Edwin Thumboo interviewed by Peter Nazareth

Abstract

PN: Edwin, I am going to read something to you. See if you recognize the poem: The recipients of the education, the English educated knew their place. They had security and a certain status and a fair living, never really near the center of power where policies affecting their society were formulated, mainly instruments and functionaries,. their outlook crippled unless they had simultaneously maintained a broad contact with their own language and culture. jET.That isn't a poem! That's from a lecture I gave at Singapore's Nanyang University in late 1975! PN: Yes; but do you agree that there is a poetic quality in those lines? ET: Perhaps. The idiom of contemporary poetry has reached a point where it is very close to prose. Moreover, the point I was making in that lecture lies very close to our fundamental thinking. The history of the last two hundred years in our part of the world was made by colonial incursion. As a reaction to that, we must rethink , rewrite and reorientate our history. PN: Isn't language one of those entities you have been most conscious of? The colonial inheritance. .. the fact that the English language itself has carried the burden of that inheritance within it? You deal with those ques tions in your introduction to The Second Tongue: An Anthology of Poetry from Malaysia and Singapore. And the most pressing issue is the one with which I began ... : Are you conscious of compressing language in such a way that your audience is not aware that the prose is poetry or, to put it the other *Condensed by us from a much longer interview. F.

Meaning making poetry: Words alone are certain good

“…Thumboo's lyric impulse, clearly present in his early lyrical poems with their focus on form, idiom, metaphor and structure (Nazareth, 1999), subsequently came to be shared with a more direct, public voice, i.e., "a range in the voice to make his poetry capable of handling societal themes that would create space for the handling of the public side of themes" (Thumboo, 2003). Whereas the public voice may be considered more accessible, and the poet's intentions more obvious, the private voice is perhaps richer in the very features by which the poet defines his craft.…”

“…Elaborating on the poem's title, gods can die, Thumboo explains that the term “gods” refers to humanistic impulses, the goodness in man. He writes, “I believe that ultimately man makes and un‐makes his destiny, depending on which side of him prevails” (Nazareth, 1999). A sense of the duality between truth and falsehood; good and evil; life and death overlaps with an emphasis on symmetry and parataxis, sustained throughout by repeated apposition and opposition; addition, negation and alternation.…”