Thumboo, E. “Introduction” in Myth for a Wilderness by Ee Tiang Hong. Writing in Asia Series, Heinemann Educational Books (Asia), 1976:vii xv (Poems).
FOREWORD
Ee Tiang Hong's first poems appeared in 1951, soon after he came up to the University of Malaya (then in Singapore). That was a crucial year for intellectual, social and political ferment, nourished by a nascent nationalism. A shift in attitudes and perspectives led to self-discoveries and commitments which challenged the individual. In those who were curious or energetic, they compelled practical as well as verbal expression. Society was reshaping itself.
For the poet words became instruments to explore, define, perpetuate a fresh consciousness that linked the beginnings of a literature in English with political and social reflection. Creative writing was almost exclusively confined to university circles. In retrospect, decidedly more poetry than prose was produced, with the prose given over to polemics and essays on political, history cal and cultural topics. The themes which moved poets despite their familiar local habitation centre around the search for roots, the framing of a common culture, the domestication and role of English and the direction of change in society. In Malaysia and Singapore these topics - and the questions they provoked - were approached with the knowledge that we were many peoples each with a cultural heritage which ought to be retained in the new, post-colonial society.
A broadly similar experience in the West Indies and Africa informs the works of Arthur Seymour, Frank Collymore and Raphael Armattoe, Dennis Osadebay and Frank Parkes. By and large Caliban spoke with his master's tongue, adopted his gestures, but soon learnt harsher accents to bemoan his condition. As he argued with Prospero, sentiment meant more than form or the ripeness of literary expression, an imbalance gradually set right by a recognition that poetry ought to be neither polite, celebratory, remote, nor too aggressive in its intentions. Intelligent manipulation of subjects came with an unremitting concern for technique; it rescued poetry from the trivial and the over generalised. Ee was aware of the dangers from the beginning, a fact that adds historical value to a body of work that is the most relevant and consistently achieved of any Malaysian poet writing in English.
Ee is a seventh generation Baba, a fact which carries implications, including a reminder, of how his Chinese inheritance, while retained to a considerable extent, contains a significant amount of Malay culture. Despite his Chinese descent he speaks Malay as his mother tongue. The Babas, choosing to adapt and integrate over the years irrevocably reduced their links with China; they are among the faithful of the land, their roots deep and abiding. Ee's attachment to the land and its people explains his concern when they are abused, for the attachment works as a constant, vital part of his perception. It supplies the historical awareness in Heeren Street and Portuguese Hamlet. In the latter, specific references to the seizure of Malacca by Alfonso de Albuquerque in November 1511 are intrinsic to the poem's total experience. Life and history actively bridge past and present, and bring into focus the irony of circumstances connected with their contemporary condition. Correlatives of this sort in the corpus of Ee's work define areas of interest, provide a general context within which individual poems acquire a useful resonance. Kuala Lumpur records the process of change; Pengkalan Chepa, Kelantan is the gift of a single moment of conscious ness that offers a sense of place, the routine of work, and the powerful disturbance of a familiar yet alien culture.
To a considerable extent, Ee's themes are identified in his "The Role of the Poet" (Focus, n.s. No. 5, July 1971), published by the University of Singapore Literary Society):
. . . the poet . . . is concerned with . . . the larger society of man, a society composed not only of Malays, Chinese and Indians but of the countless variety of peoples spread over all the breadth and corners of the world. The whole world is his fountain, from which he finds sustenance . . .
Despite their appearance of easy access, Ee's poems are seldom simple in their workings and impact. We discover an unobtrusive but taut organization, a texture of meaning that belies the ease of first reading. There is confident sophistication in the way he orchestrates his material and refines his idiom. The Caterer is inspired by an insistence on literary discrimination; On Writing a Poem wrestles to embody 'meaning' in the ablest sense of the word while offering a demonstration. The personality behind the poetry feels strongly but seeks to express itself through the mind rather than the heart. Likes and Dislikes is a neatly suggestive listing of experience. Clearly the mind is well-bred, sensitive, courageous and certain of what it is about. This combination provides bearings for an analysis of experience and a confidence to cope with delicate situations as in Interview, St Peter's Ministry.
