A regional literary pioneer
Wong phui Nam is regarded as one of South-east asia’s pioneering english-language poets and writers.
WONG Phui Nam, one of the revered Malaysian literary pioneers who helped to shape the local English language writing scene and elevate the art of poetry in Southeast Asia, died on Sept 26 in Kuala Lumpur. He was 87.
Born in 1935 in Kuala Lumpur, Wong received his early education at the Batu Road School and later at the Victoria Institution. In the late 1950s, he went on to study economics at the University of Malaya in Singapore (now National University of Singapore), and embarked on a corporate career in development finance and merchant banking.
In his early years, Wong found a balance between his studies and his aspiring writer dreams.
He was active in the literary and poetry scene, playing a role in The New Cauldron, a literary magazine founded by Raffles College students in Singapore.
During that period, he was also co-editor of Litmus One and 30 Poems, both anthologies of university verse. In 1958, he put out a collection of university-era poems titled Toccata On Ochre Sheaves.
Later, Wong’s poems produced during the 1960s appeared in
Bunga Emas, an anthology of Malayan writing published in Britain in 1964. These poems were subsequently put together in book form and published by Tenggara as
How The Hills Are Distant in 1968.
“Poetry gives you the capacity to examine yourself, a self-reflection of sorts. I think it’s important that people don’t go through life blindly,” said Wong in an interview with
The Star in September 2019.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Wong remained relatively inactive in terms of new published works.
Nevertheless, his published volumes of poetry and many of his poems were used in academic texts and found a new generation of fans. In 1988, all his poetry was translated into French and published by the Université de Lille-iii.
His second volume Remembering Grandma And Other Rumours was released in 1989.
In the early 2000s, Maya Press in Kuala Lumpur published his collected works titled An Acre Of Day’s Glass, a gateway publication which broadened his audience beyond academics and students of poetry. On the theatre stage, Wong had written two plays – Anike and Aduni – in the early 2000s.
Anike was a Malaysian version of the Greek tragedy Antigone, written by Sophocles. Originally a play about the fates of the human race in the hands of the gods, Wong provided an interesting parallel between the world of Sophocles’
Antigone and Malaysian society.
Aduni was an adaptation of Euripides’ Medea – a Greek tragedy.
A sonnet sequence, The Hidden Papyrus Of Hen-taui was published by Ethos Books in Singapore in 2013, but Wong – during his retirement – revisited those works and added more material to the book in 2019.
The Hidden Papyrus Of Hen-taui was re-released by Blublack Productions in 2019, featuring 53 sonnets dealing with the search for spiritual freedom amidst religious bigotry.
“With many of my poems, what I wanted to explore was the lack of spirituality in this country ... true spirituality,” Wong was quoted as saying in 2019 about the works in