Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Dialogues: The King of Bangkok : a collaborative graphic novel

2022; Wiley; Volume: 28; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1467-9655.13784

1467-9655

Claudio Sopranzetti, S. Fabbri, Chiara Natalucci,

Anthropological Studies and Insights

The King of Bangkok (Sopranzetti, Fabbri & Natalucci 2021) is a non-fictional graphic novel, based on more than a decade of anthropological research and an attempt to think graphically through ethnography and think ethnographically through comics. The book, which was first published in Italian, then in Thai, and finally in English, tells the story of Nok, an old blind man who sells lottery tickets in Bangkok, as he decides to leave the city and return to his native village. Through reflections on contemporary Bangkok and flashbacks to his past, Nok reconstructs a journey through the slums of migrant workers, the rice fields of northeastern Thailand, the tourist villages of Ko Pha Ngan, and the Red Shirt protests of 2010. The story narrated in the graphic novel is based on real events. Hundreds of hours of interviews and archival research, filtered through three pairs of eyes and hands, provide the ground for this account. The characters are composite and the product of narrative fiction. Every detail of their lives is real, yet none of them correspond in their totality to an existing person. The social, economic, and historical context in which the characters move summarizes the most significant events in the last fifty years of Thai history, without any claim to exhaustiveness. Some events have been omitted and condensed to make the narration more fluid. On the contrary, the reconstruction of locations, clothes, architecture, and graphic material is fully realistic. Every frame is based on a photographic and cinematographic archive, which the authors put together during a residency in Thailand in 2015, composed of more than 5,000 items from the Bangkok National Library, the National Archive of Thai Cinema, and some private collections. Following one composite character, The King of Bangkok is a story of migration to the city, distant families in the countryside, economic development eroding the land, and violent political protest. Ultimately, it is a story about contemporary Thailand and how the waves of history lift, engulf, and crash against ordinary people. In the following pages, you will find an excerpt from the graphic novel and three reflections we wrote about the process of producing the comic, collaborating, making narrative choices, and thinking about what kind of ethnographic theorizing can happen in this graphic form. The first essay is written by Chiara Natalucci and focuses on translation and the challenges of working as an editor. The second one, authored by the visual artist Sara Fabbri, explores iconography, cultural appropriation, colour use, how to represent blindness graphically, and the process of creating a page. Finally, the anthropologist Claudio Sopranzetti reconstructs the genesis of the project and its contribution to ethnography and theory. When I was asked to write this text, I panicked. My name wasn't even supposed to be on the book cover and now they wanted me to explain what role I played in creating it! The day Claudio first told me about his idea to turn his Ph.D. thesis into a narrative work, I immediately fell in love with the project and offered my help with great enthusiasm. At the time, I was working in the foreign rights department of a literary agency in London, and I thought I could be useful in getting the book submitted to various publishers both in the United Kingdom and in the United States. Also, I was seeing a rising interest in graphic novels around the world, so I prompted Claudio to consider this option. In my opinion, this medium could be very effective for two reasons: first, a graphic form would be functional in telling the story of a place like Thailand, with its striking visual contradictions, its urban mazes and natural beauties; and, second, this medium implied working in a team, which would provide a different perspective on a subject that Claudio knew all too well. It was very important for this project, I thought, not to take anything for granted, and to do so he needed a new gaze on the story he wanted to tell. Finally, knowing that he wanted to make a blind man the protagonist of this narrative, I saw representing blindness through artwork as a challenging and stimulating experiment. My intention, however, was to operate behind the scenes. I offered to help Claudio find the right comic artist and create a list of Anglophone publishers and agents to send the book to for consideration. I had good fun in preparing submission emails, including all the relevant information, a well-written synopsis, a couple of images to arouse interest, and a clear and strong presentation of the project and its authors. Finally, I proposed to follow the team along the process, being the first reader and giving them my feedback, chapter after chapter. That's all. That was my plan. Six months later, I was in Bangkok, hand in hand with two blindfolded Italians guiding them along the streets of the city. That particular moment, together with the research in the archives and the explorations of different parts of the country, was the beginning of my close and full participation in the creation of what would become The King of Bangkok. Between the initial stage and the final result, there have been thousands of hours of Skype calls, lively conversations and vivid arguments, fruitful exchanges of ideas and opinions, drafts and sketches. Over the course of the five years between my initial proposal to Claudio and the publication, my role has changed significantly. This article, therefore, is an opportunity to leaf through the pages of the novel, trying to spot my own contributions and bring to the forefront my labour as an editor and translator, often hidden behind the attempt to allow writers and artists