Written by Zikri Rahman
Translated into Thai by Hara Shintaro
Translated into English by Amir Hamzah Mohd Rizal
Illustrated by Adrian Beyer

[Klik di sini untuk membaca “Pattani Tiga Babak dalam Tiga Judul Kecil” dalam bahasa Melayu]
[คลิกที่นี่เพื่ออ่าน “ปตานี สามองก์ในสามเรื่องเล็กๆ” เป็นภาษาไทย]

Sanam Ratsadon is proud to present Orang Luar, our seventh and most ambitious issue to date. The issue collects longform nonfiction writings by outsiders in the Malay peninsula, encompassing present-day deep southern Thailand and peninsular Malaysia. Longform, so that the reader can walk a mile in their shoes. In order of appearance, the orang luar are: a Malaysian Malay Muslim doing an arts-and-culture residency in Pattani; a Thai ethnographer bonding with a self-identifying outsider and a host family in a Pattani fishing village; a Siamese man of letters looking for traces of Malay in the Thai language; a Siamese woman of letters learning from an international conference in Kuala Lumpur; a newcomer in the scene of Malaysian political activism; and a veteran artivist caught in the spotlight.

What is there for outsiders to say? A lot, it turns out. Whether for reasons of ethnicity, class, political commitment, or country of origin, to stand on the outside affords one a vantage point from which one can see, in arresting glimpses, what’s going on on the inside. Where do outsiders say what they see? Elsewhere, as it tends to be, where they belong, or in an aside or a whisper to be reported later by their captive audience.

We open with “Patani in Three Vignettes” by Zikri Rahman and “Orae lua | Outsider” by Sorayut Aiemueayut. Both are available trilingually in English, Thai, and Malay. Using the essay form, both retrace journeys across national, social, and emotional borders. A man returns to his ancestral lands; another departs. Someone opens up; another zips it. While much is left unsaid or unresolved in each piece, the two complement each other by the force of their observations in revealing what it feels like to become an outsider in what is supposed to be one’s own land.

Zikri Rahman’s essay was first published in 2020 in the inaugural issue of SVARA, a contemporary culture journal of the Malay world. It is based on his one-month residency in southern Thailand in 2019 that coincided with the sudden deterioration in health during detention of Abdullah Esormusor, about whom the translator Hara Shintaro wrote in an article on Prachatai. The residency’s official output was the essay “To Speak with Their Pens: A Conversation with Zakariya Amataya and Najib Ahmad” published on Nusantara Archive, a Taiwanese project. Sorayut Aiemueayut’s entry includes three chapters from his 2015 book Melayu as is felt, whose opening “Payoh nok yadi Nayu | It’s hard being Malay” was featured in our last issue.

Orang Luar is an attempt to forge a possible tradition of internationalism from below that may help us find creative ways to act outside the demobilization into political parties that very much characterizes the present moment in the mid-2020s for both the Thai ratsadon and the Malaysian rakyat.

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Patani in Three Vignettes

Act I
One Night, Abdullah Esormusor Was Trapped in a Country

From a friend to another friend, and so on and so forth. First story, second story, third story… – Let stories be told in odd numbers so that when they are divided by two, there will be a remainder to be further disseminated. We are against evening out stories; they should continue to be divvied up among friends. The intertwining of friends and stories shared between them might seem superfluous but it is also something that we’ve got to cherish. The story goes like this: after hoo-hahs, and fiddling about, at last I was in Patani to stay and take residency with a humble independent bookstore called Buku. Buku was not just another everyday bookstore.

During my initial contact with an ex-university activist in Patani when I was jokingly thinking of taking residency at Buku, he immediately labelled the bookstore as “the one that promotes the LGBT.” I did not ask any further questions. I suspected that there was a strictness that I would be made to follow due to the tone of his message I received on Facebook. More worryingly, I too was at a loss as to how I would later label myself during the residency there. Trouble is, the people who sent me there are an artist collective from Taiwan; I’m not a practitioner of art who has made any works.

How would we see Munsyi Abdullah if he were to take us for a ride around Nusantara? I do not want to be remembered as a continuer of the New South Bound political diplomacy of the Taiwanese government that had to look for new friends in our part of the world, in the hopes of escaping the shadow of its big brother, the Chinese Communist Republic. Just like how much of a stooge Munsyi Abdullah is in our eyes for becoming a spy for the British, yet blind to all the disasters of colonisation. Oh, I’ve gotten ahead of myself.

Let’s put it this way, after much consideration, I found it satisfactory enough that I be labelled an observer interested in the mix of Southern Thailand’s arts-culture ecosystem; those who chose “jue tanpo senjato” (war without weapons) – a phrase I picked up after meeting a few of them in the arts-culture circles of Patani. Though, there are other struggles too. Of course – a week before I was here, a military post was crashed into and civilians were still arbitrarily jailed.

