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TRANSCRIPT
Wild Thorns Living Between the Impossible and the Absurd Dara Hazeghi
My cousin kills a man and I carry off his daughter. Tragedy or farce? War is called many things: brutal, cruel, wasteful and vicious among others. Yet as Sahar Khalifeh illustrates in Wild Thorns war is, above all, absurd. Wild Thorns is about war. It is about war within the Palestinian community, as well as war between the Palestinian and Israeli communities. It is about the twin absurdities that can come out of idealism and pragmatism. The Occupied West Bank of 1972 is described as a society under assault from the outside and the inside. Yet that society, despite the misfortunes of its citizens, soldiers on. Although a novel is by definition not history, an accurate portrayal of society, even if fictional, can provide real historical insight. The interior discussion of Wild Thorns boils down to one question: how can the Palestinian people survive under occupation? The two cousins, Usama and Adil, represent the two primary approaches. Usama is the young idealist, just returned from the Gulf. He holds that survival and political independence are one and the same. So long as the Occupation endures, Usama’s sanity and existence depends upon resistance. Adil is Usama’s foil, a pragmatist of necessity, because the responsibility for the family’s material survival rests on his shoulders. For him survival requires food on the table, and that means that the Occupation must be dealt with on its own terms. The rift between Usama and Adil also exists at a higher level. Usama is a former emigrant. He worked in the Gulf. He is politically active, tied body and soul to the
PLO.1 What Usama lacks is a real connection to the ‘people’ of Palestine. Indeed, he despises many of those he meets, either as materialists, like Shahada, or collaborators, like Zuhdi, or both. Usama convinces himself that he has no stake in the humdrum day-to-day lives of Palestinians. The ‘revolution’ is everything to him, to the point that if his cousin, Adil, is in the bus that Usama blows up, Usama thinks he can accept the loss.
Usama stands for the politically active Palestinian expatriates who became particularly important in the wake of the spectacular 1967 defeat of Nasser and pan-Arabism. Yasser Arafat is of course the most notorious member of this group. He went to university in Egypt after 1948 and worked in the Gulf for a few years. Thus by the time he began directing PLO operations in 1968, he had not been in the country for two decades, and likely had little connection to those who had remained behind. It is thus unsurprising that he was quite willing to conduct risky cross-border raids and attacks into Israeli-controlled areas. It was the people there, not him, who paid the price when Israel retaliated. Usama’s polar opposite, Adil, is stuck with the less-
rewarding and ultimately more difficult task of keeping a large family financially solvent. His responsibility to the family outweigh other considerations, and so while he is hardly thrilled, he is willing to work in Israel as a laborer, if that’s what is necessary to make ends meet. Adil is a pragmatist not because it’s the ideology that he finds most attractive, but because it’s the likeliest method to keep food on the table. For his part, Adil’s position was certainly not unique. Faced with limited economic opportunities in the West Bank, high inflation and crippling Israeli taxation, an enormous number of people undoubtedly did what he did. To Usama they are of course collaborators and traitors, but it is likely that they would have been equally happy with an independent Palestine, had they seen a means of achieving that did not require their families to starve. It is this difference in attitudes that forces many social cleavages within Palestinian society to the forefront of the book. Usama is repeatedly derided for his neat clothing. To many, his attire indicates that he is well enough off that he can afford to ‘make revolution.’ They on the other hand cannot, and they resent having their patriotism questioned. This comes out again and again. Usama’s encounter with the bread seller is a perfect example of this. Usama assails him for selling bread made in Israel. The bread seller responds: “Look friend, we’re not the first to work with them. While we were still wandering the streets of Nablus looking for bread to eat, your kind were running around Tel Aviv looking for companies to award you 1 Palestine Liberation Organization, founded in 1964, with the goal of liberating Palestine from the forces of occupation, through armed struggle. The PLO considers itself the primary representative of the Palestinian people in Israel, although it was considered, by Israel and the USA, a ‘terrorist organization’ until 1991.
