Eddin's Bloodlines

News of a very interesting event at CHAI House :

MIGRATION SEASON at CHAI April - June 2010.

MIGRATION SEASON at CHAI begins with poet and journalist Eddin Khoo's exploration of his family album.

~BLOOD LINES: Poetry, Memory and the family album~

"What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto..."

(Michael Ondaatje)

What is the nature of a family memory? How is that nature evoked in the encounter with a photograph? What do family histories conceal and how are family myths constructed? How is literature crafted from an unravelling of these?

For a decade, the writer has been collating photographs that piece together the family memory for a series of prose and prose poem remembrances.

In BLOOD LINES: Poetry, Memory and the Family Album he shares examples of photographs from his family album, explains the methods of use, reads excerpts from his assemblage of prose and prose poems and discusses the curious nature of memory and autobiography.

Eddin Khoo is a poet, writer, translator and journalist. Founder-Director of the cultural organisation Pusaka, he most recently collaborated with the late, critically acclaimed artist Ibrahim Hussein to complete the artist's autobiography, entitled IB: A Life ~ The Autobiography of Ibrahim Hussein.

Entry: Donation to CHAI Min RM10

Free Entry to CHAI- Wallahs*

* To find out more about how to become a CHAI-Wallah please e-mail us at chai@instantcafetheatre.com

Date : Thursday, 01 April 2010
Time: 20:30 - 22:30
Location: Instant CAFE's HOUSE of ART and IDEAS [CHAI]
Street: No. 6, Jalan 6/3, Off Jalan Templer, Section 6
Town/City: Petaling Jaya, Malaysia

Sad I won't be able to be there myself as I'm teaching ...

Shakespeare in the Shadows

Monday learned about a very exciting project by Pusaka (Centre for the Study and Documentation of Traditional Performance in Malaysia), in association with The British Council. Called Macbeth in the Shadows, it involves the adaptation of Shakespeare's play for wayang kulit. The performance will be staged at the new Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre in September.

The project brings together one of Malaysia's top dalangs (shadow puppet master) Abdullah Ibrahim (also known as Dollah Baju Merah) ; British novelist, playwright and illustrator, Edward Carey; and poet, writer and translator, Eddin Khoo. And its aim is not only to carry on the tradition of wayang kulit, but to expand its vocabulary with new stories, puppet design and techniques of crafting. You can read all about the project in Starmag, this coming Sunday, and also my interview with Edward Carey: I'll post links then.



Carey and Khoo making puppets

Traditional art forms are in grave danger of extinction in Malaysia, and I thought one of the speakers at the press conference, YB Datuk Zaid Ibrahim, chairman of Pusaka, hit the nail on the head when he said: "The government as a whole should do more. If you don't keep this alive, then something more important will die too."



Carey's drawing of the witches

Carey echoed this when I spoke to him: "It's awful what's happening to the culture. Things should be cherished. Mak Yong and Main Puteri are in a very fragile state. It's so important the work that Pusaka is doing. ... in many countries Pak Dollah would be seen as a national treasure and it's a great shame that he isn't."

I have only seen wayang kulit only once, and it was an unforgettable experience. Badan Warisan arranged a performance by a group from Kedah and it was held in the space underneath the "rumah penghulu": the beautifully restored Malay house. I did not understand too much of the Malay because the dialect was so thick - but it was so fast paced and exciting and very very funny with many contemporary puppets being used.

And so now I'm so excited that Macbeth is going to be given the same kind of treatment. Maybe, just maybe, it will revive interest in this wonderful art form and encourage others to approach it in new ways.

Nathaniel Tarn

My interview with poet Nathaniel Tarn in StarMag today:

If anyone can lay claim to the title “world citizen” it should surely be poet Nathaniel Tarn: his biodata lists his ethnicity simply as “Earth”, and with good reason. Born in France and educated at major universities in Britain, France and the United States, he became an anthropologist and travelled to many parts of the world including Guatemala and Burma, becoming a specialist in South-East Asia.

