Whenever I visit a place, I try to read up about it. But some places are visited so often that this no longer cuts it. In that case, I would pick up a piece of local literature, and I did just that when I found myself in Sydney yet again late last year. Walking down a familiar but changed Newtown, I dropped by a few bookstores and ended up picking up Chai Time at Cinnamon Garden by Shankari Chandran.
The novel took me on a journey well beyond Sydney. Set in a fictional Sydney suburb, it is a story of Sri Lankan immigrants who fled a country engulfed in a civil war between the Sinhala majority and the Tamil minority that lasted for more than 25 years before ending in 2009. The narrative jumps back and forth between Sydney and Jaffna (and occasionally Colombo), which was a treat because I had visited both Sri Lankan cities just seven years after the war ended. In Jaffna then, I appeared to be the only foreigner around, and many buildings still had walls pockmarked by bullets. Jaffna felt morose and reconstruction was barely noticeable. This was unlike in Colombo where there was a construction boom thanks to Chinese investment. My travels in Sri Lanka and my time in Australia gave me a richer context for the novel than I would otherwise have had.
I did not know about the novel’s expansive geographical and temporal reach when I bought it, and its early chapters started warmly enough that it seemed like a breezy read about friends, community, and multiculturalism. Oh, was I wrong about the book being a heartwarming, easygoing one.
The novel gets dark quickly by its midpoint. What the book is really about is the difficulty of living in a multicultural society. The author tackles racism in Australia, but even more so the trauma that the Tamil people suffered during the Sri Lankan civil war. The war ended bloodily with the defeat of Tamil fighters. There are scenes of torture and death in Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens.
The pages describing the 1981 burning of the Jaffna Public Library are probably the ones I will remember best from this novel. The library was the most important institution preserving Tamil history and literature in the country. It was targeted as a symbol of Tamil cultural identity and nationalism in Sri Lanka. I visited the rebuilt library while I was in Jaffna and did not find it impressive at all then. Had I known about its history and its burning, I might have been more sympathetic and in greater awe.
After this, I think I will boot up the portable drives where I stored the thousands of photographs I snapped while in Sri Lanka and look more closely at the pictures of the library.
The song Begawan Solo used to play regularly on Malaysian television. It is an Indonesian serenade in the form of keroncong describing the longest river in Java.
Solo is one of the great rivers of Southeast Asia and when I think of great Southeast Asian rivers, the Salween, the Irrawaddy and the Chao Phraya would come to mind. Adding to the list is possibly the Kapuas and the Musi. But the greatest without doubt is the Mekong.
The Mekong River flows from the Himalayas, snakes through southern China and defines the contemporary boundaries of Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia before empties out into the South China Sea just south of Saigon.
The Mekong is the great river I am most familiar with. From the air, I have seen the river and its delta in Vietnam. I have been to Phnom Penh twice over the span of 14 years and marveled at the transformation of the city. I have walked the streets of Vientiane during what appeared to be a dry season when the river to the west looked meek with people walking across to either get into Thailand or Laos. Further upriver in Luang Prabang where I spent several weeks, the river was wide and fierce. To cross it as many did at the Laotian capital would be pure madness. I have been through the Chiang Khong border checkpoint, where the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge crosses a gentler Mekong. And more recently, I have been to Sop Ruak where the Thailand-Myanmar-Laos tripoint is.
While geographically and politically familiar with the river, I had never really thought about the history of its exploration until when I picked up a little gem from Tintabudi bookstore some months back. It is Milton Osborne’s River Road to China. I am familiar with Osborne from a long time ago when I took a class on Southeast Asian history at Michigan. His work was one of the references we used in a class ran by Victor Lieberman.
River Road to China recounts the 1866-1868 French expedition’s attempt to locate the source of the Mekong and determine whether it was navigable. Based on my previous travels and embarrassingly basic geographical knowledge of the river, I would have bet it was navigable all the way up to at least the Myanmar’s section. At each section of the river that I have visited, the Mekong is wide except in Vientiane during what appeared to be a drought.
