Page 20 - PULSE@FASS e-Bulletin 04_2020

Issue no. 4 | 2020

John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Henry Fielding, Laurence also engendered a great deal of admiration: “He was a
Sterne, writers so far removed from our time, Salleh made free spirit and unconventional and many of us loved him
them vital, interesting and funny. He founds ways which for it. Salleh was critical and thought-provoking, we
made the eighteenth century immediate to our reality. looked forward to his classes! He also had a great sense of
That was his brilliance. But I, and many others in class, humour. There will always be the one and only Salleh Ben
remained a tad fearful of Salleh right to the end of the Joned. Certainly, inimitable”. All in all, he says, Salleh was
academic year. a remarkable man.

Perhaps it was wise to be slightly fearful of Salleh Perhaps Professor Sharmani Gabriel, a member of the
because, as Professor Malachi Edwin Vethamani of the English Department and also a student and friend of
University of Nottingham notes, he had a sharp tongue Salleh’s, captures most clearly what made Salleh such a
and little patience for fools: “Salleh didn’t suffer fools and unique, iconoclastic and inspiring figure, both as a
was feared for his biting comments.” But as a lecturer, he lecturer and a writer. Below is her moving tribute to him.
My teacher, Salleh

I knew Salleh Ben Joned in many ways — as a poet, an Of all literary forms, it was poetry that he loved best. He
essayist, a newspaper columnist, and a public figure, but it was in his element when he read poetry in class,
is as my own teacher of English literature at Universiti delivering lines in his deep, distinctive voice, impossible
Malaya that I am remembering him today. As I to mistake for anyone else’s. His ear was attuned to the
contemplate my obituary of sorts for Salleh, writing it rhythmic sonority and cadence of the spoken word,
almost forty years after I first turned up for his class in the especially of Malaysian English, which he put to sharply
early 1980s, I realise now that having as a teacher satiric use in his own poems.
someone of Salleh’s fierce light and uplifting energy has
been my life’s privilege. Although those of us in his class, As a university teacher of literature, Salleh was driven by
like other literature undergraduates of that time, had not the need to make us understand the urgency of creativity.
come to poetry for the first time, we listened, both In our first year, he introduced us to William Blake and
spellbound and recharged, as poetry broke open worlds Gerard Manley Hopkins, two poets who, in their torments
of possibilities. and ecstasies of experience, led divergent lives. One was
derided as insane in his lifetime, the other was a Jesuit
Salleh was that rare thing, a teacher of literature who not priest. Through Blake, he took up his burning battle cry
only brought poetry alive but also taught us what poetry against the “mind-forged manacles” of convention and
could do. Through Salleh, we were reminded that poetry through Hopkins, he implored us to open our eyes, and
had a social function to it, that its power could be minds, to the ferocious beauty and energy of our God-
harnessed to bring about a change in the social order and created world.
to give rapturous expression to our human daring to
aspire and desire. And we learnt other lessons. The worst As was the teaching, so was the life. Salleh’s talismanic
form of censorship, he told us very early on, is self- force derived from his attempts to synthesize opposites,
censorship. both in his vision and interpretation of the world and in
how he chose to live his life. His name “Salleh” translates
I recall undergraduate life as being epiphanic when Salleh as “pious” (Salih/Saleh) from the original Arabic. He was
took to the rostrum. He rarely ever sat or kept still, tantalized by its semantic and discursive opposite,
preferring to move across the room, offering us through “profane”, and much of his critique was aimed at
his spirited lectures a point of entry into other lives and destabilizing the “pious/profane” dichotomy so as to
contexts of experience. There was a restlessness about shatter shibboleths and utter our world into new meaning.
him, one minute he was prancing on the desk to stress a
"He would enter the lecture hall in
point, and as if to wake us from our complacencies, and
the next he was jumping off it with equal flourish. He a striking ensemble of sarong and
songkok and at other times he
would enter the lecture hall in a striking ensemble of
would be clad in his signature blue
sarong and songkok and at other times he would be clad
jeans and beret, sometimes even
in his signature blue jeans and beret. He revelled as much
smoking his pipe."
in reciting poetry as in telling us that he trained under the
distinguished Australian poet, James McAuley.

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