By Daryl Lim Wei Jie

The Malaysian poet and writer Wong Phui Nam died on the 26th of September, 2022, in his sleep. I will always remember waking up to a text from his son, Sha’arin, informing me of this bald fact – My father passed away at 1050pm last night. In the haze and grog of the early morning, I wondered briefly if this was some deranged joke. I had just seen the man two days before, in his home in Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur. The pandemic had scuttled a planned trip in March 2020, then kept us apart for two long years.

He was immobile and confined to the house, but was otherwise in good spirits. He hoped to recover fully by December, so he could head to the optician’s to get his reading glasses adjusted. I found him as sharp as ever, and still deeply interested in literary ongoings in Singapore and Malaysia. Two hours of conversation, punctuated with frequent laughter, passed by swiftly. Towards the end of the afternoon, he said he was still writing poems and revising them, and that he wished to publish a final book. He waited for you, my mum said to me afterwards.

**Daryl Lim Wei Jie and Wong Phui Nam in a bookstore in Singapore, 2019.**

Yet his death does not come as a surprise – and though it sounds strange to say it, I do not think it surprised him. (Personally I think I have outlived my time, he texted me in August this year.) No other poet I know had so thoroughly prepared himself for death, contended with its shadowy mysteries. Death suffuses his work, acting as a catalyst of deeper truths about the exilic migrant condition that he perceived himself to be stranded in – and the broader human condition. That he found in ancient Egypt fertile ground to cultivate his own peculiar strain of myth is, in hindsight, entirely apt. One might even say he was fascinated by the scythe’s inarguable sweep.

Even as he approached the end, he faced it squarely, writing in a very recent unpublished poem, ‘Ruminations at Dawn’:

But the present filters out the senses from all else
but from itself, making it real, and we have to endure it.
Yet the present too is a passing dream, from which
we will salvage nothing, not even ourselves.

* * *

Death was a frequent visitor during Wong’s childhood. His mother died when he was four, at the age of 36, from kidney failure. His father would die during the Japanese occupation, due to complications from diabetes. His store of insulin had expired; the hospital had no antibiotics to treat the ulcer on his foot, which became infected and gangrenous. This death would turn up, years later, in the book Remembering Grandma and other Rumours (1989), with Wong imagining his father on his deathbed in the hospital:

Out of each unquiet night
there grows the sense that I am but remnant
cast up from another life, nothing that is wholly
man, thrown up log-like, upon the beach, this bed.

Remembering Grandma expresses his horror at death – not at its inevitability, but how its coming exposed the emptiness of the lives of his relatives, given over to sensuality and weaknesses of the flesh. I looked at the lives of my relatives and saw the failure of their lives in the crisis they underwent when they sensed their impending end, he said in an interview.

I can’t help but think of his father’s infected foot, though, described grotesquely by Wong as a “tight congested melon, ready to give out / its soft pulp at a touch”. I can’t help thinking of Wong Phui Nam’s own infected foot, which prevented him from walking in his last days. Of course, he wrote about it:

Pain ignited in the deep trench of my foot,
where skin and flesh has been sheared,
sheared off with some bone,
engulfs me in a fiery, insistent present
that is also the past.

That is also the past?

* * *

Twenty years old, Wong Phui Nam travelled from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore to begin his university education at the University of Malaya. The year was 1955. Singapore would achieve limited self-government that year, with the election of its first Chief Minister, David Marshall. As anticipation of eventual liberation from colonial rule grew, an incipient Malayan consciousness was coming into being.

The university had only become a full-fledged university six years prior, in 1949, a product of the merger of Raffles College and the King Edward VII College of Medicine. That year, The New Cauldron, a student magazine, began publication. The magazine set out lofty visions of a national literature:

The people of Malaya are a mixed crowd … A Malayan language will arise out of the contributions these communities will make to the linguistic melting pot. The emerging language will then have to wait for a literary genius who will give it a voice and a soul, a service which Dante performed for the Italian language.

