So, who’s this poet and playwright?
It’s Mohammed Razali Wong Phui Nam.
Bangsa Malaysia
50 years on, we may remember that one of the nine
strategic challenges of Vision 2020 is to work towards being “bangsa
Malaysia”. Mahathir’s challenge doesn’t define what this means, of
course, for we are to make what of it ourselves. It is difficult to
define this elusive race / nationality, not least because we all have
differing opinions about it (it may even be an unacceptable goal,
according to some quarters). What might the image of bangsa Malaysia be?
At 72, Mohammed Razali Wong Phui Nam seems to have
more energy and contradiction than ever. Retired economist and constant
poet, he has fashionably longish hair -- but with spectacles hung on a
string round his neck, like an old school principal. For a Muslim, he
sounds like a Buddhist. For a Baba, he sounds like a Nyonya. Under a
Peranakan father, he learned Cantonese late, then English and Bahasa
Melayu later. He speaks all three but writes mostly in English. A
sometime Anglophobe and Anglophile, he refers to Greek, medieval,
Malay and Cambodian myths and legends.
He even has a Muse. “She looks like a middle-aged
Indian woman: gray hair, white sari ...”
Is it possible, as Razali grins from ear to ear,
that here might be a mythical anak bangsa Malaysia? Not risen from
the ashes, but landing suddenly, bloody and smiling, onto the aluminium
operating table of Twin Towers-Malaysia, as if from nowhere, stunning
the surgeons who were busy closing up the skull of muhibbah. He has
come through some kind of portal! A motherlode of ancient Asian and
world languages, without the seams showing. See how he flicks
blood-red plasma off delicate eyelashes and sips teh tarik.
It turns out that Razali has had long absences before
-- such as between his first and second collections of poetry -- so
these sudden appearances of new work are simply the result of patient
working away from the public eye. It is a return to celebrate, in
Malaysia’s fiftieth year.
Death in the Family
But first, some biodata, for he is no immaculate
conception.
Wong Phui Nam was born in Kuala Lumpur, in 1935.
(He has been a Muslim for 39 years, but has used his full name only
recently, so as to give his children necessary legitimacy in case
he dies. As will be seen, he does talk -- and laugh -- a lot about death.)
As a potted history, Phui Nam was educated in
Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown and Batu Road School -- at one point, in
fact, he was going to a Chinese-medium school in the mornings and an
English one in the afternoons. In 1949, he went to the Victoria
Institution. Later, he was accepted at the University of Malaya
in Singapore for a BA (Hons) in Economics. After graduation, he joined
the (then) Ministry of Commerce, and went on to a career in institutional
merchant and industrial banking.
Wong’s mother was from Nanhai, in Canton; she was
a child when she “came as a package” to Malaya, with an aunt destined
to wed a tin miner. When Phui Nam was four years old, his mother died
of kidney failure.
“There used to be what we called a death-house on
Jalan Sultan,” he says. “It was a hospice. The dying were upstairs.
The dead were downstairs. I remember seeing all these dead bodies --
and then my mother. It was a shock.”
His father, a Peranakan turned Cantonese, “more
Cantonese than the Chinese,” died five years later in April 1944,
during the Japanese Occupation.
His father’s body was kept in the same death house.
“I was sleeping,” Phui Nam says. “At that time we lived on Galloway
Road. Relatives suddenly arrived. In the dark, my brother took me
to the death house. All those bodies again ...” Today, he still has
nightmares “of coffins tipping over.”
Abandonment, Loss and Death
Phui Nam, the eighth of 11 siblings, recalls an
episode when his family was in mortal danger: “My father was an ARP,
an Auxiliary Reserve Policeman. We were going to Singapore ... we
reached Johor Bahru, but then had to run into the jungle. Near Ulu
Tiram, we had to make a whole circle back around to avoid them.” He
adds, “It’s true, they used to throw babies up and bayonet them. I
remember dead bodies littered on the roadside.”
Once, one of his sisters was nearly taken by
soldiers. “She was dragged out, my stepmother bargaining with them,
we were all there -- but then, the officer suddenly blew a whistle,
and the soldiers left.” On the streets, Phui Nam recalls that
someone -- anyone -- could be suddenly asked to stand on a piece of
rubber wood, and hold their bicycle up in the sun for hours.
“Recently, I was in Mid Valley Megamall,” Phui
Nam says. “I heard a group of Japanese men talking behind me, and
I got the shivers.”
It’s not too much of a stretch to see the origins
of abandonment, loss, death, and a greater quest as main themes
in Phui Nam’s poetry. Associate Professor Mohammad A Quayum,
notes the “anxiety in the young boy which eventually filtered
into his early poems.”
Such rude awakening in childhood might well
have found new oxygen in Phui Nam’s sometimes bitter allusions
to the birth of a country that held out hope to be “all things
to all people” -- and then didn’t, and rots instead. Many of the
poems of Ways of Exile seem sick with disappointment. Still,
all grist for the mill for the poet who has written or edited
since young.
First an editor of his school magazine, Phui
Nam then became an editor of The New Cauldron, UM Singapore’s
literary journal, and helped bring about two poetry anthologies:
Litmus One: Selected University Verse, 1949 -1957 and
Thirty Poems. He has translated various poems by Indonesian
poet Chairil Anuar, Malaysian poet and painter Latiff Mohidin,
and Tang Dynasty poets. Of the latter, Wong’s short paper on
his translation of a poem by Du Fu (Reading a Tang Poem,
in An Acre of Day’s Glass: Collected Poems) is illuminating.
