Nazareth, Peter. "Interweaving Edwin Thumboo.  As interviewed by Peter Nazareth.  Newly edited by Gwee Li Sui" in Ariels: Departure and Returns.  A Festschrift for Edwin Thumboo. Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1999: 152-173.

Interweaving Edwin Thumboo

As Interviewed by Peter Nazareth

Newly Edited by Gwee Li Sui

 

*******

Interviewer's Introduction

Peter Nazareth

In l976, Professor Bernth Lindfors told me he wanted to do an interview with me for a volume on East African writers and scholars. This was during the annual meeting of the African Studies Association, held at Boston. He came to my hotel room with his tape-recorder. I lay down on my bed and said, "You be my psychiatrist". And he was. He brought things out of me I did not know were there. That is when I discovered the power of the interview taped for publication, the kind I had never done before.

A few months later, I had breakfast with Lindfors and Professor Robert E. McDowell, at the annual meeting of the African Literature Association, held at Madison, Wisconsin. McDowell was then editor of World Literature Written in English. I told him I wanted to review an African novel for his journal. "I need reviews like a hole in the head!" he said. "What do you need?" I asked. "I need interviews with writers", he said. "You deal with writers in Iowa City. Why don't you interview some for me?"

Well, if Lindfors could do it, so could I. Besides, I had loved reading the interviews in Playboy. In fact, the first interview for Playboy was the classic one done by Alex Haley with Malcolm X. Living in Africa, I was coming to realise that the interview was a serious art form, not something you did because you were too lazy and unprepared to do anything else.

A few months later, my wife and I started working for the International Writing Program when Hualing Nieh Engle assumed the Directorship on the retirement of Paul Engle, who had invited me as a participant in 1973. (I had left Uganda in January 1973 to accept the Seymour Lustman Fellowship at Yale, granted because of my novel, In a Brown Mantle, which had been prophetic of the coup in and the expulsion of Asians from Uganda; from Yale, I came to Iowa.) It was when I began working for the Program that I met Edwin Thumboo.

Though we had not met before, he was not unknown to me. He had just directed the M.A. dissertation of Theo Luzuka, the Ugandan who had designed the cover of my novel and who, after graduating from Makerere University in Uganda, my alma mater, had decided to go East instead of West. Luzuka had done in the seventies what I had tried to do in the sixties. I had applied for a Commonwealth Scholarship to do an M.A. at the University in Kuala Lumpur because I had a large family there: that's where my maternal grandfather had been a professional (classical) musician, that's where my mother was born. (My grandfather's story is told in my "Rosie's Theme", translated into Malay by Nazell Hashim Mohamad as "Tema Rosie" and published in Dewan Sastera in December, 1994.) But although I received the Scholarship, I did not get a place. I had received a letter from the Chairman of the Department, R. B. LePage, advising me not to come to KL but to go to England because doing so would improve my job prospects, the wisdom of which had been realised by one of his faculty members. (He was referring to Lloyd Fernando; we met at Leeds University in England, where we seem to have had very different experiences.) All right, so I wanted to go to KL and Luzuka went to Singapore -- but from the Ugandan perspective of the time, it was the same. I recall my favourite lecturer at Makerere, Murray Carlin, telling me to give his regards to D. J. Enright, who of course was the Chairman of the English Department at Singapore. Luzuka wrote to me about everyone in the Department -- and also about my grandfather, whom he met -- so I was aware of Edwin Thumboo. But I was surprised when I met him at Cedar Rapids airport to discover he was what I would today call "laser-like" not soft (and I recall him saying that I looked younger than he had expected).

Edwin Thumboo was the first person I chose to interview with a tape-recorder. My guiding philosophy was not to have a series of set questions for the sake of information but to work like a jazz musician, paving the way for insights to emerge that were not there before. As the interview proceeded, I felt I was uncovering the Rosetta Stone of Singapore. For Edwin Thumboo was near, if not at, the origin and the heart of Singapore writing, of a writing that was both searching for and creating the soul of a nation-in-formation. So I let the interview find its own course. Let me qualify that statement: I thought I was letting the interview continue but anyone who knows Edwin Thumboo understands who really takes control. When I had finished two tapes of 90 minutes each, I thought I was done: then he said, "Now let's talk about my poetry". Well, who could say No?

I read Gods Can Die and prepared to discuss each poem. Having worked as a Senior Finance Officer in the Ministry of Finance in Uganda I appreciated the nature and value of bureaucratic power in the real world and the need for a writer handling such power to disguise what he was writing. In the case of Singapore, I felt it was like living in a glass city because the country was a commercial crossroads: the writer could not make tidal waves -- at least not on the surface. So the real poetry, I felt, must be found in the depths, and I would have to try to dive to these depths with my questions and comments. When we were done, I felt we had created a new art form: literary criticism of a volume of poetry in which critic and author participated.

            When the tapes were transcribed, we found we had an interview of 80 pages, much too long for World Literature Written in English so I was not surprised when McDowell published only the first 30 pages. But Professor Fred Woodard, one of the editors of The Iowa Review (and later Interim Director of the International Writing Program when Hualing Nieh Engle retired) also wanted to publish the interview. His approach was different. He decided to make extracts from the whole interview and create an exciting dialogue in the American style, making me provoke Professor Thumboo instead of treating him with the respect due a guru. Woodard thus created a wholly new interview, which he published after approval by Thumboo and me. Pacific Quarterly Moana in New Zealand published two further extracts, one in its issue on Oral and Traditional Literatures, the other being the whole critique of the poetry. I made yet another extract of what Thumboo said about African literature and had it published in Afriscope, a monthly Nigerian newsmagazine.

            That is not all: I used a line from the interview for the title of a volume of short criticism. Thumboo said, "I had the experience once of someone asking me, ‘What's the authority for this?' I just pointed to myself. It's part of the religion of my society. I am the footnote man". The Footnote Man was the title of the volume in which, quoting Thumboo in the introduction, I used no footnotes at all. It was accepted for publication in East Africa but never came out -- yet it was named as one of my published novels in Joseph Conrad: Third World Perspectives! So the Thumboo interview had inspired a work that exists in someone's imagination.

            Never being published as a whole, the interview seems to be a work producing endless variations -- like jazz. Edwin Thumboo had the ability to zoom in on various subjects and cultures not only because of who he was but also because he seemed to be looking all over for what he could bring to Singapore, in the process making it possible for others like me to take from him, from Singapore, to the world. Two decades later, Edwin Thumboo is not the young pioneer but the father figure; so it is time for another variation of the interview. With the increasing interconnection of the world, with the increasing respect for the power of the oral, the interview can now not be read as a tome but heard as a dynamo.

 References: Interviews

"A conversation between Peter Nazareth and Edwin Thumboo on Transformations of Oral Cultures in the Third World" Pacific Quarterly Moana, ed. Norman Simms, Hamilton. New Zealand: Outrigger Publishers, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1982.

"Edwin Thumboo of Singapore", Afriscope, ed. Uche Chukwumerije, Yaba, Lagos, Nigeria, Vol. 10, No. 2, February, 1980.

"Edwin Thumboo on His Own Poetry: An Interview With Peter Nazareth", Pacific Quarterly Moana, Vol. 6, No. 2, April, l981.