As far as memory serves, Patani exists only as one grand tale; the oddity of its river that is salty instead of brackish, the corpse of a holy man that sinks-rises to the chest after being killed by the chief that goes on to haunt the castle, the colourful names of reigning queens right up to, the most well-known by me, the passed-down family tree by my grandfather regarding the origin of our family. I listened intently about Patani from my grandfather, whom I called “Ayoh”, way before knowing Patani on the television screen as one of the three bloody territories affected by the Tak Bai tragedy in 2004.

That’s how it was. Heading to Patani, I was sceptical of the Taiwan artists’ collective’s proposal that sponsored my residency. Supposedly, I, a “Malay Muslim” from Malaysia would have a better understanding of “Malay Muslims” in those three territories. For, in Southern Thailand, not everything would be told if those that came to hear were “outsiders” (referring to people from Bangkok).

Logically, I was an “insider” without the burden of the centuries-old conflict between Siam and Patani due to two reasons, my being Malay and my being a Muslim; the two are usually linked in a narrow and old-fashioned manner.

The logic was sound but history is never that simple. History, even though we use it to see truth, can only be half-held by us. History enables us to guess what is ahead, but not that which is shrouded in the past. History is only half of the truth; the other half we pass to Sisyphus and his tragedy to be killed without death.

Because of that, during my stay there, I continued asking myself about the meaning of what it meant to be an “outsider” or an “insider”. What is out and what is in; could they not provide meaning for one another? What would be the basis should we be “out” at first and “in” later? As I was being fed this narrative of “outsider” and “insider”, I did not lash out aimlessly in response, for the root of politics is just that: division. Politics only exists with the existence of a divide – from the time that the children of Adam and Eve murdered one another till the democratic ballot boxes of today. Further still, ironically, I feel it is perfectly described in a little anecdote that I will share in a bit.

Let’s put it this way: I believe that it is not just me who, I actually believe we all do, unwittingly call tomyum stalls that continue to mushroom around the peninsula as “kedai Siam” (Siamese stalls)—even though we realise that the Mek who wear the headscarf are probably more “Malay”, if not even more “Muslim”, than us.

But here, identity is not just everyday lingo and be-all-end-all quips in easy language that states “You’re Malay, he’s Muslim, I’m Gay, I’m okay”, for example. Since we delight in placing those Mek and Mat from the three territories within the circle of Siamese identity, how does that differ from the half-baked rationalisation of my friends from Taiwan about my place in this project, all because I am a “Malay Muslim”?

So, any identity that forms out of culture, religion or any social inclinations are far from being neutral and singular. To borrow the words of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, the Russian linguist and philosopher who enlightens us on this subject in The Dialogic Imagination, the moment that identity is put in a corner, it will dissolve, “soaked in struggle” with the intent of the speaker, in fact exceeding other intentions without the speaker realizing it. Often, a deeper meaning emerges through what Bakhtin calls the “super-addressee”: an echo of a voice coming from power – in this case, the Royal Thai Government through its process of ratthaniyom – the speaker or writer goes beyond whatever it was they wished to speak or write about. In this case, identity is no longer a noun, instead it is forced to be a verb. The struggle to become a Malay Muslim in Southern Thailand is one thing. To immediately be a Malay Muslim in Malaysia is another. Where, then, rests the “outsider”, and where the “insider”, when we consider these two realities?

Act II
For Weeks, Abdullah Esormusor Suffered in Bed

Ayoh’s gums were wet from pattering about the history of his ancestors of which the main point was not the history. Bitter, so very bitter, was his experience of it. Imagine, for days he went about riding a horse, dashing through the forest with sure knowledge that he would not ever return to Rusoe, his homeland. He was concerned that Siamese assassins would chase him to his final rest stop in Tumpat to extract information about the remnants of royalty from the previous regime. No one from my family had ever returned to Rusoe until I came along.

There was something that bothered my thoughts about this issue that came about as unconfirmed suspicions. First, it may well be that, from the very beginning, the trauma of being hunted by the assassins remains and the situation is still tense — it was not just one or two who were forced to forgo their names as well as their title, in fear of being asked to repay their debt in blood. Second, something more personal may have been fated — Ayoh did not follow his father when he left everything in Rusoe. History was only an excuse for him to go further away.

