The Artivism of Incantations in Isan

Abstract

Artivism is not necessarily a harmonious intersection between art and activism—it may also result from a head-on collision. This article explores the art of Patiwat “Molam Bank” Saraiyaem, a Thai folk poet-singer and former student activist who has shied away from the label “activist.” How does one soldier on doing activism with a wounded soul? My answer: through the power of ritual poetry and performance in restoring wholeness as well as acknowledging brokenness. This argument is constructed through description, comparison, and analysis of the words, the emoting, and the reception in two incantatory poems by Patiwat. In the first, Patiwat remakes the baisi su kuan rite to call democracy’s spirit essence back to the demos’s expansive body, with rallygoers as the audience-turned-agents. In the second, Patiwat remixes benediction and malediction in a double act of cleansing the traumatized self, with myself as a reader-turned-translator. Isan, the term meaning the Northeast as well as the hybrid Lao vernacular of the region, serves as a key to unlock an understanding of how Patiwat’s art both serves Thai pro-democracy activism and resists its dominant language and emotional regimen, sparking as a byproduct new activist possibilities in and beyond Isan.

Citation: Songkünnatham, Peera. “The Artivism of Incantations in Isan” The Jugaad Project, 12 August 2022, www.thejugaadproject.pub/artivism [date of access]

I. The Problem with Activism

My use of the portmanteau “artivism” is exploratory; it arises from and is grounded in the fact that the words “activist” and “activism” are pain points for Patiwat “Molam Bank” Saraiyaem, whose art I discuss in this article. Mor lam, literally ‘expert singer,’ is a title given to Lao-speaking folk performers that doubles as the name of their music genre from northeastern Thailand. Combining storytelling with song and dance, the art of molam is thriving today despite a history of persecution, cooptation, and neglect. Molam entertainers have long been key transmitters of Lao historical memory and literary heritage, especially after the Siamese state suppressed Lao literacy and traditional monastic education for men. As Siam, and subsequently Thailand, underwent waves of centralization and modernization, so did molam keep innovating musically and hybridizing linguistically to stay alive under the state and stay relevant to new generations of listeners. [i]

Patiwat, known in Thailand by his nickname Bank, is part of a new generation of molams who are revitalizing and repoliticizing the art; he also took part in monarchy-critical activism during his time in college majoring in molam in the early 2010s. As this article will show, Molam Bank has broken new ground in activism-oriented performance by mobilizing as well as inverting the cohering power of ritual via affect and emotion. The first example covered here goes into the language, the voice, and the gestures in Patiwat’s remaking of the traditional su kuan ritual as an invocation of democracy’s communal “spirit,” something one can recognize as conventionally ritualistic in its cohering, reintegrating effects. The second example illustrates how Patiwat’s remixing of cursing and blessing (in)coheres and expresses the unsettling state of unsovereignty, something one can also recognize in the personal costs so often incurred by activist commitments.

Whether used by hostile state authorities or sympathetic media, the words “activist” and “activism,” Patiwat feels, misrecognize who he is and what he does. Two instances of interpellation shall illustrate the state’s work of misrecognition. In a 2019 interview, Patiwat recounted the events leading up to his arrest in 2014:

Some time after Prayut[ii] took power, a dean at the university[iii] called me on the phone saying military officers came to see me. I went and they asked, are you an activist? I said yes, sir. They went on a sermon saying, put a lid on your activism, the military had to take control to preserve peace, this and that. I didn’t say anything back, just yes, yes sirs. Several days later, the dean called me saying the military wanted me to go sign an MOU [memorandum of understanding]. But it struck me as odd that he repeatedly insisted I go alone, that no friends tag along. I consulted with payroll staff at the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts and they agreed that something was off. They then consulted some professors I respected, who decided to accompany me to the meeting. Once we got there, both the officers and the dean didn’t at all expect that I would bring faculty members with me. The plainclothes then closed around me. An officer showed me an arrest warrant and asked, rudely: is this you? The picture on the warrant was of myself performing molam. So, I said: yes, that’s right. They cuffed my hands right then.

Patiwat’s two affirmatives to the questions of identification are markedly different, at least in this retelling. To the question “are you an activist?” at the first meeting with military officers, the “yes, sir”—from the Thai khrap— conveys compliance to authority. But to the question “is this you?” at the scene of arrest, the “yes, that’s right”—from the Lao maen—suggests recognition of self-image as a folk artist. Patiwat’s code-switching between Thai, the official national language, and Lao, one of the regional vernaculars, is common to many people from northeastern Thailand, also known as Isan. The word Isan may also refer to “Isan language,” a varied mix of Thai and Lao. Both meanings of the term apply here.

