Written by Kawi Sri Siam
Translated by Peera Songkünnatham
Illustrated by Supawich Weesapen
Published here around the 60th anniversary of Chit Phumisak’s killing

[คลิกที่นี่เพื่ออ่าน “วิญญาณหนังสือพิมพ์ (คำเตือนจากเพื่อนเก่าอีกครั้ง)” พร้อมบทนำภาษาไทย]

Each pinch of rice you chew   keep constantly in mind
My sweat that you consume   gave rise to humankind

This rice delectable   for every social rung
Came from a bitterness   so sharp and rank it stung

From toil to ripe stalks   it took many a step
From stalks to gleaming grain   a neverending schlep

How many drops of sweat   were spilled through that ordeal
How many tendons bulged   transforming crop to meal

Sweat that’s tinged with red   juices of labor sapped
All my very blood   you slurp teeth sopped enrapt

This is an extract from the 72-stanza poem “The Spirit of Journalism (A Warning Once Again from an Old Friend)” by Kawi Sri Siam, a pen name of Chit Phumisak (1930-1966), first published in five installments in August 1964 on the newspaper Prachathippatai. The poem is a passionate address to journalists whom the poem’s speaker pointedly calls friends: “O friends (still call you friends)  may you be warned once more” (stanza 69, line 1). On the face of it, the speaker sounds like another eloquent leftist writer rebuking his colleagues’ opportunism and misguidedness and pontificating about the spirit of journalism with its twin tools of the gold lance and the golden lantern, the former for piercing demons in defense of the people, the latter for shining the searing light of truth on the public conscience and the road ahead. But the irruption of the rice farmer speaking in the first person in stanzas 19-23—the extract—disrupts that facile reading.

Since about 2008, every tenth grade student in the Thai education system has been taught this extract. This uncommon inclusion in school of a communist commoner who was gunned down months before he would turn thirty-six is neutralized by its framing inside the article “The Suffering of Peasants in Poems” (ทุกข์ของชาวนาในบทกวี) by HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, first published in 1990 by her university classmates on the auspicious occasion of her thirty-sixth birthday. In the first lines, Sirindhorn professes an ignorance that has allowed thousands of teachers and millions of students after her example to ignore crucial information about the poem and the poet:

When I was a university student, I read some of Chit Phumisak’s works, but did not do much detailed study or analysis. I only heard the reputation (kham laolü) that he was someone whose scholarly research was extensive, profound, and meticulous. Back in the day when we were students, someone set a poem by Chit to melody and music, making it an earworm to this day.

The five stanzas follow; no title is given. The fact that Chit first gained notoriety while a student at the same university department two decades prior is unstated: her suggestive use of “reputation” would come off flat if you didn’t know. Chit’s poem addressing the journalists of his time is reduced to the part immortalized in music by “someone” (i.e., Surachai Chanthimathorn, also known as Nga Caravan, one of the country’s foremost leftist-royalist artists).

To be fair, this problem of ignorance begetting more ignorance is not caused by Princess Sirindhorn, but by the national curriculum planners who reprinted her article without providing much context. The article’s intended readers, who studied alongside the author, certainly knew about Chit Phumisak as an anti-establishment firebrand who was physically thrown off a five-foot stage at their university. The fact that she chose him out of all the topics for the publishing occasion was remarkable. And the five-stanza earworm was already a common reference point for Thai people of her generation, so there was no need to name the singer or even the title. In that context, Princess Sirindhorn was actually rehabilitating Chit’s likely reputation as a misguided radical in her classmates’ estimation. Writing within one year of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Thai royal sidestepped questions of Chit’s communism to describe him in humanist terms as someone who tried to give voice to the voiceless:

The use of the pronoun kū in this poem shows that the speaker is a peasant, which invites one to wonder, would a peasant in real life have the opportunity to ‘guilt-trip’ (lamlœk) anyone by saying that if it weren’t for them who toiled away, others wouldn’t have a thing to eat? And before we can even get to guilt-tripping about favors owed, assistance from society to these people in terms of the means of production, the subsidy or guarantee of prices, and the administering of justice in every aspect is a virtual impossibility. As a consequence, in many countries undergoing economic development, peasants abandoned farming en masse to go into the industrial sector or the service sector, which brought them higher income or made them money faster, more reliably, with more benefits, and without having to take as many risks as they would farming. Those who have remained in the agricultural sector often prefer to switch the crop they grow from cereals which often net a low price, since the government is obligated to control it, to other cash crops of higher prices. But there remain a great number of peasants who do not have a way to leverage a better situation for themselves—maybe it gets even worse for them. And they cannot appeal their case to anyone. Even though there have been people like Chit who tried to use their imagination to convey their inner thoughts in a way that pricked the conscience (sakit jai) of others, the problems persist.