to find their voices. What follows is a selection of examples of this clumsy yet consequential labour. Let me start with the book cover, the first page of our image selection. Choosing a title for your book is quite an important part of the writing process, one that haunts you throughout. You want it to be effective and catchy but at the same time you are aware of the many editorial and market demands. Even before starting to draft, we had always referred to the book as Awakened, which was the title Claudio originally had in mind. This translates the Thai ‘Taa Sawaang’, which means ‘bright eyes’, the opposite of blindness, and metaphorically refers to an awakening both in the Buddhist sense and in that of gaining a clearer vision on the status of contemporary Thailand, and in particular of its monarchy. Unfortunately, this option was not suitable for the Italian or the English market, mostly because the complex semantic universe of ‘Taa Sawaang’ would be lost in translation. This became the title for the Thai edition, but for the first Italian publication, we were back to square one. We started to think about alternatives. We all wanted the title to represent in a few words what we saw as the essence of the novel: the personal story of a man whose life spans fifty years of a country's history. We were looking for something of universal significance but at the same time with clear geographical and cultural hints in order to make the book immediately recognizable and identifiable. This meant that the words Thai/Thailand/Bangkok should necessarily be on the cover. Also, we were striving to link this geographical identification to the human sphere using words such as man/life/story. Unfortunately, we had to reject the option of calling it A Thai life due to a book by Li Kunwu titled A Chinese life, published in Italy by the same publisher as ours. After an excruciating brainstorm, we each decided to come up with a title and Sara would design a cover for each option. Then, we asked our editor for feedback. The solution I proposed was The King of Bangkok because I liked the idea of associating the word King with the name of a city that does not have its own monarch, stressing the absence of this figure in real life while putting Nok at the centre of our story. This gave us the opportunity to give a sense of an epic narrative while grounding it in the everyday nature of our characters. This choice did not fully convince the others but was the one that our editor favoured. At this point, we started to think more carefully about what image could provide the counterpoint to rebalance the doubts expressed by Sara and Claudio. During the course of our discussion, the idea of using Bangkok's train station in the title had surfaced, given that this location was both the starting and the final point of Nok's journey. With this in mind, Sara came up with the intuition of using the train station entrance as the cover's background image. We liked this solution, yet we felt the need to include a human component, one that would maintain the double interpretation of a royal presence but also an absence. When Sara sent us what became the final cover, adding a small man among the station's columns whose big shadow stretched out in the foreground, we realized that this option had all the elements we were looking for. This process, I believe, clearly sums up both my role behind the scenes and how we collectively approached the rest of the writing: illustrations and words always walked at the same pace, one alongside the other, one enhancing the other. Besides juggling with titles across multiple languages, another challenge we faced was our need, halfway through the writing process, to change the language of the book. The King of Bangkok was originally written in English, and yet it came out first in Italian. This happened for a number of reasons. First, Claudio's research activity is anchored in the English language. English was what he used to communicate when he first arrived in Thailand; it was the bridge language with which he started to study Thai; and also the language he used to write his articles. There was, therefore, a sort of familiarity between the story and this language. Think about when you first meet someone in a foreign country and settle on a common language. Even if that person will at some point learn your own language, it will be rather awkward to switch to it in the communication between the two of you because your brain feels more comfortable in using the language you originally had in common. This is, at some level, what was happening with the material Claudio had collected and shared with us. Second, we originally thought that this book would be more appealing to an Anglophone market. The idea was to be published in the United Kingdom or the United States, then try with other countries. We felt that the American audience could be especially interested in reading a story set in Thailand because of the size of the US market and the historical relations between the two countries. Third, and this was largely unexpected, as we were developing the novel, we received an offer from an Italian trade publisher focusing on books about Asia. Getting an actual contract was a strong boost for our confidence but at the time we barely had half of the book ready. So, besides translating what we had previously written, by accepting the offer we had to decide whether to start writing in Italian or proceed in English. We opted for the latter. This meant that, besides continuing to work as a shadow editor, I also had to become the translator of the text, from English back to Italian, a language all of us are native in. Once again, a challenge. Within this linguistic context, we had to deal with some issues typical of any translation. Regardless of the English or Italian language, the most complicated aspect was how to present faithfully some distinctive Thai features to Western readership. For instance, if you want to offend someone in Thailand, you call them snake