Ee's is a poetry of restraint; verbal dexterity, tactful and appropriate, procures latent and manifest meaning. We are drawn into his subjects, persuaded to reflect upon their larger implications. The manner in which Ee simultaneously reaches into a theme to secure a controlled fission of subject and idiom is demonstrated in Retreat. The politics of dissent and the retribution it provokes under a colonial regime is enunciated through adroit and sustained ambiguity, a tension between hope and convictions brought to compromise. The tragedy is then enlarged into a cry, a ceremony of universal loss. Its strength is that of a particular kind of sensibility working through shrewd but unobtrusive technique which includes a directness of approach that is liberating. As Ee quarries into and sifts through the drama, he convinces us of its status as archetype. Clear syntax supports a language hedged by humour, irony and loaded with telling detail, Metaphor and image - 'cockles', 'granite', 'mud', 'creatures' - define a firm line of meaning.
Between them, the poet's integrity, sensitivity and commitment amount to an inclusiveness of vision which ensures that even the apparently straightforward nature poems tend to harbour moral comments:
the great tree
still upholds its versatility,
safely, conveniently
turning and twisting
in every limb
and fibre,
and then resumes
in some quiet hour
its steadfast
stature.
The modulation of description into assessment virtue, essential and durable, lies at the core poems as To A Shrub. Nature instructs and is both metaphor and therapy.
In Ee's personal poetry we detect an active intelligence penetrating beneath the immediate occasion. In Old Friends, the ostensible theme and situation rapidly convert into a microcosm, summarising the regrettable changes which have overtaken society and the individual:
At reunions, at chance meetings
They no longer look us
In the face, no longer
Believe, nor give as once
In their ripe innocence
Words spluttered and crackled
Like seedbursts on a windy morning.
O more and more as they grow wiser
More and more they disappoint.
We are constantly reminded of how the poet's way of meaning receives support from an organic awareness, a creative impulse conscious of its burden. The immediate subject of the poem is given complete attention, but that attention is sharpened by the pressure of the poet's overriding concerns. By and large Ee's poems touch upon issues broadly public in character. The strictly personal poems are free from extra-thematic comment as in Iris and Reflection. This vein in his poetry is fully exposed in Ee's second collection Lines Written in Hawaii (1973)[i] where the contemplation of personal relationships leads to an idiolect, delicately intense because removed from the larger themes proposed by an interest in public issues.
Ee's pre-1969 poems were often directed at political and other abuses. He developed early an acute satirical eye as part of an overall view of things, a sensitive moral concern which almost compels his poetry to reflect the discrepancies in behaviour, the disparity between the stated and what is actually attained. The constancy of Ee's interest in politics and the common man - as victim and symbol - can be traced in Thoughts, Malaysian Thanksgiving, Lament, Silence is Golden, The Farce and The Common Man. It belongs to a certain view of the poet's function, of how he sees his role in his society.
Up to 1969, Ee's poetry was notable for controlled rather than powerful emotion; it was sober, precise. Poems reflecting the abuses of power, and the sufferings of people were circumscribed by a tone which, although plainly disturbing, seemed to stop short of an insistent personal rhetoric. The poet's role and the consequences it has for Ee's cardinal themes become explicit in the last fifteen or so poems in this collection.
The racial riots in Peninsular Malaysia, in May 1969, were immediately calamitous and carried long-term political consequences. Hitherto Ee's political and satirical poems were free from a communal viewpoint. But when changes following May 13th further strengthened the position of the Malays, Ee, like many others, felt intellectually and politically displaced.
In 'The Role of the Poet' Ee rejects the notion that a poet should adopt the posture expected of him by the people, government or other interested groups:
. . . a poet would do well to be himself, for only in being himself, in producing the best he can give, may he at least hope to enrich the life of whoever cares to read him, to make it more enlightened, more sensitive, more compassionate, if these are the values the readers place upon his works. In other words, the writer cannot defer to the dictates of his public without shortchanging himself, and as a by-product, shortchanging the public as well.
