When writing is a crime, we all risk exile

When writing is a crime, we all risk exile

The risks of writing are many, especially when what you write pricks the hot-air balloon of sanctimony: You risk hatred, invective, threats, anonymous phone calls at midnight, mysterious motorcyclists outside your doors and bullets sprayed into your living room. You risk jail terms. But the worst, I imagine, is the risk of banishment, of voluntary exile that’s not actually voluntary. Maybe the worst risk of all hits you once you’ve left on a one-way ticket: the risk of nostalgia.

Maybe historian Somsak Jeamteerasakul knows them all, before and after leaving the country, and especially after he was fired from Thammasat University in what reeked of political maltreatment. I can only conjecture the notion of exile. I can only write from empathy (a useful but blank and mawkish sentiment) for my experience is extremely limited compared to his and many others’.

Can one feel nostalgia for the land where one nearly died? Can one feel nostalgia for intolerance, suppression, arrogance, injustice? I really don’t know. (I do not wish to know.)

These questions about nostalgia were posed by a Chilean writer, Roberto Bolano, who fled his country after the CIA-backed coup and the dictatorship of the 1970s. But the questions remain pointed, for nostalgia is also useful, I believe. Blank, but useful. At least it confirms that you’re still alive and probably hopeful, that you’re still free to think and feel, that the Siberian gulag of the body hasn’t frozen the passion of your mind.

A forthright critic of the establishment, Mr Somsak commands a following. His writing is judicious, honest, challenging, provocative, and at times in-your-face. On the contrary, a lot of people disagree, dislike, hate or flash the middle finger at him, not to mention the ubiquitous death wishes on his Facebook and the callous attack at his house last year. After the May 22 coup, he was summoned by the military (naturally) and reportedly harassed. Somehow he managed to slip out of the country. From where he lived, he requested a sabbatical from Thammasat. They refused, and he tendered his resignation. They could’ve accepted it considering the circumstances. Instead, he was needlessly fired, losing his benefits and pension. Persecution doesn’t come in 1,001 shades, but one.

In exile, Mr Somsak keeps writing, because for writers with conscience, writing and exile are two sides of the same coin. In the worst cases, writing comes with a jail term. In the best cases, masterpieces are composed in exile (Voltaire, Zola, Byron, Wilde, Joyce, etc), although that is selfishness and romanticism on our part as we ask them for sacrifice. This week after the rector of Thammasat, Somkid Lertpaithoon, who’s also a member of the coup-appointed National Legislative Assembly, officially fired Mr Somsak, the historian wrote an unsentimental yet nostalgia-driven entry about his love of Thammasat, including his formative year as a student in the line of fire during the right-wing massacre of students there on Oct 6, 1976. The next day, again with frank un-sentimentalism, he wrote about his 92-year-old mother, who’s still in Thailand and whom he might never meet again.

Such pangs of nostalgia for the land of intolerance tells us something important: that what we’re going through isn’t just about a clash of ideology and questionable laws, not just about the political promiscuity of Thaksin Shinawatra & Co and the brutal cynicism of the elite, and not just about the bare-faced sabotage of the system and the flawed nature of democracy. What it tells us is that the curse of intolerance strikes at the human level — at the separation of mother and child, the tearing of an individual from the things he cares about, the immoral practice of reducing his home to nostalgia. All of this for what? Because he writes something you disagree with.

Exile reduces some and expands others. It emboldens some, I guess, and emasculates others. It afflicts some with nostalgia and others with cowardice (like those who live out their exile in mansions with an endless supply of Romanee Conti and spineless toadies, gazing out at the Emirati sand dunes). At best and at worst, it shows your true self.

You may not agree with everything, or anything, Mr Somsak writes or like the hard questions he keeps asking, but that shouldn’t stop you from realising that intolerance isn’t merely entrenched in the super-structure or in some quaint laws. It’s most hurtful when it comes out in the way one human treats another with prejudice and disdain. When armed thugs go scot-free but writing is a crime — or, to cite another recent example, staging a play is a crime — we’re all at risk of becoming exiles, haunted forever by bitter nostalgia.


Kong Rithdee is Deputy Life Editor, Bangkok Post.

Kong Rithdee

Bangkok Post columnist

Kong Rithdee is a Bangkok Post columnist. He has written about films for 18 years with the Bangkok Post and other publications, and is one of the most prominent writers on cinema in the region.

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