Malachi Edwin Vethamani

The debut collection featured 82 poems addressing various issues, particularly those concerning love and loss. Some of the work is based on Vethamani's memories of living in Brickfields.[5] Wong Phui Nam remarked that people might find the poems in the collection to be "difficult poems", given the deceptive "surface simplicity that ...obscures... the deeply felt range of complex emotions underneath". Vethamani was likened to "classical Chinese poets", where a common theme in the Chinese poets’ writings is "that human life is all too brief, and life comes all too soon to an end", and he added that Vethamani showed an "unexpected affinity with Buddhist thought" with regards to the idea of non-attachment.[8]

This collection has been characterised as full of "honesty, humour, and humanity"[9] and alternate between "bald poetry of statements to poems of lyrical grace".[10] He was praised for exploring important issues such as "the complications and fractures of longing, heartbreak, exile and sexuality in a Malay-Tamil society" and noted that "simplicity of language and phrase making are the hallmarks of Malachi Edwin Vethamani's poetry".[11]

Vethamani edited a volume of Malaysian poems entitled Malchin Testament: Malaysian Poems (Maya Press, Kuala Lumpur: 2017) which spans a period of 60 years, deemed to be "the most important collection of verse published thus far in this new millennium in Malaysia", since there has not been another comprehensive compilation of Malaysian verse after Lloyd Fernando's anthology The Second Tongue (1976). Malchin Testament was praised for taking this into account and including all the important poets who wrote before the 1990s, deemed as "the true predecessors of today's Malaysian poetry, such as Ee Tiang Hong, Wong Phui Nam, Siew-Yue Killingley, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Muhammad Haji Salleh, Hilary Tham and Salleh Ben Joned".[12]

The collection includes all the early practitioners of verse starting from around the birth of Malaysia in 1963, although Wong Phui Nam early poems were already written in the decade prior to that. The “Malchin Testament” of the title of the anthology was a hat-tip to a poem of the same name by poet Salleh Ben Joned, which poked fun at the possibilities of Malaysian English slang and idiom being used in the writing of local poems and "democratising the language altogether". Newer, emerging voices were also fairly represented although the reviewer lamented the absence of Nicholas Wong (or Zhou Sivan) in the anthology.[12]

This book features 69 poems from 37 poets under the age of 35 and "captures the voices of the young and the restless". Most of the poems were written in free verse, and the language used was "contemporary, youthful and often conversational", with a "distinct flavour of Malaysian English.” The poems touch on themes that range from everyday concerns to identity, growing up, dealing with loss of parents and grandparents, and political awareness.[13]

The debut collection was highly praised for “clever and ardent writings which mirrors the realities of everyday life of Malaysian everymen... where the larger questions of existence are explored”. The female characters "resist societal oppressive norms by not performing or bowing to the roles and norms expected of them".[14] In this collection, Vethamani's characters are often, although not exclusively, Malaysian Indians dealing with matters of personal freedom and choice. Some of his most memorable male characters are gay men who have to navigate their lives in a society in which homosexuality remains taboo, where Vethamani presents "these vignettes of Malaysian life just as their characters might inhabit them, with candour and directness".[15] The tone of the stories were said to be "serious, often explicit, and at times light-hearted and humourous [sic]" and the book showed that not only has Vethamani "proven that he is an excellent storyteller, but [he] has inadvertently been the author of one of the few Malaysian works in English that directly deal with queer experiences and women's sexuality".[16]

Vethamani edited Ronggeng-Ronggeng, an anthology of 28 short stories written between 1959 and 2018. The collection offers a breadth of stories; from the newness of an independent and multicultural nation to stories which express "smaller, more intimate realities".[17] It comprises a variety of genres, from social politics, social realism, to horror, and the supernatural.[18] A common thread running through the collection is the theme of belonging, "whether in terms of nation, family or society". The contributing authors were diverse in terms of the period as well as ethnicity and background, with selections from Zen Cho, Kassim Ahmad, K.S Maniam and Awang Kedua, amongst others.[17]