By Sasenarine Persaud

It is not often that one comes across a writer and critic like Peter Nazareth who tells you, up front, who he is and how he functions as a writer: “As a writer, I am interested in the practical side of writing: how it will help to change the world I am living in.” Yet in the next breath, in the next sentence he qualifies this: “Not that I overlook the question of the consciousness and emotions of the artist or the aesthetics and architecture of the art.” Perhaps, the directness of Peter Nazareth has the sprinkling of the dust of the ancient Indian seers, the Indian Rishis. Some years ago Nobel Laureate, V.S. Naipaul writing in The New York Review of a similar trait of the late President of the South American Republic of Guyana, Dr. Cheddi Jagan titled his essay, “A Handful of Dust.”

Naipaul is himself known for his directness. I have often, in the intervening years, thought that Naipaul was writing on the bluntness of Dr. Jagan because he, Naipaul, saw that reflected in himself. Dr. Jagan, an avowed communist politician was removed from office by the British colonial government in 1953. Re-elected to head the British Guiana (now Guyana) government when the constitution was restored, his government was again destabilized in the early 1960s by a well-known transatlantic anti-communist axis during the height of the cold war. Dr. Jagan would not return to power in his South American homeland until 1992, the year after Naipaul’s essay was published. Naipaul himself, one of the finest living prose writers of English, though nominated several times, was not awarded the Nobel Prize for literature until 2001. Many felt that the delay was due to his, like Dr. Jagan’s, uncompromising pursuit of truth as he saw it.

The Singaporean poet, Edwin Thumboo who is the subject of Peter Nazareth’s latest book, shares this trait of Naipaul and Dr. Jagan. Thumboo’s father was an Indian from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, while his mother was of Chinese descent. Nazareth’s thesis appears to be how Edwin Thumboo helped create a National Singaporean identity through his poetry. Singapore! Most Americans will remember little of Singapore except the incident in 1994 when a young American in Singapore was charged, convicted, jailed and caned for vandalism. Singapore, perhaps the only Island-city-state in the world, is one of the original “Asian Tigers.” Singapore, in financial circles, is considered the “Switzerland” of Asia and a major global banking centre. Until 1965 it was a part of the Malayan Federation, but was expelled and/or asked to leave the Federation, in part due to racial tension and race riots between ethnic Malays and ethnic Chinese. Singapore occupies a strategic position in the straits of Malacca and in its modern incarnation was a city created by the British as an important transit point to and from the Far East. The Japanese saw the strategic importance of Singapore during the Second World War and occupied the island, handing the British one of their worst military defeats.

Where and when does Singaporean Literature in English begin, and with whom? According to Nazareth, one of the major names associated with the beginnings of a Singaporean Literature and poetry is Edwin Thumboo. Thumboo, whose Ph.D. dissertation was on African poetry, has been a poet, professor, and civil servant. All of these roles see a convergence in his role as poet. Depending from where you are looking and whom you have read, Thumboo has come to be seen as the main architect of Singaporean Literature through his poetry, and also, especially through his most known poem, “Ulysses by the Merlion” as an apologist for the Singaporean ruling party and government, and a propagandist.

Nazareth begins his examination of Thumboo’s poetry by looking at this poem and showing the depth to the poem. In one of those quirks of life following art or literature, I became part of Nazareth’s analysis of this poem, and his response to the critics who felt that the poem and much of Thumboos’ poetry was “nationalist” propaganda for the Singaporean government. To his credit Nazareth does not shy away from this criticism; he begins his discussion with it. He quotes Dennis Haskell’s criticism, “The Merlion represents an attempt to manufacture culture, something which can only emerge organically out of peoples’ lives.”

The Merlion, Nazareth tells us citing Wikipedia, was designed for the Singapore Tourist Board in 1964. It was installed in 1972 and relocated to its current site in 2002. Nazareth shows how the poem has been misunderstood: the poet was appropriating the voice of Odysseus, who may have passed the area that is now Singapore, and in a recreated Homeric travel coming upon the Merlion. Nazareth suggests that Thumboo was attempting to create a psychic hinterland for Singapore in much the same way that many critics credit Wilson Harris with describing the vast and complex psychic hinterland of Guyana. It may be more accurate to posit that Harris was describing his own psychic hinterland. As a writer from Guyana, younger than Harris, with a different sensibility and cultural background, can Harris describe the psychic hinterland of Guyana for me? And, perhaps, this may be the objection of younger Singaporean poets to Thumboo’s attempt to create a path to the Singaporean hinterland that was suddenly severed when Singapore separated from Malaysia. A psychic hinterland for a country or state which has peoples of different ethnic and religious background is difficult to create by any one person, and it is not something that happens overnight, or over forty or fifty years.

