GODS CAN DIE

I have seen powerful men
Undo themselves, keep two realities
One for minor friends, one for the powers that be,
The really powerful. Such people take a role
Supporting managers of state,
Accept an essential part in some minor project.
But after a bit of duty,
That makes them fester with intentions,
They play the major figure to old friends.

We understand and try to seek a balance in the dark
To know the private from the public monument,
To find our way between the private and the public
argument
Or what can be said or if a thing is meant
Or meant to make amends? is generous or mean?

The casual word, the easiness, the quick straight answer,
The humane delay, the lack of cautiousness
That gave ample laughter to our evenings
Are too simple for these days of power
Whose nature is to hint not state.
So when one has a chance to talk the conversation
Hesitates on the brink of momentous things;
He ponders ...
Suggesting by some unremark
There was much more to be said.

It's a pity: good men who seek to serve
Bind themselves unto a cause,
Then use the fate of nations as a rationale
To take their friends aside,
To lead themselves into some history.
We gain uncertain statesmen: many lose a friend.

But I am glad that others are powerful with compassion,
Who see before we do what troubles us
And help in kindness, take ignorance in tow.
If not for such we lose our gods
Who lived but now are dying in our friends.


EDWIN THUMBOO

From Music to Poetry

I don't remember ever having made any decision to write poetry. By this, I do not mean that poetry just came to me pouring itself out of the blue. Believe it or not, it started from my wanting very badly to write music...The next best thing then, I thought, was to create structures with words (words are also sounds). ~Wong Phui Nam

It's The Eye of God, Some Say

I wake to find the sun make crystallinethe city aglitter in its bowl of encircling, glowing hills,
fire near and distant tree lines into emerald
and, in the neighbouring ground of the cemetery
fused into clear glass, hatch quartz fires from bones
revealed in their nests of mortality. All have passed
into that dazzling darkness they cannot know.
It's the eye of God, some say. In towers and mansions,
the beautiful rise from their mirrors as walking dead,
the famished, grown great in mouth and maw
from consuming the earth, gag through thin reeds for gorge
and the dreamless fry under splintered boughs of light.
Grazing in a field of dreams, most do not look up
As the sun opens wide the abyss into our nether world.

Light Returns (from Against the Wilderness)

Light returns here scoured

by a season of violent weather.

The grey in it shows through

from days of rain. It eats

the green from massed trees,

all colour from the morning face

of houses in this neighbourhood.

Light returns... A dull

corrosive mist, day's sediment,

settles from the sky and hills.

In the yard, the blood and golds

of bougainvillea blacken

as the field of cow grass

moves in with opaque silences.

A God Drowns (from Against the Wilderness)

Out of the eruption of a swollen night

you came - of a moment, when the sky broke,

dividing into darkness and water.

You were cast down, to feed return

of life after disintegration of the shell

that held our world. Out of your wounds

a bursting tide of mud destroyed our fields.

All day you were present by the kapuk tree,

rousing the crows over thy brackish wastes,

a scent that kept the dogs up barking by the fence.

All night you haunt me as you keep floating back,

bloated, grey man, rejected by the waters,

caught by wire on giant cross-bars of a gate

Wrenched upstream from dusun under violent flood.

Kill Me! Kill Me! (from Against the Wilderness)

Twisted and black, that wasted tree leans out

into a lucid dream of the heavens from this hill.

Its ragged branches deepen into iron,

into a ruin of grille-work floating out to the mauve

and slag, where the sun leaves a dreamless city

to its wakefulness. To-night, after the long rains,

fruit bats and insects drown into the fumes

of generation swelling in tight buds,

bursting into a spill of flowers from the waking tree.

A warm sap gives out faint odour of man.

Out of that combustible darkness... a hint of face,

a white hanging torso from the lichen and ancient wood,

an acrid, milky cloud which holds

that sly, insidious whisper: Kill me! Kill me!

L.F. : Imagining A Bilingual Nation

LLYOD FERNANDO

(1926-2008)

Born to a Sinhalese family in Kandy, Sri Lanka in 1926, Mr. Fernando's family migrated to Singapore in 1938 and he enrolled into St. Patrick's in which the Japanese occupation which interrupted his education from 1943 to 1945. His father was killed in one of the Japanese bomb raids on Singapore; leaving him to work various manual labor jobs such as a trishaw rider, construction laborer, and apprentice mechanic to support his family. He later took part time jobs as a radio broadcasting assistant and newsreader. He also enlisted himself into the Ceylon branch of the Indian National Army, not impelled by any ideology but out of a sheer necessity for self-sustenance. However, the early migration across the Indian Ocean at a tender age enriched and influenced him greatly in his writings and scholarly works later on.

