In our special situation, hail the metaphors
We can still speak, preferably in English, or even better in metaphors. The dilemma is painful: We speak in coded words and we risk being irrelevant, obscure, snobbish; but if we say it too directly, we risk something else, such as a summons, a slap on the wrist, or a mark on the forehead as the Biblical executioners arrive at the gates of Jerusalem. For those to whom Thailand remains home, both paths are strewn with barbed wire.
Earlier this week Chiang Mai hosted the 13th International Conference on Thai Studies, where about 1,000 academics, scholars and researchers participate in panels and roundtables about all Thai-related subjects, from history to art, environment to anthropology, the Deep South unrest to northeastern shamanism, ancient murals to modern literature, economics to politics. I took part in a small session in which I had a conversation on film, art and censorship with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, one of the best-known Thai artists internationally. We had been hearing stories about “spies” and plainclothes eavesdroppers at the event, but I didn’t see anyone in combat boots.
Anyway, we discussed the seven short films that Apichatpong had curated for the session. They ranged from a 2005 visual documentation showing people standing still at 8am, to a 2104 fiction about army conscripts toiling in a garden, to last year’s short about a girl in a rural school whose assignment is to draw a picture of rain. There are metaphors and analogies, visual signals and subterranean teases, and some left us with enigmas and cliffhangers. Yes: Art can be frustrating and abstract, but in good hands it is also a means to clarity. Film can be opaque, experimental and insular, but in good hands, it is also luminous and eye-opening, like matchsticks, or like specks of light hitting the screen and becoming a story. The stories the films told that day, we agreed, is that of the struggle of personal consciousness against the prescribed doctrine of nation building, especially after the 2014 coup.
In a river of piranhas, we can’t jump into the water and hope to make it to the opposite shore. At the same time, some of us just can’t NOT jump, unless our purpose in life is to remain on this shore forever. Lately we’ve been relying on metaphors, satire and comedy — not just in film but also in journalism and online pages critical of the state (think the famous Joh Khao Tuen by John Winyu or Kai Maew, an anti-coup comic strip) — to get our messages across. Prajak Kongkirati, a respected political scientist from Thammasat University, spoke at the session about how analogies and allusions have become so important to critics and how our reliance on them has also made us complicit in a game, a shadow-boxing match with the powers that continue to suppress the airing of dissenting views.
Such suppression came almost on cue, thanks perhaps to the plainclothes operatives. On Monday at the Chiang Mai conference, Mr Prajak represented a community of international scholars to read out a statement calling for freedom of academic discussion and civil liberties in Thai society (note that he wasn’t just asking for academic freedom, but freedom of expression for all). He didn’t need any metaphors, and the statement was direct, sane and well-meaning. Some scholars also took photos with a sign that reads, “an academic conference is not a military barracks”.
Right on time, an official letter from Chiang Mai deputy governor was sent to the Interior Ministry to report the movements of the academics at the conference and to inform that the security officers would “invite” three scholars for a chat (they haven’t so far, and the letter mixed up the names of the scholars). Then on Thursday, army commander Gen Chalermchai Sittisad, commenting on the statement by the academics, stressed that since the country is “in a special situation”, political freedom cannot be guaranteed. Following the law, he said, the military simply doesn’t want small problems to grow into big ones.
If there’s an institution that isn’t familiar with the art of metaphor, it’s the military: Order and diktat, directive and rules, all of them are the antithesis of allusion and interpretation. The Thailandbased scholars, artists, filmmakers and journalists, admittedly in this “special situation”, will have to work hard to negotiate the borders of metaphor, to find a way to keep telling the truth even if it takes longer, to carve out the safe space and push for more when it’s possible (like Pravit Rojanaphruk, recent recipient of the International Press Freedom Award, has done). We can still speak, in Thai, English or in code, and that’s the way to keep our consciousness alive despite the national hypnotism imposed upon us all.