MEKONG

Book Condition: As New. Fourth printing 2001. Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches. Weight: 12.6 ounces. A Novel about the Search for MIAs and Lost Treasure in Laos. In his 1995 English-language adventure novel Mekong, Western-educated Thai politician Pongpol Adireksarn, writing under the Western-sounding pen name Paul Adirex, situated the titular river within the play of the Naga spectrality and the phantom of Western neoliberal intrusion. Its central narrative, which revolves around the investigation of mysterious cases of disappearances that stretch from Laotian precolonial history to the postcolonial present, is set in the construction of a bridge connecting Thailand with Laos, “a gesture of goodwill from the US government […] intended to promote Laos’ economic development, in an effort to create ties with the nineteen-year-old Communist regime”. This foregrounds the river as a transnational space crucial to the exorcism of anti-colonial national formations, and at the same time, threatened by the haunting of the nation’s past and the spectral fantasy of a utopic future. The novel follows the narrative route typical of many postcolonial literary works — the depiction of the collision between the empirical reality of the Western logos and the counter-narrative of the East represented by the logic of the supernatural. Typified by some critics under the nomenclature of magic realism, this literary technique functions to narrativize the discursive clash between the colonized East and the colonizing West. The ethos of this literary trend is regressive, as it intends to draw the limits of Western rationalism and destabilize its totalizing character by positioning it against the repressed reality of the East. As such, the text becomes “a localized region that is métonymic of the post-colonial culture as a whole” (Slemon 20), since it depicts how the people reconstruct their history against the colonial discourse imposed by the West. In Mekong, this reclaiming of national history becomes figured as a hauntological interruption of the supernatural in the colonial space; the remnants of the precolonial past emerge as spectral narratives of the fantastic interrupting the textual space, which is in itself colonized as it is drawn in the language of the colonizer. The novel’s first part, subtitled “The Past,” archives Laotian national memory starting from the rise of its precolonial kingdoms, the French expedition in the basin, to the intrusion of the Americans as a result of the Vietnam War. This six-chapter prologue practically establishes the concept of karma as the hauntological framework that will govern the interruptions of the specters in the river’s novelistic present. Karma, the Indian civilization’s magisterial contribution to Southeast Asian philosophy, orders humanity’s existence as a chain of cause and effect concretized by the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth known as samsara. As the antecedent decides the consequence, the past looms over the present and the future as a spectral interruption. Haunted by Buddhist lore, Mekong constructs the Naga as a retributive karmic entity, a strong believer of Buddha’s teachings who attacks people for their past transgressions (73). Spectral manifestations of the serpent deity permeate the novelistic past — it entered the dream of corrupt Lan Chang emperor Fa Ngum to warn him of the impending doom brought about by his past transgressions; it wielded a retributively painful death to the French explorer Jean Dupree, who, in imposing his Western mode of thinking against the warnings of the locals who accompanied him, harmed the sacred white catfish; it attacked the boat carrying the treasures of the declining Laotian royal family who wanted to ensure that these would not in any way contribute to the formation of the socialist republic; it guarded the river, commanding its raging waters to take Vientaine’s sixteenth century king Settaritat and later the American prisoners-of-war (POWs) to the mysterious Puri village. The present, haunted by these karmic specters of history and accompanied by the impending intrusion of neocolonialism in the region, pushes the thicker, second part of Mekong, aptly subtitled “The Present.” Facilitating this transition from the prologue to the present is the Buddhist monk Wasukree, whom the elder monk Puritatto enlisted to continue his monastic mission: "Your name and mine both mean ‘Naga.’ One of your past lives and mine had a common link. Therefore, you were destined to become my disciple and carry out this mission. (24) Here, Wasukree becomes whom Derrida mentioned to be “the last one to whom a specter can appear, address itself or pay attention to” (11), the one to have “possessed the transcendental power to contact the Nagas” (Adirex 24), or in the language of deconstruction, the power to demolish the binary distance separating presence from absence, the past from the present. As the novel’s present opens with the foregrounding of another set of unexplained disappearances and the Naga’s deathly assault on the American field manager, all transpiring within the Mekong River, Wasukree meets two outsiders who intend to locate the river’s spectral monster, investigate the disappearances, and capture the disappeared from their spatial absence — Dave Shawn, an American ex-Army engineer of native Indian ancestry assigned to finish the bridge construction after the mysterious disappearance of the original field manager; and Johnny Draco, an American DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) officer who needs to solve the ghostly disappearance of MIAs and POWs and bring them back home. Accomplishing his function as the repository of the past, the monk communicates with them, explaining the narrative of the Naga, its geospiritual function in the river, and its retributive role as the karmic specter potentially responsible for the disappearances. The dialogue, which seems impossible to take place given the linguistic differences between the Thai monk and the American outsiders, in itself becomes spectral, interrupting the existing logos of transcultural communication. Wasukree thus explains, “We do not communicate by spoken words. We communicate through our minds, in a language each of us is most familiar with. I’ve tuned my mind in such a way that it can communicate with yours” (62). This novelization of the specters haunting Mekong River exemplifies how the repressed dreams of nations interrupted by colonial and neocolonial systems regress against these regimes of control. Ushering spectral remnants of their precolonial histories, ghosts of colonial trauma, and specters of the desired future, the people create polysemic spaces. Their layers of meanings thickening with spectral visionings, these spaces function as locations of resistance, which reconstruct silenced national histories and protect them against the complete ideological, economic, political, social and cultural subjugations of the Western-dictated global order.