Confessions of a liminal writer: An interview with Kee Thuan Chye

Kunapipi, Dec 2005

Kee Thuan Chye was born in Penang, Malaysia in 1954. He started writing poetry and drama in the early 1970s, while he was still an undergraduate student of Literature at Universiti Sains Malaysia, and had numerous radio plays broadcast on RTM (Radio Television Malaysia) during that period. He also wrote plays for the stage, including The Situation of the Man who Stabbed a Dummy or a Woman and was Disarmed by the Members of the Club for a Reason Yet Obscure, If There Was One (1974) and Eyeballs, Leper and a Very Dead Spider (1975).

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Confessions of a liminal writer: An interview with Kee Thuan Chye

Confessions of a liminal writer: An inter view with Kee Th uan Chye Mohammada Quayum 0 Recommended Citation 0 Quayum, Mohammada, Confessions of a liminal writer: An interview with Kee Thuan Chye , Kunapipi, 27(1), 2005. Available at: - Article 15 Confessions of a liminal writer: An interview with Kee Th uan Chye Abstract Kee Thuan Chye was born in Penang, Malaysia in 1954. He started writing poetry and drama in the early 1970s, while he was still an undergraduate student of Literature at Universiti Sains Malaysia, and had numerous radio plays broadcast on RTM (Radio Television Malaysia) during that period. He also wrote plays for the stage, including The Situation of the Man who Stabbed a Dummy or a Woman and was Disarmed by the Members of the Club for a Reason Yet Obscure, If There Was One (1974) and Eyeballs, Leper and a Very Dead Spider (1975). This journal article is available in Kunapipi: http://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol27/iss1/15 MOHAMMAD A. QUAYUM Confessions of a Liminal Writer: An Interview with Kee Thuan Chye Kee Thuan Chye was born in Penang, Malaysia in 1954. He started writing poetry and drama in the early 1970s, while he was still an undergraduate student of Literature at Universiti Sains Malaysia, and had numerous radio plays broadcast on RTM (Radio Television Malaysia) during that period. He also wrote plays for the stage, including The Situation of the Man who Stabbed a Dummy or a Woman and was Disarmed by the Members of the Club for a Reason Yet Obscure, If There Was One (1974) and Eyeballs, Leper and a Very Dead Spider (1975). However, Kee’s move to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital and premier city, in 1979, where he now lives, marked the beginning of a new phase in his writing that culminated in his agitprop play 1984 Here and Now, first performed in July 1985 at the Experimental Theatre in Kuala Lumpur. Since then, he has composed The Big Purge, performed at the Essex University Theatre, England, in May 1988, We Could **** You, Mr Birch, first performed at the Experimental Theatre in Kuala Lumpur in June 1994, and The Fall of Singapura, which has not been staged yet. Moreover, Kee is the author of two volumes of prose: Old Doctors Never Fade Away (1987) and Just In So Many Words (1993). His poems have been published in numerous anthologies and journals at home and abroad. As former Literary Editor of the Malaysian English daily, New Straits Times, and current Associate Editor of the leading Malaysian newspaper The Star, Kee is one of the most prominent English-language journalists in the country. He was the recipient of a British Council Fellowship in 1987 and Australian Cultural Award in 1994. In 1998, he was invited as a guest writer to the Melbourne Writers Festival, the Brisbane Writers Festival, and Spring Writing in Sydney. In 2001, he was invited to the inaugural Standard Chartered International Literary Festival in Hong Kong. He has been a judge and regional chairperson of the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize. Kee is also a deft actor and stage director. His acting credits over the last 25 years include roles in the films Entrapment and Anna and the King. He played a major role in the long-running TV series City of the Rich, and the role of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman on stage to unanimous acclaim in 1989. He has also directed about a dozen plays for the theatre. This interview was conducted via e-mail in November 2004. * * * MAQ: Tell us something about your ancestors who first came to Malaya. How did they negotiate between the two cultures/worlds, following their migration? KTC: I’m afraid I have no record of this. MAQ: Has the cultural dislocation affected/enriched your imagination in any way? KTC: Yes. It has certainly made me question my identity as a person and as a writer. Malaysia is still a young polity, having become independent only forty-seven years ago with a baggage of diverse races and cultures. The Malaysian identity is still amorphous. People like me from immigrant backgrounds although born here but not long after Independence have had to struggle to find a sense of belonging, and through the decades, with the formulation of ethnic-biased policies, the struggle has been made harder. We’ve had to put up with being marginalised and being less privileged than the Bumiputras. We’ve even had to suffer the insult of being called ‘pendatang’ (immigrant). I personally experienced the adverse effects of such institutionalised racial discrimination when I was denied a tutorship position after completing my first degree although I was top of my class. That deprived me of the opportunity of pursuing my Masters because I could not afford to continue my studies without a job. Today, the racial divide is still there. At its recent general assembly, UMNO, the dominant Malay-based ruling party, unveiled what it called its ‘Malay Agenda’. It defies good moral sense that in this day and age, in a multi-racial, plural society that is bein (...truncated)


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Mohammada Quayum. Confessions of a liminal writer: An interview with Kee Thuan Chye, Kunapipi, 2005, Volume 27, Issue 1,