Although the Thai and Indonesian languages have no linkages and belong to quite different linguistic ancestries, both have long had a fatalistic image of a frog who lives all its life under half a coconut shell.
—Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries
What can two nations mired in their own peculiar chauvinisms learn from each other? How does a country take a long, hard look at itself without losing the exercise of hard-fought internationalism? Earlier this month, the conference “Thai and Indonesian Writing in an Era of Conservative Redux” yielded certain insights to these questions via literary means. Featuring twenty-one speakers and conducted entirely bilingually in Thai and Indonesian, the conference is a colossal collaboration between the School of Political Science and Laws, Walailak University, Thailand, and the Faculty of Letters, State University of Malang, Indonesia.
Exemplifying the critical spirit of this “South-South” comparison, Indonesia’s keynote speaker Linda Christanty shared a personal anecdote: on a visit to Thailand, she went to a cinema and was prompted to stand up for the royal anthem. The Indonesian writer and journalist had then felt proud that Indonesians, in contrast, did not need to stand up to pay respects to some royalty from Java. However, this pride was nullified when, in 2019, the Indonesian Minister of Youth and Sports Affairs—enamored with the Thai monarchy—came up with a proposal: requiring moviegoers to stand up before the images of Yogyakarta Sultan Hamengkubuwono X and to sing along to the national anthem. Even though the proposal didn’t become policy, this anecdote is an important reminder that one cannot afford national smugness when authoritarianism spreads internationally, as it increasingly does.
Neither does the conference dwell on the opposite of smugness—i.e. the grass is greener syndrome—otherwise prevalent in international comparisons from the standpoint of a terrible national situation, especially vis-à-vis the West. Even if the grass on the other side is really greener, the vital point of comparison remains first and foremost to find out exactly how it has become so not-green where one is.
Thai scholar and critic Chusak Pattarakulvanit concurs with Linda Christanty that the so-called “conservative redux” may be more accurately described as a re-strengthening of something that never went away. In his diagnosis of the phenomenon where formerly leftist or pro-democracy writers enjoy a “free right turn,” Chusak identifies three structural contributors: recuperation of subversive works, institutionalization via patronage, and fetishization. The last entails the reduction of literary work—with its inherent capacity to go against convention—to a single prescribed reading, as well as the fixation on a certain “resistant” aesthetics that mutates it into a sacred thing (khong), divorced from actually existing social conditions.
The “free right turn” phenomenon has as its counterpart the punishment of writers who refuse to toe the line. Just this past week, on August 19, Thailand’s National Culture Committee came to a unanimous decision to revoke its recognition of veteran editor Suchart Sawatsri as a National Artist in Literature. (Suchart was once dubbed “SuSartre” for his role in introducing existentialist thought and literature to the Thai public.) The Committee has not released an official statement as to why, but everyone assumes that this has to do with Suchart’s outspoken criticism of the military-guarded government, the lese-majeste law, and most recently the royal family’s hold over COVID-19 vaccine production and research. This annulment of the lifetime achievement award is unprecedented, but ultimately unsurprising. Suchart himself has touched upon the change of his friends in an earlier interview:
. . . we used to gather around the table talking, drinking, and eating together. We all fought on 14 October [1973] with a common understanding. We were all fleeing death after 6 October [1976] in similar ways. It is therefore unbelievable that they have changed so. There’s a saying about phenomenon and essence that goes: phenomenon takes multiple forms while essence remains one and the same—it just has yet to come to the surface. I still don’t want to believe it.
The question of what essence lies under such a phenomenon is treated at length by Thailand’s keynote speaker Ida Aroonwong, editor of Aan (Read) Journal and the translator of Ben Anderson’s memoir into Thai. Parsing a line of a classical Thai didactic poem that insists “a banana is a banana remains a banana—never a plantain,” Ida blows the inauthentic posturing by Thai writers and rulers wide open. It is already well-known in Thailand that many writers who have enshrined the agency and worth of common citizens in their literary works somehow turn around and dehumanize the disenfranchised “Red Shirt people” protesting in the streets as stupid Asian water buffalo. But the Thai editor goes further by drawing on her observation of literary award committees to point out a startling parallel: in their writing as in their voting, the vast majority of people are kept out the gates and regarded as unworthy of being part of literary culture. “When the country’s majority are made out to be schoolchildren who will never pass Thai-language class—the language they use every day—what can even be said about the political struggle of those who are accused of being monarchy topplers and labeled as uneducated buffalo?” Ida concludes that self-professed “bananas” are nothing but sad symbols of impotence; the insisted-upon hierarchical distinction between bananas and plantains is undermined even in Thai dictionaries, revealing the true colors of certain literary circles—which might be more accurately described as misogynistic drinking circles. Having placed themselves as offerings at the shrine of Thai kings, this bunch of bananas may have no recourse but to rot away, now that an emerging crop of writers have broken their own paths with no need for patronage from powerful men.
