual relation. It was typical of Joyce’s countrymen that his passionate championing of the foreign playwright was considered unpatriotic as well as anti-religious, the latter really meaning anti the Catholic Church which had the mind of Ireland in its vice-like grip.

Provincialism, puritanism, religious fanaticism, and nationalism lost in the fog and bog of sheer Irish sentimentality – all this had made Joyce’s beloved native city Dublin, that one-time centre of European learning and culture, a “centre of paralysis.” It was in order to look hard and with the detachment of estrangement at this “centre of paralysis” that Joyce exiled himself. Sensitive to the “other voice”, he knew that his love must end in divorce, his faith in apostasy. But that same voice heterodox with the heterodoxy of both life and art, led him to the recovery of true love – or rather a reaffirmation of love enlarged by the human breadth of his art.

In his greatest work, Ulysses set in Dublin with a “dirty-minded” common man (a Jew too, not an Irishman) as its true hero, he traces step by earth-bound step his way though the labyrinth of the city’s provincial streets and alleys towards the great affirmation. Someone, with Joyce’s final work Finnegans Wake in mind, once nicely said of Joyce, “he had the Liffey water in his veins and on his brain; the river whose name puns so naturally with the water of life.” By putting and immortalising Dublin on the literary map of the world, the arrogant “traitor” with nothing but contempt for the noisy patriotic mob became the greatest celebrant of the native city on which he had turned his back for good. As Stephen Daedalus, the hero of Joyce’s autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, puts it on the eve of his own exile: “The shortest way to Tara (is) via Holyhead.” (Tara is the ancient seat of the Kings of Ireland until the 6th Century and here symbolizes the past glory of Irish civilization; Holyhead, the coastal town in northern Wales, is the landing point of the ferry from Dublin.

           

Sean O’Faolain

The writer Sean O’Faolain, a true patriot (he was for six years a member of the Irish Republican Army) and yet as unblinkered by sentimentalism as Joyce was, once suggested expatriation or self-exile as one of the major reasons for the flowering of Anglo-Irish literature early this century. “The intellectual blood transfusion” resulting from this tradition of literary expatriation was in part due to the fact that most Irish writers simply couldn’t forget their bloody country wherever they might have exiled themselves. O’Faolain gave another reason for that flowering Anglo-Irish literature which I should perhaps quote here – and that was “the imposition on Gaelic Ireland of the English language and the example of its masterpieces, the one offering the Irish writers access to the widest audience and the other access to a thousand shades of style”. Joyce himself never had any feeling of guilt in having to use the language of Ireland’s colonial masters, and he had nothing but scorn for the movement to revive a dead language like Gaelic.

           

In invoking James Joyce the self-exiled apostate as an example, I don’t mean to recommend emigration to those of our writers who feel they are in situation in this country akin to that of the Irishman in his. It is Joyce’s fierce fidelity to his vision and his uncompromising sense of artistic integrity that I mean to stress.  Joyce felt the need to exile himself, and his exile proved to be a fruitful one, yes. But that doesn’t mean every writer in a situation akin to Joyce’s must necessarily emigrate if he doesn’t want to die as a writer. It must be remembered that exile can take more than one form; it doesn’t have to be physical. There is such a thing as internal or spiritual exile, a form that some noted writers of the world have resorted to.  

Wong Phui Nam

In his column Other Cadences (Literary Page, January), Wong Phui Nam raised a challenging question about emigration.  The question he raised has a special reference to writers who feel that they have “no place in the new order of things”. The words within quotation marks were those of the Malacca-born poet Ee Tiang Hong, as seen by his friend and fellow poet Edwin Thumboo in a poem addressed to him, that occasioned the question raised by Mr Wong. Without mincing his words, Mr Wong says that “emigration is an evasion, a lack of will to come to terms with one’s condition”. Though his interesting reading of Thumboo’s poem is invoked in support of that statement, the wording makes it sound absolute, which I’m quite sure was not intended by Mr Wong.

           

Is emigration – especially that of a writer – always “an evasion, a lack of will to come to terms with one’s condition”? The striking case of Joyce alone should make Mr Wong want to qualify his statement. Mr Wong also believes that Ee’s emigration was a sad one because it was really a quest for “elusive Edens” that landed him in a desert of the mind. And Mr Wong here invokes his reading of Thumboo’s poem in support of his judgement. I too think that there was a certain sadness in Ee’s emigration, but I’m not sure about the “desert” bit. Ee Tiang Hong’s case is interesting and an unsentimental discussion of it could generate some insights into the question raised by Mr Wong is obviously to those English-language non-Bumi writers who feel that they have “no place in the new order of things”.

           

Without suggesting that Mr Wong is unaware of it, I would like to remind non-Bumis that even a Bumi writer if he can hear “the other voice” of his art, or if his art is capable of “the other voice” of his art, or if his art is capable of the “other voice” can feel that he has “no place in the new order of things” and because of it can face the temptation of self-exile. In one sense, the temptation can even be stronger because the Bumi writer of the kind I mean has to suffer from worse constraints on his creative freedom than the non-Bumi, despite all the talk of his being a member of a privileged race. For reasons which I don’t have space to go into here, I believe that physical exile for this Bumi writer could be the death of his creativity. If James Joyce the defiant apostate must serve as an example of him, it has to be a symbolic one. His exile must be internal or spiritual – and if he has the resources and the strength to bear with that condition and even turn it into a creative blessing, there is no reason why he can’t rejoice in his “apostasy” – with the Joycean line “silence, exile and cunning” for a motto – the “silence” here meaning the cunningly articulate “silence” of art. Whether his rejoicing as expressed in his art can be shared by his countrymen, whether the “silence” will in fact be a public one, is of course, another matter. 

12 February 1992