Bomb Children: Life in the Former Battlefields of Laos
184
Bomb Children: Life in the Former Battlefields of Laos
184eBook
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| ISBN-13: | 9781478005261 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/16/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 184 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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CHAPTER 1
THE DRAGON AND THE RIVER
Learning to Think in Two Ways
After the monsoon rains, regular as clockwork every afternoon, I stopped by a friend's shop for tea and conversation. Her shop was a few blocks from the Mekong River in downtown Vientiane, the capital of Laos. Along this part of the riverfront, preparations were under way for the Boat Racing Festival to honor and entertain the naga, or water dragons, that live in the river. Historically, naga have been keepers of civil order in Mekong cities (Askew, Logan, and Long 2007). Naga sanction laws, adjudicate conflicts, appoint rulers, and devour wrongdoers. A naga is content when the government is prosperous, lawful, and devout. If the government is weak or immoral, naga may show their displeasure by rampaging through riverside communities. Over tea, my friend wistfully commented that people used to be able to swim safely in the river. When she was a child, she told me, people were respectful and made offerings to the Vientiane naga. Swimming fatalities were rare. Recently, however, there had been several prominent fatalities. The local government has banned swimming — even during the festival in the naga's honor.
"So is the naga killing people and that is why swimming is illegal?"
She slowly shakes her head to one side and then the other, equivocating, then looks me squarely in the eyes: "Leah, you must learn that the Lao think in two ways: the naga in the river and we don't know how deep it is."
Hearing the hardening of her tone of voice, I got a feeling of crossing deep waters myself. I sat in the silence after her statement, waiting for further clarification, which she did not provide. We were alone; there was no one else present to critique her remark, yet she spoke as if she was afraid. I recalled another conversation I had with this friend: she had pointed at the seedpods of a tree growing in front of her shop, the seeds like lapping green tongues as long as my arm, known in Lao as tree tongues (lin mai), and remarked, "Be careful. In Laos, even the trees have tongues."
Vientiane was under curfew; it was common to see soldiers on patrol or at checkpoints at major intersections, though there were none visible from our seats on the porch of her shop. I sipped my bael-fruit tea and thought. She made no effort to reconcile the dangerous naga and the dangerous river, or to explain whether the government was afraid of the righteous anger of a Vientiane naga. My feeling was that the tension between her parallel statements, the ability to "think in two ways," was the meat of her remark: the government wanted to protect its people from the currents of a monsoon-swollen river, and the government wanted to prevent the local naga from devouring people, implying the regime's weakness. Simultaneously, the government, nominally socialist and secular, would not publicly admit the naga's existence. It was not merely that my question was simplistic. Rather, my assumption that there would only be one answer prevented me from appreciating crucial complexities of Lao politics and culture in a period of socialist reform, economic liberalization, and religious revival. My friend tried to teach me this lesson very early on in my fieldwork, but it was not until I became more familiar with Lao politics and the Lao language that I learned to follow her advice and think in two ways.
This chapter is inspired by this first encounter with ethnographic data in the form of parallels, though my argument is not limited to a discussion of the dragon and the river. As my Lao language skills improved, I came to recognize my friend's statement as an example of a common Lao way of expressing information in two ways simultaneously: poetic parallelism. Parallelism is a creative style or poetic form in which statements are juxtaposed, often through the repetition of similar sounds, grammars, structures, or themes. Parallels develop their richness from the latent equivalencies between everyday concepts; speakers draw on a shared pool of poetic references and current events to create subtle, textured parallels. The form has attracted scholarly attention for its potential to "provide insight into what the poets and their audiences themselves intuitively consider to be the most interesting equivalents" (Keane 1997, 107). My argument is not that parallelism is a unique Lao way of thinking, nor am I arguing that it is a special adaptation to life under socialist regimes. Parallelism is a common poetic practice throughout Southeast Asia, predating the current Lao Party state. Nor does parallelism necessarily take the form of poems, though poetry is central to its cultural enactment in Laos. Parallelism has its roots in spoken Lao and is not limited to strict poetic forms. Simple parallels were commonly used in conversations among my friends and colleagues to craft nuanced jokes, express complex opinions, and share hazardous information.
I engage parallelism in the field as provocation to methodological reflection and innovation. In this sense, this chapter is about parallelism as a quality of hazardous research and not about Laos or Lao poetic parallelism, though it is rooted in the specific Lao hazards of surveillance, police harassment, self-censorship, and lingering war violence. I employ the term "hazard" as a broad conceptual frame that includes hazards encountered in the field, such as war violence, and hazardous research methods that engage these hazards as a means of anthropological knowledge production. All anthropologists deal with hazards in fieldwork to the extent that hazards significantly shape the human experience. How should we protect ourselves and our research subjects when we work in hazardous field sites? How should we ethically carry out research with people whose daily practices and utterances are inflected with extreme paranoia? How might we learn to hear what is not speakable? As I discuss in this chapter, parallelism became a crucial mode of engaging these methodological and ethical concerns, while also being an important component of my data on postwar Laos. The surveillance paranoia that I analyze in this chapter constitutes only one possible type of research hazard, and poetic parallelism constitutes only one possible methodological response. In an authoritarian context marked by state surveillance and the threat of violence, the very form of the parallels enacts relations and is itself data on Lao society. It is these linkages between poetry, paranoia, and hazardous research that I analyze in this chapter.