After the war, Fernando completed his Cambridge School Certificate and embarked on a school teaching career. As soon as he graduated with double Honours in English and Philosophy from the University of Malaya in Singapore in 1959, he served as as instructor in Singapore Polytechnic. He was then promoted to become an assistant lecturer at the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur in 1960. Mr. Fernando was also given a scholarship from Leeds University, United Kingdom where he studied his PhD. Four years later in 1967, he returned to the same post at UM until he retired in 1978. People in Malaysia usually retire at 55, but when the time came for him to retire, Fernando refused to continue on a yearly contract or live in uncertainty. He decided to study law at City University, United Kingdom and then at Middle Temple, returned to Malaysia with two law degrees, joined a firm, eventually started his own law practice business as Advocate and Solicitor of the High Court of Malaya in 1980, and continued right up to his stroke in December 1997 which ended his professional activities.

Fernando began writing at the age of fifteen. He describes writing as taking snapshots of the society and showing the reality without being sentimental. Fernando approaches his writing in a very disciplined manner; he would begin writing at eight in the morning, and only takes breaks for lunch and tea.

A few years before his stroke though; around 1994, he converted his first novel, Scorpion Orchid written in 1976 into a play which was first produced in Singapore. The following year saw the premiere of the play in Kuala Lumpur. It was first anthologized by the Singapore Institute of Management for the Open University in a collection of literature by Malaysian and Singaporean writers meant only for student consumption and not for sale.

In 1998, Mr. Fernando managed to piece an answer to a questionnaire by Daizal Samad, a lecturer at UKM, in which he shared some refreshing and engaging information about his work and his personal life; something he had never done before. He was able to write coherently after the stroke incident, and was working on a third novel that same year but he only completed three chapters before he lost his flair in writing altogether and had to stop.

Bibliography

• 1976. Scorpion Orchid. Heinemann Educational Books (Asia).
• 1977. 'New Women' in the late Victorian novel.. Pennysylvania State University Press.
• 1986. Cultures in Conflict. Graham Brash.
• 1993. Green is the Colour. Landmark Books.
• 1968. Twenty-two Malaysian stories: An Anthology of Writing in English. Ed. Heinemann Asia.
• 2002. "Surja Singh." The Merlion and the Hibiscus: Contemporary Short Stories from Singapore and Malaysia. Ed. Mukherjee, Dipika, Kirpal Singh and Mohammad A. Quayum. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2002.

SCORPION ORCHID

INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT YEO

It is instructive to read Scorpion Orchid together with Lloyd Fernando's essays collected by his wife Marie, after his death, in Lloyd Fernando: A Celebration of His Life (2004). In both books, there are revealing passages that inform about his citizenship status, the novel's themes and characters. I am never convinced about D.H. Lawrence's advice to trust the tale and not the teller as I am sure a knowledge of what Fernando was doing with Scorpion Orchid will greatly enhance our reading of it. In the second book, Fernando wrote an essay Engmalchin and the opening paragraph is revealing:

During my life in Singapore in the 1950s, I became aware of the many races in this country and incompatibility of our colonial upbringing with the concept of a united society of multi-racial origins.

Undoubtedly, this is the theme of Scorpion Orchid.

Fernando lived in Singapore in the 1950s and it was a very tumultuous period politically. The Japanese Occupation of Singapore, 1942-45, alienated the local population from its brutal Asian rulers but it also saw disenchantment with colonial rule because of British surrender to the Japanese. When the colonisers returned after the war under the British Military Administration (BMA), there was resentment among the local population which had strong urges to be free of foreign domination. For freedom to be achieved, the multi-racial society of Singapore, comprising the indigenous Malays, the majority Chinese, the Indians (children of migrants) and other peoples on the island, had to be united. But they were not and what divided them were race and politics.

The Maria Hertogh case of 1950 had aggravated race relations. Maria was a Dutch girl adopted by a Malay woman Cik Aminah. Years after her adoption, the colonial administration allowed her biological parents to start legal proceedings to claim their natural daughter against opposition from Aminah, relatives and Muslim sympathisers. Tension, racial and religious, mounted, and when the courts ruled in favour of returning Maria to the Hertoghs, riots erupted. Muslims were pitched against Christians, Malays against white people; Eurasians, who were deemed white by enraged Muslims, were attacked.

In 1949, Mao Tse Tung triumphed over the Kuomintang and China became Communist. Pro-Chinese fervour in the overseas terrorists in Southeast Asia took on a distinctly Chinese and Communist bent, inflaming opinion and inciting violence in places like Singapore, which had a significant Chinese majority.

Lloyd Fernando lived in this cauldron. In the 1950s, he heard of violence in Ceylon between the Sinhalese and the Tamils. Ethnically Sinhalese himself, he made a commitment then. Years later, in 1988, in his essay Engmalchin, he wrote:

Ethnically, I was ashamed and disgusted by the narrow-minded and selfish stand of the Sinhalese community and I choose Singapore's citizenship because it promised a united way of life, without prejudice or dominance by any sector of the society...