"Interview With Peter Nazareth", MAZUNGUMZO: Interviews With East African Writers, Publishers, Editors and Scholars, ed. Bernth Lindfors, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1981.

"Peter Nazareth -- Interview With Edwin Thumboo", World Literature Written in English, ed Robert E. McDowell, Arlington: The University of Arlington at Texas. Vol. 18, No. 1, April, 1979.

"Peter Nazareth with Edwin Thumboo", The Iowa Review, ed. David Hamilton, and Fredrick Woodard, Iowa City: The University of Iowa, Vol. 9, No. 4, Fall, 1978.

References: Other

Robert Hamner, ed., Joseph Conrad: Third World Perspectives, Washington, D. C.: Three Continents Press l990.

Peter Nazareth, In a Brown Mantle, Kampala/Nairobi/Dar es Salaam: East African Literature Bureau, 1972.

Peter Nazareth, "Rosie's Theme", in CALLALOO, ed. Charles H. Rowell, Lexington: University of Kentucky, No. 2, February, l978; also in The Literary Review, issue entitled "Writers of the Indian Commonwealth", ed. Bharati Mukherejee and Ranu Vanikar, Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University, Vol. 99 No. 4, Summer; 1986.

My grandfather had told me his story when I first met him in KL in 1960 because he said that I had talent as a writer and he wanted me to tell it someday. I started writing it just before Thumboo came to the International Writing Program and revised it after discussing it with him.  I read it during Writers' Week in Singapore in July 1986, three years after my grandfather had passed away at the age of 96 (with Singapore members of my family on my father's side in the audience) and in KL in June 1994, thereby bringing his story home. Nazell Hashim Mohamad was in the audience in KL and translated the work as "Tema Rosie", Dewan Sastera, Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa Dan Pustaka, December, 1994.

*******

 

Editor's Introduction

Gwee Li Sui

After about a quarter of a century, the Nazareth-Thumboo interview still ranks among the few important documents in the study of Edwin Thumboo's work. Conducted in 1977 when Thumboo visited the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the interview was published in part the following year and has since then appeared in various versions.

            The full manuscript has never been made available, given both its length and the sweep of its content, and it is my firm belief that both of these bear between them a very special relationship. One cannot represent the range of the interview without granting it the length to which it aspires, nor follow its length without observing new levels of discussion that are continually opening up and -- mind you -- left unclosed, left to re-emerge at other points of the interview.

            Therefore, like editors before me, I have chosen to keep to specific themes in order to shorten the document considerably; but, unlike them, I have chosen to look for these themes across the entire manuscript so as not to lose the dimensionality involved in their discussion. As such, this version spans the logic of the whole interview and, through what Peter Nazareth calls "interweaving", hopes to achieve a newer form of narratological coherence.

            The original manuscript can easily be divided into two parts, one more vocal about Singapore's history, the poet's role, post-coloniality, and Third World literature and criticism, and the other more focussed on the poems in Thumboo's second anthology Gods Can Die (1977). This version, however, reads seamlessly and has been condensed with the following self-asserted principles always in mind: a consistency of tone, a logical progression and a liveliness of style.

            Specifically, what I have done is to have broken up passages into shorter paragraphs, altered the length of some sentences to better clarify their meaning and enhance their rhythm, left out recurring phrases and ideas which do not render an argument concise and tight, and played down on a casualness of tone without compromising on its simplicity. I have also de-contextualised portions like the reference to God Can Die as a new book, modified some of Nazareth's questions slightly to logically connect sentences, and freely added connectives in order that the argument may "flow" better.

            Re-worked for a readership that must include young Singaporeans, the selected themes are as follows: Thumboo's own recollection of his early years, Elvis, issues concerning race and religion, post-colonial questions, and the relationship between generations. I have included the segment on Elvis, not simply because it provides a rare glimpse into Thumboo's ideas on pop iconography, but also because Nazareth -- himself a celebrated Goan-African writer and critic -- is an Elvis scholar as well, having lectured famously on the King since 1992.

           Nazareth's approval and encouragement in the course of this undertaking have been vital if one knows how seriously he treats this document as a personal treasure. His open-handedness thus reveals his deep understanding of the unusual multiformity of the manuscript and its impossibility to stay locked, for long, in a handful of versions; now it is as much mine, and a new generation's, as it has always been his and Thumboo's.

*******

Thumboo:        The history of the last two hundred years in our part of the world was made by colonial incursion. As a reaction to that, we must re-think, re-write and re-orientate our history. But history deals with large entities, large problems; in the meantime, people live. Accordingly, what I was and am really concerned with is social history, the decisions and events within families, not with governments or other centres of formal power.

            The poetry written by young people today seems very much the kind you find elsewhere. It is poetry with an urban setting, poetry that inspects, that comes back to the position of the individual in society, his reactions, his emotional curve as it were, all in a rapidly urbanising society. Yet, in our part of the world, it is important to stress that contemporary history, the great flux of events and the forces of change move rapidly, are "concertina-ed", so that, in a span of ten years, there are the equivalent experiences of change and dislocation which, in other parts of the world, have taken as much as four hundred years to run their courses. Therefore, one finds, in Singapore, that the worldviews, attitudes to social, political and economic issues, and questions about education and an emergent culture, evolve at an astonishing speed. Within ten years, there has been a development of the thoughts of at least four generations.

            We live at a time and in a situation where change is the order of things. Where I come from, that gradual evolution and that passing down of ideas, their orderly and slow revision, occur under hot-house conditions.

Nazareth:         You have said before, in your introduction to The Second Tongue, that "language must serve, not overwhelm, if the Commonwealth writer is to succeed".¹

Thumboo:        Yes, and let me clarify: I would love to write intense, internalised, interior-landscape poetry. Such is probably my forte. But, as one reviewer of Gods Can Die² observes rightly, my poetry develops -- or, rather, changes -- since the word "develops" implies a value judgement, implies "improvement". The early poems are lyrical, whereas the later ones are more public. This change is my conscious choice as a poet in a particular setting, for, at any one time, I would rather write the poetry of interior monologue. But a poet in Singapore -- and especially someone from my generation -- has certain responsibilities. With a certain acuteness, I recall a kind of anti-colonial feeling which was most vivid as a pro-nationalist feeling rather than as an anti-colonial feeling. I recall a period which has left its mark on me. Correspondingly, the poet here has a certain public function.

            I am not suggesting how a writer elsewhere should write. The poet in London may have his preoccupations and, if a novelist in America discusses the problems of lining up for bread, that's assuredly his business. By the same understanding, I exercise what I feel to be my function in my society; from that function stems certain attitudes to language, to structure, to the purpose of poetry. And once you define the purpose of poetry, your poetry takes on a certain form naturally.

