ASIATIC, VOLUME 3, NUMBER 1, JUNE 2009

Salleh ben Joned, Poems Sacred and Profane/Sajak-Sajak Salleh. Kuala Lumpur:
Silverfishbooks, 2008. 192pp. ISBN 978-983-3221-22-6.

Very few poets can comfortably and confidently cross linguistic borders and still
produce work of considerable power. Often a sense of inauthenticity will accompany
the poetry of one language, rendering it ineffective. Thankfully, such a limitation is
not evident in Salleh ben Joned’s writings. In both his English and Malay poems, his
wit and often daring irreverence are unmitigated and forceful, and this dual-language
collection, Poems Sacred and Profane/Sajak-Sajak Salleh, is testimony to his
linguistic mastery (some of the poems in Sajak-Sajak Salleh are translations of
familiar English poems, such as “Kepada Kekasih yang Kesipu-sipuan” [Marvell’s
“To His Coy Mistress”] and two sonnets from Shakespeare; others are translations into
Malay of his own English poems), his nimble style, and his acute sensitivity to the
socio-political situations from which many of his poems draw their concerns.
A predominant preoccupation with Salleh is sex and its vicissitudes. While some
poems expose the carnal, earthy, and exploitative nature of the sexual act that leaves
bodies sweaty and exhausted, and feelings bitter (“Obscenity,” “The Woman who Said
No,” “Hantu” [“Ghost”]), other poems celebrate its quiet innocence that conjoins two
entities into a sublime oneness. Here is the third stanza of “A Song of Love’s Silence”
that intimates the sexual act as a moment of mystery and discovery:

Our talk, pillowed and unpillowed,

is often small talk, but big enough
in mute whispers of the body’s tongue;
you’re an enigma of innocence, touched
by the shade of the ancient twin-breasted
mountain, in whose shadow you first saw
the world; (85)

The (female) body is a geographical space yet uncharted, upon which the protagonist
experiences as novelty; and yet, rather than objectified, the woman too is allowed a
gaze from which to encounter their intimacy, which is for her also the unfolding of a
new world. These lines are deftly performed, allowing the reader to pause at the word
“saw” before she is finally confronted with “the world.” Another poem that captures
the beauty of such a private act is “Di Detik ini, Di sini” (“Here, at this Moment”).
After recounting in short stanzas the meeting of breasts (“Dada dan dada”) and fingers
(“jari dan jari”), the fourth stanza reads: “Kejantananku/ mandi di mata air/ rimba
purba kejenisanmu:/ tenggelam niat si musafir” (107), which can roughly be translated
as “My malehood/ bathe in the well/ of your ancient forest:/ thus sinks the desires of a
wayfarer.” This is followed by a stanza that suggests awareness and an embracement
of something earthy and yet primordial, thus conflating innocence and maturation as
the paradoxical and simultaneous results of copulation. Indeed, for Salleh, sex is not
the contaminating and tabooed activity which certain ideologies have sought to control

Asiatic, Vol. 3, No. 1, June 2009 Page 120

 Andrew Ng

and repress. Sex, as some of the poems insinuate, harbours spiritual dimensions and its
performance can enhance a sense of self-awareness and an inclination towards the
divine. When two bodies abandon their clothed propriety, they are declaring their trust
and exposing their vulnerability to each other. Only then can the two, no longer
divided by suspicion or shame, truly attain singularity, like that “of the Yin and the
Yang/ of the Lingam and the Yoni” (“Songs and Monologues” 7). Unsurprisingly,
there is almost a tantric flavour in some of Salleh’s poems, especially pronounced in
the poem “Rasa” (dedicated to Ramli [Ibrahim?]) with its many references to
Hinduism.
But Salleh also uses sex often as a metaphor for social commentary. In these
poems, sex augurs the decadence of individuals who have prostituted their identities to
materialism and class-consciousness. The bumigeois are especially targeted. In
“Ménage á Trois,” for example, it is not with another man that “The bored wife of
Bumigeois” is having an affair, but the television, and more specifically JR and Bobby
Ewing of the famed 80s soap opera, Dallas. The poem goes on to relate how every
night, while “hugging her dummy hubby,” she “pants for her heart’s delight” as she
imagines lovemaking with television characters even while her “Hubby keeps
bobbing/ between her and Bobby” (48): hence the ménage á trios. A hilarious poem, it
nevertheless reveals the depth to which materialism can disrupt relationships and
empty a person out of her conviction and ideals, leaving only a bored, pathetic, and
lusty shell. An equally witty piece is “Love Song of a Committed Lecturer” in which a
university academic, in a sequence of rather playful declarations, complains of the
coyness of his students that is obstructing his attempts at conquests. But the whole
poem may be a metaphor that belies the more serious problem of students being
unable to learn because of closed mindsets and a tendency to dismiss anything that
would threaten their unyielding, monolithic worldviews.
In her astute introduction, Adibah Amin, echoing Salleh’s own brief rumination
of his Malay poems (“Sepatah Kata Selepas Kata” [“A Word after Speaking”], found
on the last page of the collection), shows that in Salleh’s poems, the profane and the
sacred are not distinct entities with clearly drawn boundaries. In fact, what is
sometimes considered profane can sometimes be deeply sacred, as many of the poems
about sex attest, while there are areas regarded as sacred which actually causes a
diminishment of the individual, and thus become objects of (self-)profanity. In the
poem “Testament in Engmalchin,” there is an indirect criticism against the privileging
of one language over others, despite the multilingual nature of this country, which has
led to a weakening and bastardising of all languages. Another poem, “Sajak Berjela
untuk Sesiapa Saja” (“A Trailing Poem for Whoever”), relates the celebration of
national literature amidst a polluted city and a trampled environment – suggesting that
there is ultimately no “worth” in a national literature if it does not make us aware and
appreciative of the world in which we live. The “dirty air of Kuala Lumpur” (“udara
kotor Kuala Lumpur”) may well be a metaphor for the dirty politics involved in the
suppression of aesthetics and creativity in the name of ethnic and language privileging.
Between the extremes of the sacrilegious and the divine, Salleh’s poems reveal a
breadth of issues and concerns which are sometimes self-consciously represented (in
Asiatic, Vol. 3, No. 1, June 2009 Page 121
 Poems Sacred and Profane/Sajak-Sajak Salleh

particular, the autobiographical “The Salacious Rhymes of a Self-Taught Prodigal”),

ironic (“Spirit of the Keris”), or rendered with a mischievous tinge (the sequence of
“Perempuan” [“Women”] poems). The brevity of this review cannot, regrettably, do
justice to this exceptional dual-language collection, so I must trust the discerning
reader to procure a copy and judge it for himself/herself. If your cup of tea is the
puncturing of taboos and the celebration of trangression, then the reissuing of this
collection is certainly not to be missed.

Andrew Ng
Monash University Sunway, Malaysia

© Copyright 2009 Asiatic, ISSN 1985-3106

http://asiatic.iium.edu.my
http://asiatic.iiu.edu.my
International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM)

Asiatic, Vol. 3, No. 1, June 2009 Page 122