In 1957, Malaya achieved independence and in 1959, Singapore became self-governing. In 1960, Fernando joined the English Department of the University of Malaya and it may be around this time that he accepted Malayan citizenship. In his academic career, he thought much about conflicting cultures as reflected in many conference papers he delivered and essays he wrote. In 1986, he collected these in a book, published in Singapore, entitled significantly, Cultures in Conflict.

In Scorpion Orchid, there are four young men -- Santinathan, a Tamil, Guan Kheng, a Chinese, Sabran, a Malay, and a Eurasian, Peter D'Almeida.

The four of them had been sixth formers together and were now undergraduates in the third year at the university. They had moved in a group as young men who are contemporaries and enjoy company do, but the bond of their young manhood was wearing off and they were not fully aware of it yet.

The company they keep include Sally, a Chinese prostitute, and the mysterious prophet Tok Said. Wen the novel opens, Santinathan is coping with the members of his family and his uncles's family who want to return to India; his uncle Rasu, aunt Nalini and their daughter Vasantha, prepare to leave but he Santi and his sister Neela choose to remain. This episode shows the ethnic pull on Indians (it could be Chinese) who, in a crunching time, prefer the homeland of their imagination to the land they grew up in. Later, Santi (as his friends address him) is dismissed from the university for insubordination.

Sabran comes from a poor family in Endau, Johore, which is the southmost state of Malaysia adjoining Singapore. He acts as an interpreter for activists demonstrating against a colonial employer, British Realty. In the course of the novel, he is picked up for questioning but is later released.

Guan Kheng has a relationship with Sally. Going out with her one day in his car, they run into riots in the city, he fails to protect Sally, and she is raped and badly bruised. The bond between them weakens. In hospital, Sally, who had left her husband in Malaya, wonders, "What was she fleeing?" The crisis leads to a discovery she had repressed -- that she could actually be Malay and her name is Salmah. Uncomfortably, at this time too, "Guan Kheng thought, for seeking to be firm, to reassert, in fact, rational pride of race."

Peter, the Eurasian of Portuguese ancestry, is set upon and hurt because his assailants identify him as a white man. After the incident, he comes to this realisation about his attackers. "...At me...Not any of you. Me...I saw the point suddenly. I don't belong here. I don't know anybody here and what's more with the British getting out, I don't want to. I'm getting out too."

Sabran realises that his unionist friend Huang, who acts as an interpreter for Prosperity Union against British Realty, has different aims in fighting the British. Sabran suspects Huang has closed an eye to inordinate violence, including attacks on Eurasians. This, and the attacks on Peter and Sally, leaves him pretty disillusioned. "That was why he was going back to the Federation."

Finally, there is the mystical figure of Tok Said. Many of the protagonists have met him and come up with different versions. One unalterable fact about him is that he has prophetic power and predicted the violence that engulfs Singapore, as depicted in the novel. Sally thinks he is a holy man and an Indian and has encountered him in Trengganu and various places in Pahang, the two Eastern states of Malaya. Sabran meets Tok Said and is repelled by his "long" and "blood-curdling" scream and does not think he was a holy man. The authorities think he is linked to the Communists as an inciter of violence. Throughout the novel, the reader is left wondering, who is Tok Said? What is his role in the troubles infesting Singapore? The persistent questions asked about him and the absence of answers lend a thriller element that adds to the tension in the novel.

Two more points are worth making about this novel. True to the thinking of many in his generation, Fernando saw the political-geographical entities of Peninsula Malaya and the island of Singapore as one: Malaya. This is the novel's frame of reference. The four young men go to Singapore because the university is located in the island-state. Tok Said is a Malay-a phenomenon, spotted in Ipoh (the capital of the northern Malayan state of Perak), Trengganu, a northeastern state and elsewhere in other states.

Finally, what can be said of the excerpts from classical Malay, colonial English and one Japanese book that pepper the novel? Fernando's explanation is, "I wanted a mythic meaning to be added on the persons and the several incidents in the novel, yet references to specific works could not rely on the knowledge of the reader. I therefore selected passages which illustrated the truism that there is nothing new under the sun." This is a credible explanation. It supports my feelings that these extracts, placed at strategic points in the novel, remind readers of the multi-racial origins of Malayan-Singaporean history, of early migration, the coming of the colonial powers beginning with the Portuguese in Malacca and followed by the Dutch and the British. Indirectly, they point to the divide-and-rule policy of the British which is one of the causes of racial division shown in the novel.

Lloyd Fernando continued, after publishing Scorpion Orchid in 1976, to be preoccupied with cultures in conflict in fiction and this was demonstrated in his second and last novel, Green is the Colour, published in 1993. It is about the racial riots of 13 May 1969 in Kuala Lumpur, that lead to far-reaching political consequences in Malaysia. It is a must-read novel for those interested in Fernando's take on racial problems that continue to be very relevant today in both Malaysia and Singapore.

