Malaysian poet Cecil Rajendra's poems turn up in the most odd places: at a church-sponsored conference on the evils of tourism, in a Black South African liberation movement's newsletter, in a mass-circulation Japanese daily paper, in a Filipino law professor's human rights lectures, in a geography textbook for British schoolchildren, in a Bengali magazine, in a book about militarism, in a Time magazine cover story, in a Penang taxi driver's glove compartment -- but seldom in literary journals.

Rajendra: "Almost every aspect of our lives here is circumscribed by some piece of legislation or other." -- Photograph Christine Thery

"My poems tend to be more a part of Third World studies than literature studies," Rajendra says. "They find themselves in all sorts of places, and I am most pleased about it."

He is genuinely not interested in literary acclaim, nor abuse, though he has received plenty of both. Rajendra judges his work strictly in terms of its effectiveness in awakening people to the burning social issues that afflict Malaysia and the Third World generally -- oppression, injustice and exploitation, corruption and greed, want, hunger and poverty, ecological ruin.

His poetry is part of a total commitment. A lawyer by profession, he handles mainly pro bono cases where a principle of justice is involved, defending factory workers who find themselves on the wrong side of the country's highly oppressive labour laws, taking drugs cases involving youths from fishing villages shattered by ill-considered tourism projects, representing peasants denied justice because once in the witness box or dock they are struck dumb by the augustness of the proceedings, the belittling effect of the legal stage props, the theatrical pomposity of the official fancy dress.

Though he wins cases and obtains some measure of justice, he sees law and justice as two different things in Malaysia: "There's no question of practising law here, it's almost a farce.

Rajendra the lawyer: "I often have to suspend my sense of reality when I enter court." -- Photograph Christine Thery

We hardly touch the real issues. I often have to suspend my sense of reality when I enter court."

After a succession of setbacks, he has set up a free legal advice centre in a depressed rural area in Penang, serving needy people who would normally have no access to legal representation.

He has also considered giving up law altogether and taking up writing full-time, perhaps as a journalist at The Star, a national daily tabloid which publishes his controversial weekly column on the arts scene, as well as many of his poems.

"The Star has a readership of about 300,000," he said. "That's fantastic for a poet. It is one of the few papers here that is prepared to take a few risks. I've managed to have a lot of poems published through them that were very critical of some of the things that go on here, and the feedback I've been getting has been most encouraging.

"I wrote a poem called 'The Animal & Insect Act' about some of our repressive laws -- almost every aspect of our life here is circumscribed by some piece of legislation or other.

"People told me I'd never be able to publish it in this country, it was much too explosive, and at first it was circulated on roneoed sheets. Then I talked to the editor of The Star about the poem. He agreed to publish it, and I was amazed at the impact it had.

"For instance, one day I caught a taxi to Georgetown from my home on the outskirts of the city. We set off, and the driver started chatting to me. He asked if I was Cecil Rajendra. I said I was, and he said, 'I liked that poem that you wrote very much.'

"And he opened his glove compartment and took out a cutting of 'Animal & Insect Act' from The Star, saying, 'It's about time people spoke up about these things.'

"I was astonished -- he was a semi-literate guy, a taxi driver, how remote poetry must be from him. Yet he cut it out and kept it in his glove compartment. I was more flattered by this than by anything else. You would never get such a response in Europe. I lived in London for 13 years, and I regularly go back there; my readings there draw a lot of attention, but in terms of the real, immediate effect you can have, this place is far more direct."

"Animal & Insect Act" is one of Rajendra's most interesting poems. He followed up its publication in The Star by including it in "Refugees & Other Despairs", his fifth poetry collection, published in Singapore by Choice Books.

It has since travelled far: it was first heard in the US when Filipino law lecturer Dr Cesar Espiritu read it at a human rights seminar in Washington; he now uses it to illustrate all his human rights lectures, and the poem has since been published in the US, as well as in West Germany, Spain, South Africa and Japan, where it was included in a book on militarism in Southeast Asia entitled "People Against Domination."

Rajendra read it at a poetry recital during the Third World Book Fair held in London in April and was invited to read it on the BBC, which he did soon afterwards.

Echo from the past

The poem has an almost weird historical correspondence of which Rajendra himself was unaware. His angry ridiculing of modern security laws by applying them to animals is a strange echo of a similar anger finding the same expression, by a Malay social commentator writing 150 years ago.

Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir Munsi, research assistant of the famous Sir Stamford Raffles of Singapore, was appalled to learn that in the Malay state of Trengganu people were forbidden to use an umbrella, wear shoes or dress in yellow in the vicinity of the ruler's palace.

"Why aren't the birds prohibited from flying over the palace, or the mosquitoes prohibited from sucking the royal blood, or the lice from setting on the royal pillow or elephants from trumpeting in front of the palace?" he demanded, while real evils such as drug-taking, disease, poverty, ignorance and squalor were ignored.

This mirror-image from the past is significant because, though Rajendra has deep roots in Malaysia, he is often accused of being an expatriate at heart by the academics and formalists of the local literary establishment, who tend to see the social commitment in his writing as artistically gross, a pollution of literature.

"Dynamic" was how a reviewer of Britain's Times Literary Supplement judged Rajendra's work. "The whole experience was a complete, if unconscious, refutation of the academic and disengaged approach."

Certainly his inspiration has been more international than local: his technique has been influenced by the directness of the Japanese haiku poets, his thinking by such men as Amilcar Cabral, Pablo Neruda, Franz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Wilfred Owen, Dennis Brutus.

He is a Third World poet and his work finds relevance wherever men are poor and oppressed, exploited and robbed of their heritage. But it is with Malaysia that he is chiefly concerned, and about Malaysia for Malaysians that he writes.

"Faults in another / that would not matter / in our loved ones / assume / cataclysmic proportions / and if i did not care / i would not dare / chart / your many imperfections" he writes in "To my country".

But his Malaysian critics, both literary and political, do not see it that way, and he has been subjected to considerable pressure. So have the editors of The Star, and the publishers of "Refugees & Other Despairs", who responded by quietly withdrawing the book from circulation. Rajendra now plans to have it reprinted elsewhere.

He has found the wide relevance of his work useful as well as gratifying. He claims that Heinemann (Asia), who published "Bones & Feathers", his fourth poetry collection, would never have accepted some of the poems in the book had he not been deliberately misleading about their origins.

"The Political Prisoner", dedicated to Nelson Mandela, jailed leader of South Africa's African National Congress, "The Fan", a chilling poem about an interrogation, dedicated to exiled South African activist and poet Dennis Brutus, one of Rajendra's early mentors, and "Salisbury -- City of Night", with its "armies of sleepwalkers", were in fact all written about Asia.

Conversely, poems written about other countries have been taken to refer to Malaysia.

Fishing off Tanjung Bunga Beach in Penang...

"When the tourists flew in", also from "Bones & Feathers", was written after a visit to Trinidad, and also partly about Haiti, where shanty towns were preserved as tourist attractions -- "chic eyesores", as the poem has it.

Yet the poem fits Malaysia almost perfectly, and especially Penang, where strips of beach hotels have displaced and disrupted fishing villages (including the one Rajendra was born and raised in); fishermen have indeed become waiters, there is a rash of escort agencies where before there were none; beaches are reserved for the exclusive use of hotel guests, and recently the residents of a rural village were outraged when tourist buses began arriving, bringing hordes of foreigners to gape at them.

... But now the beach is cut off from the fishing village by a new road.

This is perhaps Rajendra's most widely travelled poem. It was originally published in the Caribbean, and, apart from in "Bones & Feathers", it has since been published in Japan, the Philippines, Bangladesh and several other Third World countries.

Rajendra read it at a conference on tourism held in Manila at the end of 1980, where it was picked up by a regional news weekly and a travel trade journal, which used it to illustrate a report on how tourism can disrupt host societies. From there it was picked up again by Time magazine and published as part of a cover story on the Asian tourism boom, and with this, Rajendra found he had finally won the approval of his family.

"I couldn't care less about an establishment journal like Time magazine," he said. "But my family was really proud of me. They'd never taken my writing seriously before."

Now they are more willing to consider his point of view, though his mother still wishes he would stop courting disaster with his foolhardy criticism of the rich and powerful.

"This time you've gone too far," she tells him each time a new controversy blows up, usually as a result of his columns in The Star.

"I try to explore the real values of Asian society, the cultural and spiritual values, not just the material values, which is the way the whole development process here is going," says Rajendra.

Cultural corruption