Bangkok at my table , excerpt in english
Bangkok at my Table
first novel by
Samia Farah
Iam looking for a publisher in English Language
Contact here in the comment section if you are interested.
Regards
Samia Farah, a multifaceted artist, she here delights us with her vision of travel ,in this funny, insightful and at times surreal novel!
The first instalment in a trilogy whose central theme is the world's capital cities... First with Bangkok in ‘Bangkok at my table’
then Paris, with ‘The Paris of Gorillas’... finishing with
‘Kyoto, radio station’
SAMIA FARAH
excerpt in English
by ‘Mama’...
a Thai woman in her seventies who looked fifty .
She had her own sense of hygiene but
managed to attract the few Farangs who hung around there.
The grime didn't put them off, and some even came back for more, returning very often to eat
at any time of the day or evening.
Mama stood out with her long black locks and wore only beach dresses.
Reggae music played in the background most of the time. At my hotel, I got to know all sorts of people from different backgrounds. Men,
women, losers, winners who, for the most part, no longer wanted to be ‘winners’, prostitutes,
Katoeys, Japanese gangsters, blacks, whites, the whole world was here and in the surrounding area.
Bangkok was at my table, and I watched this world
spin before me as if in a ‘Kaizenzushi’.
Bangkok at my table 2021 Samia Farah
EXCERPT 2
The Farangs
Antoine Foutrac, Alfred Mackormack and the others.
My neighbour on the same floor at the Hanafuda Hotel was a Frenchman whom I tried to avoid at all costs.
He would come home at all hours of the day and night, often with a girl on his arm. Sometimes I wondered where he found these girls with bow legs and flat arses.
Almost all of the Farangs seemed pathetic to me. I don't know why Thailand attracted all these lost, filthy, drug-addicted, desperate, horny men from all over the world. Like flies, they stuck around.
To top it all off, he only seemed to be attracted to Thai prostitutes under the age of 25.
My neighbour on the same floor and in the same type of room ,was called
Antoine Foutrac. As soon as he found out I was French, he talked to me and looked at me as if we had known each other for ages. This promiscuity and closeness only served to infuriate me, as I have always hated inappropriate familiarity.
The only thing that kept him from spreading himself around like jam was that he had trouble figuring out where I was from.
The French here ,like to know this kind of thing, to pigeonhole you into a category they have created in order to feed their subconscious and stimulate their good conscience.
They feel small or big depending on the person they have in front of them. Weak with the strong and strong with the weak.
That's how they positioned themselves in my eyes.
They imagined themselves to be important figures, invented themselves as great Kakou, all because they had met some ‘prostitute’ who made them believe they were exceptional beings. It was her job to make Mr. Everyman believe he was a big shot,
‘Spend the money,’ thought the hustler, that was all she cared about.
The worst thing in my eyes was that they believed the lies that were thrown at their rotten egos, shaved down to nothing, not to say festering losers with delusions of grandeur.
They were fools...
I often ran into them on the streets of Bangkok, in those bars with faded neon lights where all the world's paupers had gathered. They spouted almost word for word the same stories. They had the same experiences and firmly believed that they were the only heroes in a new commercial series. But the film had been playing in prime time for a long time under our disillusioned gaze. Only the actors changed, but the story was always the same, repetitive, as fascinating as a supermarket at 8 p.m. in a sleepy, out-of-stock suburb.
They wanted me to stupidly swallow their lies.
It was as if trainloads of Chinese people were rushing to Strasbourg Saint-Denis in Paris, France, and falling in love with Parisian prostitutes.
Declaring that all French women were whores, but let's love them all, eh?
It sounds absurd, but the comparison is valid. Thai men themselves did not understand the dystopian attitude of most Farangs.
The dream of Thai men was not to marry a prostitute, but rather the opposite, I can assure you...
Antoine wanted to ease his pain that evening; he had a pressing need to confide, to get things off his chest, as they say. He imposed his presence while I was having a one-on-one with Mr Irezumi. It wasn't that he and I had a lot to say to each other, but we liked to look at each other, eat and drink without even exchanging a single word, like two old lone wolves.
Excerpt 3
I learned that Mr. Antoine had been coming back and forth for four years to live what he called ‘a love story’ with an ex-future girlfriend. He had fallen in love with a Thai prostitute whom he wanted to change and set on the right path.
‘What a joke, isn't it?’
He told me about his fantasised past as a ‘human rights activist’.
‘But how can I help her?’ he said, putting on his Jesus Christ Superstar face.
The Chinese had chosen a name for guys like Antoine: ‘Baizuo’. A rather sarcastic and pejorative neologism invented in the 1990s to describe pseudo “educated” left-wing white people, i.e. naive or hypocritical Westerners, full of love for their ‘neighbours’, in Thailand I would even say more... for their ‘neighbours women ’, who campaign for ‘equality’ in order to satisfy and cloak themselves in a sense of moral superiority.
They are only interested in topics such as LGBT rights and the environment, and are above all boringly obsessed with political correctness.
The Chinese found them arrogant and ignorant, and I have to say, so did I. They were the lice of good intentions.
‘I've done everything for her,’ he told me tearfully. "I've tried everything, but every time she goes back to that terrible condition.
At first glance, he didn't know what “karma” meant...
“I even gave her money to stop, but nothing works. She goes back every time.
She must like it...”, I thought to myself!
These ‘Gwers’ never bought you a coffee or a beer, counted their pennies, but wanted to save the world.
The Thais, for their part, had a strange relationship with money, but they were no less generous.
I listened to him, stunned by so much nonsense, but my heart remained cold.
In my head, jazz tunes were playing from I don't know where, while his mouth was forming o's, i's and z's. At that precise moment, John Coltrane started playing ‘My Favourite Things’. Who knows why that particular tune.
My mind went into pause mode, or shut down, as soon as I heard the lamentations of the appalling french Farang.
Texte from her first novel
Bangkok at my table.2021
