Posted by Anne Basquin on October 09, 2011  |  0 Comments More from this author  |

Devotees and Mango Sticky Rice by Anne Basquin

The Phuket Vegetarian Festival is held on the first day of the ninth lunar month of each year and is celebrated for ten days. This year 2011, or 2554 according to the lunar calendar, the festival was held from the 27th of September until the 5th of October.

Sadly, on the sixth of October the Phuket Vegetarian Festival came to an end. The semi-permanent vegan or “Jay” foodstalls lining the streets surrouding the many Buddhist temples in Phuket Town were all being dismantled on the evening of the 5th. As we walked down what we fondly called “the food street” we sadly watched the last of our favorite meals and snacks being sold. Many food stalls were even handing out free treats – the last of their wares. Gone are the corn fritters and the fried potato twists; the coconut ice cream, the papaya salad, the dumplings, the mango sticky rice and all the other delicious meals and snacks which for me, epitomize the vegetarian festival, filling my days with colour and taste.

Mornings of the festival were always the most exciting. People would wake up early and be out on the streets by 7 am. While many of the street sellers had only just begun cooking the food they would sell that day there were always a few meals ready to go. Usually I would start the day with Mango Sticky Rice, served in a styrofoam dish. Sticky rice can only be described as sticky and sweet, layered with the sweetest, orangest mangoes I’ve ever tasted with coconut syrup and sesame seeds drizzled on top. Delicious. After eating I’d make my way to one of the temples nearby where some festivity or ritual might be going on; or to the roundabout at the center of town where I could perch at a cafe with coffee and a book, happily waiting for the sound of drums approaching in one of the daily street processions from temples all over the island to the center of Phuket Town.

The name of the festival – “vegetarian”, doesn’t quite do the festival justice in English. First and foremost, the festival is a vegan one, that is no dairy, eggs or meat of any kind (including fish). People who celebrate the festival, devotees, stop eating meat and other animal products for at least three days and many for the duration of the whole festival; ten days. People wear white during the festival and abstain from sex and alcohol. The festival promotes a cleansing of the body and the soul where people are encouraged to behave well in general.

Each day there are different rituals that take place at the temples around the city. The rituals include (but are not limited to) worship and propitiation of gods; firewalking, hot oil or water bathing, bladed ladder climbing and many more. The latter three rituals are performed by the Ma Song – men or women who have been possessed or “entered” by a spirit or god. It is not entirely clear how this process is completed. The Ma Song seem to be in a trance and some say they are hypnotised and feel no pain. It is believed that a true devotee will feel no pain at all. The Ma Song are people who have had some intimation of impending doom, people who fear death and may die. Again, it is not entirely clear what this means – whether the Ma Song have had dreams of death, a diagnosis of disease, or are simply very old – but they are chosen by the spirits in the hope that their lives will be extended.

On almost every day of the festival, each temple has its own street procession. Many devotees from the temple clamber through the streets with drums, flags or pumping soundsystems in souped up cars. The Ma Song wear beautiful coloured aprons over white pants and pierce their bodies, usually their cheeks; although lips, ears and eyebrows are common, too. The Ma Songs are meant to be pierced by weapons from the old legends such as knives and swords. However, many of the Ma Song pierce themselves with rifles, beach umbrellas, bicycles, flowers, tree branches, model helicopters, model sailing ships, model airplanes, umbrellas, electric drills and so on and so forth. Each year the piercings seem to become more surprising, and often more gruesome.

The Ma Song are generally in a trance, shaking their heads or dancing on firecrackers thrown at their feet by people watching the parade. Some yelp or make other strange noises while some are solemn and walk slowly, staring straight ahead. Occasionally the Ma Song are pale and birdlike, their features tinged with green. Each Ma Song has an entourage of helpers who dab at their piercings, pour water in their mouths, keep others out of the way of the longer piercings and make sure each Ma Song is going to say upright during the procession. Sometimes the Ma Song remove their piercings part way through the procession although this is very rare. In this case, the entourage will bandage their face to then continue the walk or hitch a ride on one of the many vehicles or floats blaring out music from soundsystems or filled with men and women pounding on drums and cymbals. An ambulance and several police vehicles also accompany the parade. Everyone is taken care of.

In the last half of the street procession are the shrine bearers. These are composed mostly of young men, though sometimes young boys and older men also take part. They walk in a large group of rougly ten or twelve boys. Each have their faces and arms covered by t-shirts or towels and sunglasses on their faces. They all help to carry a shrine on their shoulders. Many have long strings of red firecrackers draped over their shoulders like the ammunition of soldiers. At several points along each street the shrinebearers load the shrine with firecrackers and set off strings and strings of them, pick up the shrine on their shoulder and shake it up and down into the air. The firecrackers pop and flame all over the young men. The smoke spews into the streets and covers the faces of everyone watching. The noise and smoke make it feel like a warzone. The photographs taken by photographers who closely follow the shrinebearers are amazing – filled with the ghostly shapes of men who seem to be at war but are smiling; scraps of red paper flying up into the sky and the thick, grey smoke that billows around the men. These photographers are dressed as the shrinebearers, covered from head to foot in white, wearing sunglasses and holding large cameras that are also wrapped and carefully covered in white. They are right in the thick of the smoke and flame of the firecrackers as the young men speed off down the street to catch up with the shrinebearers before them; the shrine hoisted over their shoulders, their faces contorted in the the happy screams of youth with all the excitement of the future in front of them.

