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Article Excerpt
Based on fieldwork in non-ceasefire war zones within and between Thailand and Burma, this article explores the nexus between written language, intelligibility, and qualified voice in order to examine the Karen people as unqualified political subjects in a quotidian theater of the displaced. KEYWORDS: borders; state terror; displacement; intelligibility; sovereign power
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Experiences "inside" Burma/Myanmar (1) have been harrowing. Like many lives in many agony-ridden spaces, the torments inflicted on people under the Burmese dictatorship have by and large been imperceptible, out of the view of the world. Although the pattern dates back to 1962, when General Newin took the helm and the country became a hermit state, it has been most acute since the massacres in the country's urban areas on August 8, 1988 (the cursed 8/8/88). Conservative figures show that as of December 2004 between five hundred and fifty thousand and eight hundred thousand people have been forcibly displaced "inside" the country. (2)
Although these people are living in danger zones, the territorial sovereignty of the despotic state renders them imperceptible to the "outside" world. Their sufferings have rarely been accounted for by the international community. Most of their stories have never been disclosed, and even when they have, they have often been ignored. No matter how loud they have screamed, a large number of forcibly displaced peoples "inside" the Burmese nation-state have been tortured and killed without being heard as they dissolve back to the soil they hoped would be their homelands.
Consequently, many of these indigenous peoples or ethnic nationalities (3) have taken flight through openings along the so-called Thai-Burmese state boundary, searching for sunlight, only to end up living in darkness on the Thai side. (4) Once they cross the "state boundary" into Thailand, they are often regarded by the Thai society as the aberrant--those whose lives do not generally qualify to be accounted for, no matter whether they are living "legally" in what the Thai state terms "temporary shelter areas" (5) or "illegally" outside those shelters. Among them are the Karen indigenous peoples, who already, long before the demarcation of the Thai-Burmese boundary, were located in the border zones. Whether in Thailand or in Burma, the forcibly displaced Karens, their voices and struggles, are usually ignored. (6)
This article calls attention to the necessity and urgency of conducting academic field research in the dangerous areas in the Thai-Burmese border zones, in "the condemned grounds." As part of a research project studying political entanglements that have led to the invisibility of the suffering endured by displaced Karens, the article aims to highlight an intricate nexus between voice and territoriality. It especially seeks to delineate a geography of the sacred: a map of exceptional spaces, in the sense explored by Giorgio Agamben, whereby the displaced have been dispersed through complex forms of human disposal so as to become homo sacer. (7) The article thus advances a new line of political inquiry, both by questioning the closure of the political through processes of exclusionary counting, in ways suggested by Jacques Ranciere, (8) and by showing how this closure is ultimately dependent on state terror and its capacity to enforce a distinction between the logos of the speech of those counted and the phone (noise) of those who have no-part.
To this end, the article takes three steps. First it argues that the forcibly displaced Karens are political subjects, not simple facts of life. Second it proposes a methodology for studying forcibly displaced peoples in the border zones by weaving three topics of anthropology together with the notion of "in-between spaces"--doing so in order to capture the kaleidoscopic realities of the border zones. The three are (1) an anthropology of borders and philosophico-cultural in-between spaces; (2) an anthropology of state terror and political in-between spaces; and (3) an anthropology of displacement and refugees together with in-between spaces of terror. Third the article develops a narrative of the effects on the forcibly displaced Karens' lives caused by atrocities and territorial displacement.
Use of the term Karens is not meant to suggest that the Karens are a frozen, or fixed, people. Inasmuch as identities are contingent on the performative, I deploy the term as a signifier of those who enunciate, perform, and reenact Karen-ness, in keeping with Gayatri Spivak's view that identities are strategically essentialized in encounters or political struggles. (9) Following Ranciere, (10) I treat a strategic essentialization of the Karens as an enactment of subjectification, as the enunciative and performative acts through which Karens attempt to make themselves perceptible and intelligible and thus make themselves recognizable as qualified political subjects. Accordingly, in order to understand the sufferings and struggles of the forcibly displaced Karens in the Burmese war zones or inside and outside "temporary shelter areas" on the Thai side, it is imperative to understand how essential it is for the Karens to reenact themselves as Karens. For many illiterate, forcibly displaced Karens, a Karen dialect is their only language, their only enunciative vehicle. After days, months, or years of running for their lives, it is critical for these civilians who have taken flight to be able to trust that they belong to a "community" somewhere, a community that they believe can help them. For members of the Karen National Union (KNU--the governing body of most Karens) after more than half a century of fighting in the name of Karen nationhood, it is crucial to be able to trust that the "community" is not nameless.
