In Carolyn Forché’s poem, “What Comes,” she writes: “To speak is not yet to have spoken.” Amidst the myriad of voices clamouring to be heard today, writers often aim to reconcile the journalistic motives of witness and the cultivated balance of narration, bringing the scattered language of a society into a solid, comprehensible whole. The best of these texts has proven to be a powerful tool in re-establishing the broken links between people living under a regime, and in a newly released book from Thailand, an anonymous writer seeks to do the same in a fascinating and deeply probing exploration of the country’s strictly enforced lèse majesté laws. 

What can literature do during times of emergency, wherein testimony takes precedence over much of storytelling? This year in Thailand, amidst the ongoing crackdown on anti-government protesters—exacerbated by viral outbreaks in prisons—witness accounts by lawyers and journalists have assumed the task usually assigned to literature: to describe the human condition and to build conscience. One particular book, however, has managed to straddle the worlds of journalism and literature. A collection of anecdotes about those affected by the lèse majesté law in the 2010s, ในแดนวิปลาส (In the Land of Madness, Paragraph Publishing, April 2021), has much to teach us about how to tell the stories silenced in the throes of oppression and censorship. It is anonymized yet revealing, packed full of pain but with surprising touches of humor. Perhaps due to its relevance to current events in the country, the book has seldom been considered as a literary object. Yet, in its description, the book categorizes itself as a “Thai novel.” This gets my puzzle-solving mind turning.

One might read the categorization as ironic, and—taking “novel” to mean fiction—come to the truism that, in the Kingdom of Thailand, the truth surrounding the monarchy and its victims must, for reasons of safety, make itself anonymous, dressed up as fiction. But reading the label as a genuine attempt to define itself may yield deeper and more surprising insights. In the author’s preface, a line is drawn between reporting based on facts and storytelling based on feelings:

All the stories in this book grew out of prying curiosity indeed. Half of its fruits became serious news and information while I worked as a journalist in a small but big-hearted news agency; the other half turned mostly into emotions and feelings I put away in a bag and didn’t know what to do with.

In a situation where rights and liberties were repressed for a long time, where injustice was standard practice, the bits and pieces being collected in my bag kept getting heavier and heavier, to the point where the bag seemed to be bursting. There were two parallel worlds. People lived normal and bright lives in one, while the other was pitch dark, cruel, and noticed by very few. One stranded between the two worlds would therefore find it extremely difficult to maintain one’s sanity and normalcy.

It isn’t that fact and feeling are necessarily opposed; rather, the preface suggests that there is a remainder left over from the work of journalism—that certain parts of a journalist’s experience can only be stored as feeling and emotion. Shining the “spotlight” on society’s darkest corners provides only one aspect of reality. The other sides—unspoken or unspeakable, unborn or unbearable—are best accessed via novelistic means. In the Land of Madness definitely ‘reads like a novel’ in the sense that it is a well-crafted, compelling story wherein some characters are depicted with vivid inner lives, whereas others remain unknowable despite their palpable presence on the page. Calling it a novel also allows for some artistic license, a deviation from factual description to get at a deeper truth; in the book’s most surreal moment, the narrator notices a friend’s “internal” injuries by seeing lances of sunlight piercing through holes in his frame. READ MORE…