In the 1980s, he wrote a poetry column for the New Straits Times,
as invited by the paper’s (then) literary editor, Kee Thuan Chye.
Dark and Wonderful
Phui Nam’s own poems from the 1960s appeared
in Bunga Emas, edited by T Wignesan, and were republished
in How the Hills are Distant (Tenggara Supplement, 1968).
However, his best-known collections are Remembering Grandma
and Other Rumours (National University of Singapore, 1989)
and Ways of Exile (Skoob Books, 1993).
His body of work has received sound critical
study, led by Lloyd Fernando, the novelist, playwright and former
Head of English Literature at Universiti Malaya. In 1971, in
a paper on “sectional and national literatures” presented originally
in Bahasa Melayu at the Konggres Kebudayaan Kebangsaan,
Fernando wrote that all of Phui Nam’s poetry deals with
“preparations for a kind of self-renewal. They take place in
a luminous world just behind the scenes and are more related
to a cryptic mood, rather than to the common processes of thought.”
Elsewhere, Fernando writes that, although
younger poets Pretam Kaur and Omar Mohamed Nor were noteworthy,
Wong stands alongside Edwin Thumboo and Ee Tiang Hong as “the
three outstanding names in the first generation” of Malaysian
poets in English. Of Remembering Grandma and Other Rumours
(1989), Fernando reckoned it “one of the first efforts to get to
grips with -- rather than moan about -- the ‘detribalisation’
anxiety that has dogged the Malaysian writer for years.”
In an essay published in 2001, Chin Woon Ping
also remarks of Remembering Grandma that “the thematics of
estrangement and exile found in Wong’s earlier work -- familiar
topoi of the diasporan culture of Malaysian Chinese -- are
clarified in recurrent, one might say obsessive symbols of
pathology.” Singaporean playwright, Robert Yeo identifies Phui
Nam’s work as “bleak preoccupations with physical and spiritual
decay, death and possible resurrection.” Critic, poet and
arts-activist Eddin Khoo says: “Dark and wonderful, especially
his new work.”
The Point of No Return
But what does Phui Nam say, himself, about
the clear and present sense of death in his work? “Some people call it morbid,” he smiles,
“But that’s looking at things from the Western viewpoint.”
Western viewpoint? This is surely limiting,
even disingenuous, for the very power of many poems come
from their instilling a queasy, uneasy fear -- whether one’s
stomach lies north, south, east or west. What of the Irish
love of a wake, where death is to be celebrated -- or the
Mexican festival of death? There is no common squeamishness
about open caskets there, there in the Far West. And how
many cousins and relatives in this land, here and now,
won’t step foot in a house if someone has died in it?
Morbidity is surely not just a Western thing.
And yet, Phui Nam does mean death in an
uncommonly bright light. While his vision has seemed bitter,
at times, it has never been entirely apocalyptic. There is
usually a search in his work -- an optimistic one, as it
looks for something Other Than. The embalmer’s mummy is,
in death, ascending into the sun.
With this recent cycle of creativity, Razali /
Phui Nam’s new work suggests he has “moved on”, gone deeper,
into a certain fluency (applying himself to the discipline of
sonnets again, changing tack to write plays in verse) and deeper
into familiar, yet extended, mythical territory (he has always
made references to Greek, Chinese, Malay and Christian myths;
one of his new plays is set in “pre-Islamic” times). Perhaps,
to use K S Maniam’s choice phrase for the struggle of the
Malaysian writer, our poet has “reached the point of no return
in terms of linguistic choice.”
Mindfulness
But if Mohammed Razali Wong Phui Nam is an
anak bangsa Malaysia, and references like “rotan”, “cobra”
and “Tuanku” physically locate him here, what about his
literary pharaohs and other adventures? Consider these: Beethoven
and Mozart. (Razali’s first passion was music, and he played
the violin for a while. “But it was cheaper to have a pencil
and paper,” he says. His earliest sense of beat and rhythm is
derived from these musical beginnings.)
Other adventures have been taken through
Keats, Edwin Thumboo, Dylan Thomas, T S Eliot, Robert Graves,
St John of the Cross, Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens,
John Donne, Shakespeare ... together with translations of works
by Chairil Anuar, Latiff Mohidin and Tang poets, this is some
journeying.
Towards the end of our afternoon conversation,
the poet and playwright sighs. “I’m older than the country.”
He claims “this generation” has been “maimed.”
How? “By being deprived of global language,”
Razali says. “We are a nation of mediocrity.”
Yet, it seems, we must not look to the
future with fear. Razali later relates the four Noble Truths
of Buddhist belief: Life Means Suffering, “Dhukka”. The Origin
of Suffering is Attachment. The Cessation of Suffering is
Attainable. There is a Path to the cessation of Suffering,
using the Eight-Fold Path.
Then he adds: “It’s true, you know. There
is so much suffering. But I do believe that we can behave
better to one another. In the Eight-Fold path, for example,
it says people must be mindful. Mindfulness is very important
in our context.”
He shifts in his aluminium seat. “We are
preparing for death, you see,” he says, smiling again,
“But, of course, I don’t know what it’s going to be like.”
His face, in repose, is quizzical, yet nonplussed. An eyelash
has fallen on his right cheek.
(by Ann Lee is a writer and director. Educated
in Sandakan, Penang, Colwyn Bay and Oxford, she has been
writing on the arts, off and on, for the last 20 years.
She has a degree in Film and another in the History of Science,
Medicine and Technology.)
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