An Almost Inaudible Voice, an Ungrammatical Writing
To offer a glimpse into the plight of the forcibly displaced Karens in the Thai-Burmese border zones I invoke here a story written by a twenty-one-year-old girl. She was one of my students in an "Introduction to Politics" class I taught while conducting fieldwork in a "temporary shelter area" on the Thai side. Except for excluding some place-names, following ethnographic etiquette, for reasons that will become clear I retain the original "ungrammatical" text.
"The Hardest Time in My Life"
The hardest time in my life was when I was 18 years old. I was studied at ___ school [on the Thai side] with my two younger sisters. It was the year that I had to face many difficulties. In the end of our school year, because of the DKBA [Democratic Karen Buddhist Army], all of the students and teachers were very frightened. The situation was getting worse until we had to go to sleep between the mountains. One of my younger sisters was weak and she was very tired of climbing the mountain every evening. We studied in the daytime and after our dinner; we went to the mountains to sleep there. One day the situation at the school was very bad, because the ___ village is situated in the border of Thailand and Burma. Because of this reason, we had to close our school as fast as we could. Our headmistress told us that we had to go back to our families. So all of the teachers and students gathered and had a short meeting and said good-bye to each other. Because it was late in the afternoon, we couldn't come back to the ___ camp [a temporary shelter area]. So we stayed at the village for one more night. That night because of my youngest sister was very tired, we went to the village to sleep with our Thai teacher. Unfortunately, at 7 p.m., we had to run away from the village again because of the Burmese and the DKBA threatened. My sister was sick now and she couldn't walk no longer. I carried her on my back and my friend also helped me. We had to walk one hour to reach the place where many villagers were hidden. We slept there one night, early in the morning we came back to the village. And my Thai teacher told me that, we should go to the hospital. Then we set for the hospital immediately. She was unconscious on the way to the hospital and I was very worried. Then we arrived at the ___ hospital [in Thailand] and she was better again. She asked for water because she was thirsty. After 15 minutes later, she was dead. I couldn't believe my eyes because it was like a trick for me. I cried bitterly for my poor sister. She didn't have malaria or anything else. I didn't know what to do with her body and I felt very upset as I was torn apart from my body. Then we went back to the village to bury her. We waited for our relatives and my older sister. At that time, my mother was in Bangkok and my grandparents were also away from us. I felt very painful for our poor lives and myself. I couldn't, do anything except crying. It is the hardest time for me in my life. It happened on Feb. 1997. (11)
Recalling Aristotle's contentious distinction that signifies the sign of the political nature of humans in book 1 of the Politics, (12) one wonders whether the international community has disqualified these forcibly displaced peoples as political subjects by dismissing their voices as mere noises (phone)--that is, as a sheer fact of being--rather than as intelligible speech (logos), demonstrating recognition as political subjects. The relevance of this notion becomes clearer if we follow Agamben's reading of Aristotle's De Interpretatione: (13) "What is in the human voice (ta en te phone) that articulates the passage from the voice of the state of living to the logos is that "the voice articulates grammata, letters ... the voice that can be written." (14) Because many of these suffering voices--living in rural, jungle, or mountainous areas--are illiterate, their voices are not considered to be part of the logos. The illiterate Karens are thus not political beings but beings without qualified voices.
Written inscription, we know, has the power to tame the voice, to preserve the memories of a community, and to advance the community's culturo-political processes. However, when the stories of suffering are written in the Karen language they reach only a small reading public, many of whose members are themselves...
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