Nazareth:         Regarding this form you talk about, I observe nonetheless an inner presence of struggle. You persistently keep a lid on emotions in your poetry and, if ever you express an emotion, it is always as a means to order facts. This is the opposite of declamation! It is as if the style responds to a Singaporean situation which, in one of your poems, you describe: "Singapore is just a boil/ On the Melanesian face".³

Thumboo:        Surely, a poet writes because he understands he has something to say; so, first of all, there is always the poet's vision. This vision is constructed through a series of social influences -- those from his teachers, his elders and his peers -- through the kind of problems they define for him and which he comes to accept and, after that, elaborate as vital in his society. The problems may arise from the details of political, social, cultural and linguistic issues and the broad themes suggested by them: in other words, from responses of the heart to the capillaries. Therefore, the constructing of the poet's vision is a very conscious business. It's not simply a part of his poetry, but a part of his consciousness as a person as well. As such, he must go on to incorporate his own analysis, based on these influences, of the immediate situation shared by a sense of historical continuity.

            He is, at this point, confronted with the choice of idiom, of form, of tone. You, Peter, know the English language as well as I do. You know that it is capable of expressing the most intense inner feelings and the most broadly public feelings. Both you and I can think of examples in English literature; we have been victims as well as inheritors of English literature. But, while we may cite examples from Donne to Eliot to illustrate its diverse use for different poetic purposes, there is, always behind each example, also a different set of assumptions, a different set of interests, a different set of purposes.

            By extension, the poet knows this: writing intense personal poetry of the "ingrowing toe-nail" kind may have its place. But, given our situation as a developing or, in some sense, "developed" country, that kind of poetry addresses itself to a very narrow section of readers. In Singapore, the readers of poetry are few -- although this number is rapidly increasing -- and, if the poet is concerned with readership, if he is concerned that others should read his poetry, this number will influence him. If he wants to reach people and relate his poetry to the kind of problems dominant in his society, his style will have to range into the public.

            You ask: why then do my poems appear to be poems of fact? What I attempt to do in them is to project a point of view in the selection of the facts, in the arrangement of the facts, but I still hope that, in the end, I am writing poetry. As someone who has begun by writing lyrical poetry, I have always been concerned with form, idiom, image, metaphor, structure. That concern has, in a sense, saved me. And, while I write poems with public themes, I hope that I am still creating poems, not blatant propaganda. The propaganda is implicit as part of the poetry, but it must be the poetry that persuades, not the propaganda. This is itself one of the fundamental issues in Third World writing.

Nazareth:         You have earlier mentioned social history which, in your introduction to The Second Tongue, you say Singapore lacks. But, in several of your poems, I notice descriptions of people as they are in Singapore -- individuals and, sometimes, groups -- as if, in a quiet move towards nation-building, you are bringing to the attention of other groups the existence of these people around them, whom they don't even know, don't notice.

Thumboo:        You're right to bring to bear on my poetry the kind of understanding you have of Third World writing. As I said, we have the kind of history in Singapore that relates to events and treaties. The larger history, the public history: we must have that. Thus, we are re-orientating approaches to make sure that they no longer reflect a School of Oriental Studies point of view, the London point of view, the Eurocentric point of view. We are not the only people in the world doing this today. I think it's being done in Africa, in the West Indies; for instance, Eric Williams' book about the West Indies is fundamental.⁴ It's been quietly done, by implication, in the novels of Wilson Harris. It's also been done, to some extent, in the novels emerging from India. It is a creative correction of points of view.

            And for us in Singapore? We are a nation of migrants, really. In that sense, we are an artificial creation, but one that is absolutely vital and viable because of our geographical situation. So the only thing we have to do -- in a sense a very massive thing -- is to make sure we emerge as a people. The people who came to Singapore from, say, 1819 up to, perhaps, just before the Second World War -- there was a small influx after the Second World War -- had to function as an economic unit. But, when you are a colony ruled by the British, the various smaller societies function, by and large, within their own ambit, within their own parameters. The Chinese lived, on the whole, amongst themselves; the Indians lived amongst themselves and so did the Malays. The Indians have their temples; they have their religious ceremonies, and so on. Their social life was based largely on an export version of what happened in South India; so also with the Chinese.

            Consequently, social history was lived, but not recorded. There was no one to record that history and, in any case, people who are migrants are conscious of their history in their homelands, not so much in their places of exile. They didn't see themselves, and their lives in Singapore, as being important, as being potentially unique, because they always took their sense of direction -- in custom, in politics, in fashion, in taste -- from their homelands, either through a continuing relationship or through a recall, through mythology, beliefs and prejudices of the society in their motherlands. But, for us, now that we have become an independent nation and a republic, we need to go back, to really look at our historical as well as our social past.

            What is social history? It is not history consisting of traumatic events but a history of the family, of ordinary people, and literature is made out of the lives and experiences of ordinary people. This kind of historical continuity we alone must attempt to construct. The British, of course, weren't interested in it at all. The various ethnic groups weren't really interested in their lives in Singapore since, to some extent, the feeling of being exiles, the feeling of being dominated by and attached to the motherlands, persisted at least until the mid-fifties.

            Nonetheless, social history is important because, out of it, you construct your types, which are altogether necessary. Without them, you can't see the evolution of your own society and, thus, your writing may only be confined to the contemporary, devoid of a historical perspective. The historical perspective is important for us because, after all, Singapore is such a small place and it is already modernising so rapidly, becoming a kind of international city. We are in danger of losing our historical hinterland.

Nazareth:         You have alluded to Wilson Harris earlier and, now, you raise the question of a hinterland, but the connection with Harris is necessarily one of similarity and dissimilarity. Singapore is a small city-state with just over two million people; in Guyana, there are fewer than a million people, with nearly all but the Amerindians on the coast, with a vast physical hinterland behind. Harris' physical problem and yours would therefore be different, although the psychic and metaphorical problems seem similar.

Thumboo:        When I use the word "hinterland", I'm really using it as a portmanteau word; it sums up a great number of vital things. By it, I mean a culture, a past, also a sense of geography, a sense of place in which myths have grown, in which legends have grown, in which people have lived and have gone through a rich body of experiences. The hinterland is curious because it is both place and idea but, in Singapore, we can't really have place; Wilson Harris can have place as well as idea. So what do we have?

            Time and time again, we have been told that we belong to the great Asian traditions. There is only some truth in this since, basically, migrants are drawn from the lower classes so they aren't the best cultural examples. What migrants bring to a new country is an idea of what they are, either as Indians or Chinese, and a popular idea of what their past, their inheritance, represents. And especially when we are geographically small, there is an added necessity to construct some psychic hinterland. We know we can't have a physical one; the facts of modern politics have overtaken us. It was possible, at one point, to refer to Malaysia; Conrad does so and Wallace, the great biologist after whom the Wallace Line was named, can use "Malaysia" to mean the whole area. But we can't because modern politics has overtaken us; we are only an island of 224 square miles, 226 square miles at low tide.

            Accordingly, the kind of "hinterland" I may refer to is not straight from history; it is the psychic inheritance which anybody in India or perhaps Japan, or even an oral society in Africa, has and which he can carry with him as part of his consciousness; and not merely his consciousness, but also as a living part of the language, the emotions, the social institutions. In other words, I am referring to the whole fabric of what we consider both the background to a culture and the very culture itself.

            We are, in Singapore, busy with constructing a common, shared culture out of the very diverse elements we have inherited. This creation of a hinterland is important because it is really the base upon which all writing ought to rest. Singapore writing in the meantime, before the emergence of this hinterland, will provide the kind of Singapore identity that is needed. This is why, in my poems, I talk about diverse experiences.

