Abstract
This analysis of ‘The Myth of Sao Hai’, a short story by the contemporary Thai author Daen-arun Saengthong, focuses on the transformative act of translating an oral provincial myth into written literary form. ‘The Myth of Sao Hai’ depicts the sacrifice for the ‘nation’ of a female spirit inhabiting a millennial tree in a remote part of the jungle. The contention in this paper is that the myth, as re-narrated by Daen-arun, reveals the problematic conditions under which peripheral voices are constantly relegated to a subaltern position in relation to the centre. These are the same conditions under which Thailand's local history has been written: that is to say, under and through a hegemonic ‘royalist–nationalist’ history. However, through an analysis of ‘ironic fissure’ – that is, of dissident voices which disrupt the narrative homogeneity – the paper argues that the relationship between the national and the local is not mirrored in a fixed binary opposition of oppression and subordination. Rather, the relationship is marked by ambivalence, an ambivalence that is crucial to the possibility of the writing and the ‘narration’ of both.