Singing in a Second Tongue:

Recent Malaysian and

Singaporean Poetry in English
*
Woon-Ping Chin Holaday
Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA

In the last decade or so, there has been a significant number of publica-
tions of Malaysian and Singaporean poetry in English, notably an
anthology titled The Second Tongue, edited by Edwin Thumboo.’
Critical response to the poetry has ranged from the acclaim of Kirpal
Singh, who sees Singaporean poetry as &dquo;on the brink of achieving full
maturity&dquo;,2 to the disapproval of the American critic, Jan Gordon,
who has objected to the poetry as being imitative, narrow in scope, and
immature in language and form.3 To assess the nature and the
accomplishment of this recent verse, I would like to examine the role of
English as a poetic medium in each country, focusing on the work of
three prominent poets, Muhammed Haji Salleh, Ee Tiang Hong, and
Edwin Thumboo, each of whom represents a different ethnic group.
Among the questions I will address are: (1) what the poets’ aims are in
writing in English, (2) how each poet works out his relation to his
country and to his own ethnic tradition in his verse, and (3) whether
each poet succeeds in creating a recognizably &dquo;Malaysian&dquo; or
&dquo;Singaporean&dquo; poetry. My chief question, then, is whether the poetry
of this region has truly come of age, as it were, whether in each country
we have a poetry that may be called a &dquo;national poetry&dquo;.
Frantz Fanon’s definition of national literature sheds important light
on this subject. In a chapter ‘ ‘On National Culture&dquo; in his book, The
Wretched of the Farth, Fanon outlines three phases which characterize
the evolution of Third World writers.’ The first is the imitative phase
of &dquo;unqualified assimilation&dquo; of the colonial power: Malaysian and
Singaporean poets, by and large, have passed this phase. The second
phase is described by Fanon as a questioning, disturbed phase in which
the native ‘ ‘decides to remember what he is&dquo;. Instead of apprehending
*
Paper presented at the Modern Language Association Convention m New York City,
December 1981.
28

the total reality of his people’s experience, he merely catches the static
custom and ‘ ‘the culture he leans toward is often no more than a stock
of particularisms&dquo;. Malaysian poetry in English does not appear to
have passed beyond this phase. Singaporean poetry, on the other hand,
best represented in the work of Edwin Thumboo, appears, as I hope to
demonstrate later, to have reached a third stage: at this stage, according
to Fanon, the poet, instead of idealizing the people’s culture, becomes
an ‘ ‘awakener&dquo; of the people and creates a revolutionary literature and
5
a national literature.5
No single factor, apart from colonialism, has affected the literary
conditions in both Malaysia and Singapore as significantly as the ethnic
and linguistic diversity brought about by the importation of Chinese
and Indian labour to this region during British rule. Today, Malaysia’s
population of thirteen million comprises roughly 50% indigenous
Malays, 3 3 % Chinese, 10 % Indians, and 7% Eurasians, aborigines,
and others. Singapore’s population of two and a quarter million is
divided into approximately 76% Chinese, 15% Malays, and 7%
Indians and others.6Each racial group may be divided into those who
are educated in the vernacular or in English and those who are

illiterate; within each group there are numerous sub-groups-for

example, the Indian community consists of Tamils, Sikhs, Gujeratis,
Pakistanis, Banglas from Bangladesh, and Ceylonese from Sri Lanka. In
addition, these ethnic groups are divided by religious, economic, and
geographical boundaries, boundaries which were maintained and to
some extent exacerbated by the British policy of ruling by dividing. As
a sociologist has put it, ‘ ‘when ethnic value systems are seen ... to be