Source: Fernando, Lloyd. Scorpion Orchid. Shah Alam: Times Books International. 1992. Print.

GREEN IS THE COLOUR

BY EPIGRAM BOOKS

(DR. WONG SOAK KOON)

“I tell my beloved child there is nothing to forgive, only love to be given.”

First published by Landmark Books in 1993, the novel explores how people of different races face the challenges of living together. The story centres on Yun Ming and Siti Sara falling in love with each other in the post-13 May 1969 period in Malaysia. Both characters are not only from different racial backgrounds and faiths but are also married to different people. In addition, Siti Sara's father is a respected religious figure. How do the protagonists resolve their excruciatingly different circumstances in their fight to stay together?

In Green is the Colour, Fernando tactfully introduces the violence that erupted due to racial riots, rape, imcarceration and torture in a multi-racial population. Besides physical violence, the people were also affected mentally so that they would be divided against each other. Woman characters such as Siti Sara were given more prominence and importance as the last section of the novel was mainly told in her view. Language has been disintegrated to cover up lies and convey half-truths in order that the listeners would not form a real connection between each other and not voice up deeply-felt truths. Fellow citizens whether Malay, Chinese, Indian or Eurasian began to form an artificial togetherness rather than search their soul on the intolerance and bigotry their society faced.

Fernando also invoked the feeling of being watched among the individuals of such a society. Nearly all the major characters felt that they were under scrutiny for betrayal and treason or any other actions that break the law. Such an atmosphere breeds paranoia, and even madness. The people had to watch their every action, behaviour, and words so as to not be interpreted wrongly. They rather seal themselves up than they spill their internal turmoil over. Another constant theme in the story is the violence in sexual scene which proves that misery loves company. By doing so, the characters involved (Yun Ming, Siti Sara and Omar) were trying to transcend the loneliness and consciousness of being a pawn in the current political games.

Although the novel seem to end on a positive note, it seems that the horrors that have taken place are terrifyingly present still and can never be erased, safe for the only place which is the little rooms in our heads. Despite the existing scars of the wounds inflicted on the body and nerves, Fernando salvages the story by infusing it with simple acts of kindness between people of different races and "bonds strong as they are unspoken" as glimpses of hope for the future generation. Although trees have been felled and hills leveled for sundry development projects, it is still able to renew itself in fresh, green vegetation.

Green is the Colour is written primarily as a novel of ideas which serves as a weakness and strength at the same time. The characters were not addressed thoroughly or exceptionally except for Siti Sara. The only insight we were given are its uncompromising and unexpressed truths of the past and its legacies for the present. With the future unknown, it is only befitting that a work invites us to think about the time that has been and what is to come.

Source: Fernando, Lloyd. Green is the Colour. Kuala Lumpur: Silverfish Books. 2004. Print.

“A sensitive novel about racial and religious tolerance set against the shadow of the 1969 racial riots in Kuala Lumpur.”
— Koh Buck Song, The Straits Times


“Fernando seeks to strip away the Englishness from English, to find a uniquely Malaysian prose voice… This is evident in his remarkable ear for Malaysian English, never sinking into caricature, but establishing a familiar flow… The best thing about it (the novel), and the reason I recommend it, is its picture of a society aware of its ‘roots’ but is simultaneously rootless.”
—Amir Muhammad, New Straits Times, August 18, 1993


“After the communal riots of May 13th, 1969 there was no wide-scale communal strife in Malaysia such as is depicted in Green is the Colour. Nonetheless, Lloyd Fernando’s vision of post 1969 Malaysia earns its validity as a bold attempt to present the fissures within Malaysia’s modernity.”
—Wong Soak Koon, ‘Unveiling Malaysia’s Modernity and Ethnicity: Lloyd Fernando’s Green is the Colour, in Risking Malaysia” Culture, Politics and Identity. Eds. Maznah Mohamed & Wong Soak Koon, Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi 2001


“In his novel, Green Is the Colour, Lloyd Fernando explores undercurrents of our of our multiethnic society with insight and honesty. He shows a deep understanding of minds shaped by different cultures and faiths, and of conflicts that can create a nightmare world when tolerance breaks down. This is a poignant story of tender humanity struggling against the cold inhumanity of closed minds – a story relevant to all of us today.”
—Abidah Amin

[ŋɡoɣe wa ðiɔŋɔ];

ABOUT

"In writing one should hear all the whisperings, all the shouting, all the crying, all the loving and all the hating of the many voices in the past, and those voices will never speak to a writer in a foreign language."

