I'm indebted for my discovery of Cecil Rajendra the other week to the always informative Lettres de Malaisie. Having read Serge Jardin's review (in verse no less), I immediately set about securing my copy of Personal & Profane (as an e-book, of course, all other modes of book purchase being out of the question in these locked-down times).

According to the bio at the back of this 2015 collection of poems, Penang-born Rajendra "describes himself as a 'lawyer by profession but a poet by compulsion' and has been writing poems since the age of 11 when he first discovered the works of Tagore and Omar Khayyam".



His passionate engagement and his indomitable refusal to pull any punches have made him unpopular with the authorities at times. He has been called in for interrogation on several occasions, and in 1993 his passport was withdrawn by the Malaysian government, unhappy at his vocal environmental efforts.

In all, I found Personal & Profane challenging and invigorating. Of course, not every poem will suit every reader (personally, I found Black Goddess too cute, and If Only Our Prophets Were Women too essentialist).

But Rajendra's energy, anger, and versatility make his work addictive.

He resolutely believes that poetry should be "a fist in the face of authority" (as he says in Sedition). He wants his verse "to crack the carapace of indifference" (My Message).

Accordingly, in Memo to Myself, he sets out his clarion call to outrage:

Let us never
be afraid
to bare
our teeth of fire
to scorch
and tear
to outrageous anger
the conscience
of this slum-
bering humanity...

And here's Psalm 3:

...The day my poems
were coined in revolt
i became the idol of earthquakes

but the day my poems
dripped honey
flies began settling on my lips.

And A Different Death:

...I have a job
that pays well
food in my belly
a bank account
a roof over my head

If I demand less
for any other man
then cut me up
and feed me
to the dogs
I am dead dead dead



The world, of course, holds all too many targets for his rage: injustice, violence, environmental destruction -- and the indifference that ensures these horrors keep coming. "History has taught us sweet NOTHING," he laments in Debris. No Change opens and closes like this:

After so many poems
protest marches
in so many places
nothing changes
the bitter wind hisses
the rain spits
but the caravan of horrors
rumbles on...

In Trees, he tells us not to pity the bare trees of winter:

The prayer of the trees
will be answered
with flower fruit and leaves
Spring crowns
their waiting

In those other places
of the hoop-eyed children
there is no Spring
only
the waiting

And in North/South, he excoriates the inequality that still wracks the planet:

In our global village,

these tales of hunger
and surfeit dribble
like trails of snail-
slime in a queasy mind.

The theme is repeated in Statistics, where of an island's two inhabitants, one has two million and the other nothing.



And -- authorities or no -- he is not going to refrain from criticizing his beloved Malaysia. In To My Country, he explains:

if I did not care
i would not dare
chart
your many imperfections...

faults in another
that would not matter
in our loved ones
assume
cataclysmic proportions

one loathes the worst
in those one loves best



What Shall we Tell our Children could surely be the anthem of climate change:

What shall we
tell our children
now
the trees are gone
the skies blackened...
What shall we
tell our children?

Tourism comes in for a fair amount of flak. When the Tourists Flew In records the adverse impact of mass arrivals, while Tourists bemoans that all too many of the visitors see a nation as "no more than a set of postcards".



I found his analysis of post-colonial identity very moving. In A Song for Fanon, for example, he talks about being "a stranger to myself... innocent of my native customs", deceiving himself into an assumed identity where he ultimately becomes lost. But the turning-point comes when he reads Frantz Fanon, who sends him "catapulting back, back, back" to exploring and embracing his ethnic and cultural heritage:

...And now no longer
obsequious or afraid
ashamed, apologetic
you can see me on that road
raging and screaming
but also celebrating
ecstatic
I think I am beginning
to find myself

The book is not all about anger, however, and the personal poems are very touching. In Miles he ponders his relationship with his wife:

what would happen
should you ever leave me
we've covered
so much mileage
with who else
could i re-clock it?
who would understand
the shouting & the loving
& the refusal to call
each other "darling"

And in Two Good Night Kisses -- in language so peculiarly relevant today -- he tells us about his ritual with his children:

...Each sleep is
a little dying
there's no money-
back guarantee
on the dawning
of any morning...

And so for this
perilous journey
deep into dark
uncharted country
i give them one kiss
for the going...
another for returning
(snug, smiling, intact)
to us the next morning.

Finally, this is Moment, a beautiful little evocation of the power of the present:

Among the dustbins
and scrawny cats
yellowing newspapers
and broken slats
a moment of beauty
breaks in the gutter
as rain clouds part
and the moon peeps
and is caught
in a rainbow puddle
of oil-slicked water.

Now nearly 80, this indefatigable campaigner continues to win awards.

In Life's Reality Check, he questions what he has achieved, awards notwithstanding, and wonders whether even two lines of his verse will survive into the future. I think the answer, very definitely, is yes.