mutually incompatible within the same political system and when

socio-economic differences are demarcated by ethnic boundaries,
diversity is sharpened to the fine edge of antipathy and often
violence’ .
Since achieving independence, the two countries have diverged
significantly in their governmental policies towards the use of English.
In Malaysia, the aim has been to assert the dominance of the Malay
language and to relegate English to the status of a foreign language.
The National Language Bill of 1967 instituted Malay as the only
official language, with English to be phased out as a medium of instruc-
tion in schools and universities. Singapore, on the other hand, has
emphasized the use of English as an official language and as the
medium for building national unity and identity. This difference of
policy towards the use of English has significant implications for the
poetry that is written in each country. First, it makes writing in
English a political issue. As the Australian critic Norman Sims has
 29

pointed out, ‘ ‘to write in English in Malaysia is to make a political

statement against the national interest and to declare oneself as a reac-
tionary the eyes of the state&dquo;, whereas to do so in Singapore is &dquo;to
in
express oneself in a language which is central to the national life of the
republic ...&dquo;.1 Second, it makes writing in English a &dquo;socially
specified&dquo; activity: it designates the writer as a member of the rising
elite in Singapore, and the fading one in Malaysia.
English remains, however, in wide use in both Malaysia and
Singapore and has evolved, over the years, into identifiable local
dialects with a definable speech continuum ranging from low, medium
to high English or, in linguistic terminology, from the basilect to the
mesolect and the acrolect, with the last comparable to standard English
used in Britain.9 Most poets in Malaysia and Singapore write in
acrolect or &dquo;high&dquo; English and, apart from a few scattered efforts,
there has been no attempt to tap the rich rhythms and idioms of native
speech on a scale comparable, say, to that of Black poets in America.
Education in the English stream has had a long history in both
Malaysia and Singapore, and there are substantial numbers of people
who may be said to know more about European culture then they do
their native traditions, and for whom English is in fact the first
language. For the majority of those writing in English, however,
English is a second language learned from early childhood in English-
medium schools at which a fairly high level of competency in English
could be acquired.’0
The first significant movement towards creating a distinct
’’

‘Malayan&dquo; poetry began in the late 1940s with the rising nationalism
after the war, among the students at the University of Malaya (then
situated in Singapore). Their objective was to forge a poetry based on
Malayan life and speech, and the language to be used was dubbed
&dquo;Engmalchin&dquo;, a composite of the three main languages, English,
Malay, and Chinese. This movement began to lose momentum, accor-
ding to one of the leaders, Wang Gungwu, because the poets began to
doubt that English was the most suitable medium for their purposes
and because they had &dquo;lost their earlier vision&dquo;. Wang’s diagnosis of
the situation is especially relevant to our investigation: &dquo;When the
Malayans appear&dquo;, he said, &dquo;there will be a Malayan poetry&dquo;.&dquo;
The next generation, including Edwin Thumboo, Ee Tiang Hong,
and pong Phui Nam, began publishing in the 1950s: it is this genera-
tion, in my view, that has reached maturity and is producing the most
important poetry of the region. Of the generation of the 60’s, Muham-
med Haji Salleh stands out as one of the most ambitious and promi-
nent, having received an ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian
30

Nations) award for literature in 1977. Those of the following genera-

tion, writing in the 70’s, are generally preoccupied with personal iden-
tity and introspection, and write with an assurance and assertiveness
gained for them by their forerunners.
At a congress on national culture held in 1971 in Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia, it was decided that only literature written in Malay would be
considered to be national literature, and that works written in other
languages would constitute sectional literatures.’If we can judge from
the poetry written in English, the fact of the matter is that nearly all
Malaysian literature, by the nature of the political realities that it
reflects, is sectional and often sectarian.
Much of Malaysian poetry in English inclines towards what Fanon
describes in The Wretched of the Earth as &dquo;a will towards particula-
rism&dquo; .’It is essentially the expression of individuals from splintered
groups who define themselves along the &dquo;arteries of ethnic parti-
cularities&dquo; .’Instead of presenting the entire fabric of a multi-cultural
society or addressing the nation as a whole, it confines itself to private
or partisan interests. English, in this case, becomes the tool for one

linguistic group to voice its particular grievances to the other, or to flex

its cultural muscles.
Muhammed Haji Salleh, an accomplished poet in the Malay
language with three volumes of Malay poetry to his name, seems to be
chiefly concerned with using English to represent to the other ethnic
groups and to the world at large the Malay point of view. His poems,
anthologized in The Second Tongue and collected in a volume titled
Time and Its People, are paeans to the Malay ethos. They present
archetypal images of rural Malay life, images of fishermen, farmers,
and village folks in their earth-bound ways. In them, Muhammed
reifies the Malay claim to the land and to antecedence. The poem
&dquo;blood&dquo;, for instance, evokes the emotionally charged image -

