Stateless Category:  Literary Fiction Publisher: Silverfish Books ISBN-10:  9833221491 Type: Fiction Pages: 287 ISBN-13: 9789833221493 Price: $15.00 (eBook) The first non-Malay anthology of the literatures of Malaysia and Singapore & Tracks of a Tramp, edited and authored by T. Wignesan T Wignesan (Ed). Bunga Emas: An Anthology of Contemporary Malaysian Literature, 1930-1963 & T.Wignesan. Tracks of a Tramp (A first collection of poems, 1948-61). Kuala Lumpur: Silverfish Books, 2014, 287p. US$ 15.50 Shipping: US$ 24.00 From Malaysia to France Destination, Rates & Speeds Malaysian-Singaporean Literatures in English, Chinese and Tamil (1930-1963) T Wignesan (ed) ISBN 10: 9833221491 / ISBN 13: 9789833221493 Published by Silverfish Books, Kuala Lumpur, 2014 New Condition: New Soft cover Save for Later From The Penang Bookshelf (Penang, N/A, Malaysia) AbeBooks Seller Since October 22, 2012 About the book: A collection of poetry and prose originally in English and translated into English from the original Chinese and Tamil. (First edition published in London by Anthony Blond with Rayirath (Raybooks) Publications, 1964.) This edition also includes a collection of poems, Tracks of a Tramp, by the original editor. At the time, Bunga Emas, was the most comprehensive collection of Malaysian-Singaporean literatures to have been published. It was also the first anthology of non-Malay literatures of Malaysia and Singapore. 287 pages with biographical notes on the authors, critical essays and literary assessments, a glossary and a bibliography. Weight: 0.6kg. Post free within Malaysia. Bookseller Inventory # ML490A

Raman, Ikan Perak, Kuala Lumpur on Bunga Emas & Tracks of a Tramp
Bunga Emas and Tracks of a Tramp first appeared over half a century ago, in the period after Merdeka, the Malayan Independence in 1957, when the nation, still a fledgling, had so much hope and promise. Malaysia Day, 1963, was just round the corner. Bunga Emas means tribute, as the editor explains in the glossary, an offering of Chinese and Indian writers and poets, who had made Malaysia their home, to ‘their evanescent mother culture’. This anthology of Malayan/Malaysian Literature in English, Chinese and Tamil from 1930 to 1963 (all translated into English), is something that’s never been done before, nor since. Apart from being an excellent historical record of pre- and post-independence Malaysia writing, this collection proves that good stories never grow old or tired. Although this volume is only a small sample from the period, and it will be dangerous to draw too many conclusions from it, one can’t help but admire the sheer quality, the ideas, and the craftsmanship. They might have been written half a century ago, but they sound so current. More importantly, in here are voices of the other that we seldom hear (and often ignore). A must read.

Reply to Robert Curtis's review of Bunga Emas in New Left Review by T. Wignesan
New Left Review I/35, January-February 1966

T. Wignesan

"Reply to Robert Curtis’ Review of ‘Bunga Emas’" (NLR editor, however, deleted several lines from the "reply". "Robert Curtis" is a pseudonym.)

Bunga Emas (‘Golden Blossom’, according to your reviewer, Robert Curtis, in nlr 31) means tribute, and as explained in the glossary and jacket, is a token resistance of the Chinese and Indian (non-Malay majority of Malaysia) writers and poets to their evanescent mother cultures. Inclusion of their work in this anthology was purely on merit, restricted to 272 pp. mainly for financial reasons. Lack of a Malay section was due, as stated in my preface, to copyright reasons. First, no Malay writer sent me his work in answer to my advertisements; second, Malay literature had already been anthologised when I began compiling in the latter half of 1961. See three collections of short stories and poems: Mekar dan Segar, Puisi Melayu Baru and Sajak Melayu Baru. The Malayan and Singapore Governments’ literary agencies and the PENA, the national Malay writers association, refused to co-operate with me on this anthology.

Quite the contrary to what your reviewer implies, I have nothing whatsoever to do with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and they had nothing whatsoever to do with Bunga Emas. Despite the dedication to Stephen Spender, the anthology, if it is ‘less than representative’, was produced at my own expense, and I alone am solely responsible.

My quarrel with your reviewer is not with his literary judgments, rather with his obvious factious interpretations. Let me explain. No attempt was made to varnish ‘what it feels like to be a Malayan, let alone a Malaysian’. As my task was quite plainly to present the best writing in the country, I do not see why this should have preoccupied my plans, nor how the inclusion of Malay writers, if for exactly the reasons Mr Curtis himself gives by way of comparison with the Indonesians, could have produced this identity or image. The stance any Malaysian writer can take must confusedly be plagued, on the one hand, by influences of the rooted middle-class, western-industrial-metropolitan culture, leavened by colonial Judeo-Christian teaching, and on the other, stiffen in an anti-wasp posture, harking back atavistically and clinging chauvinistically to his effete, village agrarian, communal cultures. What is a Malaysian? Where the cultural melting pot is yet to be brought to a synthetical boil, for my part, being a Malaysian is like suffering from some deeply incurable malaise. Probably, it is between being ‘hip-beat’—non-representative—and an identity, any identity, one’s character must find in a life, any life, forming or not forming with age. Finally, if what Mr Curtis wants of the English-educated Malaysians, a language to express ‘their own social and moral traditions’ to ‘fully manifest or strengthen their sense of identity’, then he should trouble himself to re-read How the Hills are Distant, the most significant sequence of poems to come out of Asia or Africa, originally in English. What has literary criticism come to if not belonging to some ‘tidy school’ becomes an unrepentable literary offence?

T. Wignesan