I
was introduced to Edwin back in 2006 when I gave a creative writing workshop
for MELTA, the Malaysian English Language Teaching Association, in
Kuching. At the time, I had been based
in Penang and was considering moving to Sarawak with my Sarawakian wife and our
young family (we were expecting our second child) and I thought I could make
some connections at the conference and apply for a position at Universiti
Malaysia Sarawak where I later taught creative writing. Every time I saw Edwin, who was the President
of MELTA from June 2001 till January 2008, he always had a big friendly smile on
his face.
Not only is
Edwin a gifted poet, but also a short
story writer, editor, bibliographer and academic. He is currently Professor, School of English,
University of Nottingham Malaysia. He
holds a doctoral degree from University of Nottingham UK. His most recent publication is his first collection
of short stories entitled Coitus
Interruptus and Other Stories (Maya Press, 2018). He has published two
volumes of poems, Life Happens (Maya
Press, 2017) and Complicated Lives (Maya
Press, 2016). He edited a volume of
Malaysian poems covering a period of 60 years entitled Malchin Testament: Malaysian Poems (Maya Press, 2017). In 2003, he edited a volume of poems for young
adults entitled In-Sights: Malaysian
Poems (Maya Press, 2003). In 2015,
he published A Bibliography of Malaysian
Literature in English (Petaling Jaya, Maya Press). In addition to being a past President
of MELTA, he was also Vice President of Asia TEFL from 2008 to 2013. He is a recipient of the Chevening Award
(1993-1996) and the Fulbright Scholarship (2000). He had received
the Asian Education Leadership Award from the World Education Congress in
Mumbai, India in June 2013.
RR: Lately you’ve been rather
productive with the recent publications of two books of poetry, Complicated Lives and Life Happens, a collection of short
stories Coitus Interruptus and Other
Stories, plus the Malaysian anthology Malchin
Testament: Malaysian Poems!
People often say or think…who has time to read poetry? Sadly, I was one of them until I found a way! Red Lights.
Like most drivers I detest getting caught at a red light, especially
when I am running late, but then I found the perfect solution — a way of
killing two birds with one poem! I keep
a book of poetry beside me. Now I often
wish the red lights were slightly longer so I could finish the poem I’m in the
midst of reading.
This past year, thanks to those red lights, I have read most if not all
of your published poetry. They even inspired
me to dig through my unread collection of poetry that I had accumulated over
the years with the best of intentions and began reading them…poem after poem
that I might never have gotten around to read.
And for this, I am grateful for you for getting the poetry ball rolling.
One of your poetry collections is titled Complicated Lives, which seems to sum up our lives these days. Are our lives truly more complicated than
those of previous generations, even that of our parents, and does that
complication give us more possibilities (angst) to write about? I’m also thinking, perhaps, the various
sexual permutations that seem to exist in your own writing. Does complicated lives produce better poetry
and prose? Or just better gossip for the
readers?
Edwin: I believe
every generation has had its own kind of complications. I would agree that our lives are indeed
complicated. We would wish for simpler
lives but I’m afraid that’s not often the case for many of us. The complications do give us (at least, it does
for me) more to write about. It allows me to explore the various kinds of
relationships we find ourselves in, not just with fellow human beings but with
fellow creatures and the environment itself. The sexual permutations are often about love
and the desire to be loved; gender is secondary. And some of my poems deal with sexual desire
and how that could complicate lives. It
can be difficult to separate sex and love and that could cause its own
complications. “Better gossip?” No! There’s
no gossip in the poems. There’s both
pain and celebration.
RR: True, but that
doesn’t prevent readers (and nonreaders) from gossiping about the poems (and
the poet), which was what happened one hundred and fifty years ago when Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass (and added to it throughout his life).
Speaking of Whitman, I recently had this surreal literary moment. While in the midst of reading Leaves of Grass (at red lights), I was reading Lincoln by Gore Vidal (at home), when a clerk-cum-novelist asked
Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of Treasury, to consider a clerkship for a great
poet. “He comes to you, sir, with a letter
of introduction and commendation from Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
Suddenly I had goose bumps; I knew he was referring to Walt
Whitman! I knew he had gone to Washington
D.C. during the Civil War because his brother had been wounded in a recent
battle; then he stayed to help to comfort the other wounded soldiers, which he
wrote about in Leaves of Grass. Although he never met Abraham Lincoln,
Lincoln did know him (and his infamous reputation) as did Lincoln’s personal
secretary, John Hay who later wrote a book about Lincoln and had asked Walt
Whitman, since he was in town, to sign his copy of Leaves of Grass. Then Walt Whitman added several tributes
to Abraham Lincoln after he had been assassinated.