Postwar revival and development are challenging, politically sensitive topics to research even under the best of circumstances. The People's Democratic Republic of Laos is an authoritarian, repressive regime, born of revolution and warfare. The surveillance paranoia that I analyze in this chapter is one component of a larger Lao culture of terror that includes secret prison camps, forced resettlement, and political disappearance (Taussig 1987; see the conclusion for an extended discussion). "Cultures of terror" refers to sociopolitical systems in which "order ... is maintained by the permanent, massive, and systematic use or threat of violence and intimidation by the state" against its own population, for whom "fear becomes a way of life" (Sluka 2000, 22–23). For example, my friend's comment that "even the trees have tongues" is efficacious, as a kind of paranoia rooted in state terror, regardless of the state's actual capacity to wiretap and conduct surveillance. While specific instances of surveillance may be implausible, this paranoia is supported by an authoritarian sociopolitical context characterized by the pervasive use of violence and threat.
My fieldwork experiences imply a parallelism as method: My friend's skill at delicately describing the stakes in swimming in the river prompted me to consider my own ability to research hazardous topics. I offer parallelism as a conceptual frame for understanding hazards in ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological knowledge production. This approach reflects my slow sensitization to the hazards of fieldwork in Laos. My preliminary fieldwork plan for this research assumed I would encounter obstacles (for example, my ethics protocols and other research subject protections assumed I would be targeted for government surveillance). Yet there was no way for me to predict the specific challenges, or the cultural richness of these challenges, prior to entering this field site. My fieldwork experiences of paranoia compel me to align my analysis of parallelism with the analysis of the sociocultural context that makes information hazardous. While the ethnographic accounts that I present in this chapter come from both urban and rural contexts across three provinces of Laos, they each occurred in spaces of interaction between Lao and foreigners: local headquarters of foreign organizations, program sites for development projects, shops and cafés popular with both locals and foreigners. These are spaces of interaction, but also spaces of surveillance and control. The capital, Vientiane, with its special openness to foreigners, was particularly marked by surveillance, curfew, police checkpoints, and the like. This chapter moves through a parallelism of its own, in that it lies at the nexus of anthropological debates regarding the ethnography of violence and war (see, for example, Daniel 1996; Nordstrom 1997) and the hazards latent in ethnographic intimacy (see High 2011). My analysis engages these discipline-level discussions while being rooted in my ethnography of authoritarian power in contemporary Laos.
I employ parallelism as a means of consciously reorienting myself, seeking other perspectives that enrich my research and analysis. My focus in this chapter on cultures of paranoia works to foreground contemporary experiences of state terror, setting ongoing war violence into the background — and into later chapters in the book. Arranging in this manner, my aim is to firmly root my study of war's aftereffects in a discussion of contemporary Lao culture and sociopolitics. Hazards may layer upon each other without being wholly commensurable. In the next section, I introduce Lao poetic parallelism as a method for presenting multiple statements simultaneously, inviting or foreclosing multiple readings. Understanding the features of parallels enables my analysis, in the later sections of this chapter, of my own and my interlocutors' surveillance paranoia and the sociopolitical context that supported our paranoia. I engage prevalent surveillance paranoia as fieldwork dilemmas requiring an ethical response and as data for an ethnography of the Lao state. In the final section, I turn again to poetic parallelism to analyze my use of fieldpoetry as a methodological and ethical response to experiences of hazard in fieldwork.
Lao Parallelism in Poetry and Practice
The poetic form that I examine in this chapter was codified in the twentieth century as part of nationalist efforts to identify specifically Lao literature. The standardization of poems into two hemistichs, or distichs (split lines across parallel columns of the poem) occurred as recently as the 1990s — a process culminating in what Peter Koret describes as the "reinvention of Lao literature" (1999, 238). New poetic styles, authorized by the Ministry of Education, were taught in schools as a traditional Lao literary style. My interlocutors identified poetic parallelism as a traditional and Buddhist form, without recognizing its very recent standardization. The Lao form of parallelism is also commonly found in northeast Thailand, and more broadly among non-Lao ethnicities within mainland Southeast Asia (Koret 1999).