Nazareth:         Yet, in "Ahmad", you end,

Is this a challenge? Are you as poet questioning whether there is time enough to discover and create our common humanity or will we be overtaken by events?

Thumboo:        Yes, because after all, with plural societies, once you achieve independence you have a multi-cultural society. You become concerned with the search for bridges between cultures which, normally, would not have found themselves immediate neighbours. If you look, in fact, at cultural diffusion throughout world history, the penetrations have never really been traumatic. They have only been traumatic in terms of their events, not their cultural bases; there has always been enough shared within the cultures for them to adapt. But, here, you have Chinese who are Taoist, Buddhist or pragmatists who are moved ultimately by an ethic rather than a religion; you have Indians who are Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, and the Malays are altogether Muslims. Then, of course, within every race you also have the whole gamut of imported Christianity. Where else in the world can you show me that kind of mixture?

            Hence, there is a sense of tension, of racial tension as supported and defined -- and in a way encouraged -- by political tensions. I am referring specifically to the racial riots that erupted in our part of the world; I'm talking about Singapore and Malaysia. In 1950, we had the Maria Hertogh riots which were religious in origin, with Islam contending against the rest. The central event involved an adopted Dutch girl whose Malay family had arranged, quite naturally, for her to marry a Malay, but her Dutch parents discovered this and took her back. The incident created one hell of a furore in colonial Singapore. In 1964, there were riots, politically motivated, but basically between the Chinese and the Malays. In 1969, there were the May 13th riots in Malaysia between the Chinese and the Malays again. I'm not saying that these riots were simply and completely racial in origin; on each side, there were, of course, a certain style of politics and there were the communists trying to fuel the fires, as it were. The whole thing was very complicated, but the point is that, whatever the reason, there was animosity between the various ethnic groups.

            We need to build these bridges because in every culture, I am convinced, there is a centre, a humanistic centre. The humanistic centre is sometimes outward-looking and sometimes inward-looking so there is believably a chance for communication between these centres. But we need time. On the whole, the British were not concerned with forming a homogeneous society; they were simply concerned with ruling the place. They were interested in our part of the world for their reasons, not ours; they didn't have to live our lives. That which they thought was good for us was actually what was good for them.

            Indeed, among the things I believe to be good for us would be the building of these bridges between the various communal groups, not superficially but fundamentally. The fact that you and I speak the same language is not enough. The language should reach back and bring with it, for both you and me, the communicative genius of our people so that, when we use language, there is this kind of penetration, not necessarily agreement, but understanding.

Nazareth:         I wonder if there hasn't already been much more contact between the people of different racial groups than they realise. You yourself come from a Chinese and Indian background, but I see you as a Singaporean!

Thumboo:        That's interesting, Peter. I admit that, these days, there has been an increasing degree of contact between the various communities, but remember: under the British, this was minimal. Then, contact was limited to very practical things -- like meeting at the market and greeting neighbours -- and there was very little cross-cultural exchange between those who spoke only their own languages, the vernaculars. For these people, the major substance of their life occurred within their language groups. Among the Chinese, for instance, there were various communities, each speaking a different dialect, and, the further back you went, the more you would find that these communities, on the whole, existed within themselves. Their contact with other communities was the kind imposed only by the need for trade, for mutual survival, and so on.

            This kind of cultural interpenetration accelerated during the period when British power was being gradually dismantled. However, as soon as the British moved out and political power comes into the hands of nationals, there is, paradoxically, a terrific resurgence of ethnic identity because now, if I belong to a majority group, I share in its political power and, thus, I want the place to be shaped the way I want it, according to my feelings and thinking.

            The situation, I think, is true really of many of the Third World countries but, in Singapore, we are at least on the road to solving it, now that we have identified the problem. Look at someone like me of a mixed inheritance, for example. I was born in the thirties and, at that time, mixed marriages weren't many, but they are becoming more frequent now. And, if I appear to have a fairly reasonable attitude, equipped with enough perspectives to look at the competing interests of the various groups, it is, ironically, because of the English language! Indeed, the first group in Singapore to cease to be orientated by their ethnicity were the English-educated, They had moved intellectually beyond communal boundaries by achieving a view of things larger than the one normally structured by their own ethnic group or foisted by their own vernacular languages, their own first languages. Even today, you will still find generally among the English-educated a much more liberal attitude, much broader perspectives, of the problems we have; they have a greater capacity to identify the broader fundamental problems and to suggest ways out of these problems. This is one of the gifts of the English language.

            Colonialism is an absolutely mixed blessing. It's more sin than blessing and the English language, I think, is one of the interesting remainders of any colonial experience, since the English-educated were drawn from all communities -- more from some, less for others -- but all because it was multi-racial.

Nazareth:         And, of course, the English-educated are in the position of Prometheus bringing the fire back? As Fanon would have said, they have been to the centres of learning of the colonial metropolises and brought something back to the people?

Thumboo:        Sure, except for one fact: under the colonial structure, the English-educated belonged largely to the middle-class and their interest was, therefore, a self-seeking one. There were exceptions to this general rule so that, while they were able to bring back this kind of understanding, it took some time after independence from the British for the English-educated to really see a positive role for themselves. Before that, the fact that they spoke English was a kind of economic comfort.

            But, to return to a question of language, the poet writing in English is, at this point, faced with an immediate challenge. Where society is plural and monolithic, you have this terrible problem of what types you can describe as being representative of your society. You are in a period of change, of rapid change. For example, you have Chinese who are bilingual and you have Chinese who are monolingual. You have Chinese who have become thoroughly westernised and you have Chinese who have tried to remain traditional in the face of changes. That issue alone is complex enough and it occurs, mind you, not merely in linguistic terms but also in social terms; you have the same thing with the Indians, with the Malays. Each of these is complex in itself and you can just imagine the mathematical combinations and permutations, once you put the whole mix together. So our problem, really, is a question of material.

            Somerset Maugham claimed -- in a conversation in 1948 with Malcolm Macdonald, who was then British Commissioner-General in Southeast Asia -- that there was a fantastic richness of material in our part of the world. As an outsider, he could very well say that because he saw the richness of material -- not for its intrinsic qualities or in terms of its intrinsic characters -- but as an outsider, whose notion of character, of types, had already been formed by his tradition, by his novelistic practice. He came to our society as an outsider, picked the characters he wanted and wrote about these characters.

            But, as an insider, you will doubt whether the characters an outsider chooses are really representative of the matrix of your society. By "matrix", I mean the themes, issues, types, and so on. The insider usually sees the inside situation in a much more complex way than the outsider does. This is true of all Third World countries, of all nascent, changing societies.

            Our types, in Singapore, are only now emerging. The act of defining them is important, complex and takes time, but the poet doesn't have to do it. He may be involved in the process, but it is not a pre-condition, a major preoccupation, of his writing. One challenge is actually the stage where whatever one says is unlikely to irritate the power groups and the ruling party in Singapore, despite what the western press says, is liberal. I have a poem called "The Interview" about a political detainee being made to recant over TV.⁶ In most other Third World countries, I think that poem would have been banned and I wouldn't like to say what would have happened to the poet. But it was allowed in Singapore.

