Becoming Amphibious in Manta Ray

Manta Ray, Phuttiphong Aroonpheng (2018)

The aerial roots of mangroves are adventitious roots; created both under normal conditions but largely in response to environmental stress, flooding being a primary cause. They are also created from non-root tissue. And so they form incredible aerial structures, adapting, forcibly, in order to breathe. Phuttiphong Aroonpheng's Manta Ray establishes its diegetic architecture within the tropical mangroves of a fishing town in northwest Thailand, a porous zone that shares its borders with Myanmar. A fisherman (Wanlop Rungkamjad) climbs over and under the massive roots of the trees, looking for gemstones in the mud, and finds a man, presumably a Rohingya refugee (Aphisit Hama), halfburied and half-dead in the silt, and nurses him back to health. Deeming him mute, the fisherman names him Thongchai. Thongchai, a scion uprooted and propagated into a new bio-political mode, is affixed onto the fisherman's life and adapts to his new environment by mimicking the fisherman's daily rituals.

They form an odd, stilted kinship, one that skims lightly atop the deeper entanglements of questions pertaining to identity, ontology, displacement, and becoming. The fisherman disappears at sea one day, and Thongchai is left to continue performing his motions, until the former's estranged wife Saijai (Rasmee Wayrana) returns. She dyes his hair to the lost fisherman's startling platinum blonde, and buys him new shirts to replace the hand-me-downs he's been wearing. They play house for a bit, until the fisherman returns, and Thongchai wanders back to the mangroves, meandering among the mass grave of washed up Rohingya bodies. The genocidal state-machine that forced him to morph into a different state and perform this perverse symbiosis, in hopes of being able to breathe, finds him from across the border of Myanmar to Thailand. Thongchai must eventually return to the sea. There is no shelter for him here, unlike the manta rays who come to this coast to protect themselves from the squalls.

Manta Ray, Phuttiphong Aroonpheng (2018)

In Manta Ray, the very ground pulsates with precarity of the geo-body; it is barely solid, it is haemorrhaging. In the mangrove forest, the mineral body and the murdered body are buried, invisible; the plant roots are alive, breathing, visible. There is no coherence and hierarchy anymore. It is not a joyous or a "convivial assemblage," as Jasbir Puar might term it, of the human and non-human, but a necropolitical one. The bodies of the Rohingya feed the mangroves, crystallize into gemstones, and the glowing red rocks come alive at night, emerging forth from the soil. The stones are then thrown into the sea to attract the manta rays. Haunted figures clothed in cheap string lights complete the mise en scène of this stage—the murkiest of niches among the apathetic theatres of these nation-states. The film's veins vibrate with a spectral score from Snowdrops (French duo Christine Ott and Mathieu Gabry). Non-verbal non-human sounds sustain this ecology. The swampland signifies an enmeshment that can be understood only from within, and everything that belongs in the realm of the indeterminate—the stateless, the nameless—must return to the mangroves' amorphous ecology.

In Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul's conception of the "geo-body" of Thai nationhood in Siam Mapped, he iterates the porosity of mapping space, geopolitics, and the Thai-ification of the state in order to produce ordered senses of national identity and boundary. This was obviously accompanied by a state "cleansing" of non-Thai bodies at various points in the country's history. He also speaks of the postcolonial linguistic demarcations of Thailand and Myanmar:

"[…] khet, khopkhet, and khetkhanthasima meaning 'limits,' 'limits all around,' and 'boundary of the kingdom,' respectively… the word khopkhet means areas in the huamuang (provincial areas), the outermost areas of a kingdom. It is evident that Siam did not lack the terminology and concepts for dealing with the British proposals for boundaries. But considering these definitions closely, we can see that none of them meant exactly the boundary that the British had in mind. To point out only one basic discrepancy, all of the terms tend to signify areas, districts, or frontiers, not boundary lines. They mean a limit—an extremity without a clear-cut edge and without the sense of division between two powers."

It is within this nexus of violent colonial mapping and indeterminable space that Thongchai's body, despite all of its conforming, fails to become Thai enough to belong, to stay, to become valid, even within this 'extremity.' He must return first to the liminal zone of the mangrove, and then to the sea, a realm that lies beyond the khopket, where its watery delimitations engender an unbecoming, a transmogrification into a manta ray, because he cannot be Thai, he cannot be Myanmarese, and thus, identifiably human. Social order is restored, the disco ball keeps turning.

Manta Ray, Phuttiphong Aroonpheng (2018)

Manta Ray further resists the frameworks of such linguistic mapping—it neither gives words to Thongchai, nor his trauma. The fisherman teaches Thongchai to breathe underwater, demonstrating how to exhale so as to prolong his lung capacity. In mirroring this technique, Thongchai utters a low, guttural wail that stretches across the ocean, under your skin, and into the last scene's requiem to murdered Rohingya people, comprised of voices from Rohingya refugees recorded for the film. Aroonpheng exhumes this collective trauma in the form of literal bodies and gemstone-bodies buried in the state "geo-body," thus implicating the very land in its complicity in the Rohingya genocide, but refuses to ventriloquize this ineffable grief through Thongchai's character.

There are, however, cinematic puncta, that seem like relatively un-nuanced choices. At one point in the film, Thongchai finds the buried corpse of a Rohingya baby, an explicit signalling to what has been, till then, latent, insidious. The visual is, of course, horrifying, and thus, an easy point of catharsis culminating in Thongchai's tearful breakdown. The baby becomes purely symbolic, and the precarious psycho-geography so delicately constructed within this mangrove, becomes too solid in that moment. But it is not these scenes that are imprinted in the spectatorial mind, but ones of levity and attempted kinship.

Manta Ray, Phuttiphong Aroonpheng (2018)

In perhaps the most discussed scene of the film, the camera oscillates in a series of shot/countershots of the two men's faces, inundated by orbs of cheap twinkling lights that the fisherman has strung in his hut. They sway in this oneiric space, one that is transiently stateless, creating a vibrational frequency that conjures, above all, an elsewhere, a non-place belonging to no one. But this elsewhere later becomes fraught with geopolitics that reverberate outside of its indeterminacy. When the fisherman returns to find his wife and Thongchai together, he expresses the desire to leave; the three of them cannot live there together, since the hut-space must cohere with the social heteronormative state order. But Saijai tells him, "where would you go? This is your house." Ownerships rears its ugly head and forcibly maps this space, and Thongchai leaves the hut as they shut the bedroom door. In the earlier scenes of their burgeoning friendship, we find moments that are deeply reminiscent of Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, particularly in a scene where the fisherman helps a still-wounded Thongchai urinate, and their sharing of a single mattress. But these are devoid of the homoerotic charge in Tsai's work. The charge lies elsewhere—resonating in the soil, in the currents of the water that they traverse, the silence of their togetherness, their pursuit of sad and simple beauty, and their dancing.

The care invested into the crafting of this friendship isn't fallacious, despite its eventual rupture. Rather, it is a reminder to listen deeply, put our ears to the soil, dig, excavate, question, submerge, heal, nurture, all in the hopes that we might find kinships that transcend the necro-geo-politics that govern our bodies, demarcate the ways we love, hate, ignore, die. Instead of drowning the others or standing by as they flail, we must ourselves morph, expand in this gestational realm—eventually becoming amphibious, indeterminate, fluid. Only then can we begin to unlearn our apathy for and fear of the watery elsewhere-s and those who inhabit them.

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Essay by Ritika Biswas
Curator & Exhibition Producer
New Art Exchange, Nottingham UK

Guest Curator, Filmatique