I don’t know how many degrees of separation that is, but suddenly I felt
like I personally knew Walt Whitman; and thanks to reading his poetry, I was
inspired to read four books about the Civil War that had been lying around for
years waiting for…someday. That day came
after reading your poetry, Edwin, because that got me to read Leaves of Grass. So, who
knows where a good book of poetry or even a single poem can take you if you let
it? For me, it brought me closer to an
infamous Poet and a famous President and a terrible Civil War that still haunts
the American psyche today.
In Life Happens you quote the
Bible “Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a
multitude of sin”. Love — wanton love or
self-indulgent love — can also cause
a multitude of sin (and a few marriage breakups along the way). Do lovers, more today, than in the past, go
too far in their kiss-and-tell books or their hook-up and broadcasting their
blogs all over the social media? For the
lover, it can increase their notoriety (Don Juan, anyone? Or the Kardashians?), but what about the
named or flushed-out victims who must deal with the real-time fallout that can
destroy their current relationships and wreck their professional and personal lives?
Are people going too far to inflict pain
on others (payback) and even themselves?
Is poetry and even prose, based on your own writing, truly cathartic or
are writers merely a glutton for punishment?
But at whose expense?
Edwin: I
certainly do not subscribe to any form of kiss and tell in my writing. Those who write such real-life confessional books
are certainly not doing it for any kind of literary reasons. Sadly, that seems to be what some publishers
want, and they know these books have readers and they will sell copies.
My
poems are often drawn from various sources and I rework them and create my own
images and metaphors that attempt to capture the experience, the moment or the
emotion. Writing prose and poetry are
different experiences. Writing poetry
sometimes has an element of being therapeutic.
RR: As does
writing prose, which I had experienced firsthand during a divorce and a custody
battle. I wrote a long story that
suddenly answered my unasked question…where was she coming from? Why was she doing this? And what had I done that led to this? And, more importantly, what could I do to help
resolve this in a way that would be best for both of us and our child?
Edwin: Some of my early poems, especially the ‘Mother
Poems’ in Complicated Lives deal with my coming to terms with my mother’s
old age and Alzheimer’s illness. These
poems are very close to me and I still find it difficult to read them aloud in
the Readings sessions. I actually invite
others to read these poems.
Some
of my poems have been described as confessional poems. Here, I’d say that I’m not necessarily the
persona in all of these poems. Poetry
allows for this ambiguity and I do draw on it. When
I write stories, I draw from various sources. If one listens and looks hard enough you see
and hear so many things that give fodder to writers. They are seeds that allow for fertilization
with the imagination and you have your stories. I often take an issue or a problem and see how
I can give it a fresh look. My stories
do not have a clear closure as I want the readers to continue to think about
the characters and what options they may have.
RR: We write, if not for
ourselves, then for others, it seems to me, even if it is only
for one person. What may be closure for the
writer and closure for the reader may be very, very different. It’s how we react or respond to a particular
piece of writing or, by association, how it links to our past that suddenly
awakens us or even provides a solution that we hadn’t been seeking. Each reader may respond to a different
aspect of the story or the poem, even to a particular word that resonates for
them in unexpected ways. Thus, the cause
and the effect can go on and on for generations of readers…long after the
author had passed away.
Another of your quotes from the same collection is TS Eliot, “Only those
who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” This is a true sentiment that applies to
various aspects of our lives, including running a marathon, but
specific to writing, based on your own experiences, please elaborate.
Edwin: I subscribe to what Eliot is advocating in
this quote. I like to think that my
writing is an attempt at “going too far”. One needs to be careful with what one decides
to publish. There are things I write and
don’t publish. But I certainly needed to
write them for myself. My editor is my
barometer who cautions me, and I rarely disagree with him. Some of my readers say I’m brave to publish
what they read in my books. So maybe,
now I can go a little further. Malaysians
self-censor for many reasons. There is
the fear that our work might be banned or at worse the writer gets arrested. One has to be careful with matters of race and
religion. My writings do deal with race
and aspects of religion, but I am very careful not to offend though I might touch
on these issues.
RR: I remember reading one young poet in an anthology that I was
asked to write a comment for and it seemed to me that was exactly what he was
trying to do, offend. My advice to tone
it down fell on deaf ears; I had told him, later, when you mature, you are
going to cringe and regret this.
Edwin: From
an early age, I loved reading. A habit I
picked up from my eldest brother. As we
could not afford to buy books, I joined the British Council library and the
library at the Lincoln’s Cultural Centre. Living in Brickfields in the 60s and studying
in Methodist Boys’ Secondary School, Kuala Lumpur, I could walk to both the
libraries. I used to look for new books
and try to be the first reader.