He says that he has fallen in love with this part of the world all over again after a trip to Bali, Java and the Philippines last year, and is looking forward to travelling in Sarawak. He was in Kuala Lumpur recently and invited to read from his work at an event sponsored by Pusaka at Maya Gallery in Bangsar.

After a distinguished career in anthropology, Tarn eventually gave it up to concentrate on his poetry because he found it too difficult to “keep both scholarship and literature in one head”. Tarn became a professor of comparative literature at Rutgers University in New Jersey and is probably best known for his translations of Pablo Neruda’s work.

He also spent a brief spell in publishing: he teamed with Jonathan Cape to produce Cape Editions, an influential series of paperbacks which covered a wide variety of subjects and introduced a variety of new writers (including Neruda) to the reading public.

Poetry is vitally important to society, Tarn believes. “It defends against cancer of the language and encourages precise intelligible expressive language without which none of us get far at all.” He believes too that poets have a duty to tackle bigger themes rather than the purely personal and anecdotal. Tarn is pessimistic about the state of the world and sees the human race as “severely menaced at this point”. The care of the earth and all its inhabitants is a huge task and poets have an important role to play in bringing issues to public awareness.

He quotes Shelley saying that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world” and says that the poet needs to be political in the word’s widest sense, which has to do with the workings of the state on every level.

The status of poets also concerns Tarn. In Britain and America poets tend not to be regarded very highly by society. At particularly low point in his career he wrote “now I believe our average poet, if it can survive, is lucky to be something like a liver fluke progressing through the guts of sheep.”

He rails against the overproduction of writing and the underproduction of readers turned out by academic creative writing courses in the US, and believes that writers “should live a life,” rather than attend courses.

Tarn is himself a voracious reader and the basement of his Santa Fe home is filled with many thousands of volumes. He tries to keep abreast of developments in at least twelve academic fields including ecology, history of religion, psychology, Russian Studies and aviation history. His first impulse when he knew that he was coming to Malaysia was to rush out buy some fifty to sixty books on this area. But he adds wistfully, “When you get to a certain age you cannot keep on top of things: you can’t read several hundred books simultaneously”.

Tarn has written numerous critically acclaimed volumes of poetry comprising both shorter and longer pieces. (He collaborated with his wife, poet Janet Rodney, on three of the works.) His poetry was described by one times Literary Supplement reviewer as being “a very original mixture of the high and the low, the deliberately elevated and the humorously familiar”. And of course Tarn’s anthropological background and myriad academic concerns feed into his poetry.

Tarn read from his Selected Poems 1950-2000 on Saturday night, opening with Before the Snake which he describes as a totem poem describing the landscape in terms of Eden before the fall. He and read an extract from his first long poem, The Beautiful Contradictions about a Mayan village in Guatemala; and several more recent pieces including an extract from his The Architextures, about Persephone, the goddess of lyric poetry. An extract about St. Petersburg from Three Letters from the City was read first by Tarn and then read in a Malay translation by Eddin Khoo.

Khoo announced that a collection of Tarn’s poetry in Malay is underway and should be published next year. And Tarn has to come back to Malaysia, joked Khoo, since he has “seen a lot of the world, but he hasn’t yet seen Kelantan.”

On the internet you can read the whole of Tarn and Rodney’s poem Alashka at http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/rodtarn and his beautiful Bartok in Udaipur can be found at http://www.aisna.org/rsajournal2/Tarn.html.

Felt tremendously privileged to have this opportunity to talk to Tarn. I knew him only as the translator of some of Neruda's work but the reading so whetted my appetite that I have his Collected Poems on order. Felt he was someone I'd loved to have spent many hours talking to: he radiates enthusiasm for life, love of learning and tremendous compassion. And maybe poetry keeps you young, because he looked a good decade or so younger than his 77 years - very physically robust.

I was most impressed to hear that he had written some of his poetry with his wife. His long poem Alashka was written while they were on the road in an old Dodge van - who wrote which part is a closely guarded secret. Seems to me to be a particularly loving thing to do, to share your work in this way. Sehati sejiwa, hey?

Look forward to seeing him when he passes this was again, hopefully next year. So glad that Eddin Khoo is translating his work.