or animal or, if you really are mad, lizard: insults belong to the semantic field of animals. In Italian or English, this wouldn't sound as strong as in Thai, taking away some of the significance of these words, but we decided to preserve this Thai peculiarity and maintain the animal universe anyway. Therefore, we selected the option that sounded most offensive in each language: goat or beast in Italian, buffalo or simply animal in English, sometimes in combination with the word ‘stupid’ to add more emphasis. We had a similar issue with how Thai people refer to elders. Among Thai people, as a form of respect, you call an old person ‘uncle/aunt’, including them in a familiar environment even if they are complete strangers. In Italian, the same forms have exactly the opposite purpose – ‘uncle/aunt’ is a sort of slang that young people use to call each other and carry the feeling of an informal conversation. In this case, unfortunately, it wasn't possible to find a convincing alternative in Italian and we decided to use the polite and formal form of ‘Sir/Madam’, while in English we kept the same as in Thai. Another central issue was how to engage with visual and audio material presented inside the graphic novel. What languages should these be in? After long discussions, we decided to leave all posters, billboards, signs, graffiti, and protest banners in Thai in order to give an accurate representation of the country and its visual impact and feeling, as you can see in the fourteen pages of the attached selection. To do this, we created a massive photographic archive from the 1980s to the present time, divided by year, that Sara could check any time she needed to insert a specific reference or image in her drawings. For the audio material, on the other hand, we decided to work in translation. Songs, radio bulletins, TV news, and political speeches, like the one given by Thaksin in the excerpt we include, are functional to the development of the story; they serve to introduce the History with a capital H; and they are enriching elements for some important dialogues and scenes and therefore needed to be easily accessible to the reader. Taking these sorts of decisions about language, however, was only a part of what translation meant in our context. Language is intimately connected to culture and therefore translation doesn't only have to do with the former, but it pertains also to the latter. Behind any language there is a set of habits, values, and meanings, culturally constructed and reproduced. Translating for us was not only about bringing Thai words to a foreign public, but also about narrating the worlds in which those words carry their meaning. We faced a number of situations where we had to explain in the clearest possible way some Thai practices potentially quite alien to the Western reader. Let me share one instance among them: the custom of ordaining as a monk for a limited period of time. This is quite a common occurrence for young men in Thailand, particularly in the countryside, when you want to show gratitude to your parents. The purpose here is to acquire good karma for them, karma that would allow them to be reborn into a better life. Clearly, this could be quite confusing for a Western audience. The idea of rebirth and karma, however popular in recent decades, remains largely foreign. Moreover, we tend to equate monks with priests, and therefore to associate the decision to join an order to a life-long vocation. The challenge, here, was to present these dynamics without using an external omniscient voice. So we adopted a double strategy. On the one hand, we introduced the narrative device of phone calls, which would become even more central in the third chapter. Through the conversation between Nok and Hong, the reader would understand the logic behind Nok's decision and how common ordaining is for young migrants. On the other hand, we needed to explain the theological meanings of this practice. Here we used another device. We staged a conversation between the temple's abbot and the young novices, using very concrete metaphors – as abbots often do when talking to young farmers – to explore quite complex philosophical concepts. In both cases, the work of translation meant making local practices understandable and somehow mundane, while also choosing the right words and tone to describe them. This is a prime example of what I meant as the need for an external gaze to bring this story to an international public. For Claudio, these customs may have become too familiar, and the risk was to leave them unexplained. Preventing this was one of my roles, pushing both him in his writing and Sara in her drawing to consider how readers may relate to their work. All of the instances I have presented so far point to a method: incessant teamwork in which every decision was filtered through three brains, generating a multivocal result. If externally this may sound ideal, in practice working as a three meant that often two opposite opinions would emerge. Mediating between them, and at times becoming the one to tip the scale, was the third element of my work: that of interpreting the personalities of the other two authors and supporting them in finding a common ground. Often what emerged was an unstable balance, one that we continued to readjust up until the very last minute before going to print. Even now, whenever I go back to the book, I constantly find things that I would like to change. I'm still completely unable to have a smooth and fluent engagement with the story, I cannot passively accept the sentences that I'm reading. It feels so natural to change the word order here or find a synonym or reformulate a sentence to see if it may sound better. This is exactly what an editor does throughout the whole production, supervising the invisible process of building a narrative and, like an engineer, carefully evaluating if all the parts work well together, condemned to rest only when the structure is solid and stable. Five years ago, when Claudio and