With a more limited geographical knowledge but with a whole lot more courage (or bravado), that was exactly the suspicion of the French empire, which was expanding its influence across the Indochina in competition with the British. The French were looking for inland access to southern China via the Mekong, while the British were doing so through the Salween in Myanmar. There was race to Yunnan and the supposed riches of southern China.
The French expedition led by Ernest-Marc-Louis de Gonzague Doudart de Lagrée and also later Marie Joseph François Garnier met their first challenge near Sambor, approximately 200km to the northeast of Phnom Penh by river. The Sambor rapids were difficult but it could be negotiated, especially with stronger ships of the mid-19th century. de Lagrée, his men and local guides definitely did with more primitive boats after a struggle that came physically and psychologically.
The principal expedition members at Angkor in 1866. By Émil Gsell.
de Lagrée had been to the Sambor rapids before and he had thought it was impossible to pass. But the expedition did pass the rapids and that raised hope.
That hope was quickly dashed. The Khone Phapheng Falls at the modern Laotian border are the uppermost reach of navigable Mekong. Khone Phapheng Falls are in fact the widest waterfall in the world. I never knew that, thinking Iguazu Falls on the Argentine-Brazilian border being the widest. But no. The Khone Phapheng Falls have a width of nearly 11km, Iguazu is only nearly 3km.
Unlike the Iguazu that rises close to 100 meters, the Khone Phapheng is just 21 meters tall in a series of cascades. In many ways, the Laotian falls are a gentle feature. But that was enough to block any steamship from going upstream. Years later, the French ended up building a rail line to sidestep the problem presented by the Falls.
Now knowing the Mekong was unnavigable, there was still an objective left: find the source of the Mekong. And so, the expenditure pressed on but in a disastrous fashion due to tropical diseases, the limits of French medical knowledge of that time, political realities of the Indochinese interior and simply, European imperial arrogance. de Lagrée in fact spent a second half of the expedition suffering from what seems to be malaria and died unceremoniously in Yunnan away from the Mekong after a failed surgery. de Lagrée shared the fate of another French explorer, Alexander Henri Mouhot, who popularized in Europe the ruins of Angkor but died out of malaria. Mouhot is buried in a tomb in the outskirts of Luang Prabang.
The rest of the team attempted to look for the source but they eventually abandoned the mission due to a civil war in Yunnan between Muslim rebels and the Chinese imperial forces. It was too dangerous to proceed.
While there was strong suspicion about the location of source of the Mekong by the end of the 19th century, it was only truly discovered by the 1990s technology. We today know that the Mekong originates from Lasagongma Spring, deep in the Tibetan Plateau.
Finally, there are two other points I would explore slightly further.
One, the expedition played a role in expanding French influence in Southeast Asia. During the expedition, France controlled the Mekong delta (French Cochinchina) but one surviving member of the expedition, Garnier, briefly captured Hanoi on the delta of the Red River in northern Vietnam on the pretext of securing free river passage in yet another attempt to access Yunnan but this time, via the Red River. While he died in a battle near Hanoi and the city itself was liberated by the Vietnamese soon after, in the longer run, France ended up ruling the whole of Vietnam because Garnier showed it was possible.
Two, I wonder if there were non-Europeans who had traversed the length of the Mekong before the French exploration. It seems quite plain that the locals who worked as porters and navigators for the French knew about the rivers more than their employers. More than that, there were Malay fishmongers all the way from the Malay Peninsula in Phnom Penh when de Lagrée spent days dining with the Cambodian king, Norodom I. He was familiar with the king given that earlier, he played a role in forcing Cambodia to become a French protectorate. More curiously, there were Malay bombmakers as far north as Dali, the northernmost city along the Mekong that the French explorers visited. If there were Malays along the upper reaches of the Mekong, surely it would not be an overreach to expect others like the Thais, Laotians, Cambodians. Vietnamese, Chinese or any other local groups that had explored the river.
There is a short author’s note near the end of Susan Abulhawa’s novel Mornings in Jenin. In the last paragraph, the author recounted the time she met Edward Said and how that influenced her. Abulhawa is a Palestinian American, just like Said. In that page, she mentioned that Said lamented how “the Palestinian narrative was lacking in literature.” After that conversation, she “incorporated his disappointment into [her] resolve.”