&dquo;tanah tumpah darah&dquo;-of the land as the womb of the Malays, the
place from which their blood issued forth:
the blood in me has travelled the centuries
flowed in unknown veins
crossed swampy rivers and proud straits
the loins that have bome my beginnings
stood in their past
the great-grandfather who walked in piety
had filtered his purity into his dutch-hating son
who walked with him and with God.
they dominated their communities and traditions,
purified the ancestral mud to clean earth
and grew in its clutch children of faith
S
I ’ ’ blood ’ ’ 1’
 31

The preoccupation with ancestral roots and with cultural purity

stems from Muhammed’s overriding concern with the preservation of
traditional Malay customs. In an essay titled &dquo;Cultural Justice&dquo; he
defines the healthy society as one in which traditional values withstand,
in his words, &dquo;the monstrous movement of universal urbanism&dquo;.
&dquo;Cultural justice&dquo; is defined as the freedom for traditional societies to
preserve their customs and to &dquo;be themselves&dquo;.16It is significant to
note that he equates the traditional society exclusively with the Malay
one, as if there were only one traditional society in Malaysia. When he
bemoans the threat of cultural diffusion and the loss of identity, he
refers solely to the Malay society. (Ironically, as will be seen in the case
of Ee Tiang Hong’s poetry, the non-Malay groups share the same fear
of cultural diffusion because of Malay domination.)
In a paper discussing various literary responses to multi-cultural
societies, Lloyd Fernando includes Muhammed among those authors
who reject multi-cultural growth and who respond to pluralism by
resolving &dquo;to go back to one’s own heritage in the hope that
homogeneity may be restored&dquo; .&dquo; In Muhammed’s poems, other
groups, if they appear at all, are featured as suspicious elements, rein-
forcing certain stereotypes. In &dquo;the new road&dquo; we have these lines on
the exploitation of a Malay farmer:
this was his land before men in wide cars
came to pursuade him in broken malay

they bought it
they took away his generations.
(&dquo; the new road&dquo;)’8
The distrust of other groups extends to social generalizations abroad, as
evident in the poem &dquo;hawaii&dquo; in which human relations are clearly
depicted in terms of colour:
blue into blue, green with white,
black lava washes down to the shore,
to the surprised tourists.
dream of the white,
fields and profits of the yellow.
my brown man
is unhomed from his plains
and the long beaches of the pacific
(‘ ‘hawaii&dquo;)’9
In the isolated Malay world depicted by Muhammed, it is the rural
virtues and customs that are upheld. We are not shown the life of other
32

