SALLEH Ben Joned, more than any local artiste (for he was one and more), was an iconoclast that I looked up to.

To me, he embodied the true Merdeka spirit, the semangat Melayu that remains elusive to most Melayu Malaysians who are more often than not, adrift and lost in a sea of ideological nonsense.

By Melayu, I’m not referring to the convenient category that our colonialists brandished us (which we still foolishly define ourselves upon), but the Melayu or Malayness of the Nusantara – the broader spirit of the archipelagos that informs its dwellers regardless of ethnic origin, from the vague borders of the West to the furthest ends of the East.

We’ve been defined in the latter half of the epoch by what we had no control over in terms of our cultural identity. We had to reclaim it for ourselves and resist it from being hijacked by self-serving demagogues and shallow politicians.  

As a young Malay male growing up in the 1990s trying to figure out things, as much as I found passive enjoyment in music and film, there was always a gaping void unfilled on how to understand what was going on around me.

The patriarchal deference, the forced piety, the unrelenting self-guilt, insurgent politeness and the evergreen Hang Tuah versus Hang Jebat axis that was supposedly my cultural road map ate me up from within.

The “Malay male” – you can’t escape this category because structurally you are forced into corners and boxes – is such a loaded term.

By any measure, my family were the most nurturing, loving, and open-minded but there are certain things you need to figure out by yourself.

This is where one often finds a guiding voice in the wilderness, a hero figure of sorts, an archetype whom you may find some spiritual solace in.

I found it in Salleh’s collection of writing – Sajak-Sajak Salleh. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I always heeded the literary compass that he commandeered along with the works of Usman Awang and T. Alias Taib. No wonder I’m a failure as a Melayu “artis” – which is a resounding success to me.

Yes, I sing and play guitar, but I follow the fancy of literary works but with a healthy dollop of common everyday language, which helps keep it secular and “real”. 

I was late to the party (I didn’t have a cooler older brother to show me the way, I AM the older brother) and had just crossed over into my early 20s when his work came about in my hazy youth.

Hazy because the medication for clinical depression I was diagnosed with when I turned 20 (just around the time I started busking overseas, which I was determined to wean off by replacing it with my own prescribed doses of what the great Salleh coined a “roaring Tiger” through the decades (I needed a self-prescription to write this piece).

I stopped taking the pills when I noticed the psychiatrists’ office plastered with the pills’ brand on his pen, notepads and other stationery and also because an Australian classmate of mine whom I fancied coincidentally worked part time at the dispensary of the pharmacy where I needed to pick up my prescription. 

What we look in our heroes is something we can identify with. With Salleh, you could say that we were both scholars Down Under (most privileged and lucky Malays went to the “motherland” United Kingdom), we both lived in Adelaide, South Australia (although obviously decades apart, I grew up there as an infant when my parents completed their PhDs under the Whitlam education policy), and we embraced everything a Melayu was forbidden to embrace. Which ironically, to me, is what it was all about to begin with.

Rebels are sometimes created, not born – not because you are outwardly defiant, but because you actually use your brain and follow your heart. I also came to understand he, too, dealt with his own bouts of depression, something I could probably still relate.

Salleh’s words, thoughts and philosophy, leapt out of the page with not just its gusto and brevity, but with its sheer individuality of spirit and clarity of thought.

A lot of Malay literary works are buried under layers of vague symbolism and poetic shadow play. Nice, but sometimes you need to display your guts.

Salleh is THE National Laureate in my books.

It was a revelation for a skinny bespectacled middle-class shaggy-haired Malay kid bound for middle-of-the-road of ruin (okay, I’m exaggerating but it reads good on paper).

Melayu-ness loves binaries – there’s no negotiation, everything is black and white, good and evil, heaven and hell. No greyness allowed. 

Malayness, as I observed through the lens of my steady unwitting diet of American pop culture, was all fire and brimstone mirroring that of the rednecks and trailer trash of Southern Americana (which may explain my love and hate of country music).

I was and am still sure that we are better than that for we have culture, history and tradition.

Salleh lit those darkened maligned corners of the Nusantara mindset and told me to follow my gut and let go of the wheel and trust my instincts. He emboldened me.

Al-Fatihah, Hero. In the words of another fellow rebel, Rest in Power. – October 30, 2020.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.