Parallelism is a form of creativity with roots in the spoken Lao language. It is, after Roman Jakobson's (1966, 403) pioneering theorization of the form, a kind of "pervasive parallelism" that activates interrelated domains of oral language, written language, and everyday cultural practice. Written distichs replicate spoken parallels, repeating themes, words, and tones as well as the use of assonance, alliteration, consonance, and silence. Most written Lao poems are likely to have originally existed as multiple, simultaneously circulating, oral versions (Koret 2000). When transcribed, poems are often written on perishable leaves or paper, requiring regular recopying for preservation and circulation. When a poem is recopied, it is frequently changed by the copier (generally a young monk). Poems rarely carry the name of an author, and under these circumstances of frequent and expected amendments, identifying a single author would miss the point. The poems do not have single authors. The content of poems follows a similar logic: topics, characters, themes, even lines or phrases are not considered the invention of a singular poet. Poets draw on a shared collection of poetic resources to craft poems; the skill is in the clever juxtaposition of known content rather than in the creation of new content. Koret elaborates, "To understand Lao literature and the nature of its composition, it is necessary to reconcile two conflicting statements, that individual Lao stories have multiple authorship and that they have no author at all. According to traditional Lao belief, the stories that comprise Lao literature are taken from Buddhist religious sources rather than being the creation of the Lao themselves. The literature's perceived religious origin ... makes the concept of literary authorship appear sacrilegious if not irrelevant" (2000, 210). In this fashion, poetry recapitulates the "this-worldly/otherworldly parallelism" that scholars have identified in Lao–Theravada Buddhist cosmology more generally (Holt 2009, 39). This-worldly forms, whether poetical or political, are understood to exist in dynamic relation with the otherworlds of deities and spirits. The person who writes the poem does not consider themselves to be the poem's original creator, but sits at some distance from the poem understood as an inspired, semiautonomous entity.
This doubling effect is most clearly visible in the form of the poems themselves: a typical Lao poem is written as a set of two to four distinct columns. One reads across the distich, letting the gaps between columns enhance the resonance of the parallels. The center-most two columns contain the core content, with the outermost columns providing peripheral information on setting, time period, or speaker. Below, I've included the first two stanzas of a modern poem written by a group of development monks, so called for their participation in development projects, for a mine risk education project managed by an international nongovernmental organization. Figure 1.1 shows a group of young novices going through risk education materials as they brainstorm appropriate sermons. The full poem is a Buddhist sermon, designed to be memorized and recited at religious events. The full poem includes sections on the danger of tampering with bombs, how to offer spiritual support to victims, and the importance of honoring disabled family members. I have kept the distich in my English version, though the norm is to remove it in translation, in order to preserve the crucial sense of distance between distichs. I transcribed the poem in phonetic Lao so that the sonic register of the parallels is more obvious (but for the sake of simplicity, I have chosen not to notate tones).
Thaan thii maa jaak daen daan din dai gaw dii gkaam Thook thua thang logka phaen phuum phai pheuun Yoo ahsii leuu ahfrika europ odsadaalii nan Hed haa tii soi gkuu phai haai manud khon Honorable people from away lands far-
All together the world underneath the plains,
mountains Within Asia or Africa Europe or Australia Make us worthy to dangerous bombs clear
In the original Lao, each part of the poem is itself made up of smaller parallels. The phrase "faraway lands" is split across the distich, such that the gap creates a sense of farness. The first line is split between the first half, marked by the repetition of the th consonant, and the last half, marked by the repetition of the long aa vowel. Within each half of the line, the sound repetitions create additional internal parallels between words (thaan thii, for example). These paired sounds, in turn, resonate with the repetition of similar sounds or tones elsewhere in the poem. These examples of internal parallels elucidate three features of Lao poetry: first, that parallelism is a creative practice present at every scale of the poem, and not merely a poetic form; second, that paired entities are equivalent, but not identical. This is repetition with difference, each time. There is no assumption of allegiance or fidelity to an original. And third, pairs are not singular, but are often multiply paired to other parts of the poem. One has the sense of emergent, multiplying pairs, rather than an overarching system of poetic construction. Like Jakobson, in his analysis of parallels, I find that when the poems are subjected to analysis, they do not yield to simplicity but rather reveal "a network of multifarious compelling affinities" in which each line "is indissolubly interlaced with the near and distant verbal environment" (1966, 429). But, as with the parallels themselves, these connections do not require or assume a hegemonic status. There is no easy isomorphism between these poems and Lao cosmopolitical "doubling." The poems elude such easy equivalents and in this way resist the formation of large-scale systems or theories, as well as individual authorship. Recall, there is no author; the poems are written by no one and everyone at the same time. It is important to me, as a scholar, that my ethnography maintain this sense of incompleteness and frustrated origins. I am consciously choosing not to reify a cohesive system. The power of parallels is in the friction, or juxtaposition, of things that seem like they should be the same, or should sound the same, but somehow do not.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiNote on the Lao Language ix
Fieldpoem 30: Postwar 1
Introduction: The Fruit Eaters 3
Fieldpoem 11: The Fruit Eaters 36
1. The Dragon and the River 37
Fieldpoem 15: "The Rice Is More Delicious after Bomb Clearance" 64
2. Ghost Mine 65
Fieldpoem 23: Blast Radius 97
3. Blast Radius 98
Fieldpoem 26: House Blessings 130
Conclusion: Phaseout 131
Fieldpoem 18: Children 149
Appendix: Notes on Fieldpoems 151
References 155
Index 165