Reflecting on that, I think in some instances literature and art in general can be more effective in promoting a cause than academic or non-fiction pieces of work.
Over the past two years or so in response to the killings in Gaza as well as the constant illegal Israeli settlers’ violence in the West Bank, I have attempted to educate myself further about the Palestinian experience. Wikipedia has been a constant companion because it is the easiest access to a generally good source of information. But reading Wikipedia might be dissatisfying and it is easy to drown in a sea of dry hyperlinks and articles that are too long for the screen.
Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine has been helpful in guiding me through the narrative and make sense of all the information on Wikipedia. The book is the best non-fiction work on Palestine I have read yet.
But non-fiction makes you work for it. This might not work for many who read for entertainment purposes instead of learning. And non-fiction can be dry. I think the reason The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine reads great is because Khalidi merges his personal stories to make sense of the facts, which makes the grand historical narrative spanning for more than a lifetime more human.
Here is where Mornings in Jenin excels. First published in 2006 under the more controversial original title The Scar of David, the novel for me is the most emotional book I have read in a long time. The characters are fictional but they live through real events described in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. There were multiple segments of the novel where I was on the verge of tearing up. Reading it was an emotional rollercoaster that makes one sympathizes with the Palestinian people even more. It adds an extra dimension that is hard for most non-fiction to tap into.
As it turns out, Mornings in Jenin is the first English literature that explores the Palestinian experience and so, fulfilling Abulhawa’s promise to herself to incorporate Palestine into modern literature. That makes Mornings in Jenin an important novel to read in order to understand the Palestinian sufferings better.
And so, I feel Edward Said is right about the importance of literature to the Palestinian experience.
Central to Cheah Boon Kheng’s 1988 book The Peasant Robbers of Kedah 1900-1929: Historical and Folk Perceptions is the idea of theft as an informal wealth redistribution mechanism during a time of distress in rural Kedah. The thefts are framed as a guarantee for some kind of minimum welfare standard for the rural folks in general and in important specific cases, as a response by the weak against those in authority.
The result of 12 years of research and writing actively influenced by James C. Scott (the author of Weapons of the Weak), Cheah (who died in 2015) painted a picture of petty crimes being a constant concern in the 20th century rural Kedah. The historian reconstructed the conditions of Kedahan kampongs through interviews where written records failed. Written records are wholly inadequate because the Kedah Sultanate, both under first Siamese and later British influence, had limited effective control beyond major towns: the state elites had worries other than recording the lived experience of peasants, at least until they began to exert greater control throughout the state.
In that reconstructed picture, I get the idea that almost everybody engaged in petty crimes. Chickens reared regularly disappeared without a trace. The prevalence of theft however did not mean the lack of shame. In one page, the author wrote that the offending party would quickly slaughter the birds they had stolen, had it cooked immediately and then consumed as soon as possible so to not get caught. Proving such crime was next to impossible while reporting it to the authority was such a hassle that it was not worth the effort to do so. In a rural setting where the jungle was nearby, everybody was a suspect, policing was absent, the state was non-existent and the border was porous, the criminals might as well be a snake or a ghost with an appetite for white meat. The spread and frequency of petty crime worsened during difficult economic periods as distressed households resorted to pilfering for survival. Or as Cheah put it, it was a system of self-help.
Crucially, all this was an intraclass conflict. The rich lived far away from the kampongs in towns and protected by law and order. But the rural normality of crime set the stage for organized banditry at the state level and soon, interclass conflict.
The rising banditry was fueled by a weak state capacity, a changing power structure (from distributed native power to colonial centralized control) and general corruption among rural leaders.
Kedah then was more a mandala than the state we know today: strongest at the capital center but its influence dropped disproportionately fast the farther away a person traveled into the jungles. But even in that weak state structure, Kedah still had representatives in the form of village heads or similar positions. As the British expanded its bureaucratic reach outward beyond towns and centralized all authorities in the state capital Alor Setar, these local rural actors lost power and wealth.
To preserve their influence amid a feudal society, they resorted to criminal activities. They fought the erosion of their power by recruiting local thugs who carried out theft in a bigger way. In this way, the rural elites amassed muscles and capital.
