Articles

Esarn the Dying Earth

By D. A. Housman

A great number of people evicted from their lands and those escaping from poverty in Esarn to improve their lives in Thailand’s large cities, become side-street food hawkers, labourers, taxi drivers, workers in factories, slaves in sweatshops, servants and prostitutes. Some luckier ones are boxers or employees in offices. Some try to hide from their new friends and colleagues that they are from the despicable Esarn region, being ashamed of their Lao tongue and ignoble origins. A large number of Esarn Lao in exile do not want to return home.

Poverty, drought, debt, land becoming more barren or damaged by saline waste water from salt farming, rivers becoming highly polluted from toxic waste released by factories, land lost through debt, gambling or forced evictions to make way for the construction of dams or for large-scale eucalyptus plantations to enable investors to develop and expand the pulp and paper industry, disperse more than ten millions of the people of Esarn from their homes and farmlands. Furthermore a large number of unfortunate children of the destitute continue to be taken by "agents" to slave in sweatshops, factories, or in brothels.

During the first year in the capital as a servant to monks in a Buddhist temple, it dawned on Pira Canning Sudham that he had hardly a chance to improve himself. Fortunately he was allowed to attend classes in the school in the compound of the Wat. During the day, he sold coconut juice in Bangkok streets and later he moved to Wat Po to sell temple rubbings and other souvenir items to tourists to see himself through secondary school and high school, from where he passed the final examinations and university entrance examinations.

He was in the second year of the Faculty of Arts of Chulalongkorn University when he won a New Zealand government scholarship to study English literature at the University of Auckland, and consequently at Victoria University in Wellington. "I owe a great deal to New Zealand for giving me a chance to learn from a new school and a new method. Their way is a sheer contrast to the Thai’s, which is mainly reciting and memorizing lessons and texts, a method known as rote learning. In New Zealand I learned how to think, to form and voice opinions, to discuss ideas and to ask questions," claimed Sudham. "I also learned a process of reasoning, which is not taught to the majority of Thai children from the beginning. I wondered why, as a child and as a student in Thailand, I had to be blindly obedient and absolutely voiceless. Perhaps if I had learned how to think, and think profoundly and critically, I might have had a mind of my own, having my own ideas and views, and asking questions. On the other hand, I might have been branded konhuakaeng, meaning "hard headed man," posing a threat to the authorities and the despots, who had an awesome power over the Thai people at the time."

After New Zealand, Pira Canning Sudham read English literature in Australia for three years. At night he wrote his first novel, Monsoon Country, and short stories and poems. From 1975 to 1978 he studied further English literature in England, also saving himself and the manuscripts from the brutal political changes in Thailand. His first book, Siamese Drama (which has the new title of Tales of Thailand in the subsequent editions) did not appear until 1983, followed by People of Esarn in 1987, Monsoon Country in 1988 and The Force of Karma in 2002.

In New Zealand, Australia and Europe, Pira Canning Sudham experienced the Western way of life. "I grew up mentally outside Thailand," he admitted. "I did not know how to reason or the process of reasoning until I lived with a New Zealand family, observing how the parents logically answered their curious children’s questions. I learned such a process along with the children. I am grateful for not remaining a child in an adult body like many Thai politicians and leaders. However, parts of my mind had already been crippled by the age-old feudal education system that enforces rote learning, which fosters mindlessness, and being taught to fear the Masters, and obey absolutely the authorities during the formative years. I wanted to make up for this by fully developing my mind."

In so doing, he stayed as long as possible in England "to learn more, hear more, think deeply and finish Shadowed Country."

After so many years abroad, Sudham could no longer resist the call of his beloved Esarn to where he returned eventually in 1996. A team of village carpenters built him a modest wooden house at the edge of Nong Eso Hamlet, on the piece of land on which he was born. It stands among mango trees, bananas and bamboo groves left untended after his father dismantled the family’s old house to rebuild it on another plot of land in a nearby village of Baan Nondaeng.

"Grandparents passed on to us tales and folklore as well as their search for an arable area to where they would migrate. Here, lodged deep in my heart, are memories of childhood, of filial piety as well as the age-old suffering and primeval bitterness. I also remember winsome faces of young girls who stayed several years to learn by heart ballads and songs my father, who was a poet in his own right, composed for them so they could become mohlams, Esarn folk singers."

Of his father, the author reflected: "If he had been born in the UK, he might have become one of the cherished British poets. Even in the quagmire of a forgotten Esarn village he managed to pull himself out of illiteracy when there was no school in his young days. He told me that at the age of 15, while he was ploughing a field, he saw several boys walking towards Wat Napo, the monastery. He learned that they were heading for the temple sala. There, the abbot would teach them to read and write. So the eager ploughboy ran after them. But when the old peasant found out that his son had deserted the rice field with the plough still tied to the buffalo, he went after the deserter, beat and hauled the son back to toil on the land. Not until Father became a monk at the age of 22, did he have the chance to learn to read and write from the old abbot. When he disrobed after the customary three months, he began to write ballads for folk singers. In later years he became a kroo, or guru, a rural schoolteacher, and set up a primary school to teach the young while continuing to compose ballads and coach young men and women to be professional folk singers. He had been a prolific poet as well as a sage and a champion of the downtrodden, helping the poor in trouble and in litigation, fighting against injustice and corruption. It was amazing that he managed to live through dangers to the ripe old age of 94 though he had almost died from being poisoned. Meanwhile ten dedicated Esarn schoolteachers had been murdered by hired gunmen.

"Father gave me a gift of poetry, and the love of words and their sounds, an impetus to write, and the stamina to fight on in his place. If there is any regret, it is a sense of loss that my mother, who passed away at the age of 83, remained illiterate all her days, that she could not read my letters and that I had not received any from her.

"I thought that I could strive for some happiness in returning to relive a rustic life in my birthplace in order to pick up where Father had left off. One learns in time to compromise past experience of decency, fair play and freedom with scarcity, injustice, corruption and the fear for one’s life. Yet the irony is that all the primeval bitterness and anger and sorrow suffered in childhood are being experienced all over again, here, today. For now the Masters and the tycoons and their networks have vastly increased. They are far more rapacious and awesome than those I recognised in my childhood and portrayed in Shadowed Country. These are corrupt, tyrannical officials, shopkeepers, rice traders and middlemen who swindled illiterate peasants, and the local money lenders and gangs of gamblers who induced villagers to gamble away their cash and their lands. They are pale and diminutive compared to the present-day highly corrupt and immensely avaricious Masters and myopic, grabbing traders. Most of these dark lords have become extremely powerful. They have gained monopolies, concessions, public lands and forest reserves, plundering the country, destroying the forests by logging and then claiming the land for private commercial purposes and making the soil, canals and rivers saline and polluted with chemical waste and effluent released from factories. Some of them should be held responsible for using cancer-causing antibiotics banned in Europe in poultry and fish and prawn farming as if to create health havoc among the consumers for a certain insidious purpose. Alas, they enjoy impunity and become year by year greater and greedier, more diversified with global collaborating networks and high power.

I observe how the subjugated rural dwellers kept in ignorance and subservience are easy victims to the new, omnipotent Masters," said Sudham. "The lions and tigers are devouring their prey. They do not seem to care that by destroying for short-term gain they do much harm to the land and its indigenous people for centuries to come."

D. A. Housman