Returning  Home
Poems by Raymond Tong   (University of Salzburg Press, 1996)

Reviewed by Aidan Rankin

This small, but immensely readable volume charts the political journey of a thoughtful and erudite man from conventional social democracy to aspects of cultural nationalism. Tong is a former British Council Representative with immense knowledge of Africa, South America and the Middle East, who has spent much of his working life abroad. Returning home, he experiences a curious sense of exile, for he finds himself in a country that is only nominally his own. Tong is not a stick-in-the-mud traditionalist, but he regrets the passing of the larger ideals of social justice and individual bravery. Modern Britain is, he finds, a conformist, levelled-down society, where the indigenous people often appear uneasy when writing or talking of their own nationality....

This is the land of the gently manipulated where ... all too often unjustified guilt takes the place of justified pride.

Tong is a product of the optimistic, post World War II generation, who believed that they could fashion a better, but more uniform world, one in which poverty was humanely banished and the former colonies set free as modern (namely Western) democracies. Instead, he watched as new dictatorships imposed themselves on the African and Asian peoples he loved, whilst at home, progressive planning brought forth new forms of alienation -- the misery of high rise flats, the breakdown of extended families and the destruction of working-class culture. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Tong does not gloss over these failures of liberalism. He dares to challenge prevailing mania for "progress", and he does so through starkly satirical verse :

This African potentate basks in glory, prepared to use any means whatever to retain his role as president for life.
 
This smiling little Asian demagogue, despite his cultured liberal platitudes, runs his police-state most efficiently.

Whilst he delights in exposing liberal cant, Tong is no racist or reactionary. He is devoted to the landscapes and peoples of Asia, Africa and South America, and -- unlike so many self-professed "anti-imperialists" -- believes genuinely in their right to political and cultural independence. In one poem, On An African Hillside, he pays homage to a local bronze deity :

... she cannot tell us what she knows.
And we are left to look across soft hills
into the darkest jungle of her hair,
loving the shattered crystal of her gaze,
knowing that here there is forgetfulness
and peace ...

Tong's concern for the former colonies is inseparable from his anger on behalf of Britain's indigenous peoples, the English in particular. They have been betrayed, he believes, by corrupt and decadent politicians and by intellectuals who have abandoned thought in favour of dreary ranting about "gender" and "multi-culturalism" -- not true multi-culturalism, but a legally-enforced melting pot in which each added culture loses its distinctive taste. In particular, he is moved to rage by academic hypocrites like the "sociologist" of one of his poems :

Your concern to preserve identities of immigrants suggests a man who cares.
And yet, Professor, not a single word about the natives slowly losing theirs.

In his own land, this writer identifies a new form of colonisation, the colonisation of the spirit. He sees a people who have given up on themselves, who are - in a literal sense - demoralised :

I wonder if I am only imagining that more and more people talk to themselves as though pondering some terrible dilemma,
the young often angry and aggressive, the old quieter and yet clearly troubled.

In one of his most interesting poems, Portrait, Tong writes about a Skinhead whose response to modern nihilism is that of sullen rebellion. Ironically, perhaps, the dress sense of this youth is multi-cultural : the Sikh dagger, or kara, the swastika (that ancient symbol so besmirched by recent history) and the "patriotic" Union Jack shirt. For the skinhead,

... the kara is merely an item in his regalia of rebellion, a violent decoration,
a silent revolt against being a part of everything and nothing,
a sturdy companion to the studs upon his boots and leather jacket.

Tong does not condone the violence implicit in Skinhead culture. He does, however, understand it as a response to a society where consumerism is the official religion, where masculinity is not valued and where the native working class are abandoned to "market forces" or "progressive" social engineers. Returning Home reminds us that British poetry has escaped colonisation by the cultural left. Tong is a part of a tradition of social criticism that embraces poets as varied as Eliot, Belloc and Larkin. I commend his work to readers of Counter-Culture.

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Returning Home  is distributed in this country by
Drake International Services, Market House,  Market Place,  Deddington,  Oxford  OX15 0SF
Price : £7.95 (post free).

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