Written by Chutchon Aj
Translated by Peera Songkünnatham
Illustrated by Summer Panadd

[คลิกที่นี่เพื่ออ่าน “เป็นคุณเองที่รู้ดี: สี่บทกวีจาก ‘ลุกไหม้สิ! ซิการ์'” ในต้นฉบับภาษาไทย]

The following are selections from ลุกไหม้สิ! ซิการ์ (Light up! Cigar, P.S. Publishing, 2022), a widely-reviewed debut collection of poetry written around the two landmark years of the people’s politics in contemporary Thailand: 2010 and 2020.

2010 was the year of mass uprisings by Red Shirt protestors, whose royally-sanctioned massacres led to the isolation of the minority of writers who supported or sympathized with their cause for representative democracy. Speaking from that place of isolation, “My poetry is on Google” searches for an audience out there on the internet who gets what the poet says. In a similar vein, “Reader” finds a way forward for pro-democracy poetry by working against the hegemonic creed that poets are purveyors of higher truth, insisting instead that his imagined reader knows better than him. In “Pronouns,” meanwhile, the poet takes a few steps back and faces the fact that his addressees remain unknown to him, as much as he would like to believe otherwise.

2020 was the year of mass uprisings by the following generation under the following reign, a time when the majority of writers who had once been against or indifferent to the Red Shirts mostly came around. The decade-long delay seems to have prompted the poem “Question,” our final selection. Instead of addressing the elusive reader on the same side, it confronts the common (ex-)royalist reader with their shameful knowledge:

Be honest: Is it love? Or are you nervous
The man you loved is looking worse than the worsest,
But you can’t sever ties, ’cause you and he
Have already merged into a [royalist] ‘we’?

---

2010

My poetry is on Google

My poetry is on Google:
If you want to talk to it,
You have to make a bit of an effort.
Yes, now as before:
Type away in the search bar.

That’s that!
We both know
Why it is not available in print,
Does not appear on leading newspapers
Or magazines of political analysis,
Does not appear on first-rate literary journals,
Is not mentioned on primetime news shows.

Of course!
It is too impolite,
Too confrontational,
Arrogant and impudent,
Undermines national morality,
Does not stop at using low-class language
But oversteps, choosing resistance by logic,
Spells out the fallible fragility of that man,
Is, in government-speak, a threat to security.

Don’t worry about me:
I know how to fly under the radar.
We both must find an escape route,
As we know,
Many people were death-sentenced on the streets,
Or locked up without dignity.
For too long,
Fear has lain in wait to gnaw at my nerves,
So unless I yell back at it, attack it,
I’m gonna turn into a nervous wreck.
This wretched life of ours,
I can’t make heads or tails of when it began.
Don’t lose hope yet,
I can only tell myself
& set out to write something
To search for you plural,
To confirm that we’re still out there on the same planet
& do still need one another.

Yes…
Type away, now as before:
My poetry is on Google.

---

Reader

It’s you who know best,
My dear fellow reader.
You know better than I
The world of publishing, of writers and poets
& the words and the characters they write.
You told me, Secrets haunt every nook and cranny
Of tomorrow’s final act.
It’s you who see right through it,
Rendering my poetry redundant.
My dear fellow reader,
You told me, We’ve arrived at the last step,
Where you are me
& I am you.
As I write you,
You also whisper something in my ear:
You tell me, This poem must be written
To express faith in you;
You know what you should read,
What to think,
How to live;
You talk of dreams and ambitions,
Ones I can never imagine.
You tell me to put your words in writing:
That you’re happy to be a bad person,
So you can blaspheme hia!
Against this godforsaken country;
That you’re happy to be a prisoner,
So you can blaspheme rayam!
Against the goddamn owners of this country;
That you’re happy to be this poem’s writer,
So you can say that justice is in jail,
Just as we all are.
This is what you tell me to write down,
& you repeat, Don’t get my words twisted,
Write it in the most straightforward way;
Language may be floating and fluid,
But my reader will understand the meaning,
Your reader will understand the meaning:
The word hia is hia,
Neither too much nor too little:
Our reader knows exactly what it means.

---

Pronouns

This is yet another poem
Seeking to find its protagonist.
No, not protagonist:
This isn’t role playing
To flesh out a character on paper.
Every life here plays out in flesh and skin;
Under every gesture, every act lies possibility,
Possibility being the point of departure for change.
When logic maneuvers to a limit, leaps over it,
Dreamworlds will overlap with reality,
Fiction will lap over true stories.
Just as in life:
Everyone has eyes that can shed tears,
A heart that can shed blood,
An inner energy that can tear down mountains
& crush them underfoot,
And, especially, a concentration of dignity
That may not be desecrated.

I’ve gone over that basic understanding,
But there’s one thing I never got over
No matter how hard I try:
The use of pronouns in poetry
Never builds familiarity between writer and subject,
Let alone oneness.
The writer may substitute himself with them,
Or substitute them with myself, but
The scream in my poetry isn’t the sound that came out
When they had gun barrels trained on their heads.
Agony, valor,
& grief that I will never really know or understand.
But maybe this is as it should be,
Seeing that it’s not me. Never was, never will be.
I am me;
They are them.
Perhaps, in some respects, one can say we,
But all a pronoun is
Is a fleeting association.

You, I, we, he, she, or they
Meet, become acquainted, and part:
Could simply be one second with another second,
One poem with another poem,
Or even a lifetime with another lifetime;
But must eventually turn to strangers,
To petals falling slowly from a rose,
Petal by petal by petal,
To personas who passed by
Leaving threads of conversation,
Persona after persona.
But even if that’s the case,
Under every gesture, every act lies possibility,
Possibility being the point of departure for change.

---

2020

Question

Be honest: Is it love? Or are you nervous
The man you loved is looking worse than the worsest,
But you can’t sever ties, ’cause you and he
Have already merged into a [royalist] ‘we’?