In an atmosphere of febrile excitement, aspiring undergraduate writers experimented with this melding of languages, dubbed Englmalchin. Wang Gungwu recalls that “the last months of 1949 were an intensive period of experiment”, with madcap monstrosities such as Itu stamp ta’ ada gum ta’ boleh stick-lah the result. But in the end, the writers eventually decided “to write with English as [a] base”. The next year, Wang would publish his landmark attempt at a Malayan English poetry, the volume Pulse. Yet by 1955, The New Cauldron would declare Engmalchin “a failure…because of its self-conscious artificiality”.

* * *

Enter Wong Phui Nam and his associates, Tan Han Hoe and Oliver Seet. They steered the search for a new national literature in a different direction. Inspired by the French symbolists, Wong in the New Cauldron urged violence against the English language in service of a Malayan poetry:

To write poems expressing the Malayan national character … our future poets must indulge in, to misquote Rimbaud, a “reasoned derangement of” English forms of usage of the language. We can even expect violence in the syntax if necessary.

Wong and Tan edited Litmus One (1958), an anthology of thirteen poets, hoping that the book “could be a backbone for future verse-writers so that they need not work out their own system of symbols”. This energy culminated in Wong’s early chapbook, Toccata on Ochre Sheaves (1958), which attempted to build Malayan poetry on the myths and symbols of ancient Egypt. Though he later disavowed the book, his ability to evoke mounting disquiet in an alien landscape still holds power:

Within the abacus of my thought I cannot add
Or subtract the moon from upgashed furrows.
Along stone corridors of the ordered hill
The wind crept unseen, divorced of leafvoices.

Looking up my copy of his collected An Acre of Day’s Glass (2006), I realise that these four lines, like weary refugees, have survived the years, somewhat changed, and made their home in another sequence of poems, ‘First Notes’.

* * *

*Boedi Widjaja - A Tree Rings, A Tree Sings 树龄°述铃 (2021), Video still; generative video*
Image description: A still image from a DNA generative sound video. The image features a black-and-white vignette with the image of an old man framed in a blurry circle against a black background. Small, gray, serif characters are raining down in widely spaced lines around the old man. Some of the “a,” “g,” and “t” letters in the top left corner are highlighted in white.

What Wong Phui Nam really wanted to write was music. When I interviewed him in KL in 2019, he spoke of how frankly ecstatic he was when he first encountered classical music as a child. Much more so than when I came to poetry, he quipped. He tried to write pieces for the piano, but was unable to test them on the actual instrument. After the death of his father, the main breadwinner, his family was much too poor to afford a piano or hire a teacher.

His foray into musical composition crashed devastatingly into reality when a classmate in school attempted to play his piece. It didn’t sound like it had anything to do with a piano.

Then what else could I write? I started writing poetry as the next best thing.

* * *

Yet music was ever on his mind. His chapbook was a toccata: a short, virtuosic piece intended to showcase the musician’s dexterity. In his final year in university, he started writing a sequence titled ‘Nocturnes and Bagatelles’. Nocturnes are musical compositions inspired by the night – Chopin was a famed exponent – and we can perhaps hear a faint forlorn strain in these lines:

Evening settles in under a flat sky
upon a heart stricken with its emptiness.
You will not look upon my house, my broken garden
with frangipani by wire-fence strung with rain.

In How the Hills are Distant, his first mature poems, he cast himself as an Orpheus figure, coaxing music out of hard ground:

I may be ready for the torment which infects
a new beginning – to be my lute's flame
to charm these manic buildings, the columns
and mindless walls, withholding monsters
… to sue
out of a paranoiac darkness for a forgotten eurydice.

In his final years – in Chinese, we call them “night years” – he seemed to be straining to hear another kind of music. Upon turning eighty-six, he wrote:

… I am of an age
old enough to hear silence
in the winnowing in the wind of turning days,
hear it in dream, from intent listening –
…
as acuteness of ear comes with age,
silence grows ever louder.