cultures nor of the urban Malays who struggle to attain economic pro-
gress and modernization. This omission tends to produce an idealized
picture of Malay life, a picture that &dquo;catches the static custom&dquo; .20 As
he writes in a poem titled &dquo;the timeless&dquo;, his people are &dquo;time-
less/never count or add,/multiply or divide the days&dquo; .~ ~ Given the com-
plexities of the society in which he lives, the concerns and solutions
reflected in his work are essentially limited. Thus it is not surprising to
find his vision of the future for his people to be a pessimistic one:
i browse the years
the emotion and reason
of a people imprisoned in their hopes
besieged by naivete
at last to become
inhabitants of a wilderness.
(‘ ‘a taste of history’ ’’12
As it turns out, the non-Malay groups in Malaysia, also concerned
with upholding their traditions, fear the same threat of cultural extinc-
tion-in their case, because of Malay dominance. In the poetry of
Ee-Tiang Hong, a Straits-born Malaysian Chinese, Malaysia is a
wilderness because of this threat. Hence the subject and title of his
third volume of poetry, Myths for a Wilderness. 23 Due to strict govern-
ment laws prohibiting the discussion of &dquo;sensitive&dquo; issues such as
Malay privileges and the use of the national language, most Malaysian
writers are wary of discussing political matters. Ee’s engagement with
exactly these matters, a concommitant of his intense attachment to his
country, can be considered to be courageous and even dangerous to his
personal safety-it is significant that he now lives in exile in Australia.
In a paper delivered at the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1978, titled
&dquo;Malaysian Poetry in English: Influence and Independence&dquo;, Ee
discusses the uncertain future of English as a literary medium in
Malaysia. For him, the freedom to write in English is synonymous with
political freedom. He regards the English language as &dquo;a living force
that will ensure that a society may yet remain open, and so enable us to
come to terms with the modern world in a diversity of ways&dquo; . 24 He
thus defines his role as a poet in a political context. As he puts it, &dquo;to
define oneself in context is to awake to one’s possibilities and to stake
one’s freedom&dquo;. This freedom, symbolized by the freedom to write in
the language of one’s choice, is, as Ee sees it, severely threatened:
Poet and nation do not always speak the same language. In that situation, nationalism is
no more than the bawling of a perverse child demanding that it alone be heard, or it will
mess up the whole place. On another note, it is a strident voice of one communal group,

drowning and disparaging other voices, certifying them dead or insane as the case may
be.2’
 33

In Ee’s poetry, we find a compulsion to articulate the inarticulate or

the forbidden, to confront and banish the silence, demanded by law,
that threatens his very existence as a poet. With the controlled irony
that characterizes much of his work, he states in a poem titled &dquo;silence
is Golden&dquo;:
All right
So we won’t
We won’t say
We have seen
The bogey.
We will be
Worldly-wise
What we won’t see
Hear or say
Ceases to be

Only it happened, once,

A psychocase
A mute saw something
Shocking
And burst into speech.
(‘ ‘Silence is Golden’ ’’16
Unlike Muhammed, Ee regards the resuscitation of the past as a
&dquo;false ceremony&dquo;. In the poem ‘ ‘Manifesto&dquo; he says, &dquo;Let us not
extend the terms of the dying/More than is relevant/Or healthy to the
living&dquo;. His urge, on the contrary, is to:
Let the dead lie dead,
The dying creatures of darkness
Quack, scratch, screech, and crawl
Back into blukar, jungle, crevices of rock,
Or squat in the shade of a stunted tree,
Blinded, when the all dark
Shattering cockcrow
Ushers our dawn.
(’ ’Manifesto’ ’Y7
The urge to speak out, symbolized in the image of the cockcrow in
the lines above, congeals into anger and impatience with those who re-
main silent. In the poem &dquo;Justice&dquo; he declares:

People get what they deserve.

They have no right to want
Islands shimmering with hope and plenty,
Truth and goodness and beauty
Who will not cast their will
And their beliefs
Upon the waters;
34

Behold
The many who could have led
But have defaulted, and are led,
The many who should be speaking,
But are silent, barred in their anger,
While these few
Who should have been stoned
(And may he cast the first stone
Who dares!)
Bask in the sun,
The baskers.
(&dquo; Justice’ ’/8
Perhaps the most bitter and poignant denunciations are those ex-
pressed in the poem ‘ ‘Patriotism&dquo; .

Surely by the time one reaches

The seventh generation,
The seventh heaven,
One is no longer subject
To all these?