Chiara contacted me to collaborate on this book, I knew very little about Thailand. I had never been there and the little information I had – the same information you can get from a simple Google search – painted the country as a peaceful tourist paradise with staggering landscapes, beaches, and temples, delicious food, and, of course, parties and drugs. I knew that to carry forward this project I would have to expand my horizons, but I did not yet know what this would entail. Much like what Chiara said in her essay, this work required a translation exercise, in my case in visual form. At first this meant studying from home. We started building a visual archive based on material we could find in Italy and on Claudio's own archives, built over ten years of research in Thailand. While the archives provided me with images of the country, Claudio's previous book – Owners of the map (Sopranzetti 2018) – guided me through them. The more I learnt about his work, the more I understood how superficial my idea of Thai culture was. In the following months, I continued to study, starting from my area of interest and conducting research on Thai art and architecture, attempting to absorb and re-elaborate something that remained elusive, often too far from me. At the time, I was not aware of my approach's lack of cultural relativism. But this was soon to change. After several months of collaboration, we finally left for an artist residency and an exploratory trip to Thailand. Only once I was on site, doing fieldwork and drawing it, did I become more and more aware of my Euro-centric point of view, which, I discovered, was reflected in my drawings. During the first days of our residency, I was amassing drawings, studies of locations, interiors, and every other scene of everyday life I could set down, and yet the results were unfulfilling. I started to look closer at my sketches. Even though I am a trained visual artist, I felt as if I could not capture the physiognomy, the architectural style, the geometry of spaces and their atmospheres. Of course, I was able to draw what I was looking at, but the results seemed inadequate to me. Something was missing, and it was not about reproducing images faithfully, but rather about my own eyes: the gaze of a white, middle class, European woman. To quote Milton Glaser (2008), one of the most prominent graphic designers and illustrators of the twentieth century, ‘drawing is thinking’. During the residency, I understood this perfectly: in order to draw differently, I had to think differently. It took a while to realize how limited my own gaze was. As an artist, I am used to reconsidering and reorienting my point of view as a person, but I had never before confronted ethnocentric prejudices through my work. I first became aware of them when I noticed I was drawing many places, but I was avoiding drawing physicality. Unconsciously, I was walking away from an uncomfortable sensation, disappointed as I was by my caricature-like portraits. This feeling led me to question my own artistic abilities and brought me to a dark place of low self-esteem. Then I remembered a mechanism called ‘other-race effect’: I was not able to recognize specific facial attributes and therefore to draw them because I hadn't yet acquired enough perceptual expertise. When I discovered my lack of ‘sight’, I chose the approach that suited me, an approach not dissimilar to anthropological methods: I had studied Asian anatomy and Thai features, now I started to stare at people on the streets. After days of careful exercises and focused attention, I began to recognize and draw the person-specific attributes beyond the standard almond-shaped eyes so often used by Western artists. This was a revelation, and it became a method I carried forward in this work. A step back admitting my personal bias was the key to finding an effective way to assimilate a new culture in a personal (and of course partial) way. My confidence was growing along with my experience. Only then was I able to re-elaborate what I was experiencing, and to slowly begin to develop a convincing style, melding reality with my vision. At that point, the real work started. After this experience, I put aside all the information collected in Italy about Thailand and I started to look and draw everything I could with a naïve sight, without taking anything for granted, intersecting my natural curiosity with this new personal observation method. In this sense, being conscious of my background and my stereotypes opened up the mental space to reprocess and create a hybrid visual language through specific symbols, or cultural objects, understandable across the cultural differences. With this non-structured research of transversal (and transcultural) meanings, I have tried to re-create visual content that could possibly resound across both my own culture and that of Thailand. For sure, utilizing drawings – a largely universal language – rather than discursive means helped. Yet this does not mean it was a fast process. It took more than a year simply to develop the first chapter, establish the colour patterns and the rhythm of the story. Once again, this was not just an issue of drawing, but one of thinking, starting from deconstructing personal stereotypes. The ‘new method’ I adopted made me confront my own gaze not only in relation to another culture but also in relation to the rules of storytelling itself. In order to represent a different culture, the first step was to recognize my personal bias and focus on how these affected the elements in my visual narration. But then I realized I also needed to confront how these could impact narrative mechanisms, ultimately the greater significant net that holds together the single underlying pieces, building the higher level of meaning. My co-authors and I had a lot of discussions about orientalism and cultural appropriation, especially in the first chapter setting. My awareness was ongoing, but my artistic vanity was holding me back. Sometimes you can develop a