The theme of transmogrification appears in Linda Christanty’s speech as well. She and her fellow activists fighting Suharto’s New Order during their twenties saw themselves as “a pod of like-minded dolphins.” Now, she says, some of them have turned into captive rats of the entrenched oligarchic system, allowing them to survive and eat to their hearts’ content. Felicitously, the term “rats” or tikus was rendered into Thai by moderator and interpreter Pensri Panich as fung hia, the term for opportunistic Asian water monitors that doubles as a Thai insult!
Several other Thai speakers charted the rise of several forms of “post-2010” writing, i.e. writings after the massacres of Red Shirt protestors in Bangkok: revival of interest in “un-Thai” historical episodes erased by Siamese masters, testimonies of those affected by the lese majeste law, and literature exploring relationships outside toxic masculinity and the gender binary.
This last category is most polemically discussed by Panithita Kiatsupimon, editor of P.S. Publishing. As a challenge to highbrow literature, Panithita highlights two widely-read “boy’s love” novels that make politics refreshingly relatable: ชายใดเล่าจะแซ่บเท่าแฟนเก่าแม่ (There’s no man as hot as mom’s ex-boyfriend, is there?), and เมื่อไหร่จะเลิกเป็นสลิ่ม (When will you stop being a salim?). The former book by Ror Ruea Nai Mahasamut (Jidanan Lueangpiansamut) tells the story of two brothers, one in university and the other studying to get into one, entering into unlikely relationships with their mother’s two ex-boyfriends—one a son of a 70s revolutionary and the other a son of a white American GI. Panithita claims that, in terms of readership, this novel outshines all the “serious” novels published in the last decade that explore the 6 October 1976 massacre and its aftermath.
The latter book, in my view, evidences the deep convergence of international pop culture with national political awareness, characteristic of the current Twitter generation. Its author, Cyanxweek (Monsicha Sueachorn), started writing fanfiction of Japanese manga in seventh grade, and became interested in politics in her first year of university. Her novel works with recent Thai events—up until the government’s mismanagement of PPE in the early pandemic—as material for dialogue for the protagonist trying to win the heart of a politically ignorant medical student living across the hallway.
Panithita points to a new horizon of writing, a literary flourishing beyond toxic masculinity (strangely coined in Thai as men ju “stinking of penis” despite its applicability regardless of a writer’s genitals) and the damaging separation between moral seriousness and popular forms of writing associated with women and girls.
Regardless of what literary trends are on the rise to challenge prevailing conservatism, in the tide of epigones there will be up-and-coming individual voices that manage to jump out. In the presentation “Between Urban Women and Turbaned Men,” writer Mahfud Ikhwan gives a worm’s-eye account of the long road to getting his first novel, Ulid Tak Ingin ke Malaysia, published and recognized on its own terms. Coming of age in the liberalizing era of post-1998 Reform, Mahfud found himself in the middle of three dominant literary trends in the 2000s: urban women’s writing exploring previously forbidden themes, men’s writing propounding political Islam, and inspirational stories of rural uplift. He aspired to tell a bildungsroman about a boy who watched his village being emptied out through migrant work to Malaysia—which brushed up against all three. Against the author’s wishes, the book’s first publisher put on the cover a picture of a woman wearing a headscarf and a title typography resembling the inspirational bestseller Laskar Pelangi (The Rainbow Troops), appealing to established norms instead of building on the work’s true form.
In all, “Thai and Indonesian Writing in an Era of Conservative Redux” encourages attendees to look outward at unfamiliar landscapes, even if their attendance was initiated by familiar names and same-old frustrations about one single country. The mingling of the strange and the familiar leads to the imagining of further avenues for dynamic side-by-side comparisons beyond the rather flat narratives of “glocalization.” This comparative imagination will be a worthy response to Ben Anderson’s final call to young scholars: “Frogs in their fight for emancipation will only lose by crouching in their murky coconut half-shells. Frogs of the world unite!” Or to put it another way, as Chusak Pattarakulvanit urges in the case of criticism, this search for lines of flight and insight is best guided by a “rebel consciousness” towards mutual emancipation from all systems of domination, local or global.
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