Azmi Anshar has acquired a reputation as a “formidable” writer, fuelled by his mastery of the English lexicon. ApaKhabar shall pretty soon introduce his first column. Before we do that we decided he should pause and explain his writing style to our readers.

1. Thanks for agreeing to do this Q&A. For the benefit of our readers, we will go with this starter. Do you see yourself as a journalist or a writer?

Both actually. There’s a distinction but for the sake of categorisation, a journalist will cover beyond every aspect of reportage, which includes writing.

   But here’s the weightage: a journalist covers reporting, writing, editing, re-writing, sub-editing, layout artistry, graphics designing, photographing and managing the whole news operations.

   Then a journalist may manage human resources (the abovementioned professionals), tackle financing and budgeting and be active in advertising, circulation, marketing and public relations. It’s interconnected, especially when they help run a newspaper, magazine or web news portals.

   In my decades-long journalistic career, I’ve been designated in these equally crucial “non” journalistic positions.

   Therefore, a journalist carries a heavier responsibility while a writer does nothing but authors features, opinions, leader, commentaries and whatever forms of prose that don’t constitute straight reporting.

   Even then, in the golden age of newspapers, a reporter, quite simply, “reports” – someone who phones in the facts, details, observations and quotes of an event, never actually typing out the coverage but leaves the writing to a rewrite editor.

2. There is this matter of your writing style. At what point did you decide, “this shall be me my style?”

Probably after 1988 after I was tasked with the labour beat. My editors insisted that I write a weekend wrap-up for the New Sunday Times.

   Initially, it was a simple, even crude form of style, filled with repetitive and dry clichés, and re-phrasings of subjects’ quotes.

   As I improved, I started squeezing out my creative juices and applied harder thinking, and a principle that even if it wasn’t profound, the ideas must be original and the writing must avoid cliches; like it was the plague.

   The style that you see now was distilled when I edited New Straight Talk, the in-house organ for NST’s editorial department.

   I regarded it as an extension of The Star’s Scoop of the 1980s, a similar in-house organ edited and produced by the late Ahirudin Dahlan when we both were with The Star.

   I found NSTalk as the perfect platform to experiment – wildly and exuberanty – with short and long-version newspapering ideas and concepts, writing techniques and styles, layout, graphics and headlining. It was great fun until it was shut down.

   The writing style continued burgeoning: I spent five years perfecting a style that applied new vocabulary, phrasing and impact as ingredients to preparing a cuisine when I wrote Jazz Scene, a weekly jazz review column for the Malay Mail. As providence had it, I was writing “all that jazz”.

   The style followed me to Penang where I was the shortlived regional editor. I once wrote a Page One report that abandoned the KISS technique with a lead found in mid-page commentaries and leaders.

   Then the writing took another upgrade in 2004 when I prepared a page presenting smartphone photos submitted by readers for a contest that wins a more superior smartphone.

   The technology was nascent, rough and unwieldy but my job was to pen witty and snappy captions.

   That was when I tossed in words like “martinet” and “jeremiad”, admittedly words that even Western journalists don’t even think of using in their scribes.

   Shockingly, the News Desk allowed it and edited enthusiastically by the late linguistic master, Rehman Rashid.

   The style finally flourished with its florid phrases and power pick-ups when I pioneered Dewan Dispatches, a daily parliament commentary of the day’s business.

One particular phrase I thought might get me sacked was when I described Khairy Jamaluddin as the “Prince of Darkness”. It stood.

After Zainul Ariffin took over as group managing editor in 2009, he practically gave me carte blanche as a full-time commentator.

I have gone on an intellectual, often contrarian rampage since then. It’s my forte now.

3. What sort of reactions have you collated over the years?

Reactions? The admired, the good, the bad and the ugly, which was fine with me because my beef with my critics was, it doesn’t matter what the reactions are, as long as my works are read, rejoiced and reviled.

   I get tickled pink with every veneration and Freddie Krueger-butchery of my works. Tragically, many writers can’t take the heat. They can dish it out but they can’t dish it in. They don’t last long, let alone a lifetime.

   If James Joyce, Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens – my intellectual fathers and gurus with stratospheric styles – ran rings around readers and critics and still be adored, awarded and rewarded as the finest of their generations, I don’t see why I can’t.