            I am a Singaporean, I'm a nationalist, no two ways about it. Singapore is my country for better or worse; I believe it's for better. Sure, there may be problems but, as a Singaporean, if I comment honestly and in a fairly balanced way, the powers that be will accept. Of course, when one criticises adversely, there are ways and means of projecting this criticism; you can make it palatable and, if not sweet, at least acceptable, unbitter.

Nazareth:         To agree with you, I speak as a writer myself when I say that, in whatever case, you are obliged as a human being and a writer to observe your own realities.

Thumboo:        Yes, and, recalling the influences on this observation, my observation, I believe the kind of things instilled came from three basic sources and they are human sources. One was an old lady, a relative from a village in China, who spoke my dialect and who, in a sense, brought me up. Then, I had my parents -- my mother being Chinese, my father Indian -- and they both spoke English. My mother may speak Teochew, but she is actually a nonya, a Peranakan. The Peranakans are basically Chinese who came to our part of the world from at least the late eighteenth century, spoke Malay, and who, over the years, adapted themselves extremely closely to the very force and attractiveness of Malay life. Still, they are very Chinese in their ways, and Chinese with such a rigidness that certain practices among them no longer even exist in China! It's curious that people at the fringe tend to adhere more rigidly to values, customs and practices which have changed at the centre: this is one of the dynamics of any migration of a culture.

            The third main source, I think, was my teachers and this includes your cousin, Philip Nazareth, the historian. Of my teachers, the one I remember best was an expatriate, a very unusual British expatriate, who introduced me not merely to literature in English but to literatures in English. He taught me a kind of intellectual humility, showing that when you recognised an idea as being superior, or as being very useful, you accepted it and gave it credit; you paid tribute to the thing, but you took it, nonetheless.

            My discovery of an Indian inheritance and a Chinese inheritance in a way that enabled me to bring that discovery as part of the structure of my thinking, as a structure of my feeling, was something that I developed when I went to the university. But I couldn't have done it had it not been for the English language. If I had spoken Chinese, the Indian part would have been left out; had I spoken Tamil or another of the South Indian languages, the Chinese part would have been left out. But, because I spoke English and because the English I had been taught brought with it, through my old teacher, a certain humility, a certain ability to read up on things without being snobbish about them, I was able to move into Chinese culture, Chinese history, Chinese mythology. The same happened also for the Indian side of myself.

            The experiences enabled me to look at the Malay, the Melanesian inheritance of our part of the world. I found that inheritance very hard to integrate into my basic mixture of Chineseness and Indianness, but that doesn't mean I don't understand it. I do and I must say that the Malays are perhaps the most gracious in our part of the world; they are the only people here who have a fully structured society, a lived history, from ruler to slave-girl. Possibly, this is because they have been here long enough to develop such a kind of structured society. And, when it comes to writing literature, they have the law of the people, the law of the Koran -- the religious law -- and the law of the Sultan. You have this fully structured Malay society so that, within the region, wherever the Malays migrate, a whole society moves.

           You see, for the others, only a segment of the society settled in Singapore. In the case of the British who lived here, there was only -- or mainly -- their peculiar imperial breed, although, among them, there were some marvellous teachers, marvellous givers of knowledge, feeling and thought. But these were really very few. So this is why, in our part of the world, it is the Malays who have the most structured and gracious society.

Nazareth:         It is as if to create a contrast that you have, in one of your poems, a Singaporean of this present society who does all the right things and gets by; yet you give the reader the feeling that the centre is lacking, the very centre you are trying to locate in your poetry.⁷

Thumboo:        Indeed, I call him "Mr. Ang" and his kind of mentality is almost inevitable, if one is left to develop undisturbed in a thriving metropolitan city where money speaks. For, where money is the thing that runs the economy, money soon becomes the thing that governs relationships, since almost all relationships, in that kind of situation, are business relationships. Mr. Ang is among the new Singaporeans emerging now who are crude, anxious to be seen in the right places, with social ambitions but, in his own way, eminently successful because he's got the means. After all, if one runs a series of services, the man with the money buys the services. This brings about a certain kind of mentality in the giver and, harmfully, a certain compensating, complementary and questionable mentality in the receiver as well.

Nazareth:         And is it in your effort to break out of a cultural capsule that you turned to African literature? You are a critic of African literature, having done your Ph.D. thesis on African poetry; it is curious to find someone from the Far East who has studied African literature in such depth!

Thumboo:        The inner justification, for me, arose from the fact that as a "developing" country -- being, in some ways, very undeveloped in social relationships -- we had a great need to look at the newly emergent literatures of countries that had shared a colonial experience with us. Perhaps, colonialism somewhere else took a different shape and a different kind of intensity; perhaps, there was a real struggle to achieve independence. I'm thinking of a place like Kenya, as compared with Nigeria, where the British never settle.

            I soon decided that there were three basic areas of writing in English. Firstly, there is the main tradition, the parent tradition and the first export tradition -- to America, then Australia, New Zealand and parts of South Africa -- and this, for me, is the main frame, the First World literature, a literature which is by and for Anglo-Saxons who shared a religion, a language, and so on. The second area involves a country like India where there is a large, powerful classical tradition, where English first came as a visitor and is now one of sixteen official languages; but, whatever its place, there is still a powerful non-Anglo-Saxon alternative.

            Last of all but, in the long term, perhaps the most fascinating are those areas where there was an oral tradition, so that the coming of English meant the coming of literacy. Now, I'm not suggesting that literacy is superior to an oral tradition; it isn't. Specifically, there are those areas that were artificial creations, like the West Indies, whose original natives have been wiped out and you have instead Negroes, you have Indians, you have Chinese. There is no such thing as a West Indian language, since they all speak English; when you talk about a West Indian language, you really mean a certain kind of dialect of English or you mean a difference in pronunciation, you know, like Trinidadian as against Jamaican. Of course, Singapore is another example of this kind of creation.

            This approach is what took me to African literature. And, as soon as you get into it, you become fascinated because not only do you test the literature, but the literature tests you as well. For me, it also involved more than that. I've always had an interest in anthropology, religion and related subjects. In fact, when I was a civil servant, one source of sanity for me was the reading of mythology, which led on naturally to ancient religion, social anthropology, physical anthropology and ancient history. I discovered -- and, mind you, this was before 1966 -- a terrific paucity of writing about Africa's literature. Very soon, I discovered that the African literature itself spoke with a certain completeness that I found in none of the books in the various disciplines I've just mentioned.

            One thing led to another; it's part of the disease, the misfortune, of our profession that, when you start on something, you end up going into it with all the energy you can muster. Only, in this case, it was not merely the acquiring of an additional field of study, but also the education of a sensibility, an extension of a sensibility, since the experiences in Africa are quite different from those in Singapore. These disciplines offered insights because they provided a hinterland with which I could see the forces operating in the novels. In Singapore, there was no ready hinterland to think in terms of; our hinterlands were really ideas, countries in the mind, of the various people of our country. The experimentation with language, the phase through which the writing had to move, the debates about "the function of the writer", and so on, were all fascinating.

            Peter, we in our part of the world could be easily dominated by a colonial system of education simply because we were smaller. We are only now recovering from this system whose "products" has entered into positions of power and has retained the prejudices which its education had instilled. It's quite horrifying to recall the years I spent arguing, with Singaporeans, for the need -- which seems so obvious to us now -- to read literatures outside the narrow confines of English literature!