particular affection for a single drawing or an idea for subjective reasons, forgetting to focus on what really works for the story. In the beginning, I was attracted by my own idea of Asian spiritualism and thought I could use these visual choices to create metaphors and parallelism to describe the main character's intimate evolution. Figure 1 is one example of this dynamic. The plate represents Virhulok (Wirunhok), one of the Yaksha (demigods) ogre warrior guardians placed in front of the Wat Phra Kaew Temple in Bangkok. My initial intent was to use him metaphorically to create a parallelism between the standing warning demon and the beginning of Nok's journey, but this choice was a distraction from the real intent of the plate. This frame shows the moment when the main character, who is blind, went out in the city for the last time. This is the frame when the reader's story began, not Nok's story. I wanted to warn the reader with an aesthetic obscure symbol as an Asian Caronte, forgetting that if you have never been in Thailand, you couldn't know the symbolic role of Virhulok. Overall, the point of interest was the relationship between Nok and the city, a city not only as a physical space but as an unknown menace that we meet for the first time. My duty was to suggest the idea of an unfair duel between a human consciousness and a huge abstract force. We had a lot of discussion about this introduction. I could not only draw the city, I needed to suggest a visible tension between the subjects. The result of the process is a page with the main character in front of his house's door, but the city is already there: in his house, on his back, he is surrounded by it (Fig. 2). We immediately recognize the figurative value of the representation, but we can also easily recognize a plausible city made of sharp objects, and the text gives us the context: a blind man is about to leave his house to go through the city. The city is something more than a place; we can feel the imminent danger. The city has already done something to this man; he has clearly already experienced it. He has internalized the city. We can see that, but we don't know why yet. The function of this plate is also a storytelling hook and a trigger to the reader. One of the most difficult chapters to draw was the last one, the one about the ‘Red Shirts’ protest, and the one from which our selection here is taken. I had seen tons of photographic material and video documentaries. Claudio was there in 2010, so he could not only explain to me the dynamics between the protesters and the police and the political situation, but also recount the specific stories of his friends and his actual memories. When the protest happened, Ratchaprasong was already a rich area, filled with shopping malls, multinational companies, fancy restaurants, and boutiques. But during the period we wanted to represent, these places were devastated, burned, and full of rubble. When I was there for our residency, in 2016, everything I could see had been rebuilt: new buildings and shiny store lights. My sense of alienation was extreme because, in my drawings, I had to represent those places during the protest, filled with people fighting for their rights, but in reality I was standing at the site of their defeat. I also felt really close to my characters; I didn't want to draw their suffering. I tried to find different ways to describe the violence in the streets, the police assaults, the barricades, and the general fear. As you can see in the selection, finally I chose to describe everything, highlighting the human interaction, using a deep perspective, giving a fast pace to the story, and adding the colour red, the colour of the protest. In this graphic novel, the colours are not descriptive or real. Much like the form of lyrical realism that Claudio explores in his essay, they have a narrative and psychological function. I chose them based on my first impressions of Thailand: if I think about those places now, I can see them exactly with these colours. At the same time, during my stay in Thailand, I started to collect impressions and information on the specific value of the colours in Thai culture, like the symbolic relationship with bright colours and social power, or why specific colours (like yellow and pink) are associated with the monarchy, the King, and popular wishes of speedy recovery from the King's illness. I was looking for the particular connection between colours and common sense. All the members of the royal family, for example, have a specific colour: bright yellow is the colour of the king, which explains why the ‘Yellow Shirts’ were the movement in support of the monarchy. Blue is the colour associated with the Queen, the mother of the nation. I found a connection with my culture, because blue is related to the female divine. (The mother Virgin Mary's dress is traditionally blue, referring to the ascension, the sky, vastness. In the past, this colour was made from expensive turquoise powder, in many ways linking the Goddess to opulence and of course the highest value.) Observing how Thai people respect and idealize the Queen led me to recognize that some of the features of ‘occidental blue’ were linked to ‘Thai blue’. This connection enriched my personal perception of ‘Thai blue’, motivating its specific use in the Queen's official communication, but also in advertising or in fashion. These already existing colour codes were relatively easy to navigate; more difficult was to choose colours to associate with specific spaces in which the characters moved. For instance, in the story, Bangkok had to be represented as a multi-tentacled, frightening city, almost a living creature that was dangerous for the common person. But the city also needed to be dynamic and vibrant, full of hopes and opportunities. I chose cold, bright colours to communicate the distance between the people and the city, making visible the suffocating layered architecture, starting from the neighbourhood and culminating with the skyline, a