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Awards encourage growth of local
literature
By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK - Roberto Anonuevo and Darmanto Jatman
represent two different poles in the universe of
Southeast Asian literature because of the language that
peppers their poetry.
While Anonuevo is at home
with his native Filipino, Indonesia's Jatman is
attracted to a multilingual idiom - though both their
home countries are sprawling archipelagos with hundreds
of ethnic groups and languages.
It is a
distinction that reveals how each views his role as a
poet in the region.
For Anonuevo, writing in
Filipino, the national language in the Philippines, is a
means of asserting the power and beauty of this tongue.
Jatman, for his part, may begin a work with his own
Bahasa Indonesia, but as his poems unfold they are
peppered with words from other languages and, at times,
idiomatic expressions, too.
This flavor of
diversity was captured in an award ceremony here on
Tuesday for works of poetry, novels and short stories
from the region - the annual Southeast Asian Writers
Awards, also known as the SEAWrite Award.
After
all, the SEAWrite winners from nine of the 10 countries
who make up the Southeast Asian region had composed
their works in mother tongue. These included Vietnamese,
Lao, Thai and Malay, in addition to Filipino and
Indonesian.
Anonuevo and Jatman, SEAWrite Award
winners from their own countries, were chosen by their
peers for their collections of poems.
For
laureates such as Anonuevo and Jatman, as with some of
the other winners, the most impressive feature of this
regional award is its openness to all the languages in
the region - and not just to works written in a
dominant, and in the case of several countries, also a
colonial tongue, such as English.
"This will
feed the growth of local literatures," a soft-spoken
Anonuevo said of the award. "To do otherwise, to forget
your tongue is to take away the memory of your past and
to deny literature from your own perspective."
In his winning collection, he offers poems to
convince the world about "the beauty of the Filipino
language and to show the world that high quality
literature can be written in the Filipino language, not
just English".
Anonuevo thrives in a language
that he defines as being coined from mainly Tagalog, a
widely spoken language in the Philippines, but due to
its colonial and trading history has also ingested
words, phrases and nuances from Spanish, Chinese and
Malay.
The winner from multicultural Singapore,
the majority of whose people have Chinese ethnicity,
mirrors a similar sentiment, pointing to the
significance of needing to assert one's identity through
poetry written in the mother tongue, which in his case
is Malay.
"The diversity of languages and
literature is a Southeast Asian reality," said Mohamed
Latiff Bin Mohamed, winner of the SEAWrite Award in
Singapore for his collection of poems. "Writing in the
Malay language is a way of expressing our Malay
identity; it affirms my roots."
Indeed, a former
Thai SEAWrite Award winner considers this stress on the
region's diversity a welcome counterpoint to the image
of unity being asserted by the governments of the region
through its main diplomatic grouping, the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Ironically, it
is the region's cultural diversity that has made English
the working language of the 10-member ASEAN, whose
member countries are the same ones covered by the
SEAWrite award.
"It is a contradiction that
cannot be denied between the ASEAN governments talking
of a common region through the language of economics and
the writers offering details of differences in every
nation," said Suphan Thongklouy, who won the Thai award
in 1998.
The foundation for encouraging variety
in the region's literature was laid in 1979, when the
award was first given.
Those who initiated this
annual prize, including the management at The Oriental,
a landmark hotel in Bangkok, and Thai Airways, the
country's national carrier, stated then that the award
was to create greater awareness and understanding of the
literary wealth among the ASEAN countries.
Hence, says Jatman, poets and story tellers
working in any of Indonesia's nearly 200 spoken
languages or dialects have as much a chance to be a
winner as those who write in the national language,
Bahasa Indonesia.
"This is an apt response to
globalization. It invites localization," he said.
Yet at the same time, he adds, one cannot ignore
the many influences one encounters in the region. "There
are many languages in my mind, many different cultural
experiences and they come out in my poems."
But
while the SEAWrite award has created space for Southeast
Asia's literary wealth, the lack of competent and
adequate translations of the winning works has been a
perennial problem.
"It is one of the premier
literary awards in the region, but a pity there is
little that is translated to make the works accessible
to a broader audience, in many languages," said Surapone
Virulrak, director of the cultural management program at
Chulalongkorn University in the Thai capital.
"Maybe it is the best we can do for the moment,"
he added. "It brings to the fore the region's
complexities and differences in our commonality."
(Inter Press Service)
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