They demand
That we start all over agam,
Prove our loyalty
(To God or Caesar?)
Or go back to where we came from,
They demand
That we accept the new order,
Stomach the reversal of our lot,
Hold our tongue, seal our lips,
Be grateful for what we have got
(The fruits of our toil),
They demand ...
With all these, goodness,
How shall I breathe with dignity
What air of freedom there is
Here in my motherland?
(‘ ‘Patriotism&dquo;~9
As if in response to Muhammed’s claim to &dquo;purity&dquo; in the poem
&dquo;blood&dquo; quoted earlier, Ee says in his paper on Malaysian poetry in
English: &dquo;Where once we were all in the same family, there is now a
lot of bad blood. We are told who are the natural issue, the step-
children, the foster children, the bastards.&dquo; In his view, all the talk of
Malaysia as a unified nation is empty rhetoric and the country is far
from attaining a national identity. As he says, &dquo;A Malaysian is only in
the state of becoming, if not quite a nonentity. As for the English-
 35

educated, it’s not even sure what some of them do want to become, or
what will become of them. &dquo;3° Eventually, because even those who
oppose the repression and the inequities are themselves fragmented as a
group, there is little choice but to retreat. It becomes apparent, even-
tually, that it is futile, in his words, &dquo;to shed/One anger against the
world&dquo;. In the epilogue to Myths for a Wilderness, Ee intimates his
own withdrawal and that of a number of others who have departed from
the country in resignation, frustration, or fear:
Here you stand, mediator, at the crossroads of the great civilizations,
A multiplicity of languages, religions, myths, etc.
Feel all over the dark plain, immense potential,
The air mutable with spores that irritate the
Imagination.
Only beware of the taboos, planted among the flowers,
Beneath familiar bowers, and telling as tombstones.
You may not satirise the weaknesses and the follies of class or race
Lest you tread on its snail-horn sensitivities,
Nor can you say aloud what you really feel about the vital issues
Lest blood flow in the streets and barren the padi-fields.
Lampooning is out,
The influence of some humorless personages being so pervasive
You might as well give up the ghost, watch the grass grow,
Few profitable fields of employment being open to you, poor idiot.
(&dquo; Epilogue
In the Malaysian case, then, English is the medium for a poetry of
sectarian interests. For the Malay poet, Muhammed Haji Salleh, it con-
veys the Malay point of view to non-Malays. For the Chinese poet, Ee
Tiang Hong, on the other hand, it expresses the displaced, threatened,
minority position of the non-Malay. Nestled between these two poles is
a motley collection of verse amounting mostly-using Fanon’s
phrase-to a &dquo;stock of particularisms&dquo;, poems about watching the
grass grow,32 or about ethnic nostalgia fast rendered quaint by the press
of actual events.
In Singapore, the poetry of Edwin Thumboo uses English as an
unambiguously positive poetic medium. As Thumboo sees it, there is
no other language that serves as well as English to form, in his words,
‘ ‘a vital bridge&dquo; between various linguistic groups. In the preface to
his anthology, The Second Tongue, he describes English as ‘ ‘a com-
modious, hold-all language&dquo; possessing a &dquo;comprehensible, flexible,
resolving power, a readiness to render fresh, profound statement&dquo;.33 In
keeping with governmental policy of using English as the official
language to build a unified society, Thumboo regards English primarily
as the medium for expressing a syncretistic vision of the plural society.
36

To embark on creating an indigenous verse in English, Thumboo

recognizes that the first task is to rid the language of cumbersome
colonial trappings: &dquo;Mastering it&dquo;, in his words, &dquo;involves holding
and breaking a body of habitual English associations to serve that con-
dition of verbal freedom cardinal to energetic, resourceful writing&dquo; .34
The poet, speaking for the people, must exorcize the unwanted
elements of the colonial powers, a process that must, perforce, begin
with getting rid of the colonialists’ physical presence:
We so but merely ask
No more, no less, this much:

We ask you see

The bitter, curving tide of history,
See well enough, relinquish,
Restore this place, this sun
To us and the waiting generations.
...

Depart white man.

Depart Tom, Dick and Harry.

