Muhammad Haji Salleh dan Menyeberang SejarahMuhammad Haji Salleh and Menyeberang Sejarah

Muhammad Haji Salleh was born on 26 March 1942 in Taiping, Perak. He was educated at the Malay College Kuala Kangsar, the Malayan Teachers College at Brinsford Lodge in England, and then English literature at the University of Malaya in Singapore. He took an MA at the University of Malaya in 1970 and a PhD at the University of Michigan in 1973. His career began as a teacher at a trade school in Butterworth from 1960, then as lecturer through to professor, including as Director of the Institute of the Malay World and Civilisation at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, and he has been emeritus professor since 2009. He received the ASEAN Literary Award in 1977 for Perjalanan Si Tenggang II, became the sixth National Laureate in 1991, won the S.E.A. Write Award in Bangkok in 1997 and was named National Academic Figure in 2008. He has written more than seventy books in Malay and English, about fourteen of them poetry collections, and translated the Sulalatus Salatin into English for Penguin.

Menyeberang Sejarah: Kumpulan Esei Pilihan appeared in 1999, with a second printing in 2006, and runs to 647 pages. It is not a monograph with a single thesis but a collection of essays spanning some three decades. The key word of its title, menyeberang (to cross), carries connotations of courage, risk and transformation. The book’s arrangement is read as a deliberate method: moving from inside outwards. Part one, Mendialog Warisan (Dialoguing with Heritage), deals with the hero, metaphor, the aesthetics of sorrow, the fold of orality in written literature, Richard Winstedt and the pantun. Part two takes up beauty and audience, part three, Wacana Mutakhir (Contemporary Discourse), treats historiography and criticism, including Baha Zain and the Angkatan Sasterawan 50, and part four, Di Ambang Dunia (At the Threshold of the World), looks to Derek Walcott, Hugh Clifford, translation and globalisation, closing with a bibliography of over six hundred entries.

One of his key contributions is a critical reading of colonial scholarship. His essay on Winstedt, the colonial scholar-administrator whose grammars and literary surveys shaped how Malaysians understood their heritage, asks whether he was a scholar, a colonial writer, or both. The stance taken is to read the colonial archive against the grain: take the usable data, discard the colonial frame and build a Malay frame. With the help of Walter Ong, orality is understood not as a stage left behind but as a fold that remains present within written texts; with Mikhail Bakhtin, the relation between the pembayang and maksud of the pantun is read as dialogue in the literal sense.

The aesthetics sections reclaim beauty as a serious category. Western criticism grew suspicious of beauty, while colonial aesthetics labelled colonised literatures ‘simple’ or ‘quaint’. The essay on beautiful suffering shows that suffering can be beautiful without denying its reality, rooted in Sufi aesthetics of sorrow and longing and in the poetry of separation in the Malay-Islamic tradition. The image of the serambi, the verandah as an in-between space of the Malay house, is used to depict the audience as co-present participants rather than passive spectators.

He also audits his own discipline. The essay on the problem of criteria in Malaysian criticism questions the tendency of postcolonial literatures to judge themselves by academic standards inherited from the coloniser. Angkatan Sasterawan 50, founded in Singapore in 1950 with the slogan ‘art for society’, is read critically before the book moves to world literature, as if Malay literature had to reckon with its twentieth-century self-definition before crossing. In the final part Derek Walcott is read as a fellow postcolonial poet who bent the coloniser’s language to Caribbean rhythm and myth, Hugh Clifford is read through Edward Said’s Orientalism as an example of structural distortion even in sympathetic representation, and the translator is seen as one who stands on both banks of the river.

His theoretical companions, Bakhtin, Ong, Roland Barthes, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and Aijaz Ahmad, are used with clear roles. Aijaz Ahmad matters because he challenged the privileging of English-language diaspora writers over literatures in local languages; Muhammad himself writes mainly in Malay and translates outwards, refusing the hierarchy that treats English-language postcolonial writing as the true canon. Its limits are acknowledged too: essays across three decades leave visible seams, and because it is in Malay the book is almost invisible to English-language comparative literature.

The philosophy of crossing it contains rejects two false choices: defensive nativism and assimilationist cosmopolitanism, both of which assume that identity means standing still. The sequence is to begin at home, build a vocabulary, test it against colonial scholarship, audit the discipline, then cross outwards as an equal. For Aceh studies, long read through Snouck Hurgronje and colonial scholarship, this model is relevant: the hikayat, the Sufi poetry of Hamzah Fansuri and Acehnese oral tradition can be read with the tools of modern theory without surrendering the standard of judgement to outsiders.