Nazareth:         How much of African literature has influenced your own work? How much has become available to Singaporeans and has had an influence, so far as it can be measured?

Thumboo:        The general influence, I think, has been really in terms of the extension of sensibilities. It is difficult to quantify, but it's extremely important because it helps to make the educated Singaporean more open to new local writing. Moreover, it alerts a teacher to the possibility that we can do this, we can write literature, so that a promising pupil will now be treated -- with sympathy and understanding -- in the school where, twenty years ago, he would have been told: "Shut up, what makes you think you can write?"

            This is a great change, this awareness that English literature is no longer English literature and that English is no longer the preserve of those born in England. Anybody may write in the language who uses the language, even someone in so-called, and I stress the adjective, "darkest" Africa; mind you, we still have a few illusions about Africa as much as Africans sometimes think we are part of China, so the mythifying is mutual! Well, we feel that if they can write this stuff in Africa, hell, we can do it also. The knowledge helps to steady the nerve, to extend the nerve, for writing local literature. It also modifies the very narrow kind of academic approach to literature which, perhaps, the truncated, export version of the Cambridge Tripos foisted on various parts of the world, like "Prac. Crit." and so on. The toughness of Leavis may be marvellous, but it's good largely in a well-cultivated garden where you've got to get rid of some of the cultivators, not the plants.

Nazareth:         That's a garden that has been built with manure produced by our worlds!

Thumboo:        Can I make another point about the influences? That's the main thing: the modification of sensibility, the whole re-examination of the question of literature in English, that it ought not to be exclusively British literature. But, given our situation, the influences could be via poetry, the most thriving genre in our country. It's a more direct instance of one's own use of language: it's easier to break away in poetry, from your main traditions of English poetry.

Nazareth:         Still, Edwin, you had published a lot of poems even before you turned to African literature. You've been of the first generation of Singaporean poets, allowing for the fact that that term "first generation" is tricky. How is it that you have continued to write and grow while your contemporaries fell by the wayside?

Thumboo:        You are referring to our intellectuals and I use that word with great hesitation; the "intellectual", as defined by the very label, is itself a western formulation. In China, I'm sure the poets and the philosophers never thought of themselves as "intellectuals", since the whole tradition that led to their rise would frown on some of the elements contained in the word "intellectual". But we'll use it nonetheless, for the moment.

            The so-called intellectuals, especially in a small place like Singapore, get absorbed into power structures, administrative structures and, by power, I don't mean merely political power. I mean political, economic, business, and administrative structures. And the higher you go, the less time you have to write. I'm not romanticising when I say that every writer has to be a bit of a rebel or, if not a rebel, a person with a slight . . . discontent? "Malcontent" is too strong a word. Anyway, by and large, those who wrote, those with real talent, stopped writing once they left the university and got into the government, into commerce, onto statutory boards and other quasi-government bodies. And nothing succeeds like success, so once they became successful members of the establishment, poetry suffered because there isn't really any tradition of writing in this setting.

            Also, remember that the whole notion of the writing of poetry, as seen in connection with the tradition in the English language, is quite different in some of the other existing Asian traditions. Take the Chinese tradition, for example. Among the Chinese, once you are a great scholar, the chances are that you ought also to be a great poet. In that tradition, there is a direct correlation between the capacity to write poetry and one's scholarship. Almost every great poet in China has been a scholar -- although it doesn't follow that every great scholar has been a great poet -- and, by "scholar", I mean a person who knows the language, with or without a certificate. There is this tradition in Singapore.

Nazareth:         Now that you mention it, what happens when, as a scholar and a Singaporean, you write criticism, not poetry? As you admitted yourself, you can't fall back on Leavis and the others; you have to start almost from scratch.

Thumboo:        Criticism here is a pretty kettle of fish, really! If I am writing something on Shakespeare, I write in terms of the scholarship on the subject; this is a game we have to play. Even if you have good ideas to express, even if you have a point to make, you've got to play their game according to their rules when it comes to sacred areas, sacred cults. But once you've moved to new writings, the rules change. They have to change, although there are some who are not merely outsiders but outsiders who come from the main tradition. They will attempt to impose their critical principles, not their critical vision; there is a difference.

            You see, with an English critic writing about English literature, chances are, he has not only a critical method, a certain approach, a certain methodology, which, however sensitive and flexible it may be, there will also be, behind it, a vision of not merely the function of a critic but, more importantly, the function of that literature, its place and its lineage. You extrapolate these principles and say: "Look, the critical principles have to follow where the language goes".

            There's some justification in making that assertion: literature isn't merely language. Literature is also value, vision, experience. You can say in mathematics -- which is a kind of language -- that the rules are the same in any part of the world and that, whether you are a black mathematician, a blue mathematician or a green mathematician, if you are solving a quadratic equation, you are solving a quadratic equation. Your diet may be different: three mathematicians solving the same mathematical problems might have had different breakfasts that morning, but the mathematical rules remain the same. But three other people who've had different breakfasts -- one eating well, one starving, one just having gruel -- who see a beggar that day, will each have different reactions. Quite naturally, the fellow who's himself starving will have much more sympathy; the fellow who's well-fed will say: "What the hell is happening?"

            This is my point. Language, and literature, are so variable that while you may say some notion about the good and bad practice of language should follow, wherever it is used, skill, a large part of that act of judgement of understanding, must come from an understanding of the whole contextual fabric of experience which supports the language and which gives the language the opportunity to move, to speak, to be active. So, criticism has to be very carefully put together, especially when it comes to Third World writing, and I do not mean special pleading. That's the kind of attitude we have to discourage as much as we discourage the extreme, where one virtually asserts, for example, that you have to be Black before you can talk about Black writing.

            And, to the possible question about how one reconciles then one's growth, I think one is never really pushed to stand and deliver one's comprehensive critical principles. You approach a literature and construct the best means of understanding you can muster towards it. If it involves heavy footnoting, that's part of the racket; if it involves some solid thinking, some honest inspection of one's own feeling, one's own questions about life, one does this.

            I had the experience once of someone asking me, "What's the authority for this?", and I just pointed to myself. It's part of the religion of my society: I am the footnote man. If you are a Hindu, it would be the height of impertinence for an Englishman to say: "Give me a footnote". It's like asking an Englishman who quotes from the Bible or tells you that something or another is from the Bible: "Look, where is your authority for interpreting the Bible this way?" He'll be very insulted; so also for us.

Nazareth:         What about the connection between the written and the oral? It seems we have tended, until recent times, to pay no attention to the oral tradition, the way people talk and behave; we have also forgotten the process of conversion from the written to the oral.

Thumboo:        Perhaps, but I have thought about the problem, not in terms of literate and oral, but in terms of literate and conversational. I have lamented the fact that, in our part of the world, there is an insufficiency of good conversation and, unless the spoken word is spoken, bearing a high rate of mobility both horizontally and vertically, literature will find it very hard to develop.