But, perhaps, this is not that important in Nazareth’s examination of Thumboo’s poetry. In his narrative, Nazareth makes a subtle switch from the Merlion to Thumboo’s psychic territory. Nazareth seems to have forgotten the Merlion and the strong reactions to it and to Thumboo’s poem on it. But the reader hardly notices this. The digression and exploration of other Thumboo poems is seamless. Nazareth is sticking to his game plan to “discuss Thumboo’s poems as stories, without losing track of the need to analyze them as poetry.” There are no chapters in Nazareth’s narrative, just subsections—which makes for challenging reading.

One of the features of this book is the way Nazareth reproduces whole sections of poems, and often entire poems of Thumboo. How, after all, can you discuss a writer’s work—especially poetry—and not provide the reader with a sample of poems?  The selections provided by Nazareth may well comprise a slim selection of Thumboo’s poetry. This is one of the fine features of the book. There is no way a reader can read this book and not get an idea of the breath and scope of Thumboo’s poetry. In this regard, Nazareth serves not only as critic, but as an editor who has provided a “Selected Poems of Edwin Thumboo.” In doing this, Nazareth does what many other critics are afraid to do, and at the same time offers an invaluable service to the reader. In fact, what greater service can a critic provide to a poet than by presenting a sampling of the poet’s work? Nazareth goes further; he provides his analysis alongside, and often within, the poems. This was novel for me as a reader.

The narrative of the book is divided into subsections, “Making Us See”, “Seeing The Political”, “Friends And Mentors”, “History, Metaphysical History”, “The Erotic”,  “National Consciousness”, “Ekphrasis and E-Mail”, “Love And Loss”, “Singapore Lament”, “Returning With Yeats”, “Sun, Moon, Power”, “Asia”, “Seeing Singapore’s People”, “Missing Power”, “Dreaming”, “The Footnote Man”, “Memory, History, Words”, and “Spiralling”.

If this all seems confusing, perhaps, it is—until the reader reaches the last section, “Spiralling” and understands how Nazareth has been taking us through Thumboo’s poetry: in a spiral. Many sections are swirling by us more than once in slightly different incarnations in a kind of twinning. There is, for example, a subtle twinning of subsections such as: “Seeing The Political” with “Missing Power”; “The Erotic” with “Love And Loss”; “Returning With Yeats” with “Spiralling.” These subsections have an overlap of subjects and themes.

One of the many interesting things Nazareth does is allowing others to speak of Thumboo’s poetry and work. Here is Kirpal Singh: “Thumboo is among the finest love poets alive today.” There is Leong Liew Geok: “In no other poet of Thumboo’s generation or after, have his breath, purpose and discipline been equalled.” Geok is here commenting on Singaporean poetry. There is Sasenarine Persaud on Thumboo’s poem, “Shiva”: “It is a poem that a creative writing teacher would want to use to show what a fine poem could/should do.” On Thumboo’s poem Krishna, Persaud wrote, “This is a brilliant and extraordinarily deep poem—and I am not quite finished. I want to look at his merlion poem again.” Persaud did look at Thumboo’s Merlion poem again, and we will look at that response shortly.

In the editor’s note, Kirpal Singh refers to an incident in which Thumboo is being interviewed by a foreign scholar on Singaporean Literature. The scholar asks for an authority she could cite on Thumboo’s commentary on Singaporean Literature. Thumboo’s prompt response: “When it comes to Singaporean Literature in English I am your footnote.” Singh, then a young writer, describes how he was fascinated by this extraordinary response. The second part of the book is a long interview of Thumboo conducted by Peter Nazareth in 1977 in Iowa. Various parts of this interview were previously published. This is the first time the interview is being published in its entirety. Thumboo refers to this extraordinary statement again in the interview offering a clarification: “I had the experience of someone once asking me, ‘What’s the authority for this?’ I just pointed at myself. It’s part of the religion of my society. I am the footnote man. If you are 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 something or other is from the Bible, ‘Look, where is your authority for interpreting the Bible this way?’ He’ll be very insulted. So also for us.” If Naipaul writes on Dr. Jagan because of shared traits, perhaps, so too with Nazareth; he is also a “footnote man” and his own authority on his subject: there is no footnote in this work.

The point of this seems to be not only the double standards of western critics and their views regarding their own literatures and that of non-western Literatures and cultures, but also that Singaporean Literature in English is young and Thumboo has been there at its genesis—and is still there. Nazareth has come in a circle or cycle back to his theme and to Thumboo’s position in the existence of a Singaporean Literature in English: Thumboo holds a central position in this literature.

