Tyrell Haberkorn
Photo by Camille Point
Bio
Tyrell Haberkorn is professor of Southeast Asian studies in the department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law and Violence in Northern Thailand (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), which rethinks the meaning of revolution in terms of legal rather than armed struggle, and In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), a new history of post-absolutist Thailand written through the lens of impunity for state violence. Haberkorn also writes and translates about Southeast Asia for a public audience in such publications as Dissent, Foreign Affairs, Mekong Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Prachatai. She has received fellowships from Fulbright, the Australian Research Council, the Association for Asian Studies, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Einstein Forum, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
Project Description
To support the translation from the Thai of the prison memoir All They Could Do to Us by Prontip Mankhong. Arrested and imprisoned for her participation in a satirical play, The Wolf Bride, deemed an insult to the monarchy, Mankhong's memoir chronicles the daily life of her 744-day imprisonment in the Central Women's Prison in Bangkok from the day of her arrest on August 14, 2014, just two days before her 26th birthday. In the middle of the memoir's 852 numbered pages are 32 unnumbered pages that contain actual-size copies of the writings she wrote in secret, hid, and sent out of the prison. The handwriting in these 32 pages is so miniscule—on tiny pieces of paper—that the reader must either squint or use a magnifying glass to read her accounts of cruelty and fear. This memoir has never been translated into English.
Article 112 of the Thai Criminal Code defines the crime and stipulates a punishment of three-to-15 years imprisonment for lèse majesté. Used sparingly for decades, cases increased following the September 19, 2006 coup and skyrocketed following the May 22, 2014 coup. One of the most extraordinary cases was that of Prontip Mankhong and Patiwat Saraiyaem, who were arrested in August 2014 and sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for defaming the king in a satirical play performed the prior year.
Upon Prontip’s release, she immediately began writing the memoir that became All They Could Do to Us. She writes in the first-person plural pronoun “we” because she was accompanied by both a little demon who urged her to challenge power and argued with her and a tiny bird of hope and freedom. There is another, unspoken meaning of the “we” that she writes in and the “us” in the title: all Thai people who have lived through the dictatorship. The book carries the promise of struggle—both for her readers and her translator. Prontip refuses the easy categories of either victim of the regime or hero of dissent. She writes in a voice at once playful and wise—a sassy teenager combined with the sharpest grandmother on the block—and makes up her own words when the existing Thai language is insufficient.
I first met Prontip when I translated fables she wrote while imprisoned, and translating her memoir is the most humbling, and inspiring, project I have taken up. This fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts is a tremendous gift and will give me the time to dwell between the lines of this book, and struggle to render Prontip’s challenging, unsettling, and joyful memoir into English for a new set of readers.