At that point, Patiwat did not yet know that he was being charged with lese-majeste[iv] for his villain role of a royal adviser in the 2013 satirical play Wolf Bride. The image did not really match the crime. The rather unwarranted use of the image of a molam performance in the arrest warrant led to the second yes: he recognized himself in the image and proceeded to misread it. This yes, in turn, was misapprehended by the officers who cuffed his hands. He spent the following two years in prison.

Then, four years after release, Patiwat became the odd one out in Thailand’s most high-profile lese-majeste and sedition case against “core leaders” (kaen nam) who spoke in a historic rally in September 2020. Lumped in with all the internationally prominent protest leaders, Patiwat, an invited speaker at the rally, found himself to be Number 3 on the accused list, was imprisoned in October, then released ten days later, then imprisoned again in February 2021, then released two months later. In this time period, the unprecedented entry of monarchy-critical activism into the country’s mainstream media coverage, both on television and online, intensified the effects of celebrity culture already operating within the movement. Patiwat was given the spotlight he craved, yet he was notoriously combative with journalists in his refusal to answer “stupid questions” and his refusal to be portrayed as an activist, let alone a kaen nam. “Being a core leader is above Molam Bank’s head,” he commented in a mix of sarcasm and resentment the day of his release in October. The following extract from an interview I conducted over Zoom in December 2020 illustrates his love-and-hate relationship with the “illusory world” (lok maya) of media attention, potentially including attention from me:

It’s a good thing [communist symbolism] is being brought up. In my time there wasn’t open discussion about it. We wanted to talk about it so bad and could only do so in whispers. But now when they did it, it became a national sensation, right? Every media channel pointed cameras at them. To be in the spotlight, to be the media, to have the media, is to involve yourself in money and marketing. Marketing means it’s a system of capitalists which means it functions by money, bear in mind. […] All you celebs and famous leaders—this is not a slight against anyone—let me tell you all that you’re getting caught up in that illusory world that’s playing you for fools and messing up my life in turn. Because this time I got put in prison not because of my own doing, but because of you all’s. Why, yes. I’m here to just put the blame on them. Today Molam Bank only insults his own movement. As for the government, it’s already numb and indifferent from many an earful I’ve given it. You understand now? Anything else? Ask away, and then put things together yourself.

Although Patiwat Saraiyaem has insisted on various occasions on being identified as an artist rather than an activist, this doesn’t mean that this former student activist has come to reject activism. Two incantations in verse that Patiwat wrote and performed in the second half of 2020 will prove otherwise. One calls into being an expansive community of equals; the other, a collective cursing. Through a contextual analysis as a remote observer and a close reader-turned-translator, I will put together an account of artivism that achieves its reality effects through belief, ritual, and the embodied act of reading.

II. The New Normal of Rituals

Magic rituals have come to play a major role in Thai political activism under the reign of King Vajiralongkorn, who inherited the throne in 2016. Regardless of one’s beliefs in the occult, the general belief among monarchy-critical protesters that the king is highly superstitious already imbues any invocation of the occult, whether serious or tongue-in-cheek, with a gratifying sting. The most iconic and much-reproduced example is the installation of the Second People’s Party Plaque in Bangkok’s historical center in September 2020. (See, for example, Siani 2020). The amateur officiant not only sacralized the object symbolizing a new dawn of democracy after absolutism, but also put a curse of sexual dysfunction—by popular request, clarified the officiant—on those who would remove it. This is a thinly veiled jab at the womanizer king, who the protesters believe ordered the tampering with the 1932 People’s Party Plaque, which disappeared a half-year after he became king. This tampering and disappearance is laden with dark arts associations (see Kritsada 2017).

A month before the iconic ritual that installed the Second People’s Party Plaque in Bangkok, Patiwat Saraiyaem similarly reworked to democratic ends in downtown Khon Kaen the ritual of su kuan or summoning of the spirit essence (Tambiah 1970: 223-251). Also known as baisi su khwan in Thailand and baci in Laos and its global diaspora,[v] su kuan brings a community together to provide moral support and induce well-being by recalling one’s straying spirit essence from the wilderness and inviting it to bind itself to one’s body. The binding mechanism is two-pronged: through listening to the officiant’s chanting in one’s vernacular (rather than a sacred language like Pali) and by having senior community members tie cotton strings (ideally warmed and waxed by a candle) around one’s wrist. Depending on the occasion—a joyful wedding or a worrying pregnancy; a college orientation or a homestay farewell; before a movie’s release or after release from prison—the aggregating and reintegrating chant may address the spirit essence of any number of living persons, from an individual to an entire community. The ritual manifests both spiritual and social efficacy, and “charges” the person with morale as well as enables them to accept and bind themselves to what is expected.

