LAW is "the world's most conservative profession". Art is "the preserve of parasites". Tourism is "complete and utter desecration of an environment".
Lawyer, artist, human rights activist, the Malaysian poet, Cecil Rafendra, is an opinionated recent tourist in Ireland. "Ah, but I am a traveller," he laughs, for there is a difference. A guest of Concern Worldwide, he stayed with friends in Crumlin, Dublin.
He is described by Concern's chief executive, Father Aengus Finucane, as one of the developing world's most provocative poets. Small wonder. Rajendra, believes that artists must be social activists if they are to lend any credibility to their work. A writer who merely charts the ills of society, and no more, is "no better than a parasite feeding off the sores", he says. The artist who is not willing to take risks would "be better off selling insurance".
Ouch...
The Malaysian shared some of his views at a recent poetry evening hosted by Concern Worldwide in the Dublin Writers' Museum. Also reading were Prof Brendan Kennelly of TCD the Dublin poet, Mr Rory Brennan; Ms Rita Fagan of the Family Resource Centre in Inchicore, Dublin, and sister participants in the Unspoken Truths women's community adult training project.
"Often here, our perceptions of the achievement of people in the developing world can be obscured by the diet of images and messages that accompany individual disasters," Ms Penny Cabot of Concern Worldwide explained before the event.
"The media and aid agencies rightly draw attention, but there is a danger that repeated images encourage stereotypical ways of thinking about the developing world."
Rajendra is alert to stereotypes of all shapes and sizes. "There are many who would say that an artist's contribution to society is his/her work, and that he/she need do nothing else," he believes.
"It is not the business of the artist, they say, to change society. That is the business of politics." Yet in "an embattled and ever changing third world, such propositions smack of pusillanimity of the highest order."
Opposites attract
What's worse, he says, is the tendency for authoritarian regimes and the literary establishment - often poles apart on questions of censorship, security and individual freedom - to join hands. Sometimes they "almost echo each other in their vociferous denunciation of the creative writer who intercedes for social justice".
Born in Penang, Cecil Rajendra grew up in a Malaysian fishing village, Tanjong Tokong, which has now succumbed to "progress and development". He was educated at the University of Singapore and Lincoln's Inn, London, where he qualified as a barrister in 1968. That was the formal part. During his 13 years in London, he also worked as cook, post man, messenger, labourer, a wine cellar porter, youth officer, scriptwriter, market researcher and legal adviser.
In the early 1970s, he initiated a cultural forum called Black Voices in a coffee house basement in Old Brompton Road, London. He was also part of a travelling players' group, known as the Third World Troubadours. While living in London, he says that he was the first Malaysian poet to be listed by the National Poetry Secretariat of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Though he became a familiar name on third world studies reading lists, he received little acknowledgment for his artistic efforts at home.
Legal first
Nevertheless, it was there that he set up his legal practice, and was one of the founders of free legal aid. He is chair of the Malaysian Bar's committees on both human rights and legal aid.
The Malaysian scheme, based on 15 centres nationwide, is unique, he points out. It is funded by lawyers, with no State involvement, to ensure its independence. The contribution of 100 dollars a year is not much, but it is mandatory, he says.
He has little truck with many in his daytime profession. "Law seems to be a career identified now with money, rather than with justice," he sighs.
For his own sanity, he continues to write, and his poetry has been translated into several languages and published in over 40 countries. The arms race, the nuclear threat, violations of human rights, effects of development on people's cultures and despoilment of the environment are constant themes in his work.
His concerns about tourism, as expressed in his work Sons for the Unsung, strike a universal chord:
"Like every honest citizen/ I have no bones to pick with progress/ but if croupiers and waiters and foreign investors/ take over from our farmers and fishermen/ when my son grows up/ what will he eat/ tourists, transistors or stones.
High cost holidays
It is the sort of sentiment which would be appreciated almost anywhere these days, due the pressures on the environment imposed by the world second largest industry. Far too often, the leisure sector exacts a heavy price, according to Tourism Concern, a new London based organisation set up to raise awareness about its effects.
In Kenya, for instance, the Masai have been forced off their ancestral lands to provide national parks, where tourists, are free to roam and observe big game. In Burma, which has designated 1996 as the year of the tourist, the moat at the royal palace in Mandalay was cleared by forced "voluntary" labour, and homes were demolished.
Then there is the lovely tropical island of Lombok, which has become very popular with visitors to Indonesia. The government is "tearing down homes" to pave the way for development, and the "tourism frontier" is moving so fast that communities have no time to prepare and adjust.
The organisation does not necessarily advocate that we should all stay at home. It aims to help travellers to understand the issues, forge links, and campaign for a just and sustainable industry which takes local people into account.
The Aran Islands are not on that list yet, but it is the subject of a profile in the prestigious National Geographic. The downside of tourism is acknowledged in the April issue by Lisa Moore LaRoe. "Aran is a beautiful woman, and some people here are pimps," she quotes one islander as stating.
"You can have her any way you want her, just give us money, he told her, in despair.
Yet, she says that far more islanders she spoke to viewed tourism as the salvation of "a place whose traditional livelihood of fishing suffers from dwindling ocean stocks and vigorous competition from other nations in the European Union".
She seems to agree. "Chaotic as the tourist bustle on Inishmore can be, it's still easily escaped. Five minutes beyond the pier, visitors disperse to explore ruins, beaches, and the 14 small villages sprinkled across the island's nine mile length. Locals remain free to savour the traditions that still define the land."