* * *

One of Wong Phui Nam’s books is titled Against the Wilderness. I don’t think he was being melodramatic. In university, he faced down the hostility of the university’s English lecturers, who deeply disapproved of his literary activities. They threatened to fail him and those who associated with him. For this reason, Wong didn’t qualify for a degree in English, and only in Economics. Wong summarised these attitudes in an interview, with a characteristically wry coda:

All English poetry was holy writ. How dare we Asiatics even think of adding to it … ‘If you have not imbibed the language with your mother's milk, you will never have an ear for it, you see.’ (Actually, what one imbibes is baby talk with one’s mother’s milk.)

Even as he overcame these doubts about writing in English to produce some spectacular breakthroughs in poetry, culminating in How the Hills are Distant in 1968, fresh crises arose due to the political situation in Malaysia.

The riots of 13 May 1969, arising from deep communal tensions, provoked two major shifts that occurred in 1971: one economic, one cultural. Famously, the New Economic Policy sought to reduce ethnic economic disparities, with an eventual target stating that the Bumiputera (indigenous people) ought to hold a 30% share of the equity in Malaysia. Relatively less attention has been paid to the role of the National Culture Policy, which asserted that the national culture of Malaysia had to be based on the indigenous culture of the region. English literature was relegated to a “sectional” literature.

This situation silenced Wong, for about two decades, reducing him to a “fierce… charred mute” (to quote a poem he wrote after Rimbaud). Reflecting upon this in 2006, he said:

The language situation created grave doubts for me about my writing. I felt then that, by writing in English, perhaps I would never be able to draw on the ‘authentic’ life of this country. I questioned myself as to the legitimacy of my writing and I questioned myself into silence for quite a long while.

* * *

To encounter Wong Phui Nam’s poetry for the first time is to be plunged into a dark, alien landscape of foreboding, even hostile presences. Unregenerate beasts, demons and malevolent gods range the land. It is a world that actively resists interpretation:

You who would look for signs, or starve
among a wilderness of stone, there are only the boulders
drowning in pits of worked out mining leases.
From the main street of the town,
see how the hills are distant, locked in their silences.

Yet scholars have tried, and have read in the poems of How the Hills are Distant an expression of the migrant, exilic condition. Wong himself provided the clues, expressing his horror at the barren circumstances of his ancestors, who arrived in a “culturally (and spiritually) denuded state”, armed only with debased religious rituals, which he deemed “scant inheritance … to contend with the wilderness.” This deprivation he would explore in a personal way, in Remembering Grandma.

Others read into the poems the frustration of an attempt to articulate a unified, national consciousness. Again, Wong was his own explicator, stating that

In cultural terms, the Malaysian psyche is a naked one … We clothe our nakedness in tatters stripped from mutually unrelated cultures to which we severally claim to be heirs but which are not ours as a single people. I have thus come to see my work as a progressive mapping of this unprotected state.

One way of seeing it is that his poetry represents an aborted Malayan culture, an undead abomination staggering across the peninsula, searching for a home.

This seems to be a country where I have lost my way…

* * *

Increasingly, I have come to think of his poetry as a type of world-building. I take seriously his pronouncement that he has written for those who truly understand what it means to have to make one’s language as one goes along. Every nerd knows you only create a language so you can build a world around it.

I think this Wong-world, despite its sometimes perverse bleakness, was a means by which he understood the perplexing conditions and contradictions that engulfed him. A country that sidelined him and the language he wrote in (…yet he married a Malay woman, and converted to Islam). Separation from his closest compatriots: Oliver Seet and Tan Han Hoe suddenly became Singaporeans, after Singapore separated from Malaysia on 9 August 1965. The departure of other promising English poets from Malaysia, like Ee Tiang Hong and Shirley Lim. His own work in merchant banking, which must have rubbed up against his own persistent sense of living in a wilderness “serving the imperatives of commodity markets”, as he said in his introduction to Against the Wilderness (2000).

The world he constructed he had control of. He could be its main maker of meaning, or lack thereof. It was a realm of the “sick consciousness”, the wounded psyche. In this realm he battled himself and the demons that arose, decade after decade.

In a review of his collected work in 2007, Shirley Lim would comment: “It is when Wong forgets his losses … that his achievement as Anglophone poet of Malaysia's polyglot peoples and histories is most persuasive.”