Based on a video recording of and the script for this performance in August 2020, what Patiwat staged was a summoning of democracy’s spirit essence. It was requested as part of the rally Isan plot aek, pla-daek jong jaroen (“Break Isan’s Yoke, Long Live Fermented Fish”), organized by an ad-hoc coalition of activist groups and non-governmental organizations on a plaza at the Democracy Monument in downtown Khon Kaen. The rite’s material trappings were there: on the ceremonial tray or pa kuan, pa being the shortened form of the Indic word phaachana/bhājana ‘vessel, receptacle,’ stood a banana leaf sculpture in the shape of a castle spire with tiered wings, flowers placed on the tips, cotton strings draped around the wings like tassels, and a candle on top. A few hundred rallygoers, who had earlier stood at attention to the national anthem with a defiant three-finger salute originally inspired by the Hunger Games movies around the time of the 2014 coup, gathered around the tray and sat down in widening circles, waiting for our artivist, clad in a long-sleeve rough cotton shirt, his hair coiffed into a crest, to work his magic. With the picture so far, this threatens to be a spectacle essentially no different from the media recognition-obsessed activism Patiwat decried as ineffective.

In order to tease out what sets Patiwat’s democracy-calling apart, I will run it through a series of points of contrasts. The first is Tambiah’s (1970) 50-year-old ethnographic account of the rite that pointed me to Patiwat’s crucial modification of kinship terms. Before any chanting started, the first thing out of his mouth was a disclaimer; his seizing upon the pandemic lingo “New Normal” elicited some laughter from the audience.

Today, the one performing the rite is not being disrespectful. Normally they will have someone over the age of sixty do a baisi su kwan. Nowadays, things are done New Normal-style. Age is irrelevant. You have a mouth that can speak, go for it. You have the capacity to do a baisi, to gather your people (pi nong) together, do it.

In Tambiah’s account, the officiant, the paam (from the Indic brahman) is invariably an older male householder whom the community regards highly for his former monastic learning. Half a century later, the convention still holds, but is no longer a hard and fast rule. In a conversation during the writing of this article, Patiwat explained to me that this loosening of age requirement, which accelerated in the past decade or so, was due to three factors: the increasing paucity of traditional paam, the transferability of molam’s skills as chanters,[vi] and the local demands for molam in place of traditional paam which led to more widespread acceptance, one event at a time. And so Patiwat, a man in his early 30s who several years earlier could not bring himself to complete a 15-day Buddhist ordination after his release from prison,[vii] usurped this position. In doing so, he suggests a different way of being well-versed: rather than his religious credentials, his capacity to officiate the rite derives from his art of verse-making. As he continued, referring to himself as a molam but referring to his friend Buatong, a mor khaen or khaen player who frequently accompanied him in performance, with the honorific ajaan/ācārya ‘teacher’:

Now, beloved and respected people who are hearing this: focus your attention, set your minds at peace. Enter the rite of baisi su kwan today, with Ajaan Buatong who will start us off with Buddhist and Brahman ritual, and Molam Bak Nuat Ngoen Lan Patiphan Luecha here will summon you all (pi nong)’s spirit essence to return to the body, gathering it together to fight dictatorship and obtain democracy.

By leaving to a second officiant the prelude of chants in praise of the Buddha, the asking of local sacred beings for forgiveness should they do things the wrong way, and the postlude appeal for protection from the Buddhist Triple Gems, Patiwat brackets off religious authority from his incantation.

Lest I overstate the unprecedented quality of Patiwat’s performance, it must be noted that this su kuan for democracy also represents a continuation of his artistic lineage: the chant is directly descended from those of Patiwat’s teacher Wandee “Molam Udomsilp” Phonthongsathit, born 1950. Around 2009 and 2010, at the high point of Red Shirt organizing for the return of representative democracy, Patiwat followed “Mother Udomsilp” around to rallies in Isan, where she officiated su kuan rituals for Red Shirt protestors. Unfortunately, no recordings of nor scripts for these performances can be found, so a comparative study to ascertain what’s truly new about Patiwat’s version is not possible at this time.

Patiwat’s simultaneously respectful and playful approach toward tradition would become apparent five minutes into his 20-minute incantation, when conventional tropes of the wilderness started to blend into specific tools of political trauma: the tanks, the laws, the lies. And soon, alongside the conventional call and response where the officiant prompts the audience to say ma der kuan oey, ‘oh spirit essence, come back,’ more organic responses arose as well. Ten minutes in (at 22:35 mins in the video), an elderly woman tied a cotton string around his left wrist as he continued chanting. Then, at the end of his performance (at 31:20 mins), another woman went up to him, stuck a one-hundred-baht note on the banana leaf sculpture (an act at once reminiscent of tipping a molam on stage and donating a money-tree to a temple), grabbed and tied a cotton string to his wrist, and then gave him a hug and sniff-kiss combo that he complied with before signaling to Buatong to continue with the postlude chants in Pali. (This second woman is not unknown to Patiwat: she is the mother of one of the rally’s organizers. But even if she were a total stranger, such displays of affection still wouldn’t be unusual for a molam fan who goes up and tips.) As the blesser is blessed by the people he was in the middle of blessing, he is implicitly given the blessings—his reform of the rite is legitimated. In Tambiah’s functional-structural account, elders confer blessings (bundled with social duties) on their younger counterparts via su kuan, just as young men confer merit on their elders via Buddhist ordination and monk-officiated rites. This gendered reciprocity between generations in complementary rituals is collapsed here into a single (still gendered) reciprocity of care between equals.