Yasser Arafat
franchises so you could sell their products (68).” The upper class is fatally compromised in the eyes of the bread seller. They form a ‘comprador bourgeoisie’2, always willing to put Israeli pounds before Palestinian people. They are illegitimate. Obviously the problem with this is that with the traditional community leaders thoroughly discredited, who will move in and take their place? Interestingly enough, Usama would probably agree with many of the bread seller’s criticisms. He has no patience for his grandfather who spends day and night complaining to journalists. A grandfather, it may be added, who was a member of the pre-Occupation elite. Usama wants action, not talk, and he chides Adil repeatedly for this. In point of fact, Usama is supposed to be part of a new resistance movement. The PLO was founded in 1964, and certainly once Yasser Arafat took over, it remained largely free of the taint of the previous generation of failed leaders. As a representative of this emerging organization, Usama is supposed to stand for the new, not the old. The obvious background to all this is the Occupation, which added its own dose of absurdity. Palestinians were taxed heavily with ‘liberty taxes’, which went to pay for their continued occupation. The taxes they paid for food went to subsidize Israeli agriculture. The money they were supposed to contribute to the Histadrut3 was used to maintain high wages for the Israelis. The list goes on. Adil and Zuhdi highlight the impossibilities of the situation. Adil realizes that even the Jewish workers are not treated well, in absolute terms. They too are being exploited, he decides. Yet when Zuhdi and Shlomo end up in a fight, and Adil is unable to stop it, he becomes an eager participant, enraged that his efforts at “Middle East peace” had been rebuffed so rudely. It is later Adil who comforts the Israeli wife of the officer that his brother, Usama, had killed. Yet it is also he who tears the epaulets off the dead officer’s uniform, because of what they symbolize. Further, it is Adil who in the end pays the price of Usama’s recklessness, and it is the house he worked so hard to keep that the Israelis demolish.
2 An interesting term which suggests that indigenous collaborators (Palestinian traders and merchants) could benefit from their association with Israeli policymakers, and which complicates the security of those under occupation—take similar roles, or resist more forcefully? Either way, more Palestinians are at risk. The concept has its roots in Asian colonialism, particularly in Hong Kong, Macau and Shanghai, where British (and other European masters) were successful in extending their economic hegemony by having trade in non-‐Asian products facilitated by Chinese merchants—thus, oppression by the Europeans becomes substantially faceless. 3 The Histadrut is a federation of Israeli industrial groups, and is the economic base of Israel’s government, society, and security. It has been criticized as an instrument of economic oppression, and not just to Palestinians.
Nationalism4 in this story is not a hero but a villain. It is nationalism that prompts Usama and Basil to destroy their family. It is nationalism that kills Zuhdi. It is nationalism that utterly fails to offer any practical solutions to day-to-day problems, serving instead as an absurd chimera for the gullible and the naïve. Nationalism is exhibited as being devoid of any foundation, and thus merely another castle in the sky on which the foolish dote. Instead, what one sees is a form of resigned solidarity. Bonds between individuals tend to be local. There are no national networks save, perhaps, the PLO. While people locally look after each other, that’s the extent of it. Meanwhile, social fragmentation runs deep. The poor distrust the well off. The well off disdain the poor. In terms of organization the society seems scarcely less fractious than it did in the years after the Arab revolt. On the part of the ‘revolutionaries’, there is a brutal contempt for those who try merely to live their lives. It is worth mentioning that the Occupation was consciously designed to have these sorts of effects. Israel most certainly had no intention of allowing nationalism to spread if it could prevent it. Their policies were intended to do more than undermine the Palestinian economy. By weakening local businesses, they made people dependent on Israel for goods and employment. Dependency, as we saw with Adil, clearly reduces political tendencies. The policy of house demolitions had much the same effect. The consequences of living under the same roof as a PLO fighter for any period would be homelessness. Once homeless, some would no doubt blame the PLO. While the Israelis did not cause the deep divisions in Palestinian society, they were happy to profit from them. At a broader historical level, Wild Thorns offers a plausible explanation for the seeming inaction of Palestinian society under Occupation until the late 1980s.5 The divisions detailed were not the sort of things easily papered over, and the forced dependence, combined with isolation and partial estrangement from those most eager to fight the Occupation, made matters doubly difficult. The political response of Palestinians was to some degree a victim of circumstance as well: those who could resist by sacrificing did, those who couldn’t didn’t. These are of course generalizations, but in a good number of cases, they seem justified. Survival within Wild Thorns boils down to navigating the many treacherous conflicts afoot in the Occupied territories. On the one hand, all fought Israel, since all attempted to continue to live in the area. Even passive Adil was fighting, for by keeping his family alive, and in Palestine, he was opposing Israeli policy. At the same time, Palestinians were fighting each other, over strategy, over leadership 4 Consider how Khalifeh devalorizes nationalism throughout the novel; by making it a villain, what then becomes the heroic? What signified becomes valorized? How does this perpetuate the conflict, rather than promote peaceful solutions? 5 The Intifada was a Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories, which lasted from December 1987 until the Madrid Conference in 1991. The militant groups Hamas and Fatah originated in the context of the Intifada, and their supporters regard the Intifada as a protest against Israeli repression including extrajudicial killings, mass detentions, house demolitions, forced migrations, relocations and deportations. The Intifada represents the first active radicalization of Palestinian resistance to the Israeli policies—we can perceive this, perhaps, as a systemic triumph of the values Usama represents.