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, born 5 January 1938 in Kamiriithu, near Limuru in Kiambu district, Kenya, of Kikuyu descent, was baptised as James Ngugi. His family was caught up with the Mau Mau War (also known as the Mau Mau Uprising/Revolt/Rebellion and Kenya Emergency) which lasted for eight years since 1952. His half-brother Mwangi was actively involved in the Kenya Land and Freedom Army while his mother was tortured at Kamiriithu homeguard post. However, he received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda in 1963 in which he also produced a play, The Black Hermit in 1962.

Ngũgĩ published his first novel, Weep Not, Child in 1964 while attending the University of Leeds in England. It was the first novel in English to be produced by an East African writer. His second novel, The River Between (1965), highlighted the Mau Mau Revolt and narrated an unhappy romance between Christians and non-Christians. It is currently being used in Kenya's national secondary school syllabus. On the other hand, his other novel, A Grain of Wheat (1967), marked his embrace of Fanonist Marxism. He later renounced English, Christianity, and the name James Ngugi as colonialist; he changed his name back to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and wrote in his native Gikuyu and Swahili.

Ngũgĩ helped set up the Kamiriithu Community Education and Cultural Centre in 1976 which partly organized African Theatre in the area. He embarked on a new form of theatre in his native Kenya that sought to liberate the theatrical process from what he believed to be "the general bourgeois education system" by encouraging spontaneity and audience participation in the performances. His project sought to "demystify" the theatrical process, and to avoid the "process of alienation [that] produces a gallery of active stars and an undifferentiated mass of grateful admirers" which, according to him, encourages passivity in "ordinary people". 

Although Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) was a commercial success, it was shut down by the authoritarian Kenyan regime six weeks after its opening. The unabridged political message of his 1977 play provoked the Kenyan Vice-President of that time, Daniel arap Moi to order his arrest. While detained in the Kamiti Maximum Security Prison for over a year, Ngũgĩ wrote the first modern novel in Gikuyu, Caitaani mũtharaba-Inĩ (Devil on the Cross) on prison-issued toilet paper.

Adopted as an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, the artist was released from prison on December 1978 and fled Kenya because he was not reinstated to his job as professor at Nairobi University and his family was harassed. Due to his writing about the injustices of the then dictatorial government, Ngũgĩ and his family were forced to live in exile. In the United States, he taught at Yale University for some years, and has since taught at New York University with a dual professorship in Comparative Literature and Performance Studies where he held the Erich Maria Remarque Chair, and Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine. His son is the author Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ.

They only safely returned after Arap Moi was voted out of office 22 years later.

On 8 August 2004, Ngũgĩ returned to Kenya from a month-long tour of East Africa. Three days later, robbers broke into his high-security apartment and assaulted Ngũgĩ, sexually assaulted his wife and stole various items of value. Since then, Ngũgĩ has returned to America, and in the summer of 2006 the American publishing firm Random House published his first new novel after nearly twenty years, Wizard of the Crow, which was translated from Gikuyu to English by the author. Two years later on 10 November, Ngũgĩ was harassed and ordered to leave the Hotel Vitale at the Embarcadero, San Francisco by an employee. The incident led to a public outcry and angered the African-American community and the Africans living in America which prompted an apology by the hotel.

Ngũgĩ's work included novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He is also the founder and editor of Gikuyu journal Mũtĩiri. Some of his later works included Detained, his prison diary of 1981, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), an essay arguing for African writers' expression in their native mother tongues rather than European languages in order to renounce lingering colonial ties and to build an authentic African literature, and Matigari (1987), one his most famous works, a satire based on Gikuyu folktale.

His most recent books are Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, a collection of essays published in 2009 with the argument turning into the crucial role of African languages in "the resurrection of African memory," and two autobiographical works: Dreams in a Time of War: a Childhood Memoir (2010) and In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir (2012).

Ngũgĩ has frequently been regarded as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has won the 1973 Lotus Prize for Literature, nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, and awarded the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award (finalist Autobiography) for In the House of the Interpreter.

For more information on Ngũgĩ, please click here.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• The Black Hermit, 1963 (play)
• Weep, Not Child, 1964, Heinemann 1987, Macmillan 2005 
• The River Between, Heinemann 1965, Heinemann 1989, 
• A Grain of Wheat, 1967 (1992)
• Ngaahika Ndeenda: Ithaako ria ngerekano (I Will Marry When I Want), 1977 (play, with Ngugi wa Mirii, Heinemann Educational Books (1980)
• Petals of Blood (1977) Penguin 2002
• Wizard of the Crow, 2006, Secker

"Our lives are a battlefield on which is fought a continuous war between the forces that are pledged to confirm our humanity and those determined to dismantle it; those who strive to build a protective wall around it, and those who wish to pull it down; those who seek to mould it and those committed to breaking it up; those who aim to open our eyes, to make us see the light and look to tomorrow [...] and those who wish to lull us into closing our eyes.
~Prof. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Autobiography of An Eurasian-Malayan Nurse

SYBIL KATHIGASU (1899-1948)

BACKGROUND

Born Sybil Medan Daly to an Irish-Eurasian planter, Joseph Daly and a French-Eurasian midwife, Beatrice Matilda Daly née Martin, on 3 September 1899 in Medan, Sumatera, Indonesia (which explains her middle name). The fifth child and the only girl, she was trained as a nurse and midwife and spoke Cantonese fluently.

