Page 21 - PULSE@FASS e-Bulletin 04_2020

Issue no. 4 | 2020

Born in Melaka, “like my hero Hang Jebat” as he liked to by to ask if he could have his copy autographed.
say, Salleh was very proud of his Malayness and “sambal-
loving” ways. He was also well-versed in the Quran and the Terence did not have to think long to write these words:
Hadith. His education abroad enriched his perspectives. “To Salleh, who inspired me to take the road less travelled”.
Thus, he lamented the loss to the Malay language and the Salleh was astonished by this message, and in fact
nation’s literature with the death of Pak Sako as intensely telephoned Terence the next day to say he still could not
as he mourned the loss to Spanish literature with the believe it. I don’t think Salleh ever realised how much he
murder of the poet Lorca. If he was in love with English had inspired his students. It was incomprehensible to him
poetry, he was equally besotted with the Malay pantun. He that he might have played a part in steering the course of
had an intense admiration for Octavio Paz, Henrik Ibsen, our lives. Such self-doubt was perhaps understandable as
James Joyce, and Chairil Anwar — these were his other Salleh, as we had come to know, was prone to depression,
heroes, writers whose works, if not lives, refused to to those long days of darkness and despair. These were
capitulate to the seductions of conformity. the Sundays when we would not hear from him.

The mock pieties and unthinking reverence of Malaysia’s In 2009, soon after returning from a few years abroad, I felt
literary, cultural and political elite provided fertile ground a need to get in touch with Salleh and organised for him to
for Salleh’s acerbic wit. The solemnly smug, the give a talk and reading to students of my Malaysian
puritanically patriotic, and the rigidly religious — these literature class. Salleh was keen to meet them, promising
were Salleh’s enemies. He waged peerless war against me that he was going to read “naughty stuff”! I titled the
them in his poetry and essays. If he was accused of being event “The shock and the syok: An evening with Salleh Ben
insensitive by his detractors, he was also forthright and Joned” as I was keen for my students to sample the
honest. Pretentiousness and hollow rhetoric affected him shibboleth-smashing – “sallehcious” – pleasures that my
coursemates and I had been fortunate to experience
so deeply that he was often moved to act brashly. Although as
his behaviour was sometimes brazen, Salleh’s motivations part of our undergraduate education.
were to denounce hypocrisy and minds steeped in
grinding conventionality. Although he was not, could not be, at 68, the robustly lucid
and quirkily energetic Salleh who had been my teacher, his
And make no mistake. Despite his “notoriety” and celebrity, views and voice were recognisably his. When I called to
Salleh was no distant or standoffish lecturer. He often thank him again the next day, Salleh was anxious to know if
hitched rides on the campus bus with us or joined us when the evening had gone well. When I assured him that it had
we were at the canteen, sharing in our conversations and gone exceedingly well and that he had made a big hit with
pinching cigarettes off my coursemates, one of whom was my students, I could sense that this did something for his
Terence (now my husband). He would occasionally invite equanimity.
us to his home, part of a staff complex of tumbling, two-
storeyed, colonial-era bungalows built just outside campus I have a yellowing but prized-copy of the Old English epic
in Section 16, where he would show us the books he was poem, Beowulf, in my library. It is special because it was
reading and point to the meaning of the art hanging on the Salleh’s gift to me for what he said was an “unusually well-
walls. written” essay on nineteenth-century British poetry. The
book’s opening page is inscribed in what is now his
I lost touch with Salleh after he left UM and though I was a immortal hand, “To Sharmani, with faith in the world and all
regular contributor to the NST’s literary page in the 1990s, my best, Salleh, 14th February 1985.” His gift of faith was
to which he was a columnist, we did not have the also a gift of love.
opportunity to meet again. Over the ensuing decade, and
as Terence and I established ourselves in our careers, we It is obvious that Salleh’s was no narrow path. Neither was it
somehow or other got reconnected with Salleh. He would straight and easy. His precarious psychological health,
call us on the telephone at home on languorous Sunday personal tragedies, and the pressures of holding on to non-
afternoons to talk about what he was working on, but conformist views, and living by them, would no doubt have
mainly to chat about this and that. One day, he dropped in taken a heavy toll on him. Despite it all, Salleh had a
at Terence’s office in UM with a copy of his (Terence’s) profound faith in the world, in the capacity of the human
newly published book. He had picked it up at the imagination to rise above man-made fetters, dogmas, and
bookstore, he told my husband, not only because Terence chauvinisms.
was a former student of his but also because he was proud
of the kind of work that Terence was doing. He had come I rage, and rage, against the dying of his light.

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