and over the means of resistance. From these struggles to achieve the (nearly) impossible, the absurd emerges as a natural outgrowth. It is in such a situation that war between those who should be friends becomes as vicious as war between enemies. Fortunately, Sahar Khalifeh indicates, Palestinians in the Occupied territories in 1972 had adapted to surviving the almost impossible situation. If they could not completely reconcile black and white, they came as close as was humanly possible.
http://myownlittleworld.com/miscellaneous/writings/wild-thorns.html 17 July 2005
Discussion Questions
1. What is intended by the description of Palestine as, “the promised land?” For Israelis, the right of return6 is guaranteed in the 1948 Constitution; what is ironic about this policy, given the recent history of European Jews?
2. The opening chapter of Wild Thorns introduces the concept of the death of romanticism (and romance) as signified by the character of Usama. Obviously, this is not a love story as such; therefore explain what is inferred by the introduction of this subtext in the motivations of Usama, and the Palestinians he represents.
3. Usama is returning to the West Bank—evaluate the interactions he has at the IDF checkpoint. What impressions of this exchange does Khalifeh impart to her reader? What literary techniques help her achieve this effect? Consider the psychological and emotional dimensions of this ‘relationship’ and the greater whole it represents.
4. Consider the mirroring of Usama’s interrogation with the unseen woman’s assault by the IDF officers in an adjacent room—what, essentially, unifies their experience at the hands of the IDF officers? What are two possible (and typical) justifiable reactions to these events?
5. Usama thinks to himself, “What had happened to these people? Was this what the occupation had done to them? Where was there will to resist, their steadfastness? His disgust erupted into an angry question: ‘Where’s the resistance then?’(21)” How does this echo what Foucault7 has suggested to
6 The Law of Return is legislation enacted by Israel in 1950, that gives all Jews, persons of Jewish ancestry, and spouses of Jews the right to immigrate to and settle in Israel and obtain citizenship, and obliges the Israeli government to facilitate their immigration. Originally, the law applied to Jews only, until a 1970 amendment stated that the rights "are also vested in a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew". As for Palestinians, these rights have never been acknowledged. The government of Israel views Palestinian assertions of the right to return as baseless, and does not view the admission of Palestinian refugees to their former homes in Israel as a right, but rather as a political claim to be resolved as part of a final peace settlement, that is systematically complicated by the occupation of both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (and later, the Golan Heights), all traditional ‘homelands’ to Palestinian communities. 7 Recall that some of Foucault’s research basis involved the social dynamics of prisons and prisoners, a useful analogue to appreciate occupation. In his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault suggests that reforms in penal institutions moved away from rehabilitation (read assimilation) to simple exertions of power through subjection, and humiliation. More on this later in the novel…
us about how institutions of power operate? What might we surmise will be Usama’s motivations, as he reintegrates into West Bank society?
6. Khalifeh’s novel largely interrogates the variable tactics of dealing with occupation, as personified by the characters of Usama and his cousin Adil. Define and evaluate how Adil reacts to occupation in a fundamentally different manner than Usama—what is involved in the opposition between Idealism / Pragmatism?
