Wednesday, October 7, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
/ARTS WEEKLY/SOUTH-EAST ASIA: Languages Open New Literary Worlds
Marwaan Macan-Markar
- Roberto Anonuevo and Darmanto Jatman represent two different poles in the universe of South-east Asian literature due to the language that peppers their poetry.
While Anonuevo is at home with his native Filipino, Indonesia’s Jatman is attracted to a multi-lingual idiom – though both their home countries are sprawling archipelagos with hundreds of ethnic groups and languages.
It is a distinction that reveals how each views his role as a poet in the region.
For Anonuevo, writing in Filipino, the national language in the Philippines, is a means of asserting the power and beauty of this tongue.
Jatman, for his part, may begin a work with his own Bahasa Indonesia, but as his poems unfold they are peppered with words from other languages and, at times, idiomatic expressions, too.
This flavour of diversity was captured in an award ceremony here on Tuesday for works of poetry, novels and short stories from the region – the annual South-east Asian Writers Awards, also known as the SEAWrite Award.
After all, the SEAWrite winners from nine of the 10 countries who make up the South-east Asian region had composed their works in tongues that came naturally to them. These included Vietnamese, Laotian, Thai and Malay, in addition to Filipino and Indonesian.
Anonuevo and Jatman, SEAWrite Award winners from their own countries, were chosen by their peers for their collections of poems.
For laureates like Anonuevo and Jatman, as with some of the other winners, the most impressive feature of this regional award is its openness to all the languages in the region – and not just to works written in a dominant, and in the case of several countries, also a colonial tongue, such as English.
”This will feed the growth of local literatures,” says a softspoken Anonuevo of the award. ”To do otherwise, to forget your tongue is to take away the memory of your past and to deny literature from your own perspective.”
In his winning collection, he offers poems to convince the world about ”the beauty of the Filipino language and to show the world that high quality literature can be written in the Filipino language, not just English”.
Anonuevo thrives in a language that he defines as being coined from mainly Tagalog, a widely spoken language in the Philippines, but due to its colonial and trading history has also ingested words, phrases and nuances from Spanish, Chinese and Malay.
The winner from multi-cultural Singapore, the majority of whose people have Chinese ethnicity, mirrors a similar sentiment, pointing to the significance of needing to assert one’s identity through poetry written in the mother tongue, which in his case is Malay.
”The diversity of languages and literature is a South-east Asian reality,” says Mohamed Latiff Bin Mohamed, winner of the SEAWrite Award in Singapore for his collection of poems. ”Writing in the Malay language is a way of expressing our Malay identity; it affirms my roots.”
Indeed, a former Thai SEAWrite Award winner considers this stress on the region’s diversity a welcome counterpoint to the image of unity being asserted by the governments of the region through its main diplomatic grouping, the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Ironically, it is the region’s cultural diversity that has made English the working language of the 10-member ASEAN, whose member countries are the same ones covered by the SEAWrite award.
”It is a contradiction that cannot be denied between the ASEAN governments talking of a common region through the language of economics and the writers offering details of differences in every nation,” says Suphan Thongklouy, who won the Thai award in 1998.
The foundation for encouraging variety in the region’s literature was laid in 1979, when the award was first given.
Those who initiated this annual prize, including the management at The Oriental, a landmark hotel in Bangkok, and Thai Airways, the country’s national carrier, stated then that the award was to create greater awareness and understanding of the ”literary wealth” among the ASEAN countries.
Hence, says Jatman, poets and story tellers working in any of Indonesia’s nearly 200 spoken languages or dialects have as much a chance to be a winner as those who write in the national language, Indonesian.
”This is an apt response to globalisation. It invites localisation,” he says.
Yet at the same time, he adds, one cannot ignore the many influences one encounters in the region. ”There are many languages in my mind, many different cultural experiences and they come out in my poems.”
But while the SEAWrite award has created space for South-east Asia’s literary wealth, the lack of competent and adequate translations of the winning works has been a perennial problem.
”It is one of the premier literary awards in the region, but a pity there is little that is translated to make the works accessible to a broader audience, in many languages,” says Surapone Virulrak, director of the cultural management programme at Chulalongkorn University here in the Thai capital.
”Maybe it is the best we can do for the moment,” he adds. ”It brings to the fore the region’s complexities and differences in our commonality.”
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/ARTS WEEKLY/SOUTH-EAST ASIA: Languages Open New Literary Worlds
Marwaan Macan-Markar
- Roberto Anonuevo and Darmanto Jatman represent two different poles in the universe of South-east Asian literature due to the language that peppers their poetry.
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