Patiwat’s use of the compound pi nong, literally ‘big sibling little sibling,’ idiomatically ‘folks,’ remained constant throughout the chant; zero references were made to pu tau (elders), paw mae (parents), or luk lan (descendants). Indeed, the only term of address not related to siblings was siaw tai sahai yu (ride-or-die friends). In my first draft translation of the chant into English, I rendered pi nong ‘kinfolk,’ missing the point almost entirely.

I asked Patiwat about his flattening of age hierarchy, whether he meant to evoke the concept of “fraternity” a la the French Revolution, perhaps. (I asked him this because one of the performance poems he had written in prison retells the story of the storming of the Bastille, made tangibly Isan by an abundance of Lao and Thai kinship terms and proper names.) He replied, “the fact that there is the concept kuan [spirit essence or soul] already means there is equality. The farang [Westerners] didn’t have such a concept built in.” While such immaterial claims of primitive equality may have no anthropological merit (see, for example, Sahlins 2017), this reading of kuan provides a locally tangible metaphor for a democratic political subjectivity: the spirit essence exists equally in every human person.

During the chant, Patiwat’s personification of democracy flits between the specific and the general. One moment it refers to the general political situation in Thailand, then the next it refers to a very concrete circumstance that pertains to the few. Through the incorporation of such marginal circumstances into the whereabouts of democracy’s essence, the embodiment of democracy becomes increasingly expansive. For example, the following series of conjectures end with a reference to the forced disappearances of activists who had fled the kingdom after the 2014 coup by Prayut Chan-ocha:

Quit fooling around in the cell block behind the walls

Or are you sitting crying in a corner after your trial

Ended in a long prison sentence?

Or did they spirit you away

With death threats to your friends and family?

Or did they call you on the phone to make you paranoid

Your body twitching at night?

They knocked on your door and told you

They’re gonna stab you to death, didn’t they?

Or did they kidnap and kill you, leaving your husk of a corpse

In the thick woods somewhere in Cambodia?

Here, during the ritualistic performance, the dead, too, become representative of democracy’s vital force, despite Tambiah’s categorization of kuan as the force of life complementary and opposed to winjan as the spirits of the dead. Unprompted, an audience member made explicit the reference (at 28:10 mins): they summoned by name Wanchalearm Satsaksit, a political refugee who had just been abducted and disappeared two months earlier outside his residence in Phnom Penh. This led Buatong, the second officiant, to repeat the name into his microphone and add “come, too, any of you who were disappeared; come, too, any of you in Laos,” summoning the political refugees no longer there as if they were still there. In effect, Patiwat’s incantation induces organic acts of solidarity in the audience-turned-agents. It actualizes the ideal of egalitarianism in a ritual space and time.

III. Throwing Oneself to the Ground: Emoting in Context

The next point of contrast is between two instances of Patiwat Saraiyaem throwing himself to the ground. In the su kuan rite, a series of place names of political trauma in Bangkok and Khon Kaen reaches a crescendo with the line “Bangkok Remand Prison where you used to be.” Bangkok Remand Prison is, in fact, the place Patiwat used to be for two years of his life. Patiwat dramatized this line through the shaking of his voice and body, the melismas which dragged out some syllables to mimic weeping, and the act of sitting upright on his knees only to throw himself on the mat at the end of the line. The performance was met with cheers, laughter and applause from many in the audience. (Watching remotely, I teared up.)

This act was repeated two months later to a much different effect. On October 30, 2020, several high-profile lese-majeste defendants were granted provisional release by the court. That evening, supporters and journalists waited for them in front of Bangkok Remand Prison, but upon release all the core activist leaders were immediately re-arrested for different charges and put in a police van, leaving only our artivist to reach the prison gates. He started to perform a sorrowful verse, reading off a piece of paper. Near the end of the piece, at the line “injustice flattened me, knocked me senseless,” he threw himself on the asphalt. As some of the people around him tried to cushion the fall, all the microphones and cameras followed him as he continued performing: “Brothers and sisters, do you, any of you, feel for me / Take pity on me, your humble servant, who has borne the brunt of karma.”

While these two instances of throwing himself to the ground are not identical in intensity, they are both attempts to emote, i.e., theatrically convey a line’s emotion. Both are knowing performances of real emotions to a public audience, yet the latter comes off as much more of a desperate personal cry, not least because of the forcibly shaven head, the clearly distraught face, and the direct appeal for sympathy. But I’d like to draw attention to the difference a ritual framing makes. Rituals, as Byung-Chul Han observes, “produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence. They de-psychologize and de-internalize those enacting them” (2020: 7).