At this point, it might be worthwhile to apply what we know about Jungian archetypes as we deconstruct the dyadic parallelism Khalifeh builds with Usama and Adil. Each feels their own shame, derived from the same initiating and existential circumstance. Adil’s protestations aren’t convincing, least of all to himself; Usama’s disbelief at the learned helplessness dimension of his people under occupation disgusts him (and reminds Adil, too). Perhaps Khalifeh is inviting us to consider
Adil and Usama as a unity of the Self and the Shadow. The dark impulses that are the signifiers of Usama balanced by the equivocations and rationalizations of Adil, whose considerations are legitimized by the fact they are made to perpetuate the survival of his family—in doing so, he too defeats Israeli intentions, but by different means. If we consider Martin Seligman’s8 animal experiments to interrogate the biologic dimensions of depression, at the University of Pennsylvania in 1967, we can recognize his theory of learned helplessness, and how cognitive restructuring does, in fact, occur. Subjects under occupation lose the will to resist; they fail to see the potential for hope in hopeless situations. Some may resort to ever more extreme (but ultimately self-defeating) measures.
7. With his mother and cousin, Nuwar, perhaps we have a sense of the fractured anima within this Usama/Adil unity. In what ways do both of these women subtly indicate their appreciation for Usama, at the expense of an equal admiration for the efforts of Adil? What is inferred that Usama’s mother believes, “God will settle everything (32)” and what contrast is suggested that Nuwar believes, “We’ll settle it all ourselves. (34)” Is there an argument Khalifeh may be making as to the religious nature of the modern conflict?
8 The concept of learned helplessness was discovered accidentally by psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven F. Maier. They had initially observed helpless behavior in dogs that were classically conditioned to expect an electrical shock after hearing a tone. The impact of learned helplessness has been demonstrated in a number of different animal species, but its effects can also be seen in people. Consider one often-‐used example: A child who performs poorly on math tests and assignments will quickly begin to feel that nothing he does will have any effect on his math performance. When later faced with any type of math-‐related task, he may experience a sense of helplessness. Learned helplessness has also been associated with several different psychological disorders—depression, anxiety, phobias, shyness and loneliness can all be exacerbated by learned helplessness.
Martin Seligman
8. While searching for Adil at his home, Usama meets Adil and Nuwar’s younger brother, Basil, who introduces his friends, who are having a heated discussion as to the Israeli policy of education—are there ironic comparisons to be made with the policy described with the following excerpt? What effect is created in the reader’s imagination? Why does this cause Usama to feel some hope? First, at elementary school, we’re repressed and tamed. Then at secondary school, our personalities are crushed. In high school they foist an obsolete curriculum on us and our families begin pressuring us to get the highest grades so we can become doctors and engineers. Once we’ve actually become doctors and engineers, they demand that we pay them back for the cost of our studies. And our parents don’t work their fingers to the bone to pay for our education so that we’ll return and work for peanuts at home. So the only solution is emigration, which means working in Saudi Arabia, Libya, and the Gulf. What’s the result of all this? Educated people leave the county, and only workers and peasants remain. And that’s exactly what Israel wants to happen. (59)
9. Examine the interchange between Usama and the Breadseller (67-69) which
makes Usama feel “…alienated and impotent.” To what extent could it be argued that he feels this way due to a sense of class guilt,9 for his (though not personally we can surmise) complicity with the Israeli policy at times in the past? In what ways is Usama more and more an outsider in Palestine? What danger does he represent for those such as Adil and the Breadseller?
10. How would you describe and justify the position of Zuhdi? (75-80) What painful truths does he provide Usama, and why do both Adil and Usama feel ashamed by the implications of Zuhdi’s statements? In what way might the reader consider Zuhdi to be the wisest of all the characters we’ve encountered thus far? Why is that problematic?
11. One of the more notable aspects of Wild Thorns is the rich emotional texture
that has been achieved with these characters, particularly with Adil and Usama. At the centre of the novel (81-102) Khalifeh crafts a detailed description of this disparity between Usama and Adil, as they try to understand each other:
a. Consider the tu quoque10 logical fallacy—Usama is convinced that
Zuhdi is not patriotic—how is Zuhdi, in fact, Usama’s ally, at least ideologically?