But the local elites needed the local thugs as much as the latter needed the former. The thugs needed the local elites as a shield from Alor Setar, or at least some kind of legitimacy within a feudalist framework.
Here, the idea of wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor becomes tenuous as the local rich preyed upon the poor even as the rural elites did this in rebellion against growing colonial authority (and it should be mentioned, against the sultan too).
As events would have it, the alliance between the rural elites and the thugs employed and protected would not last. Quarrels happened for whatever reasons and the latter turned against the former, stealing for rural and urban elites alike. The victimized peasants celebrated this and this is what Eric Hobsbawm called social banditry: actions taken as illegal by the law but carried out by the oppressed groups as a form of resistance. Some in fact shared their spoiled with poor, making them as Cheah Boon Kheng called them as the Robin Hood of Malaya. Such appears to be the case with the peasant robber Panglima Nayan (and several others) who was eventually killed by the British-Kedah authorities.
But not all cases (in fact most cases) could be labelled cleanly as Robin Hood kind. Stories about these individuals are contradictory and there are forgotten aspects about their cruelty to their own, with their benevolence exaggerated. It is a complicated truth, unlike popular folk tales told in Kedah.
Cheah the historian understood this but still came out to defend his thesis: it does not matter what the truth is. What matters is the perception of the peasants. That perception and stories from the peasants told are their way of rebelling against the authorities. These stories are the weapons of the weak.
Cheah’s defense of the thesis is acceptable and solid in fact. But I am troubled with the brushing off facts in favor of perceptions, if we transport this lens to analyze contemporary issues. Here, I am referring to social media which has inundated everybody with information (regardless of truth) so much that everything become perceptions with increasingly no bearing to facts. Would the employment of perceptions regardless of truth by fringe extremist groups (by definition non-mainstream and so… ignored/oppressed/suppressed/disenfranchised?) qualify as weapons of the weak?
I have not read Weapons of the Weak and I will try to read it soon with that specific question in mind.
My readings could be driven by current affairs. That was the reason I picked up Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. And that was the reason I recently read Michael Axworthy’s Revolutionary Iran: the Twelve-Day War between Iran and Israel had just concluded. These books always remind us that there is almost always a long history behind contemporary events. Things very rarely just happened on a day.
Revolutionary Iran, first published in 2013, focuses on the 1979 Iranian Revolution. But it also covers a hundred years’ worth of history, starting from the early 20th century (with the fall of Qajar Iran and the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty) up to the controversial 2011 Iranian presidential election. The long sweep of history is written up all with the aim of setting the revolution in its proper context.
As with any kind of similar books (such as much thicker and expansive The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya), the breadth and depth of the discussion are a challenge to casual readers equipped with only general knowledge of the country: there are just too many names, too many years and too many events to remember and make relevant to the whole exercise. These names and events are all interrelated, making reading Revolutionary Iran complicated. One could get lost along the way. That could cause frustration and eventually DNF: ‘did not finish’. The phone is always ready to dumb us down with social media, ever jealous of any of us perusing long-form materials.
The complexity reminds me just how useful a glossary and an index could be. It kept the story in my head straight while going through the pages of Revolutionary Iran.
Referring the glossary and the index could be a pain. Flipping pages back and forth is disruptive to reading flow. It is almost like reading while consulting a dictionary or an encyclopedia at the same time. It almost feels like reading Wikipedia with all of its hyperlinks could have been a more enjoyable endeavor.
But reading Wikipedia has its own pitfalls. Those hyperlinks are rabbit holes to be explored. With an undisciplined mind, one could easily end up reading about Kurdish nationalism or the history of Azerbaijan all of which may have some relevance to the events of 1979, but does not assist us in understanding the nuances of the Iranian revolution any better. Wikipedia’s hyperlinks could provide context, but an overload of information could also drown out of the context. Some who wander are lost.
So, a book, unlike Wikipedia, is a guided tour. It keeps the fluff out by focusing and contextualising the essentials. It is the model-building tool. And the glossary and the index, often forgotten, are little manuals useful if the reader needs help along the way.