Gently, with ceremony;
We may still be friends,
Even love you ... from a distance.
°
(&dquo;May 1954&dquo;)’S
In his two recent volumes of poetry, Gods Can Die36 and Ulysses By
the Merlion,37 Thumboo clearly attains the status of a &dquo;national
poet&dquo;. His is a poetry that addresses the needs of the people. It is a
poetry that may properly be called, in Fanon’s words:
a literature of combat, because it moulds the national consiousness, giving it form and
contours and flinging open before it new and boundless horizons; it is a literature of
combat because it assumes responsibility, and because it is the will to liberty expressed
in terms of time and space.&dquo;8

Thumboo has found his poetic subject and inspiration by rising to

meet the needs and aspirations of his country; namely, to survive as a
stable, ‘ ‘rugged&dquo; nation in a volatile region. Most importantly, he sees
his commitment as a poet as belonging, not to any particular ethnic or
racial group, but to the pluralistic society as a whole. (His expansive
and detached vision, allowing him to move freely from one ethnic
group to another in his poetry, may partly be attributed to his mixed
parentage-he is the son of an Indian father and a Chinese mother.)
The most striking feature of Thumboo’s work is his sense of social
responsibility, based on a conscious decision to eschew personal pre-
occupations and to be a public poet dealing with the crucial issues of a
 37

developing nation. In an interview with the African writer Peter

Nazareth, Thumboo defines the problems of his nation:
We are a nation of migrants, really. We are, in that sense, an artificial creation, but an
artificial creation that is absolutely vital and viable, because of the geographical situation
of Singapore. It is an important place, geographically. So the only thing we have to
do-in a sense a very massive thing, is to make sure we emerge-as a people.... Because,
after all, with the plural societies, once you achieve independence, you have a multi
cultural society. We are busy searching for bridges for cultures.’9

In the poem &dquo;Catering for a People&dquo;, he writes of Singapore’s

precarious geographical position:
We are flexible, small, a boil
On the Melanesian face.
If it grin or growl, we move-
To corresponding place,
Keeping sensitive to trends, adapting,
To these delinquent days.

and of the responsibilities ahead:

... we have to work at a destiny.
We stumble now and then. Our nerves are sensitive.
We strive to find our history,
Break racial stubbornness,
Educate the mass and Educated-

There is little choice-

We must make a people.’o

The poet’s function, as Thumboo sees it, is to set before his people
their collective myths and symbols. Behind him lie the rich treasures of
several great and ancient civilizations, but the past must not be ideal-
ized nor simply resurrected for its own sake. He must remember
&dquo;Past, present, future&dquo; .4‘ Time, &dquo;no longer a/Slow, old, patient
man&dquo;, must be &dquo;Re-invented, rigidly calibrated,/At the mercy of
micro-seconds,/Computer-time ...&dquo;.°2 Where necessary, the poet
must create new myths or adapt those of the past, from both the East
and the West, to suit his needs. In the title poem ‘ ‘Ulysses by the
Merlion&dquo;, the Greek traveller finds along his odyssey that he has to
come to grips with the strange, hybrid creature, the merlion, synthesis
of Eastern and Western myth, symbol of Singapore:
Nothing, nothing in my days
Foreshadowed this
Half-beast, half-fish,
This powerful creature of land and sea.
38

Peoples settled here,

Brought to this island
The bounty of these seas,
Built towers topless as Ilium’s.

They make, they serve,

They buy, they sell.
Despite unequal ways,
Together they mutate,
Explore the edges of harmony,
Search for a centre;&dquo;

Thumboo’s past experience as a civil servant well equips him for

these tasks, and for the purpose of representing and awakening his
nation. It allows him, firstly, to view social and political situations with
an analytical eye and, secondly, to employ the &dquo;impartial rhetoric&dquo; of
the civil servant in the British tradition.&dquo; The experience enables him,
most importantly, to write a verse that is, in its best sense, pragmatic,
that is &dquo;sociological and yet finds its source in subjectivity&dquo; .45
The diverse cultural influences meet and mingle in his poems in a
typically Singaporean context. One of the best examples is the poem
&dquo;John &dquo;-a name shared by members of various ethnic groups-which
attempts to encompass all the kinds of discourse and food found on the
island:

