A new era of the Malaysian creative forces you are about to see everywhere. Get to know them now before they take over.

For Pavithrah, poetry began by accident and stayed by choice. At 18, stepping in for a missed slam, she nervously performed Disappearing Act, a poem on mental health. That trembling first performance sparked a ten-year journey of using language as a tool to connect, empower and speak truth. Today, the Malaysian poet wields words with intention, shaping a voice that&rsquo;s as thoughtful as it is resonant. Poetry often acts as both mirror and megaphone. How do you decide when your work should reflect personal truths versus amplify collective experiences? The personal is political. The mirror and the megaphone go hand in hand. My poetry has always drawn from my lived experiences as a Malaysian Indian woman, I can&rsquo;t write about what I haven&rsquo;t lived. But as a Malaysian-Tamil poet in Kuala Lumpur, where the poetry scene often lacked people who looked like me or spoke my language, I felt it was vital to speak on the experiences that matter to my community: institutionalised discrimination, colourism, feminism, economic and social gaps, and other issues that affect us. Equally important was celebrating the beauty of my community, the joy, love, culture and resilience that coexist with these struggles. I wanted these conversations to feel intimate and personal, not overly academic or inaccessible. My thought process was simple: If I&rsquo;ve been through this, surely others have too. I&rsquo;ve always believed the best poetry is honest. That honesty reflects the truth without compromise, revealing realities that readers may not have known, or may have lived themselves but struggled to contextualise. Your virtual community creates space for brown artists to talk about art, culture, and identity. What gaps or silences did you hope to address when you started it? Our first virtual community, Poetry Sangam, started as just a small group of friends, Indian writers who felt the poetry scene in Kuala Lumpur and Malaysia could be more inclusive. We began as four people, meeting regularly to chat, share what we were writing, and discuss shows we wanted to organise. While Poetry Sangam eventually disbanded, that drive never went away. Years later, after COVID struck and the community slowed down, I saw an opportunity to create a virtual space where artists could meet, share work, and engage in open, safe discussions about the issues affecting our community.

Lumpur

Identity can be both grounding and limiting in how audiences interpret art. How do you navigate the expectations that come with being seen as a &ldquo;brown artist&rdquo;? I won&rsquo;t lie, it&rsquo;s difficult. Carrying the label of a &ldquo;brown artist&rdquo; often comes with expectations about the kind of work I should produce and how it should be received. I often return to something my favourite writer and friend, Dhinesha Karthigesu, once told me: the very fact of our existence in these spaces, speaking truth to culture, is already an act of defiance. As a Malaysian-Tamil artist, my identity isn&rsquo;t something I can put aside, it&rsquo;s written on my skin, shapes my lived experience, and informs how I move through society. Naturally, it finds its way into my art. Rather than seeing that as a limitation, I treat it as an entry point: a responsibility to reflect the truth of that experience and to open a small window into it for others. It is important to me that my work reflects honesty and pays respect to my culture, my identity and my community. The responsibility to represent it in a way that reflects that and not one that is tokenistic then falls on curators to represent and include &ldquo;brown artists&rdquo; intentionally in art spaces.

"Impact, to me, would mean our stories travelling beyond our own circles, shaping culture and shifting the way people think about belonging, identity and justice." - Pavithrah

In your view, what is the most urgent conversation brown artists need to have with each other today, and what role does art play in that dialogue? Audre Lorde famously said, &ldquo;Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence&hellip; Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.&rdquo; I believe brown artists should, and do, engage in necessary conversations about creating work with intention. Creative expression, especially from women, people of colour and queer people, is inherently political because it voices truths that dominant culture has long silenced. By transforming personal pain or joy into poetry, art converts individual experience into collective consciousness. But these conversations cannot exist only within minority or &ldquo;brown&rdquo; artist communities. They must reach the broader community, particularly...

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Photography Floyd Grey Creative Direction, Styling &amp; Words Syazil Abd Rahim Hair &amp; Makeup Joey Yap Photography Assistant Sze Yang Styling Assistant Fekar Khairul

Malaysia Day Special: Inside the brilliant mind of Pavithrah

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