Pink Marshmallow 86’s Weblog

SALLEH BEN JONED was a Colombo Plan scholar sent to Australia to study English and ended up spending 10 years there. He became a student of the late James McAuley, one of Australia’s major poets, at the University of Tasmania. He came back to Malaysia in 1973 and joined the English Department of the University of Malaya which he quit in 1983 to become a freelance writer. Sajak Sajak Saleh/Poems Sacred and Profane was published in 1987 and As I Please, a collection of prose writing, in 1994. His second collection of prose pieces Nothing is Sacred was published in 2003. He launched his new collection of Poems called Adam’s Dream during the Citigroup Kuala Lumpur International Literary Festival 2004.

In his poem, “Malchin Testament”, the persona is showing the scenario of the community in Malaysia on how they use English language and he criticizes the Malaysians in that sense. In the other sides, this poem shows how the Malaysian wants to be totally free. They want to make English as their own and try to build up their own identity and nation. That’s why they did not really care if there’re complains about how they use English. After being colonized for years, the Malaysian tries to build up its own identity whereas they want to be free from any colonization. They hated colonizer but at the same time still use their language.  We can see the evidence in stanza two and three: ..“stress put in all the wrong places, we say ‘cool’ eeben wen it’s hot lah, we hate the mat saleh races, but hijack deh lingo lah!..(Stanza 2) and “we true malaysians, you no, we pree people, you no: pree, to make english not English, but our very own, you see”.. It shows that a new vision of Malaysian had emerged in all their blessed arrogance and freedom.

“Malchin” is a hybrid language which is the combination of the first syllable of the words “Malay” and “Chinese”. The way of how this poem is written shows that the persona is totally celebrating Malaysian cultures. He writes about the issue of “Malayness” and “Nation” identity in such a way as to break down stereotypes. Identity and “Nation” was therefore continually subject to tensions and contestations which resist state-proffered categories. Obviously, the persona has abrogated the grammar and he did it with full of conscious. The point is to mock the Malaysians who totally speak broken English and seem to take it as there’s nothing wrong with that and they are freely to make the language as their own and speak it as the way of they speak of their own. Despite they came from different backgrounds and beliefs – that’s the point that reunited them as Malaysian community with multicultural background that repress divergent views on identity, community and belonging. The persona is proud with Malaysian culture, which shows that he is celebrating the Malaysian culture using a specific style of writing, behold to his identity of a Malaysian poet. 

In the early 1950s, LEE KOK LIANG, a Malaysian of Straits-Chinese heritage who was to become one of Malaysia’s most accomplished writers of fiction in English, spent two years at Lincoln’s Inn in London completing a law degree that he had begun at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Lee recorded his European observations in a journal-cum-diary entitled Sketches, Vignettes & Brush Strokes (also given a second working title of Ramblings and Remembrances), written in London and Paris between January 1952 and February 1954, and they form, in part, the basis for his first novel, the unpublished London Does Not Belong To Me which is due in 2003. Death is a Ceremony and Other Stories was his second collection of short stories, published in 1992.

Overall, “Death is a Ceremony” is a story of a boy – Baba, who had grown up to a man, is recollecting the memories of his late grandmother’s death, at the moment of his mother’s funeral ceremony. In this story, culture is a strategy of survival, which depicts how culture signifies, or what is signified by culture, a rather complex issue. As the eldest son, he is responsible to be the head of the funeral procession, whereas makes he noticed the absence of something – the sense of lost respect towards his own culture. As a consequence, the conflicting styles are in a reflection of the cultural and historical discourses, battling to be heard within the story that lies beneath Malaysian’s Chinese community. Through his memory recalls, he is in search of his own identity and yet realizes what he already dismissed – the value of a family that he left out many years ago for the modern lifestyle in the city. There were lots of cultural issues discussed in the story which support that the writer celebrates the Malaysian culture in more specific term, a Chinese culture.

In this story, he used the flashback literary technique profusely to depict the past and the present concurrently, wherefore make it more interesting to see how certain things being presented in this story and thus, makes the story stands out. Here, within the framework, the story is written from the third person, omniscient point of view which mean that the narrator sees all, reports all, knows and explains the inner workings of the minds of any or all characters. For instance, sometimes the narrator tells the readers about the main character – Baba, through the eyes of other minor characters in the story. The used of some diction from two different races in the text – i.e sarong (Malay) and chi kee (Chinese), were the portrayal of Malaysian multicultural lifestyle amongst the people take place. Hence, the writer wants to deliver a message for the new generation; to put more appreciation towards the culture in order to maintain the ancestral tradition. That’s the right way to keep on celebrates the Malaysian culture throughout ongoing civilization in the future, although after the 50 years of nationhood.