Lloyd Fernando’s from Other Writer’s Perpective

Sunday March 2, 2008

A scholar and a gentleman

BY KEE THUAN CHYE

   

A friend remembers a great teacher, author, editor, and the first person in the country to promote the idea that local writers could produce worthy Malaysian English language works.

LLOYD Fernando was truly a scholar and a gentleman. He was a man of grace and polish who invariably spoke well of others. He loved literature and imparted his knowledge of it to his students with such passion that it made an indelible impact on their lives.

Above all, Lloyd was a fighter. Belying his urbane and gentle demeanour was a tough and tenacious spirit. He would not buckle under a discriminatory system when he was Head of English at Universiti Malaya. He fought his cases when he subsequently became a lawyer. He fought against the official practice of categorising Malaysian literature as “national” (for Malay writing) and “sectional” or “communal” (for writing in other languages). He fought for life when he suffered a severe stroke in 1997 and survived.

 On Thursday, he eventually succumbed to atrial fibrillation. He died in the Universiti Malaya Medical Centre three months short of turning 82.

Lloyd’s inner strength was honed from an early age. In 1938, when he was 12, his family migrated from Sri Lanka to Singapore. His formal education there was disrupted when war broke out and his father died in a bombing raid.

Faced with having to fend for his mother and siblings, the teenaged Lloyd had to take on a series of menial jobs. He was a trishaw rider, construction labourer, apprentice mechanic. He even signed up for the Ceylon branch of the Indian National Army.

After the war, Lloyd was determined to continue with his studies. He passed his Cambridge School Certificate but had to be a schoolteacher for some years before he could enter university at the age of 29.

He graduated with double honours in English and Philosophy and moved to Kuala Lumpur to be an assistant lecturer in Universiti Malaya. After obtaining his PhD from Leeds University in Britain, he was made professor in 1967.

I knew Lloyd best as a fellow writer. When I first met him in the late 1970s, it was with great respect for the work he had done – and was still doing – in promoting Malaysian English-language writing.

He was really the only person at the time visibly promoting new writing in English. He edited the landmark anthology 22 Malaysian Stories (1962) that gave recognition to fiction writers, the most outstanding of whom was Lee Kok Liang. Deservedly, that volume has seen numerous reprints and been adopted as a text in literature classes. It was even reissued more than 40 years later, in 2005.

Lloyd also brought attention to Malaysian playwrights. He edited New Drama One and New Drama Two (both published in 1972), which presented the works of Lee Joo For, Edward Dorall, Syed Alwi, and others. Without these two volumes, some of the plays of our pioneering playwrights might have now been lost.

I got to know Lloyd more intimately through participating in literary events and discourses with him. He was the embodiment of moderation. Even when he spoke with passion about an issue, his voice seldom crescendoed to a bellow. He often spoke about his vision of a multicultural Malaysia transcending race and religion. That was something we had in common, together with our concern for racial integration and equality.

He dealt with these themes in his novels, Scorpion Orchid (1976) and Green Is the Colour (1993). Some have criticised his style as being too academic in its detachment, but the message shines through nonetheless.

I regard the novels as two of the most important works of Malaysian fiction in any language. They came from a writer who loved his country enough to advocate eschewing narrow tribal concerns in favour of humanism and harmony.

Lloyd once told me that one of the challenges he encountered in his writing was his constant attempt to find ways of expressing himself in English without sounding “English English”. He avoided stock epithets and turns of phrase. He strove for Malaysian inflection. Those who mistook him for a patrician professor of English – no doubt reinforced at one time by his pipe-smoking penchant – never saw the colloquial Malaysian side of Lloyd.

As a family man, Lloyd seemed to have it together too, so I once sought his advice on bringing up children. “What should we do,” I asked, “to make our children understand what’s right?”

“You just have to keep talking to them and talking to them,” he said. “There’s no other way.”

I have been privy to moments he shared with his family. They seemed like friends to one another. His daughters, Eva and Sunetra, were on a first-name basis with him. Like their mother, Marie, they affectionately addressed him as “Lloydy”.

I also admired Lloyd for his discipline. When we were in Australia at a literary conference in 1995, we would get together in the evening to savour the local delight: wine. Lloyd loved wine as much as I do, but he would never go beyond his limit of two glasses while I would guzzle like there was no tomorrow – and suffer the fallout the next day.

But no, it was not just that. Lloyd’s discipline extended, even more admirably, to non-hedonistic pursuits. Coming from a background totally devoid of Malay, he taught himself that language late in life and achieved a fluency that allowed him to discourse on literature at national conferences and among Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka stalwarts.

In his 50s, when he might have been expected to put his feet up on the desk, he opted out of academia to study Law, and subsequently set up his own practice.

Then the blow came in 1997. I don’t think I’m a softie but when I visited him in the ICU ward and saw this once spirited person on the narrow bed, unable to speak, with a tube up his nose, I broke down.

It seemed that a blood clot had encroached on 70% of his brain, and the diagnosis was dire. But Lloyd’s will, as always, was strong. He pulled through the critical stage and was soon discharged.

I looked him up at his home after that and found he had, remarkably, regained much of his ability to speak although the left side of his body was paralysed. He said he was undergoing physiotherapy and vowed he would be back to driving in due course. I said, “Let me know when you do. I’ll come along for the ride.”

He never got that far. There were some things his will could not overcome. His condition deteriorated over the years but he carried on, lovingly attended to mostly by Marie and Sunetra, who also spared no effort in ensuring that he still enjoyed the cultural life by taking him, wheelchair-bound, to movies, concerts and other events.

On hearing about his passing, I e-mailed the sad news to eminent writer Shirley Lim Geok Lin who was once his student at UM. She replied:

“If Malaysia had more like him, our history would have been very different, and as a people and a nation we would be in a much better position.”

I couldn’t agree more. Lloyd epitomised a generation that had a firm idea of what is right. Sadly, there is now one less gentleman among them.

Source :

http://www.thestar.com.my/story.aspx/?file=%2f2008%2f3%2f2%2flifebookshelf%2f20500565&sec=lifebookshelf