            In Singapore, our cultures are really not oral cultures. Of course, we have song; every literary tradition has its own quantity of song. But the classical music of both the Indians and the Chinese, while they each have an important place as music, is usually associated with some other activity, like drama or religion, with other social occasions. You don't get people congregating for the sake of music per se, as in Britain, where you get chaps going to New Hampshire to listen to Mozart, Beethoven, or whatever. In our part of the world, that kind of musical occasion, where you go and listen to the music, seldom occurs. They may seem to do it nowadays but, even when you go and listen to Ravi Shankar, you're really listening to religious music. Also, the idea of the great artist, the great performer, is very much a western importation; the great musicians at the courts of the Maharaja or the Emperor, we don't really remember their names. We remember the artists and the painters only because their art keeps on being visible, but music -- the echo from the universe -- just disappears, dissipates itself.

            The importance of spoken words, I think, has always been there, but there comes a number of problems once you import a foreign language. When the language first takes root, there is usually a very functional kind of understanding. As the language is taking root, you already have your alternative aesthetics in your own vernaculars, so chances are, if you burst out in song, it will be in a vernacular.

            Still, this has changed over the years. I think Elvis Presley has been devastating in our part of the world so much so that, in fact, you occasionally get a chap called "Elvis Presley Tan" or "Elvis Presley Wong"! This happens because ours is a multi-racial, multi-cultural society; when you use a common language, that language is employed for practical purposes, as a kind of lowest common denominator that is used idiomatically at best, but not creatively.

            Of course, there were groups who broke into the language, and perhaps identified with it, like the Eurasians in our part of the world, the Anglo-Indians in India, the Burghers in Ceylon, but they never created nor sustained a literature. This is fascinating enough in itself.

Nazareth:         I think that one of the unfortunate things in the so-called Commonwealth is that we haven't known enough about Elvis's musical roots. Commercialism aside, a lot of Elvis's music had, in fact, folk roots in the United States and one of his qualities was being able to blend diverse sources, including the music of White American singers from pop and country ‘n' western. There is nothing wrong in being influenced by things from outside as long as we have a degree of choice. In literature, one may consciously made experiments with words, but I don't mean just words; I mean to try to modify English words so that they carry through the matrix of one's experience from one's vernacular.

Thumboo:        There are two things to be said. Firstly, when you talk about an influence, you are presupposing something to be influenced, an indigenous tradition which can absorb or accommodate the influence of someone like Elvis. In Singapore, however, there isn't that kind of tradition because, as I said earlier, we are still wrestling, trying to form, trying to find our forms, our own aesthetics. Accordingly, Elvis comes as part of a fad and fads never take root. There isn't any kind of natural, inevitable musical education in our society that can enable people to see what is good in Elvis. It's the latest stuff, it's on the pop charts, the record companies promote the discs, and the poor kids buy them. There's a strong commercial truth behind all these importations and there's not enough real ballast yet to judge and resist the commercialism.

            So, when I talk about Elvis, it's just a name that popped up in my mind; after all, Bill Haley and the Comets also passed through but didn't stay long, being comets. We've been through all these phases. And don't forget: this kind of music is associated here with the so-called "yellow culture", "western culture", "pop culture", "drugs", and so on.

            Secondly, regarding choice and experimentation, I have taken the view, as a teacher as well as one involved in language practice in Singapore, that the English we use here has to be a stable one. Being a very small country -- geographically small and small in numbers -- this challenge of stabilising it can be met, but the standard of English has fallen, is falling. It will be a devil of a job arresting the decline and, therefore, we feel that, in terms of the grammar, there ought not to be such a thing as "Singapore English". The lexis, perhaps, will be Singaporean because, after all, English is such a hospitable language; it has survived words like "pukka" and, if we can add a few of ours, why not? But the grammar has to be stable and the main areas of language, the umbra of a language, the core of the language, that -- the orthodox part of the language -- we must know because a small country never has its language learned by other people.

            Also, given the industrialisation programme, given the economic and commercial infrastructure, we must be constantly in a position to tap developments in the world, to be able to communicate without causing problems for those we are addressing. Can you imagine a long distance phone-call between Singapore and America if you have a kind of Ijaw voice at the other end? We have to speak, use an English, that is broadly international, both in structure and intonation.

            For us, the sensibilities of our various ethnic groups are sensibilities that have been structured by written languages, not oral traditions. By and large, oral traditions are from agricultural societies, pastoral societies. Not only does that kind of difference in lifestyles bring about different emphases in the respective sensibilities, it also habituates a sensibility to a certain use of the language because it is oral. The uses of memory, sound and rhythms would surely differ from that in a literate tradition; the languages then develop their own genius, their own capacity for being memorable through various verbal configurations. For us, that kind of sensibility vis-à-vis language isn't there, though it is there for song because you sing and you remember.

            This point about possible differences between sensibilities structured by a literate tradition and by an oral tradition hasn't really been investigated, I think. When the African writer, for example, complains that he cannot get into English, what he is really saying -- the full subtlety, the nuances, the inner logic as it were, the resonances of his thought and of his concepts -- is that this language English hasn't prepared itself for his distinctive lifestyle. But the point is that English can be extended, can be re-tooled, to cover this kind of sensibility. Okot p'Bitek's Song of Lawino is a classic example.⁸ He claims that, with the very act of translation, something is lost, but the same happens to Chaucer's late middle-English and, mind you, that's translation within the same language! The real question to ask is whether enough remains so that the version you have translated, or transliterated, is viable as it stands, as literature. And I think it usually is.

Nazareth:         With the depth of tradition, you may have also raised the question of myth and its value to society.

Thumboo:        Oh yes, definitely. In our part of the world, we haven't been able to re-create a myth-oriented society either. We come from myth-oriented societies, but we haven't been able to create a comparable ambience and resonance; we have a series of sub-myths, each a subset of something outside.

            I touched on this vis-à-vis our own situation years ago when we came into contact with and sought to move into and absorb Chinese mythology, Hindu mythology. Those are massive undertakings and I've never completed them because you can't really. Mythologies are deceptively open-ended in the sense that they are continually revealing, subtly instinctive. Even if you complete the reading of dominant myths, that's not enough; you've got to think and feel myths. Re-creating becomes pointless because entering myths is not a search for information but a search for processes, processes that can bring thought as well as feelings into a single act of mind. Consequently, this great capacity to classify myths the way they classify folk tales is respectable futility. I tried that too and I know the time isn't ripe.

            Perhaps, the time will never be ripe because, by urbanising, we are creating types who see far less a need for a myth-oriented society, who see more of a myth-pragmatic society, which means people who would be more immediately sympathetic to Camus, Sartre, and not to the majestical, instructive, liberating power of the Mahabharta or the Ramayana or the Li Sao or the I-Ching. The young will never acquire the capacity to appropriate and analyse their significance and are consequently not aware of their loss. They wouldn't see it as a loss, since they automatically see themselves as being in an urban situation, subject to urban pressures, and thus identify very quickly with the kind of fragmentation that occurred first in the West.

            Every Asian country is really emerging from a phase of history which is metaphysical into the physical, into physics, into industrialisation, into modernisation. Of course, we too will begin to have our fashionable traumas; we will start having our psychologists and our psychiatrists. But why has this come about? The answer is fairly simple: it has come about because history took certain courses in Western Europe and that is precisely the course we are trying to set for our own countries.