But is the voice in the poem actually trying to guilt-trip? Rather than make you feel bad, this voice may be trying to enlighten you here. It’s not you owe me; it’s you eat me. The extract culminates in a strange image of physical/psychic absorption through the teeth reminiscent of Karl Marx’s vampire metaphor—Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks—revealing the sweat consumed to be nothing short of blood. Rather than a fanciful exaggeration, the blood-slurping can be read as deeply accurate: one’s lifeforce fuels the other’s lifestyle. And that fueling goes deeper than I bleed so you can feed: it’s I made you.

Sirindhorn moves on to a thematically similar poem (which may actually be two poems) by Li Shen, a Chinese poet from the Tang Dynasty. Quite a bit more biographical and textual information is given, including the title of the poem. After a line comparing the writing technique of the two poets, she concludes:

At this time, the conditions of countries have changed from Li Shen’s time more than a thousand years ago, and from Chit Phumisak’s time thirty-some years ago. In my own time, there isn’t much of a difference that I see. Therefore, until everyone switches over to eating food pellets like the space pilots, the suffering of peasants will remain a poignant (sa-thüan jai) force for poets of the Computer Age to come.

By falling back on the timelessness of suffering, the pricked conscience has nowhere to go. Despite the poetry’s affecting power, this kind of takeaway retreats to a cliché so familiar to the sedentary reader that any poignancy will turn into a comfortable sentiment of pity and resignation rather than an existential jolt of shame and conviction that might transform the sense of one’s place within the world.

To go beyond the clichéd takeaway, we might try reexamining the question of time. Before we get to the historically specific conditions of agricultural production and policymaking, let’s look at the temporal dimension in the literary text itself. Thai doesn’t use verb tenses or articles, and pronouns are commonly omitted. These linguistic quirks lend themselves to a funky temporality and impersonality in poetry; as Eliot Weinberger puts it in the case of Chinese in 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, “in the poem, what is happening has happened and will happen. Similarly, nouns have no number: rose is a rose is all roses.” In Chit’s poem, one such case is the line ”My sweat that you consume   gave rise to humankind.” In the English translation, there is a jump from the present to the past tense, as well as a rather grandiose collective as the object. In the Thai original, both time and object are ambiguous; a trot of the second hemistich is “thus built born to being human.” One can make sense of the apparent time jump and logical leap from your consumption to human becoming in at least two ways: iron it out by the mundane reading that farmers’ sweat has in fact nourished you since before birth, and so gave rise to your individual human existence; or lean into it by the mythic reading that laborers’ sweat which you all are feeding on is what gave rise to humanity and civilization in the first place. This is not that big of a stretch actually, as the two Thai syllables rendered as “blood” in the extract’s final line, sai lüad, may also read as “bloodline,” that is, the speaker’s line of descendants, their proverbial flesh and blood. Kū, the vulgar (to polite society) first person singular pronoun, may therefore stand in for a collective of laborers through time. And sū, the archaic (to standard Thai) second person plural pronoun, may refer to one person, like the lone reader, or whole classes of people.

It must finally be noted that, contrary to Princess Sirindhorn’s assertion, the pronoun kū is also for kings; in fact, on the earliest extant Thai inscription on stone attributed to Ramkhamhaeng, King of Sukhothai from 1279 to 1298, or alternately, as some historians argued, to its 19^th-century discoverer Prince Mongkut, who went on to become King of Bangkok from 1851 to 1868, the pronoun appears three times on the first line alone—myfathersnamesriindraditymymothersnamenangsuangmy
brothersnamebanmuang. Here, a new reading of Chit’s poem comes into view: the first-person kū may be more archaic or archaizing than vulgar. Whereas the second-person sū appears twenty times from stanza 3 onward, kū first appears suddenly in the middle in the possessive “my sweat” and “my blood(line)” of stanzas 19 and 23, only to disappear until the very last line, in stanza 72, where kū takes up the perspective of the remorseful sū in the future. In that middle part, the peasant is revealed to be the subject—of the sentence, and of history. Stanza 47 reads, “The masses are the masters   whose favors rank first / Bow your heads, serve   like oxen in the field well-versed.” The journalist as ox, the peasant as master: the ancient voice that goads you to work the tools of your trade; the source of your word; the king of your world.

If so, let us journalists of the Computer Age hear our Old Friend speak once again in all Their strangeness.

Acknowledgment: With thanks to Karen Kovacik and Laura Nagle for their feedback on the translation and to Ida Aroonwong for her feedback on the discussion.

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from The Spirit of Journalism (A Warning Once Again from an Old Friend)

Each pinch of rice you chew   keep constantly in mind
My sweat that you consume   gave rise to humankind

This rice delectable   for every social rung
Came from a bitterness   so sharp and rank it stung

From toil to ripe stalks   it took many a step
From stalks to gleaming grain   a neverending schlep

How many drops of sweat   were spilled through that ordeal
How many tendons bulged   transforming crop to meal

Sweat that’s tinged with red   juices of labor sapped
All my very blood   you slurp teeth sopped enrapt