b. Describe the internal conflict for Usama at this point of the novel. What is the moral hazard that gives him pause in his efforts to carry out
9 With roots in Marxist theory, class guilt is simply that recognition that manifests itself as personal conflict for those who benefit in terms of economics, circumstance, power or privilege because of their willing complicity to work for the benefit of themselves as proxies of the bourgeoisie, while still deriving their identity as proletarian, whom they abandon all allegiance to. Orwell might well consider them as ‘nonpersons.’ In classic Marxism, class guilt acts as a check on individualistic compulsions, and thus disempowers the bourgeoisie. 10 Tu Quoque is avoiding having to engage with criticism by turning it back on the accuser—answering criticism with criticism. Usama is the master of this, and is rather cavalier in how he deploys it.
his mission on the Egged buses? How does his mission, if successful, perversely achieve the Israeli government’s objectives? What is the effect upon the reader that Usama doesn’t realize this?
c. Consider the scene at the café where Usama overhears the
conversation of Palestinian workers (89-91); is there a difference to how the reader receives this information and how Usama does? If the reality of Palestinian submission is a class struggle, what is it based upon, and are there possible solutions?
12. Ultimately, what decisions does Usama make after his attempt for Adil and
he “…to understand each other” fails? What fundamental differences between the two cousins are illustrated through their conversation in the Saada neighbourhood? From your point of view, is Usama the real “instrument of the enemy?” Why or why not?
13. Evaluate the prison sequences of Zuhdi and Basil—both receive an explicit and implicit introduction to Marxist theory11—however, there are differences in the interactions each has: Basil becomes intoxicated with rhetoric, while Zuhdi has to resist the suspicions that he is a spy. How do we make sense of what is happening to them, in a Foucauldian12 sense, and to what extent do you feel either of them may survive the prison with their beliefs (or innocence) intact? Consider the conflicts that each has to deal with.
14. The climax of Khalifeh’s narrative revolves around Usama’s missions—a knife
attack on an IDF lieutenant in a market, and the bombing attack on the Egged worker’s buses moving out of Nablus into Israel.
a. Evaluate Um Sabir’s rapidly shifting allegiances during the attack at
the greengrocer’s—how do you explain this psychologically? What immediate questions are prompted in the reader?
b. When the IDF officers come to Usama’s mother’s home, she too demonstrates conflicted emotions—why do you think this is so? What values are at the core of these conflicts?
c. Zuhdi’s release from detention punctuates these scenes involving Usama—why do you feel Khalifeh has placed this event here as a counterpoint to the central action? What purpose does it serve?
d. Reread the chapter detailing the attack on the Egged buses (179—185) and discuss the techniques the author uses to intensify the
11 Basil is immediately set upon by the older prisoners, who heap him with praise and a new nom de guerre, Abu al-‐Izz (father of glory), while Zuhdi’s nemesis in cell 23, Adil (spot the binary there), has co-‐opted all of the prisoners in an impromptu course of dialectical materialism—literally, a captive audience. In both cases, the rhetoric of Marxist theory as it applies to the condition of the Palestinians is largely perceived as hollow and impractical, although it is intoxicating to Basil. 12 Recall that Foucault tells us that institutions of power cannot exist as spontaneous events—they are constructed by (in Marxist terms), the proletariat. One cannot be oppressed without consent.
chaotic action, the shifting loyalties, and moral equivocations of the ‘actors’ in the scene. Considering the interplay between Zuhdi and Usama, who are both dying of their wounds, what is the overall impression for the reader?
15. As the novel closes, Khalifeh brings us back to the real centre of the
narrative—the al-Karmi family. The youngest members of the family are Adil’s brother and sister, Basil and Nuwar, and with their final developments in the novel, we can fully synthesize the author’s commentary on the insidious destructiveness of occupation—it’s not so much an enemy without as it is an enemy within.
a. Consider the final development of Nuwar’s character (186-201) and how she signifies a feminist locus for the novel, and the psychology of occupation itself. In what ways is she neither a feminist nor a revolutionary? Why is it significant that these two terms are unified in this context?
b. In what ways is she exactly like her brother, despite the fact that she spends much of her time ridiculing him throughout the story?
c. Abu Adil calls his youngest son Basil a “…prodigal13 brat” (196) who
has impugned most of the members of his family for various modes of cowardice. What do you think motivates him to destroy his own family, as the IDF soldiers move closer and closer to arresting Basil?14 What impression upon the reader would you suggest is intended by Khalifeh that Basil escapes the consequences of his participation in Usama’s terror cell, and the consequences of the summary destruction of his family?
d. Ultimately, what do Adil, Nuwar, and Basil each personify in the
context of the Israeli Occupation? Which character is the most tragic? Which is the most farcical, or otherwise absurd? Why do you feel the author wants this ‘question’ to be resident in our minds as we evaluate the al-Karmi’s at their ignominious end? You may wish to involve your understandings of Seligman’s learned helplessness theory and the notion of cognitive restructuring.