Yet what is Wong Phui Nam without his losses?

* * *

His poetry is like some varieties of Chinese tea, I remarked to a friend. After one has gotten through the bitterness, there is an exquisite sweetness. This describes a shuixian I just had over the weekend, was the reply.

There are redemptive moments of lightness in his poetry, which feel like hard-won victories. In ‘Temple Caves’, we are in another part of the Wong-world. (He told me its images were inspired by the Batu Caves, a significant Hindu holy site just outside Kuala Lumpur.) We journey through these not-Batu caves, and descend into a harrowing realm of superstition and blindness not unlike Plato’s allegorical darkness. The statues of the gods here are mere torsos, stiffened rib cages locked with wire / and heads hardened about bent pig-iron rod. We are asked, rhetorically, What can they suggest? The answer:

All that we can hope to know about being more
than merely human is held fast, mixed in with coarse grain
in bodies, calcified into substance

that daily becomes more solid, more resistant than stone.

As we descend, the darkness deepens, it thrusts itself into the face and teeth… it beats back upon us our dis-ease. We are trapped in a dream of fury that would not subside.

Yet in the last section of the sequence we are told that it has been rumoured there are exits / in the most unexpected places. The poem ends on a prophecy. The sun, once caught in a massed entanglement of coiled roots, will tear and free itself:

Breaking out of the earth it will ascend
taking to itself half of the heavens, reveal itself
a tremendous bird of lightning, of the source of light,

bird that cleaves the world to itself in a consuming fire.

* * *

‘Temple Caves’ first appears in Remembering Grandma, and I find it interesting that the images of this prophecy are so precisely a reversal of the ending of a poem in the same book dedicated to his brother, who died of cancer:

Out of the melting heat of fierce corruption
there rose no other, no spreading of great wings,
no bird of renewal, bird out of the cleansing fire.

Though Wong was horrified by his clan’s futile struggles against death, he seems to have believed there was some possibility of spiritual truth that could emerge from properly reckoning with death.

In ‘Imago’, the last poem of Remembering Grandma, this truth, addressed directly as a you, is described as a grub-like potentiality residing in each person. You are faint imprint, of life / still to be received. It bides its time to one day be the revealed imago, perfect / in limb, in wing. This fully formed creature will rise, in due time, soar beyond / the common dust of day. Yet the speaker still declares himself too much of the flesh. We leave him, awaiting this epiphany, in uncertainty of the hour.

* * *

It is this same universal reality or truth that is being addressed in Wong’s last book, The Hidden Papyrus of Hen-taui (2012; revised edition, 2019), which opens:

Because we are mistaken about ourselves
We mistake a fearsome, punishing god for you.

These poems, set entirely in ancient Egypt, ostensibly tell the story of a neophyte Egyptian priestess and her increasingly heretical thoughts. In reality, I think they tell of his own spiritual convictions. Most of us, he thinks, are lost in this present world of dreams:

I am lost so deep in the common dream of the world,
I cannot wake. In dreaming the world, I weave
my own snare, a shimmering web sticky with the reality of
a seeming world. I am as a fly enmeshed…

When at last, in the final poem, Hen-taui liberates herself from this deceiving dream, she says she “will wait, till cleansed / of self, for the return to being, to you, the still centre”.

I return to that poem that Wong wrote upon turning eighty-six. As he journeyed to death, he stated his beliefs – and hopes – plainly, without the cloak of metaphor:

At eighty-six I hear – yet barely
of sure and certain hope
that with the shutting down of the senses,
the snuffing out of thought and the turning up
of its deep roots – that after earth or after fire,
silence at journey’s end is not an utter, unremitting nothingness

but a homecoming, a return to stillness,
stillness that is the origin of all creatures great and small.

For a man so invested in myth and symbol, this plainness seems almost too vulnerable and naked. Like Shem and Japheth, I want to look away.

* * *

The day after I met him for the last time, I went to Kinokuniya in KLCC, easily the most prominent bookstore in all Malaysia. I stopped by the poetry section, which was amply stocked with authors from all over the world – except, I realised after a thorough, dispiriting search, Wong Phui Nam.

