FEB 15 — On February 7, Professor Lim Chee Seng (1950-2011), arguably Malaysia’s most eminent Shakespeare scholar, passed away at his home in Subang Jaya.
At the time of his death, he was a professor with the English Department of University Pendidikan Sultan Idris. He was, however, best known for his long and distinguished career with the English Department of University of Malaya.
A graduate of University of Malaya and Oxford University, Lim joined UM as a lecturer in 1977, and spent a fruitful 32 years there as a scholar, educator, writer, administrator and mentor. He served several terms as department head and in 1998 was appointed professor of English at UM.
His work extended beyond Malaysia to include key roles within the International Shakespeare Association, and the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. He spent a year as Visiting Fellow at Yale, and was twice appointed visiting professor at the Centre for Advanced Studies in English in Calcutta. His articles on Renaissance literature and post-colonial writings in English have been published in books and journals around the world.
His list of achievements are indeed impressive. However, it was his love for Shakespeare, upon which he’d built his academic reputation, that he will be most remembered for.
These were difficult times to be teaching English literature in University of Malaya. There were rumbles that the department was a colonial throwback, and student enrolment was low. In the late 1980s, the English Department, under Lim, created the Rancangan Asasi Inggeris programme, an innovative scheme aimed at boosting the number of students registered to study English literature at UM.
The RAI programme circumvented the quota system and enabled many students who would not otherwise have got into UM a place in the department. I will always be grateful to the department, and Lim for the foresight and, dare I say it, cunning, of creating a loophole through the system.
Like all good teachers, he strove not so much to teach as inspire. He shared with us his appreciation of the written word. He stressed the importance of critical thinking, of finding connections between plays and poems written centuries earlier and the world around us.
His passion was infectious. All these years later, I can still remember the excitement with which he told us about how new insights into African culture were challenging traditional interpretations of the handkerchief in Othello.
Producer Adeline Tan remembers his “deep and rich voice, which made Shakespeare a lot more interesting”, and it’s a fact that more than a few undergraduates swooned a little in the English seminar room every time Lim recited a sonnet or read aloud a soliloquy to illustrate a point during lectures.
I can’t say I knew him well but we reconnected some years ago when he contributed a couple of articles to the arts website that I ran at the time. It was a coup for us to have someone of Lim’s stature write for us. In 2006, we invited him to work with us on the Kakiscript Playwriting Competition. Chee Seng, as he insisted I call him, was a pleasure to work with.
His intelligence and pragmatism in formulating the judging criteria and his impartiality and scholarly critique when it came to judging the works were crucial to the success of the project. It was a measure of the man that he attended to his duty of selecting the best plays written by ordinary Malaysians with the same seriousness he’d given to his position as a long-time judge of the prestigious Anugerah Sastera Negara.
The last time I saw Lim was some time in late 2009, to select the winners of the 2nd Kakiscript Playwriting Competition. At the meeting, I told him that my partner Jenny Daneels and I had made the difficult decision to shut down the website we’d founded nine years earlier. Circumstances had made it too difficult for us to continue with it.
His reaction was unexpected. Chee Seng seemed genuinely upset by the news and he kept saying “we must do something” to keep the website alive. He offered his help to rally support, and talked — there was that passion again — about the importance of developing the local arts scene through open discourse.
I knew that he was disappointed that his term at UM was not further extended beyond 2009. However, keeping occasional tabs on Chee Seng via his Facebook page, it seemed that, at 60, he was as active and as driven as ever.
He’d joined the faculty of the Sultan Idris Education University and was introducing literature to a whole new generation of students. He was involved in research and writing, flying off to all parts of the world to deliver papers and attend seminars on language and literature.
The news of his passing came as a shock to many of his students and ex-students. It's hard to imagine that this gentle man will no longer be there to induct young Malaysian students into the secrets of prose and poetry as he’d done for so many of us.
With his passing, memories of the man bring us each back to the source of his passion. In the words of Crescentia Morais, a former student: “I'm cherishing every memory of him, and am going back to literature with renewed passion.”
There is an old saying that you die twice. The first time when you physically expire, and the second when somebody says your name for the last time.
May you never taste of death but once, dear Professor.
Lim is survived by his wife Rema and daughters Joanna and Suzanna.
* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.