John Watson, John Tan

John Harniman, John Raja,
John Cawelti, John Waiyaki,
John Sinclair, John Kasaipwalova,
Live by mountain, river,
In the comfort of mythologies,
Condominium, palm grove,
Conical house of reeds,
Hedged by files and duties,
Separated by auguries, civilizations.
I know them all, know they
Can meet, be equal,
Cogitate, break bread,
Apportion chapatis over fish-head curry;
Dine subtly

There is a special harvest

(&dquo; John &dquo;)&dquo;6

assessing the social landscape around him, Thumboo is basically

In
optimistic, though retaining a firm sense of reality:
 39

our children will to school,

Keep tidy, learn new maths,

Return bilingual, improve upon us
While we keep about our tasks.

Whatever the dialect of Your tribe

O Lord,
You’ll surely help those
Who also help themselves.
(&dquo;Christmas Week 1975&dquo;)&dquo;
Unlike Muhammed and Ee, each of whom foresees a wilderness caused
by the encroachments of the other race, Thumboo makes no prog-
nostications. What he does make, on the other hand, is a rally call to
his people to meet the challenges ahead and to keep before them
new visions,
So shining, urgent,
Full of what is now.
(‘ ‘Ulysses by the Merlion&dquo;)°8
Pragmatic, efficient, wise, Thumboo’s poetry articulates for his people
a fact ultimately essential for their survival:

A City should be the reception we give ourselves

What we prepare for our posterity
The City is what we make it.
You and I. We are the City,
For better or for worse.
(&dquo;The Way Ahead&dquo;Y&dquo;
To sum up, then, my inquiry as to the role ofEnglish as a poetic
medium in Malaysia and Singapore, it can be said that it remains
questionable in Malaysia while in Singapore it seems to be assured of
continued and vital use. If we were to compare its role in these two
countries with that of French in the Negritude movement in Africa,
however, it does not appear to have the cohesive, trans-national power
that French has among the Blacks. While in Malaysia, English is con-
fined mainly to ethnic concerns, in Singapore, it struggles to forge a
national consciousness. Perhaps the difference lies not so much in the
inherent qualities of the language as in the cultural and social condi-
tions to which the languages have been put to use. The Blacks of the
Negritude movement have been able to transcend tribal and national
barriers mainly on the basis of the recognition of their racial
heritage-as Blacks; it is precisely this same consideration, race, that
divides the peoples of Southeast Asia. One would hope for them that
more spokespersons will emerge with the vision and the eloquence of
Edwin Thumboo.so
40