In
my 20s, I read more poetry than prose. And
I read more modern poetry than I did the Romantics like Wordsworth. In fact, I only began to like Wordsworth much
later in life. I enjoyed T.S. Eliot from
my Form 6 days. I loved the way he wrote
about people and life after World War Two. His religious poems resonated well with me,
coming from a Christian background. I
try to capture our contemporary society in my poems too.
As
in the case of poetry, I read more modern prose writers like Virginia Woolf,
Joseph Conrad and E. M. Forster. Shakespeare
grew on me very quickly too. I started
reading Shakespeare in Form 4. I had a
wonderful English Literature teacher. She
introduced me to many writers including Ovid. The American writers came much later in my
life, then I discovered Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Hemmingway, Steinbeck,
Faulkner and Baldwin and Scott Fitzgerald.
Among
the earliest Malaysian writers, I read were Ee Tiang Hong, Muhammad Haji
Salleh, Wong Phui Nam and Hilary Tham. Edwin
Thumboo had just brought out a volume of Malaysian and Singaporean poems
entitled ‘The Second Tongue’ and it opened the door to local writing,
especially poetry. I read Malaysian
short stories and novels much later.
I
had the privilege of being a student of Professor Lloyd Fernando. He was certainly a mentor and role model. We
became friends and he gave me access to his personal library in his home and
much of my early research on the bibliography of Malaysian literature was done
here.
RR: Getting the right teacher or
lecturer can make a huge difference; one turns you on, the other shuts you
down. For your Malaysian anthology Malchin Testament: Malaysian Poems, which
spans sixty years and covers nearly sixty poets, what were your criteria for
choosing the poems? I could imagine that
would have been a difficult undertaking, not wanting to leave someone
deserving out, against cries of bias or showing favouritism or having to
defend yourself to the inevitable backlash from fellow poets and friends, “How
come so-and-so has four poems and I only have three!”
Edwin: I had
several criteria for selecting the poems. First, that the poets are Malaysians or are
poets born in Malaysia and may now have gone abroad but continue to write about
Malaysia. Second, I chose only poems that have been previously published.
My
work on The Bibliography of Malaysian Literature in English helped me
to find just about every published poetry collection by Malaysians poets. Third, I only published poems that the writers
gave me permission to publish as they hold the copyrights to the poems. The number of poems for each poet represented
the volume of the poet’s publications. There
are some poets with just one or two poems. These are usually the emerging poets whose
works have appeared in anthologies and the poets did not have their own
collection of poems. There are more
poems from the established Malaysian poets.
RR: That sounds fair; I hope they were all happy! I liked how the anthology, as you stated, “brings
together voices of poets from multicultural and multilingual Malaysian
appropriating the English language for their own expression” which I feel is a
tribute for all Malaysians, something everyone should be proud of. But has there been a struggle for this
multicultural and multilingual Malaysian voices to be heard and accepted by
all? Is this an on-going process or has
Malaysia turned the poetic corner, so to speak, and embraced all of these
voices, enriching the literature of Malaysia in the process?
Edwin: Malaysians
write in an English which is quite distinctive. We can recognize Malaysian English both in its
standard and non-standard forms. We can
see the influences of the local languages on Malaysian English and it certainly
enriches the language, but we need to bear in mind that it should have
intelligibility for both local and international readers.
Writing
in English in Malaysia has not been easy. Having the writers’ voices heard is a good
start. We do not have many publishers
who want to publish poetry. There is the
option of self-publication. Even
established poets like Wong Phui Nam self-publish. Most poets look for options abroad and online
literary journals. It slightly better if
you are publishing prose but that too is very limited though the opportunities
are more in the last few years.
Those
who write in English in Malaysia do not get any governmental support unlike
those who write in the Malay language. This
lack of support has not deterred the writers as we see many more young people
writing in English than ever before.
There
are some success stories of Malaysians publishing in English who have won
awards and received international recognition. The first person to win such an
award was Shirley Geok-lin Lim in 1981 when she won the Commonwealth Poetry
Prize for a debut volume. Tan Twan Eng,
Tash Aw and Rani Manicka have won prizes for their novels. This year, Saras Manickam won the Commonwealth
Short Story Prize for Asia. So, it is
looking good for Malaysia, writing in English. As a literary tradition, we are only about sixty
years old. There is a lot of diversity
in the writing and that for me makes Malaysian writing in English rather
vibrant.