Tethered to the su kuan ritual, Molam Bank’s artivism decenters the activist individual. His verses become more than—or less of—a way to express himself as an activist or an artist. When he folds his own traumatic experience into the su kuan rite, he transcends himself, and the tendency to individualism is muted. For example, the line where he throws himself on the mat, i.e., “Bangkok Remand Prison (gets up on knees) where you used to (drags out the syllable) be (drops),” has no pronoun in the original Isan. I put the “you” there due to grammatical necessity, which led to my decision to add an “I” in brackets in the text of the translation to signal the folding of first-hand experience into second-person address: “Bangkok Remand Prison where you [I] used to be.”

Succinctly, Han defines rituals as “symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world” (2020: 2). In Tambiah’s account, the su kuan rites work by way of the Lao vernacular—the language of home, understood by every villager—in enacting healing or morale-charging effects. Patiwat’s language, for sure, does this. Towards the end, after all the scenarios of straying in the wilderness of dictatorship, the incantation turns its focus back to the scene of mutuality as immediacy, spontaneity and communitas (Turner 1969: 136).  The words are so thoroughly embodied they activate the entire sensory apparatus in the effort to pin down the sixth sense, so to speak:

I’ll call you back, valiant spirits

To restore warmth to the body

To eat and to drink all that your sibs has prepared,

Both savory and sweet

Come back… Come drink rice whiskey from this mug

Drink to your heart’s content,

However many jars it may take

Your friends are happy to provide—it’s all at your disposal

Come back! Oh spirits, come back (call and response x3)

Wear the silk sash your mother wove

Sprinkle yourselves with perfume

Put a flower behind your ear

Breathe in its cool fragrance

So that I may bring these cotton strings from the sky deity

To tie you in place to soothe the body and bring longevity

Come back…

Sit right by your ride-or-die friends

Take some sticky rice and mold it in your fist

Press the ball down in the chili paste with fermented fish,

You do that, okay?

Come back…

Sing and dance along to the tunes of the molam duet

Then to the tunes of the molam troupe

Flaunt your moves and enjoy yourselves all night long

If you’ve arrived, holler!

(call ho-ee-o-ee-o-e-o-e-oy, response heew, x3)

Now, sister, tie one on the left arm;

Brother, one on the right

Don’t be afraid, tuck yourselves in and relax,

You do that, okay?

We must not forget, however, that this ritual was staged in downtown Khon Kaen, a regional center of education and commerce. Not everybody in the audience understood Patiwat’s Lao-heavy Isan language, especially in its poetic diction and symbolic register. Indeed, the journalist who recorded the full video of the rite struggled to confidently explain its meaning at the end of recording. Alongside a measure of catharsis and feeling at home, Patiwat’s verses actually bring out, to varying degrees, an unsettling foreignness in many democracy-loving Thais.

This is deliberate on Patiwat’s part. Rather than translating his art for the general audience, he insists that the audience bring themselves to it. This is where the notion of artivism acquires another layer of significance: the art itself may push back against the dominant language of political activism. Patiwat’s art of molam translates national (and international) politics into dialect, only to broadcast it back to the dominant society ruled by monolingual Thais. The family resemblance between Thai and Lao only makes Isan language that much more likely to be misunderstood through false cognates.

Together with language, emotion forms an essential part of the artivist resistance to mainstream activism. As one might feel excluded from Patiwat’s performances due to the language/cultural barrier and yet drawn in by the political intelligibility, so one might relate to their emotional content and yet cringe at its unfiltered display. Among the activists who put on a brave face to keep up the people’s morale, Patiwat openly bristles at core leaders, cries on TV, and incorporates sobbing sounds into a morale-charging rite. Summarizing Patiwat’s art into an activist soundbite would therefore miss the part where the art dissents from more conventional notions of activist moods—thereby challenging what is considered a legitimate or effective mode of being politically active. I have noticed that some protest organizers struggled with finding quotable, coherent rally cries by him for media reproductions, e.g., on face posters calling for his release. The one exception—the widely shared slogan “I’ll live out a hundred lifetimes, but they won’t have my forgiveness”—only underscores the limited range of what is considered appropriate for activist emotional display, especially for activist men. This limitation of the activist mediascape partly explains Patiwat’s ambivalence towards it as well as the awkward place he occupies in the roster of protest leaders.

And yet, this resistance to activist codes creates generative space for activism as well as expands the sense of who can be an effective activist. The resistance, the “being difficult” in both the linguistic and the emotional sense, can itself be a challenge for the uninitiated to learn to listen more carefully and for the unduly repressed to learn to feel more fully. This learning can then germinate other forms of activism alongside the mainstream. In the following coda, I will sketch out the generative possibilities of artivism through the medium of my own body and subjectivity.