            The alternative is that you don't re-structure the myth. You can tap the myth because the myth has shaped the language and, if you learn the language, its dominant symbols will enter into you. If I were to make the sign of the cross, even the atheists would know what I mean and feel its power. It doesn't mean he subscribes to it. In other words, the recognition of its value in certain circumstances is quite apart from its value as a symbol, its weight as a symbol, but there is recognition, nonetheless.

Nazareth:         I was wondering about the Ulysses connection in "For Peter Wee":

Surely, you have had in mind the Ulysses myth and have proceeded to make him enter your part of the world!

Thumboo:        Yes, and, in another poem "Ulysses by the Merlion", I even have him visit us in Singapore!¹⁰ A merlion needs explaining: it is a lion with full mane and a mermaid's tail, all scaly and alluring, which we have invented, since we are a port and our symbol is "Singapura", where singa is lion and pura is city, hence "city of the lion". This marvellous merlion symbol was strange for my generation as we knew lions and mermaids, but this was the first time the two had come together. Yet, for my children, a merlion is a very natural thing because, while it is synthetic for us, they received it formed.

            This is itself a comment on the manufacturing of mythology and how effective it can be. I make Ulysses come to our part of the world on his travels and use him as a mask to speculate about our history. The theme is something I have thought about, and excruciated over, for quite a while: the question of what are we, what are the things that make us tick, what are the things that drive us. And, for me, Ulysses is this symbol of exploration, of vivid archetypal travel, being an intelligent name-giver, a myth-maker, an individual of infinite courage who "strove with gods".

Nazareth:         But your poems also feature other individuals, as in "Ahmad" and "Ibrahim bin Ahmad", whose titles are Islamic names, revealing a Malay perspective on Singapore as well. There is also "Moses", where the individual connects presumably with Islam, Christianity and Judaism.¹¹

Thumboo:        When it comes to questions, racial themes, things, when it comes to politics involving race, religion and language, I believe groups are irrational, but individuals are marvellous. You can't talk to a mob; you can talk to persons.

            It's no longer possible, in Singapore, to insist on plural societies and, whether there is going to be true ethnic integration, only time will tell. But we can't have the rape of the Sabine women in the twentieth century; you can't resolve problems that way. Resolve them we must, when it comes to prejudices, and this resolution always occurs at the level of personal relationships or personal contact. Governments have never resolved racial prejudices. People, individuals, on the other hand, have and, if a man with six kids realises this, his six kids will realise it a little more. There is this multiplier effect of sanity, of common sense prevailing; people, on the whole, want to live in peace and to live together. I have this faith in human life, in people, in the individual.

            You see, the old Christian business of "love thy neighbour" was meant for a monolingual, homogenous society but, if you look at all the great books, they always have two strands. One is the domestic one, related to the particular society, and it is at the point where this domestic strand expands that the religious, spiritual, humanistic message becomes universal, the brotherhood of man, and so on. Every religion preaches this although, unfortunately, most people practice the domestic side of it, not the universal side, which they talk about only because, ultimately, competing interests, nationalisms, politics, the body politic, override everything else.

            The need for this universal message is why, in my poem "Wat Arun", I have the line, "Lord Buddha, shaman with the wheel / Was in the loaves of Christ", to suggest that compassion was not the invention of Christ.¹² It was there all along and it will all along be there; I am sure there was compassion among all men because love is an essential ingredient for the development of civilisation. In "Christmas Week 1975"¹³, I further let the reader establish what I mean by "Lord" and, whatever he puts there, the structure will control the meaning. He can say "Adi Amin" for "Lord" if he is a member of the third motorised regiment stationed in the barracks or wherever. You know what I mean; I mean the Christian God and, behind the Christian God, all the Gods, really. They are One, perhaps.

Nazareth:         That connects directly with the important title poem, "Gods Can Die".¹⁴

Thumboo:        The title suggests the Hindu notion of the Godhead as being within man, in man. I say a Hindu notion because its various sophisticated formulations are there, as, for instance, the idea of man being both God and Devil, torn within himself, torn from his goodness. The idea of goodness originating and renewing itself within man is urged by many religions; the Christian in a state of grace comes close to exemplifying this idea, although the supporting metaphysics is different. I believe that, ultimately, man makes and un-makes his destiny, depending on which side of him prevails. For me, "Gods" doesn't contain merely the formal meaning of the word; it means humanistic impulses, the goodness in man, the Hindu idea.

            Specifically, I was thinking there of the example of politics, since it is, in one sense, perhaps the most powerful twentieth-century God. I was thinking of the corruption of politics when it enters into an equation, whereby politics equals power and power equals this: "I'm different from you, I'm higher than you because I have power and you don't". That is the worst form of corruption because it works precisely against those impulses that bring people together. Sure, you should, by all means, be yourselves, but remember you must be with others too: that is the way of the Taoist, the way of Buddha, the way of Christ. And that's why I write what I write, for, in a Third World situation, I feel that a poet also has a double responsibility. One is his responsibility to remain a poet for himself and the other is to have a function within his society, but this involves necessarily some sacrifice of inner voices.

            But the time may come when you feel you've done enough with larger themes in that, as you continue to write about them, there is the growing diminution of real interest. Maybe one should balance the two; a poetry that is personal in origin, by the very nature of its demands, ensures that one's idiom is kept healthy and rooted in the psyche. I myself started off in 1949 by writing some poems; since then, I've always been involved in the promotion of other people's works by other poets, helping them directly, looking at their poems, talking about them, putting anthologies together, getting magazines going, and so on.

            Now, I feel I have done enough; it's time for younger people to help promote the writing. As you grow older, you feel that there is a need to re-tap one's inner sources, emotional sources, to keep your language vital. I must go within the self.

---

NOTES

1	Edwin Thumboo, ‘Introduction', in Edwin Thumboo (ed.), The Second Tongue: An Anthology of Poetry from Malaysia and Singapore, Singapore: Heinemann Asia, 1976, pp. vii-xxxv, ix.
2	Edwin Thumboo, Gods Can Die, Singapore: Heinemann Asia, 1977.
3	From Thumboo, ‘Catering for the People', in Gods Can Die pp. 56-57.
4	Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.
5	Gods, p. 28,
6	Gods, pp. 50-51, 51.
7	‘How to Win Friends'. Like ‘Ulysses by the Merlion' mentioned later, this poem would be included in Ulysses by the Merlion (Singapore: Heinemann Asia, 1979), but at the time of the interview both had only appeared as periodical literature.
8	Okot p'Bitek, Song of Lawino, Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1966.
9	Gods, pp. 10-11, 11.
10	This would be the title poem of Thumboo's next collection of verse. Also see Note 7.
11	Gods, pp. 28, 29, 30.
12	Gods, p. 12.
13	Gods, pp. 60-61
14	Gods, pp. 62-63.

References

p'Bitek, Okot (1966) Song of Lawino, Nairobi: East African Publishing House.

Thumboo, Edwin (1976) ‘Introduction'. In Edwin Thumboo (ed.), The Second Tongue:An Anthology of Poetry from Malaysia and Singapore. Singapore: Heinemann Asia.

________ (1977) Gods Can Die. Singapore: Heinemann Asia.

________ (1979) Ulysses by the Merlion. Singapore: Heinemann Asia.

Williams, Eric (1944) Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.