She married Dr. Arumugam Kanapathi Pillay, a Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) Tamil from Taiping who was born on 17 June 1982 to Kanapathi Pillay and Thangam. Initially there had been religious objection from her parents as he was a Hindu and she was a Catholic. He married Sybil with his father's agreement on 7 January 1919 in St. John's Church, Bukit Nanas, Kuala Lumpur after he agreed to convert to please Sybil's family and took a new name Abdon Clement Kathigasu. He operated a clinic at No 141 Brewster Road (now Jalan Sultan Idris Shah) in Ipoh from 1926 until the Japanese invasion of Malaya.

Sybil's eldest child, Michael, named after her elder brother who was born in Taiping on 12 November 1982, was born on 26 August 1919; 15 days after Sybil's elder brother was killed in Gallipoli 23 years later as a member of the British army. However, due to major complications at birth, Michael died after only 19 hours which led to the devastated Sybil to adopt a young boy, William Pillay born on 25 October 1918. Then a daughter, Olga, was born to Sybil in Pekeliling, Kuala Lumpur on 26 February 1921 and she was a very special baby to Sybil because she had no birth problems. A second daughter and the last child, Dawn, was born on 21 September 1936 after Sybil returned to Ipoh on 7 April 1921.

The family fled to the nearby town of Papan days before Japanese forces occupied and bombed Ipoh. The local Chinese community fondly remembered Dr. AC Kathigasu and nicknamed him in Hakka, "You Loy-De". Residing at No. 74, Main Street in Papan, Kathigasu secretly kept shortwave radio sets and listened to BBC broadcasts. The family quietly supplied medicines, medical services and information to the locals and fighters of the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) until they were arrested in 1943.          

Despite being interrogated and tortured by the Japanese military police, Sybil persisted in her efforts and was imprisoned in Batu Gajah jail. Her fingers were ripped off with pliers and her legs were scalded with iron rods. She was also forced to drink large quantities of water before the Japanese military police stepped on her bloated stomach ("Tokyo Wine Treatment"), and she suffered damage to the spine and skull due to beatings with a bamboo stick. Her then five-year-old daughter, Dawn, was dangled from a tree and her torturers threatened to roast her child alive with burning charcoal beneath her. After the liberation of Malaya in August 1945, Kathigasu was flown to Britain for medical treatment where she started jotting down her memoirs.

Sybil received the George Medal for Gallantry, a high civilian honour by King George IV several months before her death in June 1948; an old wound at the jaw sustained from the kick of a Japanese boot that brought on a fatal bout of septicaemia.

She passed away on 4 June 1948 at the age of 48 in Britain and her body was buried in Lanark, Scotland. Her body was later returned in 1949 to Ipoh and reburied at the Roman Catholic cemetery beside St. Michael's Church opposite the Main Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus (now SMK Convent) on Brewster Road in Ipoh.

A road in Fair Park, Ipoh was named after Sybil Kathigasu (Jalan Sybil Kathigasu) after independence to commemorate her bravery. Today, the shop house at 74, Main Road, Papan, serves as a memorial to Sybil and her efforts.




NO DRAM OF MERCY (2006)

A memoir of Sybil's memoirs, the author gave an account of a woman (Sybil Kathigasu) of great courage, who should be regarded as a beacon and role model to all Malaysians. Sybil's life is perhaps the best example of unity: a Penangite of Eurasian descent who sacrificed her life for the MPAJA.

It is one woman's struggle and sacrifice driven by deep personal conviction for justice, in the face of inhumanity at a time when Malaya was upside down. The contribution of woman to the course of history, including Sybil's, had always been under-documented, under-recognized and often untold.

Luckily for us, she lived to tell her story and penned down her gripping experiences. In short, it is a rare historiography of a true national heroine. She, like many others in the war effort, gave the ultimate sacrifice to the nation in order that we may live peacefully.

Get your copy here!
Another blogger's opinion.
Read more here.
Research on this book.

The Two T's

TAN TWAN ENG

Born in Penang in 1972, Tan studied law at the University of London, and later worked as an advocate and solicitor in one of Kuala Lumpur's law firms before becoming a full-time author of fiction. He has a first-dan ranking in aikido...