This then is a country where one cannot wish to be … where all conclusions, all arguments are broken down to miles of striations, the soft mud-flats.

* * *

My favourite sequence of his is ‘Candles for a Local Osiris’, from Remembering Grandma. Wong imagines what happens to an Osiris figure who is transplanted to a Malayan landscape. This Osiris’ regenerative mission ultimately fails:

… A god, that day you stalked
your quarry till a sudden clearing in the woods
happened on you and its changes of climate
coursed through your veins. The flowers
you found here were furry and green
and could not bloom. In the undergrowth, the thing
you surprised had the look you did not understand.
And when remembrance of what you had done,
or left undone, could no longer hurt you
like a wound, under the leafy shadows
you were made ready for death.

In these poems, Wong achieves an elemental horror that reaches heights of myth unmatched and unprecedented in poetry from this part of the world. The stranger whose face is leprous under the road lamp / and his face clogged with new earth. I turn his haunting phrases over in mind, and they seem as fresh as when they were written, and when I first read them seven years ago in a bookshop in Singapore.

He probably believed that his own quest to rejuvenate the land had failed. Eurydice had slipped out of his arms. Provocatively, he declared, in 2009, that Malaysian writing in English was dead.

In 1993, in an essay titled ‘Out of the Stony Rubbish: A Personal Perspective on the Writing of Verse in English in Malaysia’, he claimed that Malaysian writers in English were writing largely to the dead, in Baudelaire’s sense of the unborn. He grimly hoped that what is written will be read some time into the future.

I am not sure about that future, and its distance from now.

* * *

In one version of the Osiris myth, Osiris is murdered by his brother Seth and dismembered, the pieces of his body scattered throughout the Nile. The body pieces are transformed to river reeds, and through this myth, the ancient Egyptians experienced the river and its legendary fertility as an emanation of a god.

I think about the very first poem of How the Hills are Distant, first published in Bunga Emas in 1964, a year after Malaysia was formed:

The old man grows,
lives from subconscious hills,
sentient in fishes and reeds that slant
towards eloquence of words.
The waterfowl cry
his flowering of vowels on the wind.

“How the Hills Are Distant” was recorded by Wong Phui Nam on the 16th of August 2022 as part of a larger audio-archive of Malaysian poetry titled A Wasteland of Malaysian Poetry in English curated by Brandon K. Liew.

Wong Phui Nam: Selected Publications

Poetry

Toccata on Ochre Sheaves (Singapore: The Raffles Society of the University of Malaya, Singapore; 1958)
How the Hills Are Distant (Malaysia: Tenggara, Department of English, University of Malaya; 1968)
Remembering Grandma and other Rumours (Singapore: Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore, 1989)
Ways of Exile (London: Skoob Books, 1993)
Against the Wilderness (Malaysia: Blackwater Books, 2000)
An Acre of Day's Glass: Collected Poems (Malaysia: Maya Press, 2005)
The Hidden Papyrus of Hen-taui (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2012)
The Hidden Papyrus of Hen-taui (revised edition, Malaysia: Bluback Productions, 2019)

Plays

Anike (Malaysia: Maya Press, 2005)

Daryl Lim Wei Jie is a poet, translator and literary critic from Singapore. His latest collection of poetry is Anything but Human (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize. His work has been featured in POETRY Magazine, Poetry Daily and The Southwest Review. His poetry won the 2015 Golden Point Award, awarded by the National Arts Council, Singapore. He edited Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet (2020), the first definitive anthology of literary food writing from Singapore. He is putting together an anthology of Malaysia-Singapore writing, entitled The Second Link.

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Boedi Widjaja's practice contemplates on house, home and homeland through long-running, interdisciplinary series developed in parallel. His approach is often autobiographical and oblique. Drawing as method is a defining element in his practice; expressed through diverse media from experimental photography and architectural installations to bio art and live art, with an emphasis on process and bodily engagement. Widjaja was trained in architecture and has worked in graphic design.