THAILAND: Red Shirt Stage Offers Platform to Marginalised Culture

• by Marwaan Macan-Markar (khon kaen, thailand)
• Tuesday, May 25, 2010
• Inter Press Service

That is how people in this provincial city describe the performances that Wanida Pimdeed gave in Bangkok, some 450 kilometres away, for weeks. They were concerts to air the sounds and lyrics of ‘mor lam’, a genre that has its roots in this rice-growing rural belt of north-east Thailand.

In the afternoon of May 9, as the 48-year-old Wanida was belting out one of her ‘mor lam’ songs with an almost rap-music like quality, screaming into the microphone, then breaking into a melody, it was picked up live by a community radio here. The radio station broadcast her Bangkok performance to listeners in villages beyond the city.

But Wanida’s appearance for a string of concerts was not part of a conventional musical tour in the cosmopolitan Thai capital. Her stage was at the site of an anti-government protest movement that had occupied an iconic shopping district in Bangkok since mid-April.

The crowds she entertained were also from Isaan, as the north-eastern provinces are known. They were all sympathisers of the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD), who had occupied Bangkok’s upmarket shopping heartland of Rajaprasong in a round-the-clock street protest in an attempt to force the government to dissolve parliament and hold early general elections.

'All my songs are about people like me and our hardship,' said Wanida, who makes a living as a rice and livestock farmer.

'I communicate with my audience in Isaan,' she added, referring to the local dialect used in this part of Thailand, which is closer to the language spoken in neighbouring Laos than the mainstream Thai language common in Bangkok. 'It is the language of the grassroots, the people at the bottom.'

But Wanida was not alone during the days and nights the UDD, whose supporters wore their signature red shirts, occupied Rajaprasong. Other entertainers from this region that is home to Thailand’s rural underclass were also offered the UDD stage as a platform to broadcast their Isaan culture, with its distinct music and language.

This show came to an end on May 20, when heavily armed Thai troops succeeded in driving away the red-shirt protesters and reclaiming Rajaprasong. A week of clashes from May 13 to 20 between the troops and the armed wing of the UDD resulted in 54 deaths.

Yet what the UDD protests had achieved in offering a stage in Bangkok to entertainers from the north-east is not lost on experts familiar with this region’s unique cultural identity in this country of 66 million people, a third of whom are from Isaan.

'It is probably safe to say that ‘mor lam’ and ‘som tam’ (papaya salad) are the most significant identity markers for Lao-Isaan people,' said James Mitchell, a researcher of Thai popular music based at Australia’s Macquarie University. 'But it has been regarded by Central Thais as lowly hilly-billy music for ‘ban- nork’ (provincial people).'

'There is still very little ‘mor lam’ played on Bangkok TV or radio stations,' he added during an e-mail interview.

'The present Isaan cultural dominance and the sheer weight of numbers of people who (have identified with) the UDD has meant that ‘luk thung’ (the most popular form of Thai country music) and ‘mor lam’ have been the most frequently performed genres of the Red Shirts protest stages.'

Such a sense of cultural marginalisation from the Thai mainstream has added to a making of a regional identity. 'The feeling of being the ‘other’ among Isaan people is common,' said Buapun Promphakping, an associate professor in the faculty of humanities at Khon Kaen University. 'Although Isaan people recognise that they are Thai citizens, they feel that they are not similar to or hold the same quality of ‘Thai’ as those who are in Bangkok.'

Yet it is a regional identity that is not absolute in the wake of urban migration. 'We have to be aware that the identity and ethnicity of Isaan people has diversified,' explained Buapun, himself a native of Isaan, during an interview. 'Feelings of inferiority are common among those who are native to Isaan but may not be common among the traders (in urban areas) and government servants.'

A consciousness of such a regional identity has deep roots, going back to the dawn of the 20th century, when Thailand, then called Siam, witnessed a 'peasant' uprising. 'At the very beginning of the 20th century, thousands of people living in what is today north-eastern Thailand joined the first major ‘peasant’ uprising in modern Thai history,' stated Charles Keyes, emeritus professor of anthropology and international studies at the University of Washington.

'The revolt (was) a response to a ‘crisis of power’ that came about because of the extension of the authority of a new centralised Thai state in a frontier region,' added Keyes in ‘Northeastern Thai Ethnoregionalism Updated’, a chapter in a soon-to-be published book.

'For the ruling elite in Bangkok (at the time), the (rural people’s) belief in ‘phu mi bun’ (leaders having exceptional powers) was deemed to be rooted in the ‘stupidity’, ‘savagery’, and ‘ignorance’ of the people of the northeast.'

Such derision is still very much in the air a century later. The rural community that Wanida hails from and catered to during the red shirt rallies were scorned upon by Bangkok’s elite, who described the rural farmers who supported the UDD as ignorant, stupid buffaloes.

© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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