Written by Sorayut Aiemueayut
Translated by Juria Toramae
Illustrated by Summer Panadd

[คลิกที่นี่เพื่ออ่าน มลายูที่รู้สึก ในต้นฉบับภาษาไทย]

Dreams of justice are not a luxury, but holding on to them might be. When one is overwhelmed by feelings of injustice, such dreams may become wasteful, or even irrelevant if one doesn’t know where to look anymore.

This dynamic between feeling, knowing, and dreaming is revealed by the featured ethnographic vignette from Melayu as is felt (มลายูที่รู้สึก, Patani Forum, 2015). The Thai title seems headed for the phrase “as is known” (thi rujak) but swerves away at the last syllable to announce a different form and a different practice of knowing an ethnicity: one that is based on feeling (rusük).

Which can first involve unknowing: undoing prior knowledge about a people, in this case the Malay Muslims of Thailand’s Deep South. An acquaintance, on one hand, with hostile depictions of insurgency and Islam propagated on mass media platforms and, on the other, with sympathetic clichés about victimhood and localism repeated on panel discussions featuring academics, NGOs, and community leaders. Instead of sorting out truth from falsity, the book invites the reader to start afresh at the level of common(er) feelings and to question received wisdom as it comes up.

Even so, the fact that a feeling is widely shared is not to be taken as the basis for a more authentic knowledge. Melayu as is felt does not seek to authenticate collective identity as an intrinsic quality of a people. Quite the opposite: it focuses on the moments when ethnicity suddenly becomes salient in a village life riven by all-too-human interpersonal disparities and conflicts. On occasion, the ethnographer even suggests that the identity being wielded functions as a cover for a truer concern or a less righteous cause. By doing so, the writer guards the reader against essentialist or exceptionalist readings of Malay Muslim culture even as he writes that culture into existence elsewhere in the book.

We present “Payoh nok yadi Nayu – It’s hard being Malay,” the book’s opening chapter. An incident occurs that reflects a racist and classist disregard for life on the part of Thai government officials. The incident recalls another incident which took place in the region less than a year earlier. In the latter, known as the Tak Bai incident, seven protestors were killed by gunshot and 78 more succumbed to suffocation and other injuries after security officials beat up and stacked detainees face-down five-deep in trucks for five hours for transport to a military base. Attesting to the incident’s lasting effects on the families of the dead and the injured, the Deep South Museum and Archives’ Initiative field researcher Nikarema Hayeeniloh writes in the closing chapter of Tak Bai 2004: Taste of Memories (Sasakawa Peace Foundation in collaboration with Silpakorn University, 2023), in Emma Potchapornkul’s translation:

Every family wishes to see the offenders punished under the law. Even though their mental anguish remains, year after year, government after government, there has been no answer provided to the question of who must be held responsible. So, families and relatives are left with only their trauma and must find a way to heal from within themselves.

In Islam, we are taught that every death has a cause and that death comes inevitably to all. If Tak Bai had not been the cause of death for those men, then something else would have been. Since I started working on this project, I have learned just how great the losses were. It is heartbreaking. I think about the feelings of those wounded and maimed. I think about the feelings of those who received compensation. And then I think about those who got nothing because they were too afraid to share any information with the authorities. There are many families that would rather not talk about what happened, still. Many families still struggle to come to terms with what happened. I wonder, then, might this incident have simply faded into the past together with the lives it took?

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Payoh nok yadi Nayu
It’s hard being Malay

In mid-2005, I visited Pattani and acquainted myself with a group of Malay-speaking Muslims for the first time. I knew nothing of them besides the fact that they called themselves Oré Nayu. Yet at the time I had no interest in knowing what Nayu or Melayu really meant to them in thought and in feeling. All I knew was that I had stepped into a dangerous place that was full of violence.

It would be apt to say that Pattani was suffering from a crisis of representation as no one in the general public including myself had the means to really understand beyond its portrayal in the media, i.e. a barbaric battleground with daily casualties of attacks and explosions. The term “Three Southern Border Provinces” which includes Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat (and parts of Songkhla) is routinely referred to as a borderland that is at once alien and dangerous to the state.

Back then, an air of mistrust engulfed everyday life in other regions. In Bangkok, commuters became exceptionally wary of Muslims on public transport. During my taxi rides, drivers often swore at the “Muslims of the South” against the backdrop of the airwaves that heavily featured news of tragedies followed by the abrasive voices of opinionated callers, some of whom even lamented the tsunami’s failure to wipe out Pattani.

The air of mistrust did not spare those overseas. When a reporter friend was about to visit Pattani for an assignment, her family and friends pleaded with her at the airport to change her mind. They even shed tears as though it was their final farewell.

While the violence in the “Three Southern Border Provinces” is undenied by all inside and outside Thailand, Muslims from the region remain largely stereotyped and misunderstood. Most Thais assume the Muslims are by default Khaek and consider them threatening and treacherous (based on an old expression that urges one to hit a Khaek before a snake, if one ran into both at the same time). Sometimes they are suspected to have ties to radical Islamic groups in wars of terror.