In my late teens I became obsessed with aikido. For a period of eleven or twelve years, I trained for hours almost every day, read up and watched everything on it -- books, manuals, instructional videos. Aikido's practical and philosophical aspects fascinated me. I went to classes even when I was ill or injured, of only to sit outside and watch, because I had been told that you can learn just as much by observing.

and lives in Cape Town:

I was working as a lawyer in Kuala Lumpur and I wanted to see the world, so I thought doing a master's degree in law justified that. My South African friends suggested a university in Cape Town. It's a beautiful and fascinating city. I travel between Cape Town and Malaysia regularly. I'm normally only in Cape Town during winter, which, coming from a tropical country, I enjoy. I go back to Malaysia every year and stay for long periods of time. Malaysia is "home".

The Gift of Rain, set in Penang during the World War II, was published and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007. It is about a certain Philip Hutton of Chinese-English heritage and his relationship with Endo-San, a Japanese diplomat who teaches him aikido. It tells a riveting and poignant tale about a young man caught in the tangled webs of wartime loyalties and deceits.

Tan's second novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, was published by the same publisher, Newcastle Upon Tyne: Myrmidon, in January 2012 and awarded the Man Asian Literary Prize (2012) and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. The story is concerning a newly retired Supreme Court judge, who was taken prisoner by the Japanese during World War II and later served as an apprentice to a Japanese gardener; trying to make sense of her life and experiences. The novel took place in three different time periods; the late 1980s, the early 1950s, and World War II as backdrop for the story.

• An interview with Tan Twan Eng
• For more information on Tan Twan Eng, visit here.

TASH AW

Born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1971 but raised up by Malaysian parents in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Aw studied law at Jesus College, Cambridge at the tender age of eighteen, and the University of Warwick before settling down in London to write. After graduating, he worked as a lawyer for four years while writing his debut novel which he completed during the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia. Aw cited his literary influences as Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Anthony Burgess, William Faulkner and Gustave Flaubert.

Tash Aw is a private person with not much details being revealed about his personal life and character, so to know more about him, one can contact him through michelle.kane@harpercollins.co.uk OR anna@davidgodwinassociates.co.uk, and also follow up with his updates through his Twitter.

The Harmony Silk Factory (HarperPerennial) is the textiles store owned by Johnny Lim, a Chinese peasant living in rural Malay in the first half of the twentieth century. It juxtaposes three accounts of the life of an enigmatic man at a pivotal and haunting moment in Malaysian history; revealing the difficulty of knowing another human being, and how our assumptions about others also determine who we are. The novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Book Awards First Novel Award as well as the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First novel (Asia Pacific region), all in 2005. It was also longlisted for the world's prestigious International Impac Dublin Award in 2007 and the Guardian First Book Prize.

Aw's second novel Map of the Invisible World (Spiegel & Grau) was released in May 2009 and narrated about two brothers, Adam and Johan, who were abandoned by their mother as children, and later separated when they were adopted by different families in Indonesia and Malaysia. A page-turning story, it follows the journey of two brothers and an American woman who are indelibly marked by the past—and swept up in the tides of history.

His latest novel entitled Five Star Billionaire, published by Fourth Estate in 2013, is actually a series of narratives covering the experiences of Malaysian migrants attempting to settle in China and begin a new life for themselves. It offers rare insight into the booming world of Shanghai, a city of elusive identities and ever-changing skylines, of grand ambitions and outsize dreams. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2013; Aw's first nomination.

Aw also wrote a few short stories:

• "To The City", Granta, 100 (Winter 2007)
• "Sail", A Public Space, Issue 13 (Summer 2011)
• "Tian Huaiyi", McSweeney's 42 (December 2012)

• A Conversation With: Novelist Tash Aw
• For more information on Tash Aw, visit here.

Wong Phui Nam

WONG PHUI NAM (1935)

Economist & Poet

Date of Birth: 20 September 1935

Place of Birth: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Education: Batu Road School & The Victoria Institution;

The University of Singapore (B. A. Economics)

Phui Nam's father, Wong Tak Wah, was of Peranakan stock - a fourth-generation descendent of a taikong (captain of a Chinese junk) who settled in Malaysia after his ship ran aground near Malacca and got damaged beyond repair. His mother was a first-generation Malaysian Chinese, the daughter of a boatman in Canton, who was merely a child when she came to Malaysia as a "package" along with Wong's maternal grandmother's sister who was destined to wed a tin miner. After his marriage to Phui Nam's mother, Wong decided to distance himself culturally from his roots. Wong, who was "more Cantonese than the Chinese" died in April 1944 during the Japanese Occupation, five years after his wife passed away of kidney failure. Phui Nam was four years old.

Till today, he still has nightmares "of coffins tipping over."

"There used to be what we called a death-house on Jalan Sultan. 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's body was kept in the same death house.

"I was sleeping... 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..." 

He recalls an episode in his past 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... It's true, they used to throw babies up and bayonet them. I remember dead bodies littered on the roadside."

