/ARTS WEEKLY/POETRY-SOUTH-EAST ASIA: Tower of Babel Hinders Dialogue

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 18 2004 (IPS) - Ceasar Ruiz Aquino’s journey as a poet wound its way to the Thai capital this month, when the 62-year-old Filipinio was awarded a prize for being among the best contemporary writers in South-east Asia.

Sharing the stage with him on that occasion was Do Chu, a fellow poet from Vietnam who was also in town to receive his South-east Asian Writers Award (or the S.E.A Write Award).

Yet neither men could read the other’s work nor have they done so before. Even the moment of shared triumph at the S.E.A. Write Award ceremony was muted: The two winners could not engage with each other as winners do in the first flush of success.

It was a predicament faced by some of the nine men and women named as this year’s winners of what is described as the most prestigious creative writing award in the region.

What kept them apart was language – the absence of a common tongue to bridge the nine countries the winners came from, namely Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Do Chu only speaks Vietnamese, which Aquino knows not. While Chey Chap and Rewat Phanpipat, the winners from Cambodia and Thailand, feel comfortable in their mother tongues.

”We lack the instant chemistry to engage because of the language barrier,” Aquino explained in an interview. ”I haven’t been able to read the works of the other awardees because of this.”

That such is the case 25 years after the S.E.A. Write Award was launched is an indictment on the governments of the region failing to value the poets and novelists in their societies as vital pillars to forge a sense of unity.

South-east Asian governments have, on the other hand, invested money and time to forge regional links through more soulless activities like trade and finance, proof of which is borne out by the creature that was conceived in the 1970s – the Association of South- east Asian Nations (ASEAN).

”It is about translations, about translating and distributing the works of writers from the region so we can discover each other. This has not happened,” Zurinah Hassan, this year’s winner from Malaysia, told IPS.

It is a lapse that has dogged the world of South-east Asian literature for the past two decades with no hint of a remedy, she explained. ”It is nothing new. When the writers from the region gather, this is one frequent complaint. We cannot read each other.”

The various languages spoken in this region is only one feature of its cultural diversity. Its range of religions, culture, history, political systems and states of development are as significant.

Even the S.E.A. Write award has not proved an exception to overcome the hurdle of translations, since there is no record of the works of past winners being translated into all the major languages spoken in this corner of Asia.

”We have translated some of the winning books before but not into all the languages so that they can be read across the region,” Rex Morgan, president of the Rex Morgan Foundation, one of the backers of the literature prize, said in an interview.

”The problem comes down to funding all the translations. I don’t think we are ever going to solve it completely,” he lamented.

Consequently, South-east Asian readers have been shut out, in their own backyards, from the universe being described by the poets and storytellers. And if the breadth of themes that had inspired this year’s S.E.A. Write winners is any indicator, then it is a rich cultural terrain being deprived its due.

This year’s winners – who were all poets, given that was the genre being recognised according to the S.E.A.Write Award rules – had been touched by poverty and suffering, nationalism and tradition, culture and nature and the moods of an individual in love – themes that move ordinary South-east Asians.

”As he waits for moonlight, he dreams of familiar/ graces/ tenderly, indelibly imprinted in his heart/ they weave themselves into a textured tapestry,” writes Rewat, the Thai poet, in ‘Childhood Recollection.’

While Haji Jawawi Bin Haji Ahmad from Brunei, conjures a sense of suffering in lines such as these – ”You are standing among them now/ though you are in poverty/ begging from those giving/ begging among yourselves – in his poem ‘Nationalist.’

Aquino’s poetry, on the other hand, celebrates nature with hardly a hint of politics or passionate lines about the crises engulfing his native Philippines.

Vietnam’s Do Chu is still haunted by the U.S. invasion of his country in the 1960s and how people endured those bloody times. Yet he chooses images from the sea to convey his mood.

”War and conflict have been a recurring theme in some of the works during the past years also, because there are countries in the region that were torn apart by it,” said Oraya Sutabutr of Bangkok’s Thammasat University.

At the heart of the poems coming out of these countries like Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos is the struggle to ”negotiate one’s existence in the years after the conflict,” Oraya added during an interview.

Yet more commonly shared realities – such as the old pastoral sprit being vanquished by the assertive march of the modern economy – are also recurring themes.

Nevertheless, such poetry that binds and suggests a unity of the poetic spirit in the region is not known by all, due to the language barrier.

”This makes us feel separate, as if we are coming from different continents,” says Aquino. ”We don’t have a sense of belonging to one cultural area, though we are geographically very close.”