RR: Plus Ivy Ngeow’s Cry of the Flying Rhino and Bernice Chauly’s Once We Were
There both won prizes. Having witnessed that
transition in the thirty plus years since I first came to Malaysia, I wholeheartedly
agree.
Anthologies...poetry...short stories...is a novel the next in your
future offerings, or is that risking going too far?
Edwin: I am working on a number of projects. I hope to bring out a collection of Malaysian
short stories, similar to that of Malchin Testament: Malaysian Poems. It’s ready to go to the publisher. This project has taken a lot of time as I want
it to be representative of stories from the 1960s to the present.
I
have also been writing poems and short stories. This I do constantly. I’ve re-written couple of my short stories
into scripts, hoping they will be staged at some point. I was very encouraged when three of my stories
from Coitus Interrupted and Other Stories were used to stage a performance
called ‘Love Matters’ in Mumbai by Playpen Performing Arts Trust directed by
Ashish Joshi in 2017 and 2018.
I would look to write a novel but maybe not yet. Some of my short stories could have the seeds
for a full-blown novel, we’ll have to wait and see.
RR: Back in the 1990’s, I used to be the Penang Coordinator
at MACEE, the Malaysian-American Commission on Education Exchange, which was run
under the Fulbright Program. As a recipient
of a Fulbright Scholarship, tell us about your Fulbright experience. How has the program impacted your writing and
your professional life?
Edwin: I totally enjoyed my Fulbright
experience. It was the first of a series
that was called “Reading America”. We
started at New School University, New York where we were given lectures on a
variety of topics ranging from literature to politics and history. New York City was in itself a learning
experience. There’s so much to see and
do. Going to the New York University
Library and having access to use it was very exciting for me. I was in all the bookshops, especially
Strand. There were theatres, museums and
art galleries to go to. I can just go
on.
We then went to New Mexico. Here we had a few tours and going to the
native Indians reservations was an amazing experience. Made me feel rather sad when we were told
about the history and violent past with the white settlers. A highlight in the New Mexico section was
going to Georgia O’ Keeffe’s house and seeing her work. Finally, we went to Washington D.C. Here, we received various guided tours,
including the White House and some monuments. The visit to Library of Congress is something
I will remember. What an amazing library
both architecturally and in terms of its collection of materials.
The Fulbright program provided an excellent
opportunity for networking. There were
about twenty of us from different countries who shared similar interests, mostly
literature. We are still in contact and
I’ve been to visit some of them. We
continue to communicate and read each other’s work. This has certainly contributed in our
professional lives.
RR: I'm sure it did. Hopefully you'll inspire other writers to apply. I once had an amusing experience with Fulbright in
Kuala Lumpur when attending a formal dinner in the mid-1990s. The set menu consisted of, among several
delicious dishes, two Brussel sprouts, which I thought a rather peculiar choice.
I wondered who had taken the poetic
licence to suggest such an unpopular dish for the menu of a formal dinner
filled with hundreds of Fulbright scholars, Malaysian government officials, and
international dignitaries? No doubt,
someone very important and everyone was afraid to say, “Aiyoh, are you crazy?” Instead they meekly shook their heads in
agreement. Not to anyone’s surprise (I
call it poetic justice), those same two Brussel sprouts were the only untouched
items left on the hundreds of plates taken away by the waiters.
What else would you like us to know about you, about your
writing, or any writing topic that you feel passionate about that needs
addressing?
Edwin: I like to present a Malaysian Indian
perspective which is contemporary but also deals with the past. The past is very important to me, for example
the loss of people and places. Brickfields,
my birthplace, features in my poems. I
like to write about loss, longing and loving. My hope is that my treatment of these themes
and issues will be different and will give a fresh and unique perspective.
I
am currently doing a book tour to many universities. The purpose of this tour is to meet my readers
and potential readers. It gives me an
opportunity to meet young people and very much want to share my love for poetry
and literature. So far, I’ve visited
about eight universities in Peninsular Malaysia, one in Sarawak, one in
Singapore and two in Taiwan.
RR: What advice would you give young poets or writers
who are struggling to finish (or even seriously start) their first book?
Edwin: If you want to write, my advice is to read. Read widely and read as much as you can. That
is certainly the first step towards becoming a writer. I would advise writers to have reading
buddies. People who you could trust to be
honest with you about your work. Also, a
poet or short story writer, one could send poems and stories to literary
journals and online magazines. Many of
these are peer-reviewed and they often give useful feedback; getting them
published is certainly a great way of building one’s confidence. Hopefully, with this one publication they will
have enough writings and confidence to get more work published, possibly even a
book.
Other Interviews with First Novelists:
Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.
Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day.
—Borneo Expat Writer
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