This suspicion also entails scrutiny over clothing, the hijab, the wearing of facial hair, and distinct religious practices (prayer 5 times a day, no pork consumption, monotheism). The cultural and religious differences of Muslims of the South—considered alien and dangerous—had become a point of contention that challenges the nationalist narrative of cultural homogeneity. In this sense, it was no surprise to see the terms “Southern Bandits” and “terrorists” quickly spread and take over as the explanation for every incident.   

The state’s attempt to troubleshoot the “Three Southern Border Provinces” was quick and manifold. Many military troops were sent to be stationed at each designated “risk area.” Around the same time, the National Reconciliation Commission was instituted, community organisers from both the public and the private sectors were brought in to forge peaceful reconciliation among victims of the violence. Various development and empowerment projects were mobilised soon after to lift villagers from poverty, unemployment and the lack of education. Meanwhile, research from renowned academic institutions sprung up like mushrooms “in search of the truth” along with large-scale and much-publicised panel discussions to present the new findings both nationally and internationally, specifically in regard to multiculturalism and the state’s unity. 

All of that took place within two years of the firearm heist of 4 January 2004 which was seen from the state’s perspective as the first instance of escalation. As a fly on the wall, although I was troubled by the violence, my concern was no different from what a fellow human and a fellow Thai would feel for any other. I would only pay some special attention when the news involved structural injustice to Malay Muslim people: from the lack of access to resources in the seas and the forests, to the lack of access to education and the adverse impact from development projects. But these were obviously common problems faced by many communities in the world and were not unique.

In all honesty, I didn’t become aware of the meaning and importance of being Nayu or Melayu to Malay Muslim people until I was in a small teahouse with a group of Malay friends in the middle of a kampong by the bay. They summoned up the courage to ask me about that one thing that bothered them for so long. With a dejected look they asked, “Are the people here Thai or Nayu? Bae, can you tell the difference between the two?” I was stunned by their questions.

Earlier, a little over two hours prior, I was swimming at a beach in front of the kampong where children would normally gather. It was unusually quiet. There was only a fisherman repairing a boat. As I swam further, the winds and waves grew more forceful and the water turned cloudy. When I looked up at the sky, I could only see a reddish hue across the near-setting sun. Combined with the screeching winds and the howling waves, it all became rather grim so I quickly swam ashore to find two people already waiting for me. One told me amid the wind’s roars to hurry home as a storm was approaching then the two went on to warn others to hurry back to shore or not go into the water on their fishing boats. As I rushed to pack my belongings at the beach and ran through the rain back to my place, the storm swept into the bay and swallowed a fishing boat in front of all the eyes of those who had made it ashore.

Everyone could see the boat owner and his son trying to swim back against the strong current in the middle of the sea. They called for help from the water police who had bigger boats that could withstand the waves but their request was dodged and pretty much denied. Some fishermen sought help elsewhere but were likewise refused. In the end, they could only watch the boat owner drown as he lost strength to swim while the son narrowly made it to the shore. When the sea had calmed, the father’s body was found on the beach covered in mud and clumps of seagrass…

“Can’t really answer that, Bae. I don’t really know. What do you think?” I threw the question back as I felt put on the spot with the mood in the teahouse. Palm leaf tobacco smoke hung heavy over my head.

“A Nayu person has no rights. Especially the poorer Nayu, they have even less rights. Previously when a Thai village and a Nayu village caught fire at the same time, they chose to quench the Thai houses first, even though the Malay houses were closer to them. It’s the same with today’s drowning. They could have saved the man. Now how will his wife and son go on living?” A man replied, his expression hard to describe.

Slowly the teahouse fell silent. All that could be heard was the sounds of breathing…

Soon, as puffs of smoke dissipated, some people from the kampong opened up about their struggles for being considered “too religious” and “high-maintenance” by the Thai community and for being “too lax” and “incorrect” by some other Muslims who had studied advanced-level religion in the Middle East. With endless arguments about whose Islam was more pure, conflicts often arose within the community in defence of their local religious practices.

“Even Nayu people don’t think alike. Besides close friends, no one can be trusted, let alone the authorities.” The man’s words went beyond mere frustration.

Despite all this, many of their dreams are not any different from the “Thais” nor from other people around the world. Many families wish for higher education for their children—to achieve job security and to avoid the hardship of sea fishing. Others imagine their children thriving in the civil service—as teachers, soldiers, or police. At the same time they just want to be “good Muslims.”

Nevertheless, being stuck amid the polarising struggle between Thainess and Melayuness leaves no room for a different way of living and thinking. Most people, men and women, cannot but be avoidant with strangers and quiet about their aspirations and their inner selves, letting them fall by the wayside and slowly fade away like a boat waiting to be put out of commission. There’s just the words of one man whose feelings could perhaps represent everyone else’s in the teahouse. He said to me softly, “Seriously Bae…It’s not easy to be born Nayu.”