At one time, 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. I heard a group of Japanese men talking behind me, and I got the shivers." 

Eighth of 11 siblings, Wong Phui Nam had his early education at two Chinese school in Kuala Lumpur's Chinatown. He later joined the Batu Road School and from there went on to the Victoria Institution in 1949. While he was there in the morning, he was attending private classes in classical Chinese in the afternoon, boning up on Tang Poetry and the Three Character Classic. He was also interested in music and took up violin during his schooling.  He was equally adept at sports on the V.I. field where he actually broke the school high jump record during the 1954 School Sports and was secretary to Loke Yew House which he represented in swimming and table tennis. By then, Phui Nam had dabbled in poetry but had not shown his works to anyone.

At the University of Malaya in Singapore, there was active discouragement towards writing poetry by his western lecturers due to him presuming to use the English language as a medium. Still, Phui Nam was inspired by the Singaporean poet Edwin Thumboo who has just published his first work Rib of Earth and so he began to read whatever he could lay his hands on. In addition, Phui Nam was the editor of the student journal The New Cauldron and was later responsible for two anthologies: Litmus One: Selected University Verse, 1949-1957 and Thirty Poems.

On graduation, Phui Nam became an Assistant Controller of the Industrial Development Division of the Ministry of Commerce in Kuala Lumpur. He had a stint in Bangkok as an economist later on and after completing that, he joined the MIDF where fellow Victorian Tun Ismail Mohamed Ali was chairman. He left after ten years for a private company, and eventually joined the Malaysian International Merchant Banking Ltd. After he retired in 1989 as a general manager, he wrote a poetry column for The New Straits Times and taught briefly at a private college. He is currently a training and marketing consultant in a private company.

As early as the 1950s, Phui Nam spoke of the poet's dilemma—whether, in his words, one "just wrote poetry, or a poetry identifiably Malayan." Wong believed that the language was at its best when the poet was attending to his or her response to the "sum total of conditions under which we as Malaysians live." In the preface to his first and landmark volume of poems, How The Hills are Distant, he attested that "these poems need to be written. They are of a time, of a place, of a people who find themselves having to live by institutions and folkways which are not of their heritage, having to absorb the manners of languages not their own."

Most of the poems Phui Nam wrote during the sixties first appeared in Bunga Emas, an anthology of Malaysian literature edited by fellow Victorian T. Wignesan. Phui Nam's poems have also appeared in Seven Poets, The Second Tongue, The Flowering Tree, Young Commonwealth Poets '65, Poems from India, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Malaya. He was also published by literary journals like Tenggara, Tumasek, South East Asian Review of English.

His mature poems are regarded as among the best Malaysian poems in English, unsurpassed in their eloquence and linguistic richness. Most of them are contemplative and draw their images from the local landscape. Phui Nam's poetry explores the experience of living in multi-cultural Malaysia. According to him:

Before the British set up the country, Malaysia was a totally agrarian society. Suddenly we get this commercialism and development of plantations to supply a metropolitan power. Even for a writer in Malay, whether he is a Malay or a non-Malay, he has to reinvent the language. All the more so for Indians and Chinese. For a Chinese, when we write in Chinese, we cannot pretend that nothing has happened and try to write Tang poetry. So for us to write in English, we are exiled three times, culturally and spiritually from China, culturally from the indigenous Malay culture and then writing in English. We cannot claim that it is a tradition. I would say we have appropriated the language. So, in a way, it is a much more interesting medium to work with the language against the tradition.

Phui Nam's poetry contain traces of abandonment, loss, death, and a greater quest as main themes which Associate Professor Mohammad A Quayum noted originated from "anxiety in the young boy which eventually filtered into his early poems". Such rude awakening in childhood might well have found new oxygen in some of his 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. 

However, in 1971, in a paper on "sectional and national literatures" presented originally in Bahasa Melayu at the Kongres Kebudayaan Kebangsaan, Llyod Fernando (novelist, playwright, and former Head of English Literature at Universiti Malaya) 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 thoughts." 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."

"...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."    ~Chin Woon Ping, on Remembering Grandma, 2001

"...bleak preoccupations with physical and spiritual decay, death and possible resurrection."     ~Robert Yeo, Singaporean playwright

"Dark and wonderful, especially his new work."                         ~Eddin Khoo, critic, poet and arts-activist

Bibliography

1. (1968). How The Hills are Distant. Tenggara, Department of English, University of Malaya. (Prose poetry)
2. (1989). Remembering Grandma and Other Rumours. Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore.
3. (1993). Ways of Exile. Skoob Books Pub. Ltd.
4. (2000). Against the Wilderness. Blackwater Books.
5. (2006). An Acre of Day's Glass: Collected Poems. Maya Press.
6. (2006). Anike. Maya Press Sdn. Bhd. (Play directed by Jo Kukathas & Zalfian Zufi)