   I take every critique, praiseworthy or thrashy, as a badge of honour, a confirmation of my worth. Many writers course through their professional lives with neither admiration nor heckles. The worse that can afflict a writer is indifference of their works.

4. In your first column for Apa Khabar, you singled out the English language as a big gift bestowed upon us Malaysians by the British as the colonial master. So, we are better off than the Indonesians and Thais being our immediate neighbours?

In a word, yes.

   For these two nations, the idea that they were never colonised by the British Empire is a source of national pride for centuries, until the advent of technological advances, compounded by the World Wide Web, compelled the world to critically read and understand English as the defacto mode of communication.

   The Thais and Indonesians, like China, had to skip learning English the glacially, pop culture method we undertook with pleasure. They forced themselves to dive deep into instructional classes, books and videos, thus the limp biscuit conversational approach and wooden, even robotic, writing pattern, as if they were translated by Google Translator. Maybe.

   The Thais speak English phonetically slanted, which is fine if the accented English is lucid. But their English is unhelped by their writing script, the Thai abugida, that’s unromanised.

   It would be like if we, in the absence of English in our lives, were to write jawi on one hand and struggle with the ABCs the other.

   The Indonesians, with due respect to their fabulous literary titans (Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Mochtar Lubis and Chairil Anwar anyone?), their great works were written in Bahasa Indonesia. And, their greatness and reputations, Pramoedya especially, leapt internationally after they were exported in English translations.

   Bizarrely, since the last century, the Indonesians somewhat realised the value of English, not as officially written or spoken language, but as proto-pidgin brogue. And how.

   First, they filched English words by the bucket loads, infused them into their vocabulary, grammar, abbreviations and instructions, written and spoken, to the point that a Frankensteinish and mechanistic gibberish was tenuously patched and celebrated, accompanied by solid content.

   Because the Indonesian intellectuals are considered superior in output and thinking, our Malaysian (Malay mostly) intellectuals situationally mimic their Eastern brethren in conversational forms whenever they get together. It’s either fascinating or nauseating.

   British English is the gift bestowed not just to Malaysia but the world all over, America even so.

   It makes the world go round, love it or not, with rabid consternations from non-English democracies of European, South American and Asian nations, and authoritarian superpowers bent on world domination.

   Their leaders insist on addressing the world assembly in their lingua franca although they can probably speak and understand working English.

   The greatest pop songs and literary works are from English or English-based musicians (Beatles, Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, Elvis, Jimi Hendrix) and the greatest, most influential literary authors are English or English-written. Shakespeare, Tennyson and Hemingway are just three examples of hundreds.

   Yet, spoken English, in its vast distribution, discourse and application, is no longer England’s possession.

   The world embraced and consummated it, played around with it, improvised and broke it into in their respective argot.

   Hang out with non-white Commonwealth folks of India, Jamaica, Malaysia, Nigeria, South Africa, Hong Kong, even Australia and New Zealand. They all have their own patois as unique as the origins of English were.

   Their versions of spoken English may be alien to Londoners to the Midlands although Manglish and Singlish, while endearing and practical, is an embarrassing mess.

   These non-British folks’ Queen’s (now King’s) English is unrecognisable in its spoken form but even in its written form, the variables mutate if you jump across time zones.

   England can choose to be proud of or flabbergasted at this civilizational language snatching, like all the nations’ football teams who beat the crap out of Harry Kane and Co while playing for the country that invented football/soccer but which can never win the Fifa World Cup outside of Wembley Stadium. Ouch!

   This thinking has been with me since the 1990s when I began formulating and perfecting my prose.

5. Do you have a personal list of “difficult words”?

English words in general are not difficult, at least not to me. For as long as there is a dictionary and thesaurus accompanying me in my adventure of shooting missive missiles, English words are a lifeblood of epiphany, illumination, knowledge, even wisdom,

   The difficulty is in the understanding of its definition and meaning in juxtaposing to its application, context and frame of reference that is the bedrock of civilisation.

6. Do you pick up new words, still?

All the time. My favourites now are jobbery, preternatural, dibs. The massive database hidden in the Oxford English Dictionary is an adequate arsenal for my battles with pedantic linguists, Nazi grammarians and obnoxious critics.

7. You have acknowledged in previous conversations that reading your articles could prove to be, well, tough. Are you hoping to share knowledge?