IV. An Artivism of Enchantment Beyond Isan

My experience of activism is marked by cycles of disillusionment. While the Thai term ta sawang (‘eyes becoming wide-open’), the popular shorthand for disillusionment with the Thai establishment, privileges knowledge as the catalyst for activism, I think of disillusionment more often as the end of a utopian dream, the dispelling of activist hope for a new world. Let me give you two examples. In my undergraduate years at an American liberal arts college, I committed to a specie of queer separatism by rooming with fellow queer people of color in an off-campus location, only to quickly realize that so many incompatibilities came up among us. After college, I returned to northeastern Thailand with the dream of planting my feet firmly there by cultivating relationships and collaborations with fellow Bangkok-critical Isan writers, only to finally realize that I had overstayed my welcome, and that the only fellowship that existed was the one the guest imagined. In both of these cases, sober knowledge deflated activism rather than galvanized it.

How to restore the sense of possibility when one no longer feels at home in the world that has emerged through activism? (I’m not saying that activism should feel comfortable; I’m saying that life in activism needs a place to feel at home.) As a result of persecution or bullying or exploitation or strife or intimate partner abuse, some remove themselves from the scene of activism, while others remain. Some keep quiet for the sake of the movement, while others speak up for the sake of the movement. Neither is likely to make one feel more at home in the activist world. Any conventional artivist ritual, for that matter, wouldn’t make one feel at home in that world either, unless it acknowledges the wounds deemed distracting or secondary to the movement.

After his imprisonment in October 2020, Patiwat Saraiyaem came out of Bangkok Remand Prison more broken than before, as many of his friends and former friends can attest. His spirit essence, at least a significant portion of it, was lost. Ten days after his dramatic performance outside the prison gates, he finished a long poem begun in detention and sent it to me. Also an incantation, this poem, I found, was worlds away from the su kuan script I had received and translated as per Patiwat’s request two months earlier. But for this one I didn’t need any convincing—captivated, I jumped at the opportunity to translate and perform it.

Even as it strives for wholeness, this new incantatory poem keeps acknowledging brokenness. Radically split, it switches erratically between several addressees and between the benevolent and the malevolent. To illustrate, below is an extract from the tail end of the translation “A Song of Forgiveness *Within*”:

Sadhu der

All the creatures on Earth

That I have depended on

My proletarian comrades

Or? peasants enduring hard life

On their modest parcels of land

May the powers of the Party

Come to their [our] rescue

Guide their [our] “thick” gray matter

So it adheres to the Dhamma of the Party

To the foot of the letter

So that it sees a path of light

The golden light of sovereignty

Of the demos

Of the laboring classes

Who stand shoulder to shoulder

As for them wandering souls

Where are they at?

Karma Officer, detain them!

Restrain them! Imprison them!

Sadhu der

Religion of religions, prophet of prophets

May you provide shelter

Sacred powers in all the skies

Buddhism Christianity Islam

Brahmanism Hinduism Sikhism

Together with Taoism Confucianism

May I hold on to your praxis

To the “Dhamma-Vinaya” of all religion

May the powers of black magic

Pin you down to the last fiber of your body!

May whirlpools and quicksands

Swallow you up!

Whoever hates my guts

May their heart be cleansed

May their hard feelings soften

So they know love

And to yearn for it, to treasure it

In the bottom of their heart

Let their heart be lifted

Bringing beauty in tow

Followed by faith in me, no less than in others

Sadhu der

Whoever wishes for my victory

May they find luck

May disease and other devilish devices

Be defeated by their own doing

Till Mara collapses, sinks under the surface

Wrapped in the coils of water nagas

And swallowed whole

Sadhu der

May the powers of white magic

Protect me in my journey, uplift my lot

Bless me for eternity…

Sadhu.

In this incantation, Patiwat appeals to all belief systems he knows, including communism. While the omnivorous approach toward belief can be read as a sign of desperation and powerlessness, as he described to an interviewer a nightly ritual during detention:

Every night before I went to sleep, I’d put a curse on them for putting me in prison. This was to underscore the fact that I couldn’t rely on the courts, I couldn’t rely on science, I couldn’t rely on logic, therefore I had to rely on the occult. In prison, there’s a Buddha image they call Luang Paw Po, who has sacred powers. I performed the curse in front of Luang Paw, did it out loud, with no fear of censure from the guards. I cursed: sadhu der, sadhu der, may your family be wrecked and ruined. Actually my cursing was just make-believe (upalok). I said it so the guards and the other prisoners heard it.

Still, I find this make-believe magically cathartic, and it has since come to be a reliable source of moral support for me, somehow. How?

