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Let me put it this way right from the start: If I had had my own way, or rather if I had been in possession of my senses or in my right mind, I would never have worked on Malaysian or Singaporean literatures. The curious thing about my encounter with Malaysian-Singaporean writers and intellectuals is that I was singularly unprepared to assume the roles of critic, academic or anthologist over their... More

Let me put it this way right from the start: If I had had my own way, or rather if I had been in possession of my senses or in my right mind, I would never have worked on Malaysian or Singaporean literatures. The curious thing about my encounter with Malaysian-Singaporean writers and intellectuals is that I was singularly unprepared to assume the roles of critic, academic or anthologist over their productions at a time when their activity was mainly confined to the University of Malaya in Singapore. And yet, paradoxically, I became just that kind of an exegete, owing to a series of "wilful errors" on my part. Instead of choosing to settle for a career by qualifying in Singapore where the region s institutions of learning, such as, the Raffles College for the Arts or the King Edward the VIIth College of Medicine, I opted for Bar Studies at the Inns of Court School of Law in London as an external student. After a series of further "abetted errors", I found myself teaching English (and American) literature at the University of Maryland in Heidelberg in 1960-61. The university offered me a five-year Fullbright to do a Ph.D. in English (while teaching) at College Park in Maryland, but then as usual I knew better, and I quite na�vely accepted a grant from the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an international cultural organisation whose siege social was in Paris, to travel and report during a tour of South and Southeast Asia. It didn t occur to me then that I could have kept both, for the grant was for only a couple of months. To make things even more difficult for myself, I asked the cultural body representatives (to whom I was introduced and recommended by the Thirties poet Stephen Spender), if they couldn t publish an anthology of writing by Malay(si)ans and Singaporeans. They said they would try the Rockefeller Foundation for a subsidy. The reply: no one was interested in such a collection, not sufficiently enough to subsidise such a project. The muddle-head that I was made me insist that I would go it alone and on my own steam. I didn t realise I was heading headlong into mainstream muddled-up Malaysian politics. My published doctoral dissertation: Etude compar�e des litt�ratures nationales et/ou officielles de la Malaisie et de Singapour depuis 1941, and the present volume do not therefore constitute areas of research I would have wanted to probe. They are accidental fallout instituted by random circumstances. Curiously, or rather not-surprisingly, no Malaysian or Singaporean has ever acknowledged my contribution to this field of research. And this is as it should be, I concur.

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