The second week there, I went to Rusoe with Achan Jehabdulloh, the founder of Patani Art Space, and Dr. Arafat, an examiner from the National University of Singapore. They were generous in all matters throughout my stay. I was in Rusoe in the hopes of meeting with the heir of a scholar who had the respected title of Al-Fathani (“of Patani”). Dr. Arafat had written a lot about transnational migration, especially that of the Patani, in his research. Among his observations, it is too abrupt if we are to conclude that the Malay in the Thai South were mere followers, seeing that the discourse unravelled from the tomes of the Al-Fathani continues to be critically interrogated.

They settled in Mecca for quite a while before a number among them made the decision to return to the Thai South. In the conversation between my two hosts at Rusoe, I found it difficult to capture all the details discussed because I, myself, was far removed from the matters discussed. I can only share an extraordinary gastronomical experience here. Imagine, warm tandoor bread and chicken curry paired with king’s salad. Before taking leave, the heir of Al-Fathani said jokingly “kalu ado hok nego roti paye di tigo wilayoh ni, ambolah hok ngajar sek dio buak.” (If there’s someone who sells tandoor bread in these three territories, it is I myself who taught them how to make it.)

The feeling after passing the small town of Rusoe, as soon as we took leave from one of the Al-Fathani heirs, is difficult to capture. Tears only came when I reflected for a few moments upon my time in Rusoe after returning home. Rusoe is among several “red zones” in the three territories, places where Patani freedom fighters wander about with their weapons drawn. The seven commandments of Haji Sulong still echo and the Siamese army still searches in vain for the voice of their utterer. It would be impossible for the army to arrest everybody who wore a beard or a headscarf or spoke Malay, who according to the powerful was “not” Siamese — but an “outsider”.

The name of Rusoe itself does not have a meaning; likely it is a Thai transliteration of a Malay word, plucking out all meaning from the original word Resok, a species of Jati timber. Resok is not the first to be Siam-esed by the country. History is full of meaning. Meaning is captured through language. If language is unsettled, what meaning is there? What’s more, its trajectory of history? For those in the three territories concerned, it is a crossroads that is passed by everyday. To choose is wrong; to not choose, even more so.

Act III
Dearly Departed, Abdullah Esormusor Heads for Eternity

Sometimes I realise, my right ear does not quite listen when I talk with friends. Often I am forced to make them repeat themselves, if they are willing and diligent enough to do so. From there, I learned to piece together the matters discussed and rebuild my thoughts from the remains of words, if any. While in Patani, it was not just once or twice that suddenly a table of whispers forced my ears to work. The dialect was not the main problem for my understanding; I am what city people who are bereft of culture pejoratively call “bau budu”: fluent in or capable of understanding dialects that are analogous to the East Coast.

Whispering in Patani does not sit quite right for certain situations. At a table around a food stall, in a car as one crosses a military checkpoint, in a meeting room with plenty of people. For me, in this matter, I am quite conservative: whispering is for the sweet nothings of lovers in the bedroom. How could whispering ever be used in a time like this? That was a huge misunderstanding on my part. But I learned to understand and my own ears also made sense of it. Whispering means to be careful in ensuring that a message is successfully delivered. And let the wind take care of the rest.

Among the clearest whispers was when I followed a meeting in Thai and English that attempted a dialogue about the political development in the three territories. Out of nowhere, the main speaker lowered his voice to say “sapa lo ni kito tokleh cayo ko ore Sie,” (even now, we cannot trust you Siamese) — history stopped here. In that noisy meeting, his whisper chose me alone. Whispers, for me, are sighs of belief. And whispers appear in the gaps of conversations about anything; the Patani Tale that is read in secrecy during ratthaniyom underneath the Phibunsongkhram regime, while feeling betrayed by Malaya for their lack of enthusiasm in “entering” Patani into the Peninsula until they chose to participate in other struggles around us.

Mere whispers, should they gather together, can amount to a loudness that stings the ears of the powerful. Abdullah Esormusor was so quiet. In fact, too quiet. He, who was no one and not unique, was arrested overnight by soldiers on suspicion of being involved with protest efforts in Southern Thailand. On 22 July 2019, his frail unshaken body was rushed to the medical emergency unit. “Brain death”, so claimed the army. But no one seemed to care to believe that explanation. How could they believe it? Laws and justice itself have long quarrelled with each other on this side of the peninsula. In fact, for this matter, both – laws and the quest of justice – were hastily used to silence the people.

We will never hear the voice of Abdullah Esormusor again; he passed away on 25th August 2019 after a month in solitary confinement. He was not a politically influential gedebe (folk hero) who enjoyed riffing about this or that. No one knows what he whispered before his eyes closed or when he was assaulted by the soldiers. Thousands still live, continuing to whisper elegies for the chain of history, “This is our Tak Bai”, that will never be forgotten.