After the LOCKDOWN! PANDEMIC! the world became a little stranger. Things I once loved dearly no longer seemed important and the passage of time began to ebb and flow in tandem with my own cascading mortal anxieties. Seeking to assuage this kind of generational guilt, I returned from Melbourne to Malaysia. There, in the everyday, I began to recognise that nothing and no one had changed except for me. Putting together a writing practice, or being the kind of writer I imagined myself to be when I was younger, still felt like a perverse and all-the-more pitiable endeavour amidst the rat race of Kuala Lumpur.

When both K.S. Maniam and Salleh Ben Joned passed away in 2020, I realised that despite dedicating a good portion of my adult life to reading their work, we had never actually had a conversation let alone met. I had not had a decent conversation with any of the writers I was working on or with, despite the sizable catalogue of burning existential questions buried beneath their out-of-print fifty-year-old books in my living room. I decided to change that. I began travelling, visiting and corresponding with, and recording Malaysian poets from the post-war generation. In between recordings, they spoke to me about their life, careers, dreams, but rarely about their work. When they read their own poems, time stands still and the words on the page come alive through their voices, animated by their hands and faces, lips singing song to power with each cadence, each breath reverberating in the open air before dissipating slowly back into the somber present where I, an audience of one, am listening.   

And so? 

The archive-exhibition A Wasteland of Malaysian Poetry in English began on a premise two-fold. First, that the post-war generation of poets in English are still writing, still questioning—still speaking— some fifty, sixty, seventy years on, in defiance of hostile conditions and national policies on identity, language, and culture. They are not memory-frozen historical and anthropological objects. Second, writers of my generation had never heard them or of them, with no real access to their work or life, written or otherwise. Curating these eclectic voices across seven decades together is not an act of creating value, taste, or privilege—it is an act of community. A Wasteland of Malaysian Poetry in English was shown as a free and public exhibition across several weeks in Kuala Lumpur in 2022, and then Melbourne and Penang in 2023. It included physical interactive exhibits of the recordings on mediums corresponding to the decade of the poems (cassette, CD, iPod, Zoom) as well as spoken word readings, open mics, and writing workshops. Some of these works have been made accessible online at Portside Review and Liminal Magazine.

The video works in the following essay were shown at the Melbourne exhibition and feature poetry readings imposed upon a resonant barren landscape caught in-between high-traffic walkways. Alongside these, I have stitched together several clips of audio interviews and their transcripts, captured in-between our usual recording sessions, that speak towards a kind of assemblage of our own.