I find Robert Pinsky’s proposition that “in poetry, the medium is the audience’s body” (1998: 8) to be useful here. Pinsky was originally referring to the act of reading a poem to oneself without the presence of the expert’s body, but I think it can apply to Expert Singer Bank’s poetry just as well, especially when I encounter it on the pages he brought from prison. Bank once told me in chat, “even if there is no lam voice to reach my people’s ears, they’ll get to see and read it.” By putting reading alongside listening, and not simply a poor substitute for it, this chat message suggests an embodied practice of reading that is not at all divorced from listening.

Indeed, reading Isan poetry, particularly a lam text meant to be performed, requires what Nicole Brittingham Furlonge calls “listening in print” (2018: 1-11) where the reader must learn to hear the sounds embedded in the text. Molam Bank usually sets his performance poems over the basic line structure of 3 words/caesura/4 words with tone restrictions on top of it. (Lao and Thai are tonal languages.) In Isan prosody, what counts as a word is more flexible than in standard Thai. While both languages are chiefly monosyllabic, meaning “word” generally means “syllable” in the context of poetic forms, a word slot in Isan poetry can be accurately described as a “stress” as it regularly allows for two syllables. Thus, the 3-4 line structure serves more as a guide for the poet-singer to glide over than as a strict number of syllabic slots to fill in. Each line is also extendable on either end. As artifacts of oral tradition unsubjugated to calcified poetic forms, these features of flexibility make the texture of Isan poetry richly variable by default. What this means for the inexpert reader is that “to see and read” that texture necessarily involves the exercise of one’s hearing faculties in tracing how each line plays off of established rhythms and tunes, and even how each word sounds, as many times an Isan word has a different tone from how it is marked according to standard Thai orthography.

By calling his cursing “make-believe,” Patiwat lifted the curtain on his magic: he didn’t actually believe in all that he chanted, but did it for the sake of his public in prison. But what if the listener, unlike King Vajiralongkorn (allegedly), doesn’t believe in the occult either, how can his curse have any efficacy for them? My secular answer: it is efficacious for me because I believe in the power of poetry. As Dana Gioia puts forward in his 2015 essay “Poetry as Enchantment”:

All poetic technique exists to enchant—to create a mild trance state in the listener or reader in order to heighten attention, relax emotional defenses, and rouse our full psyche, so that we hear and respond to the language more deeply and intensely. [...]

A rational adult understands that neither the star nor the spell [telling rain to go away] has any physical power to transform reality in accordance with the child’s wish. But the poet knows that by articulating a wish, by giving it tangible form, the child can potentially awaken the forces of imagination and desire that animate the future.

Gioia’s example of a child reciting nursery rhymes may seem barely applicable here, but it helpfully highlights the staying power of oral tradition in giving tangible forms. In Thailand, the word sadhu, functionally equivalent to ‘amen,’ is uttered at the end of a Buddhist prayer or a wish made at spirit shrines. Sadhu can also be used in a non-religious manner to express one’s endorsement of another’s good deed or wishful remark. Der is the quintessential Isan ending for Thai ears. Together, the phrase sadhu der articulates a familiar wish-format in a minor tongue. Repeated as a refrain, it becomes the joint by which ill-wishing and well-wishing are articulated together inside the rhythmic and melodic form of a traditional Isan poem.

Originally entitled ลำล่องอโหสิกรรมหัวใจ “ตน” (lam long ahosikam huajai “ton”), with the pronoun “oneself” (ton) put in quotation marks for emphasis, this slow chant for karmic nullification (ahosikam) made me question right away whose karma is not being forgiven. The anonymization of addressee in the poem invites each reader to do their own work of filling in the blanks and resolving the cognitive dissonance (e.g., “all I want is peace and all I want is war”). This ambiguous, undecidable messaging does have literary precedents. Openness to interpretation is a classic feature of Lao prophetic literature (Koret 2007), an apocalyptic genre which Patiwat reads religiously, so to speak, without reading it as religion. He reads it as art. And that’s where the innovation lies.

Donning the cloak of religion, the incantation artfully conjures “the temple inside our hearing,” to borrow Seamus Heaney’s resonant phrasing (1995). It works via ambiguity similar to a bat sonthe or ‘mystery card’ airing grievances that goes unsigned for fear of retaliation, where the recipient is either implicated in the grievances or entrusted with remedying them. But rather than feeling attacked (“So I’m the problem, huh”) or feeling responsible (“I’m the one in the position to solve this”), the audience of this poem can instead relate (“Me too”) and join in the catch-all chorus of sadhu der—thereby engendering communitas among wounded souls. As the incantation instructs the ambiguous pronoun ton,

Engrave this on my [your] soul for good luck

Apply it so good results come around

Keep it for blessings, and as a warning to yourself

The sudden switch from “for blessings” to “as a warning” comes across as vigilance, which I find relatable. (Or it might come across as paranoid schizophrenia if you don't find it relatable.) Once bitten, twice shy: the blesser leaves room for suspicion toward the one he blesses. With reversals like this, the poem gives voice to my dissonant desires for karmic retribution and karmic nullification, my wholehearted trust and nagging suspicion of betrayal, a split, unsovereign condition I have come to accept as an inescapable part of life chest-deep in the trenches of political activism. By giving tangible form to my mixed feelings, the poem has a therapeutic effect: it makes being split habitable. It lets me pick up on the residues of trauma within me and models how I might go about picking up the pieces. That’s perhaps why I like to reread it, and why I translated it to English: in the hope of engraving it as deeply as possible within myself, and potentially between the both of us. Thanks for reading, and may our artivism leave you enchanted.