13 Compare this with the Biblical story (Abrahamic traditions notwithstanding) of the prodigal son. In this story, from the Gospel of Luke, a father gives his two sons his inheritance before he dies. The younger son, after wasting his fortune (prodigal means ‘wasteful and extravagant’) goes hungry during a famine. He then returns home, hoping for redemption by renouncing his kinship to his father. Regardless, the father finds him on the road and immediately welcomes him back as his son and holds a feast to celebrate his return. The older son refuses to participate, stating that in all the time he has worked for the father, he did not even receive a goat to celebrate with his friends. The father reminds the older son that everything the father has is the older son's (his inheritance) but that they should still celebrate the return of the younger son. Consider the parallels here that Basil, signifies that wasteful extravagance, an indulgence in vengeful idealism. According to a more recent reading these interconnected parables from Luke—the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Prodigal Son—are a unity unto themselves; the younger son, who strays far from home, equates with the lost sheep, while the elder son, who remains at home, corresponds to the lost coin. One went far, one stayed near, yet both were lost. Are both Basil and Adil lost? 14 You may wish to evaluate Basil’s actions in the context of what the Greeks called a Pyrrhic victory.
16. In the final scene of the novel, the IDF demolishes the al-Karmi home, for the
crime of harboring the ‘terrorist’ Basil. Although this is easily read as tragic, as Khalifeh directs us through the description of Adil’s internal monologue, what argument can you substantiate that this is also farcical, and that in the end, these Israeli policies are likely to be successful in continuing the marginalization of the Palestinians under Occupation? What power do the Palestinians actually possess?
17. Hazeghi, in the initial reading, has provided a succinct analysis of the role of nationalism in the development of Khalifeh’s novel. He writes, “It is nationalism that utterly fails to offer any practical solutions to day-to-day problems, serving instead as an absurd chimera for the gullible and the naïve.” What, in the final reflection, do you feel should be taken away from the novel in terms of the discourse it develops regarding nationalism? How can we contextualize it in other forms (Thailand15 perhaps, but there are numerous others) to best understand Khalifeh’s more general thesis?
15 Thaiification—or Thai-‐ization is the process by which people of different cultural and ethnic origins living in Thailand become assimilated to the dominant Thai culture, or more precisely, to the culture of the Central Thais. Thaification was a step in the creation in the 20th century of the Thai nation state where Thai people occupy a dominant position, away from the historically multicultural kingdom of Siam. Thaification is a byproduct of the nationalist policies consistently followed by the Thai state after the Siamese coup d'état of 1933. The coup leaders, often said to be inspired by Western ideas of an exclusive nation state, acted more in accordance with their close German nationalist and anti-‐democratic counterparts (pre-‐Nazi) to effect kingdom-‐wide dominance by the Central Thais. The businesses of interspersed minorities, like the traditionally merchant Thai Chinese, were aggressively acquired by the state, which gave preferential contracts to ethnic Thais as well as collaborative Ethnic Chinese (again, a kind of comprador bourgeoisie). Thai identity was mandated and reinforced both in the heartlands and in rural areas. Central Thailand became economically and politically dominant, and Central Thai (differentiated from multi-‐lingual Siamese) became the state-‐mandated language of the media, business, education and all state agencies. Central Thai values were successfully inculcated into being perceived as the desirable national values, with increasing proportions of the population identified as Thai. Central Thai culture, being the culture of wealth and status, made it hugely attractive to a once-‐diverse population seeking to be identified with nationalist unity. The main targets of Thaification have been ethnic groups on the edges of the Kingdom of Thailand, geographically and culturally: the Lao of Isan, the hill tribes of the north and west, and the Muslim Malay minority of the south. There has also been a Thaification of the large immigrant Chinese population. In all relevant respects, Thaiification is, as Foucault has suggested, a confiscation of identity, enacted by hegemonic systems of subjection, humiliation, and other socio-‐economic oppression.