In 2012, the late Zainuddin Maidin amiably confronted me, on my way to pick up the Best MPI-Petronas Media Columnist of the Year Award, with this exact conundrum.

   A. Kadir Jasin, who was in earshot of our banter, commented to Zam that while many readers don’t understand or misunderstood my prose, the award judges certainly didn’t. I don’t know if Zam took it as a slight or a pithy explainer.

   Nevertheless, my old Star news editor K. Sugumaran, with his fondness for antiquated language (I’m fond of them too) would hyperventilate and bash me with his umbrella if he confronted me like Zam.

   Here’s my articulation: I am not writing a front page news report where the strictures are to KISS (keep it short and simple or short and sweet and short, stupid, take your pick): like traffic signage of turn right, turn left, stop, bumps ahead type of simplicity.

   Writing could be categorised into food eateries and restaurants: hawker, fast, cuisine and exotic.

   1. Hawker: In our daily excursions in linguistic adventures, at home and in the office, we expend written and spoken language like we eat hawker food – easy, simple, familiar, and comfortable like char kueh teow, nasi lemak, roti canai and teh tarik.

   2. Fast Food: If we have to engage with officialdom, we use the fast food vein: everything is prepared in advanced, the menu is non-malleable, nothing can be added or subtracted, what you see is what you get. No improvisations. Like instant noodle. Satisfyingly boring.

   3. Cuisine: Malay, Thai, Italian, French, Japanese Korea, it doesn’t matter the fancy restaurants you take your fine dining. The food is artistic, expensive, elaborate, laborious and aesthetic.

   While there are plenty of hits, there are loads of misses too. But that’s where I come in. My writing idiosyncrasies is prepared like fine cuisine, hopefully appreciated by a Michelin-star rating.

   4. Exotic: Very few people have starters or mains of monkey’s brain, turtle soup, elephant, whale or horse meat, crunchy crickets or cicadas.

   A writing style in the rage of these dishes are confined to certain writers: James Joyce certainly, the jazz/rock critic Greg Tate, literary critic Cynthia Ozick and novelist Tom Wolfe inspired me but to write a line like them is to demand readers to masticate on kangaroo meat.

   It works exceptionally though I do dabble in these oddities on some of my funkier days.

8. Do you also analyse the writing styles of others?

This is extremely crucial. Without reading and analysing contrasting styles of famed and controversial writers, your writing is assuredly staid, myopic, insular, cliched, dull and banal.

   For some writers, their style may be dried leaves in the heat but they make it up in ideas and wisdom.

   My go-to writers are not necessarily in this order: novelists, linguists, historians, essayists, pamphleteers, humourists, scientists of all stripes, artists, medical doctors, playwirghts, philosophers, religionists, criminologists and authors of erotica and sports.

   I’d be a vacuum, a pretentious small-time thinker devoid of the density of their deep influence.

   I’d go back to time and pick a moment when my fondess, no, make that obsession, for reading anything and everything is laid out by my late father, the primary school headmaster who imbued in me the unconditional love for reading after he set up a library of sorts at home.

   I remember the books he acquired for me – sets of encyclopaedia, classic and classical tales of ancient characters and wisdom (Mark Twain was a favorite) and Reader’s Digest, which I devoured like a champion professional hot dog eater.

   He left me a legacy unparalled and unsurpassed. Bless him, even if he belted me for defying his warnings not to swim in the nearby mining pool.

   Reading, especially the hunger for new material in the early 1970s when money was short, reached its apogee when I daringly broke the padlock to a moveable shelf in my Standard 6 classroom filled with wondrous books.

   I could never understand, until today, why those books were kept under lock and key but for my troubles, I was chastised and stopped from reading further after I had guzzled five teen novels.

   The psychological consequence of that censure is reflected on my home library of a thousand books.

   At heart, I am uppermost my father’s son – a teacher. There’s nothing more animating and inspiring than instructing a class of young journalists or an auditorium of discerning listeners who expect forthright, candid and honest opinions when I talk shop on socio-political issues of the moment.

   And a key element I’ll lay it down for them, besides advocay for free speech, is to install a built-in bullshit detector to detect, not lies or fake news (it’s very easy) but subtle and sublime falsehoods, skilful spin, dark deception and gross gaslighting in the long journey of reading, listening and learning.

Thank you.

Azmi’s father, Mohd Anshar Nawi passed away on March 13, 2022 at age 85