NOTES

1 Edwin Thumboo, ed., The Second Tongue, Singapore: Heinemann, 1976.

2 Kirpal Singh, "Achieving Maturity: Singapore Poetry in English," Westerly,
4, December 1976, pp. 91-4.
3 Jan B. Gordon, "The Crisis of Poetic Utterance: The Case of Singapore," Pacific
Quarterly (Moana), 4, pp. 9-16.
4 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, New York:
Grove, 1963, pp. 222-3.
5 Ibid.
6 Stanley Bedlington, Malaysia and Singapoe, Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978,
pp. 118-19 & 213.
7 Ibid., p. 118.
8 Norman Sims, "The Future of English as a Poetic Medium in Singapore and
Malaysia," CNL/Quarterly World Report, 2, iv: 12.
9 See John T. Platt, "The Sub-Varieties of Singapore English: Their Sociolectal and
Functional Status", in The English Language in Singapore, ed. William Crewe,
Singapore: Eastern Universities Presses, 1977, pp. 83-93.
10 The English curriculum in these schools consisted of hearty doses of Shakespeare,
the Romantics, the novels of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy.
Those who majored in English literature in the universities studied the entire
gamut of British works ranging from Beowulf to the moderns. American literature
has only recently gained respectability, with the introduction of authors such as
Hemingway and Fitzgerald. A course in Commonwealth Literature was intro-
duced in 1966 after Professor Lloyd Fernando, returning from the University of
Leeds, assumed the chairmanship of the English department at the University of
Malaya.
11 Wang Gungwu, "Trial and Error in Malayan Poetry," Malayan Undergrad, July
1958, p. 8. Quoted in Harry Aveling’s "Towards An Anthology of Poetry from
Singapore Malaysia", in South Pacific Images, ed. Chris Tiffin (Queensland:
South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature & Language Studies,
1978), p. 87.
12 Thumboo, The Second Tongue, p. xxxiv.
13 Fanon, p. 239.
14 Stanley Bedlington, p. 172.
15 Muhammed Haji Salleh, Time and Its People, Kuala Lumpur: Heinemann, 1978,
p. 15.
16 Muhammed Haji Salleh, "Cultural Justice," in Questioning Development in S.E
.
Asia, ed. Nancy Chng, Singapore: Selected Books, 1977, p. 107.
17 Lloyd Fernando, "A Note From the Third World Towards the Re-definition of
Culture," in Awakened Conscience, ed. C. D. Narasimhaiah, New Delhi:
Sterling, 1978, pp. 326-7.
18 Muhammed Haji Salleh, Time and Its People, p. 58
19 Ibid., p. 72.
20 A phrase used by Fanon, p. 223.
21 Muhammed Haji Salleh, Time and Its People, p. 52.
22 Ibid., p. 16
23 Ee Tiang Hong, Myths for a Wilderness, Singapore: Heinemann, 1976.
24 Ee Tiang Hong, "Malaysian Poetry in English: Influence and Independence,"
Pacific Quarterly (Moana), 4, p. 69.
 41

25Ibid.
26 Ee Tiang Hong, Myths for a Wilderness, p. 41.
27 Ibid., p. 46.
28 Ibid., p. 51.
29 Ibid., p. 52-3.
30 Ee Tiang Hong, "Malaysian Poetry in English: Influence and Independence,"
p. 70.
31 Ee Tiang Hong, Myths for a Wilderness, p. 59.
32 See, for example, Hilary Tham’s poem "Grass" in The Second Tongue, p. 6.
33 Edwin Thumboo, The Second Tongue, p. ix.
34 Ibid.
35 Edwin Thumboo, Ulysses by the Merlion, Singapore: Heinemann, 1979, p. 14.
36 Edwin Thumboo, Gods Can Die, Singapore: Heinemann, 1977.
37 Edwin Thumboo, Ulysses by the Merlion, Singapore: Heinemann, 1979.
38 Fanon, p. 240.
39 Peter Nazareth, "Edwin Thumboo Interviewed by Peter Nazareth," World
Literature Written in English, Vol. 18, No.1, April 1979, pp. 157 & 161.
40 Edwin Thumboo, Gods Can Die, pp. 56-7.
41 Edwin Thumboo, Ulysses By the Merlion, p. 20.
42 Ibid., p. 22.
43 Ibid., p. 8.
44 See Peter Nazareth, "Edwin Thumboo Interviewed by Peter Nazareth," p. 153.
45 A term used by Jean-Paul Sartre in describing the poetry of the Negritude move-
ment. See Jean-Paul Sartre, "Black Orpheus," in The Black American Writer,
Vol. II, ed. C. W. E. Bigsby, 1969, p. 9.
46 Edwin Thumboo, Ulysses By the Merlion, pp. 12-13.
47 Edwin Thumboo, Gods Can Die, p. 61.
48 Ulysses By the Merlion, p. 19.
49 Gods Can Die, p. 59.
50 I would like to acknowledge the following persons for their help in obtaining
materials for the preparation of this paper: Professor Edwin Thumboo, University
of Singapore; Professor Katherine Staudt, University of Drexel; Richard Binder,
University of Drexel Library.