In a way, Nazareth began his enterprise by looking at the differing opinions of Thumboo, either as key in the formulation of a Singaporean Literature, or as a propagandist for the Singaporean government. It is clear that Nazareth’s position is not the latter. Much of this argument manifests in the reaction to Thumboo’s poem, “Ulysses by the Merlion” which is associated with the monument, half lion half fish, commissioned by the Singapore Tourist Board. We were being taken through a discussion on this issue at the beginning and before we knew it we were siphoned off into various other aspects of Thumboo’s poetry; a journey broken up into the subsections mentioned above. As I followed Nazareth’s path through Thumboo’s poetry, I found myself thinking that Thumboo’s best poetry was poetry that did not deal with Singapore, but poetry written in and about other places, or stimulated by other places. The section, “Edwin Thumboo As Counter-Ulysses”, is a section focusing on poems Thumboo wrote during his travels away from Singapore. There is, “Kangaroo Island” arising from a trip to Australia. This poem sings. There is another similar poem on Australia. In the subsection “Asia”, there is another moving and fine poem, “Autumn, Iowa City.” There are other fine poems, too, dealing with friends and acquaintances who had moved away from Singapore.

Thumboo says in a recent email to Nazareth that he is coming to feel that the poet is first and last a craftsman, with craft trumping “inspiration.” Often, this appears to be the view of writers attached to academia, but craft without spirit or “inspiration”, or writing where craft is the main preoccupation produces a lifeless and meaningless poetry. A good, recent example is Paul Muldoon’s poems in his Pulitzer Prize wining collection, Moy Sand and Gravel (2002). In this collection Muldoon, who is an academic and has been professor of poetry at Oxford and currently a professor at Princeton, is clearly preoccupied with craft and words, almost to the exclusion of the spirit and emotion, or “inspiration.” The result is the worst book of poetry to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize that I have read and, in my view, a book not worthy of this prize. From the Thumboo poems presented in Travelogue, it is those poems in which the poet allows his voice and emotions to come through that we see his best poetry.

As a reader unaware of the politics surrounding Thumboo’s poems, manifest in the response to his “Ulysses by the Merlion”, it was spirit or “inspiration” over craft that came through to me and held me enthralled. Reading this book, I had forgotten this, forgotten my response to this poem before the book was published. Almost at the end of the book, after Nazareth has taken us through several subsections and much of Thumboo’s poetry, he comes back to this poem, “Ulysses by the Merlion” with which he begins his examination of Thumboo’s work. And he quotes my response to this poem! Peter Nazareth had not asked me to read this poem; he had asked me to comment on Thumboo’s “Krishna”. But I was intrigued by Thumboo’s “Krishna” and wanted to see what else I had on Thumboo. Nazareth quotes my response: “I remembered Voices: An Anthology of World Writing in English published a decade ago, in which I had a poem. There was Thumboo’s ‘Ulysses by the Merlion.’ I read it and was immediately moved by Thumboo’s profound weaving in and out of history…the poem had touched the mythmaker in me, and I had the genesis of my own response, my own poem in that instant. Yet I walked around with Thumboo for days before I could write…All that has been said has been said before; it is the task of the poet to imbue old, much used words with freshness and new/old insight. There is only one way a poet can do this, if he is lucky, and this is by imparting spirit, prana, life-force. This is what this poem offered up to me.”

Commenting on my response above, Nazareth writes in his book on Thumboo’s poetry: “Can anything more be said about the poetry of Edwin Thumboo than has been said by Persaud? Yes. The poem by Persaud triggered off by “Ulysses by the Merlion”. Nazareth goes on to produce my entire poem, “Odysseys, My Love”. It is an unusual thing for any critic to do. Yet for Peter Nazareth, the unusual is normal.  And he is right. For a poet to be energized to write, to be “inspired”, to be gifted with a companion poem after reading another poet is the surest vindication of the excellence of the original poem. I have been a “fortunate traveler”, to quote Derek Walcott, in being exposed to the poetry of Edwin Thumboo. And I believe that Edwin Thumboo, and I, have been fortunate travelers to be exposed to a critic like Peter Nazareth, who in this book on Thumboo continues to stretch and extend the parameters of criticism closer to the spirit of the dust of that Indian soil that has been the source of our origins and inspirations.

Sasenarine Persaud is the author of 8 books. His awards include the K.M. Hunter Foundation Award (Toronto), the Arthur Schomburg Award (New York) for his pioneering of yogic realism, and fellowships at the University of Miami and Boston University. Persaud’s work has appeared in several anthologies such as The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories (2000) and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (2005). His next book, a novel, Wounding Silence will be published in Spring 2009 by Macmillan (UK).

A Handful of Dust: ET and the Merlion
Peter Nazareth’s Interlogue, Volume 7: Edwin Thumboo, Creating A Nation Through Poetry
Ethos Books, Singapore, 2008.