References

Nicole Brittingham Furlonge, Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature, University of Iowa Press: 2018.

Dana Gioia, Poetry as Enchantment, 2015.  

Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present, translated by Daniel Steuer, Polity: 2020.

Seamus Heaney, Crediting Poetry, 1995.

Made Mantle Hood and Bussakorn Binson, Cognitive Collaborations: Sounding Southeast Asian Sensibilities in Thai and Balinese Rituals, Music & Medicine, 2014, 11-16.

Kritsada Supawattanakul (กฤษฎา ศุภวรรธนะกุล), หมุดหน้าใสคือความอ่อนหัดทางการเมืองของอนุรักษ์นิยม ชาตรี ประกิตนนทการ: 2017.

Peter Koret, Past, Present and Future in Buddhist Prophetic Literature of the Lao, Buddhism, Power and Political Order, Routledge: 2007.

Talia Latch and Mike Eckel, Ex-political Prisoner Patiwat Saraiyaem: Molam is my Religion, The Isaan Record, Dec. 8, 2016.

Peera Songkünnatham, Translator’s Introduction to Patiwat Saraiyaem’s “Lao Phaen 11/04/2015,” Center For Southeast Asian Studies University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Justice in Translation Series, 2022.

Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide, Farrah, Straus and Giroux: 1998.

Marshall Sahlins, The Original Political Society (The 2016 Inaugural A. M. Hocart Lecture), 2017.

Edoardo Siani, The Sovereigns of Thailand and the Skies, The New York Times, Nov. 3, 2020.

Stanley J. Tambiah, Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in North-east Thailand, 1970.

Ashley Thompson, The Calling of the Souls: A Study of the Khmer Ritual Hau Bralịṅ, 1996. Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Working Paper No. 98.

Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Cornell University Press, 1969.

Endnotes

[i] Read more in my introduction to Patiwat Saraiyaem’s “Lao Phaen 11/04/2015.”

[ii] Prayut Chan-ocha, Thai politician and former Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Thai Army who seized power as Prime Minister of Thailand in May 2014. He remains Prime Minister today.

[iii] Khon Kaen University, Thailand, where Patiwat was a student at the time.

[iv] From lèse-majesté, a French term meaning “to do wrong to majesty.” In Thailand it is a crime according to Section 112 of the Criminal Code to defame, insult, or threaten the Thai king, queen, heir-apparent, heir-presumptive, or regent; it carries the punishment of 3 to 15 years’ imprisonment per offense.

[v] The Khmer ritual hau bralịṅ also bears striking similarities to su kuan. Ashley Thompson (1996) glossed it as “the calling of the souls” and provided a fascinating rationale for rendering it in the nationally distinct yet always already transmigrating concept of soul: “the various concepts of ‘soul’ are not interchangeable; yet it is in part their essential indefinable singularity, their shared resistance to translation, which makes them effective cognates” (1). I thank Chairat Polmuk for pointing me to this dynamic account of syncretism that explains as well as flips the dualisms reinscribed by these rituals.

[vi] The kind of molam discussed here is distinct from professional spirit healers (molam phi fa) who also go by the title molam (see, for example, Hood & Binson 2014). While the entertainers and the healers share common roots, they are differentiated enough that entertainers like Molam Bank cannot easily transfer his skills to a phi fa possession ritual combining chants, dance, and khaen sounds, as this ritual is tied to specific ensembles of healers and healed who have been initiated into a specific deity’s care.

[vii] As an interview of Patiwat Saraiyaem in 2016 entitled “Molam Is My Religion” went: In order to fulfill his mother’s wishes and to cleanse his bad luck, he became a monk. But he only followed his mother’s wish. “I feel neutral about being a monk,” he says, “because I believe in every religion.” In prison he studied Christianity and other religions. He believes that God created everyone equally. Bank could not be confined in a place too similar to prison. Before his 15-day time was up, he snuck out of the temple at midnight on September 5th. There were a lot of things in his mind to think about and he could not get any peace. He said his mom was angry, but he couldn’t stand living there anymore. Bank leans in and says over a glass of beer, “I was in prison for two years, how can you force me to be in a temple?”