This freedom is exercised in poems written after 1969. Although their themes are about the individual they are also concerned with issues at the very heart of Malaysian politics and intercommunal relations. Ee recognises this with a responsibility that is unmistakable, for the anger and disappointment, while ever present, are mixed with tones of real regret.
The bitterness engendered greater verbal authority and constructive energy. Where the earlier style had tended to be cerebral, these later poems are imbued with a bitterness and an intensity that is immediately personal in a mode new in Ee's poetry. In one way or another, the poems insist on the need to talk about the upheaval and reflect on the extent to which the tragedy affected Ee. In addition to their status as documents of his suffering, their value is augmented because they image the dilemma and the feeling of alienation among some Malaysians. The crisis of identity, of place and purpose. precipitated in Patriotism are fundamental in that they strike at the very confidence out of which the individual functions.
Surely by the time one reaches
The seventh generation.
The seventh heaven,
One is no longer subject
To all these?
The journey is over.
All the conflicts, the strains, the trials
Resolved generations ago
In that choice, irrevocable,
To cross the seas.
And if there was gold
In the mines and in the jungles
There were also death, hunger and disease.
And surely after all these
The gates of heaven must open,
Unconditional, without question,
No question but that
All men are equal
Under the rain and sun.
New political realities threatened intellectual, social. political and familial security, by loosening the supports of traditional society. That the place in the sun earned by the work and sacrifice of previous generations was also reassessed was disturbing. The individual, while acquiring a growing national identity. does not relinquish his residual identity as a Malay, Chinese or Indian. The transition from a communal to a national identity will proceed without doubts or qualms only if there is a fair degree of certainty that he will have that place in the sun.
The May 1969 incidents - which provoked Requiem - were not the first. There had been the Singapore riots in July and September 1964. But the May riots were the visible, dramatic expression of fresh political, economic and social problems created by the manner in which power and opportunity were being distributed among the various communal groups in Malaysia. In their wake came substantially broad, far-reaching concessions to Malay rights.
The poems which complete Ee's present collection are reactions to this situation. Political compromise, the selfish and self-justifying over-confidence among leaders and politicians move him to reflect upon The Times, The Morals . . . . Those in power who ought to ensure equality for all, talk and 'politic' at the expense of the people.
After the promises, the cheers,
Pity, the non-fulfilment.
But Ee is scrupulous in assuming a share of the blame:
I believe
Neither you nor any one of us
Possesses the simple courage
To leave the comfort of the times,
Go forth into that eerie calm
To stare
Down the cold eye
Of the snoring typhoon.
The point is taken up in Letter to a Friend in which he blames the problems of the present on the silence of those who ought to have spoken out against the course of events by which a country is shaped in the interests of those in power. Here the poet performs his highest function because he is himself urging the need for reasonable action:
Perhaps we should quietly leave our seats
Now, rush out of the stuffy theatre
Before the alarm is sounded, and the stampede,
And in crowded streets vie for an audience,
Describe what we have seen inside out
Plainly, without any treading praises
Or a timid dyspepsia
Muddling the issues.
How total Ee's involvement has been can be judged from these poems. Aspects of and elements in the situation which he inspects and agonises over are depicted in terms of cause and effect, of how they circumscribe the individual and his family as part of an historical process. But past, present and future, are written about in the knowledge that, paradoxically, suffering steadies the tragedy enabling the poet to recognise for himself that a terrible agony is born.
One bright auspicious hour
You will hear your elders speak
Of Freedom soaring in the sky,
And hovering on a cloud, and stirring
In the leaves of sun-aspiring branches.
Inspired, you will burn in your passion
To hack through treacherous swamps
And the darkly creeping blukar of oppression . . .
Ee is coping with divisions and tensions he laments and clearly does not want. His patriotism is for the country and the people because, ultimately, they matter, not the politics.
EDWIN THUMBOO
University of Singapore
1976
[i] The first is I of the Many Faces published in 1956.
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