The roads are lined with devotees not taking part in the street processions. The devotees set up shrines in front of their houses or shops that line the roadside. They light incense, fill a plate with fruit and candy and set up little steaming cups of tea along one edge. The Ma Song take small rests from the procession at these shrines, taking a sip of tea or pouring them on their face. They take a piece of fruit and offer it back to the family, sometimes they take a stick of incense and wave it over the family who are bowed with their hands in prayer. The Ma Song bless each family by saying a prayer or waving their flag around the heads of the family members.

The Ma Song take on the bad luck of the community and bestow good luck in return. The firecrackers, thrown throughout the streets at Ma Songs and other devotees alike are used to ward off bad spirits. The louder, noisier and more smoke filled the street is, the harder it is for all that bad luck to stick around.

As the procession files past, crowds of people bow their heads and pray to the procession. Many people from the parade hand out thin, string bracelets, candy, icecream, coins wrapped in small red bags and carefully tied with a golden ribbon and other such symbols of good luck and happiness. Even I, as a “farang”  (foreigner), face obscured by my camera, was handed a multitude of gifts and bracelets which adorn my wrist with the memory of the experience I was a part of in Phuket. The smiles, the welcoming, the absolute acceptance I received in Phuket without any prior knowledge of who I am was mindblowing and shocking to me. Never have I ever felt so warmly acknowleged, so wholeheartedly accepted into a community I knew very little of. People who barely speak a word of my language nor I barely a word of theirs, tell me that I am beautiful or that they like me in a  combination of both English and Thai so that we can both piece together a compliment, a grin and a “wai”, hands folded in front of your face, a sign of deep respect for each other. The people of Phuket Town have left a deep impression on me that will be impossible to forget.

The last night of the festival is by far the most impressive. People are still dressed in white, eating vegan food and still refrain from drinking alcohol though everyone is in a state of absolute joy and rapture. People gather in certain areas of town like the roundabouts placed around the city, to watch the fireworks that will be set off all through the night, well into the wee hours of the morning. In fact, on the early morning of the 6th of October, after the sun had already begun its ascent, I could still hear the occaional pop and boom of fireworks being let off around the city.

Anyone can set off fireworks and almost everyone does. Right outside shops doing their best trade of the year, selling boxes and boxes of fireworks, small and large ones are set off. Young children light firecrackers, older children and grown men set off much larger ones, not all of them making it quite as far into the air as one might hope. Cars and motorbikes continue to drive through the streets despite the road being the perfect place to throw or set off fireworks. Policeman hang around in crowds gossiping and watching the show. I even saw a couple of policeman lighting off their own fireworks, right in the road with cars approaching on either side Despite the obvious danger of the situaton, the roads being driven on, the age of many of the chilren setting off fireworks, the proximity of the fireworks to humans and other highly flammable materials, no one I saw was ever hurt and no one seemed at all concerned about being so.

After an hour or so of lazily taking part in the festivites, watching the showers of light and blocking our ears to the loud booms, we were approached by two older women with cotton wool. They tore off four pieces and mimed to us that we should put them in our ears. We gladly stuffed our ears full of cotton and walked to where many people had begun to congregate. The policemen, duty calling, blocked off the roundabout with orange traffic cones and returned to their post to watch the following procession. A few minutes later we heard the approach of thousands of firecrackers going off at once. Everyone within a few metres began lighting fireworks of all kinds and throwing them into the street. Some people even set off large ones from the middle of the street, right in the middle of the smoke that had begun filling the area.

A procession was here, one I had not expected. There were a few pierced Ma Song but the procession was the shrine bearers moment of stardom. There must have been over thirty groups of these men and boys bearing shrines, lighting off strings and strings of fireworks while the entire city threw others, large and small at them as well. Many were walking in bare feet and all were covered in layers and layers of white shirts decorated in symbols of dragons or claiming “I (heart) Phuket”.

Very quickly I could no longer see the procession. The entire roundabout was filled with a thick, pungent smoke that burnt my throat and lungs. Many people wore masks and everyone had little balls of cooton wool jammed in their ears. There was a wall of people lining the street, pressing in towards the firecrackers, the smoke and the shrinebearers. I could hardly see the lights from the fireworks with all the bodies covering them and the thick cloud of smoke that wouldn’t leave for hours.

Closer to the procession men and Ma Song bowed together, fireworks at their feet, covering their heads in the flags the Ma Song often carry, annointing each other in the light, burn and smoke of the firworks; lighting on and under their bare feet. This ritual was repeated over and over again as the procession moved along with what seemed like every soul in Phuket Town eager to feel the burn of smoke in their lungs as they felt the bad luck of their lives drift out from them on a cloud of smoke and gunpowder. The smoke created another world, a veil that seemed easy to pass through. People moved in the crowd as part shapes that emerged and receded into the gloom and smoke, sharp lights exploding all around them in a halo of sound. Drums beat around the town, cracks, whistles and shouts came from all around. It was another world, almost a spirit world, where the dead and living can walk side by side to congratulate and celebrate all the life around them exploding and popping from within the thick haze of the world.

The last night of the festival made the sixth of October even more somber and lifeless than the ten days leading up to it. I walked down a road that before had been bustling and hustling with buyers and sellers of all types, of food of all types, that was now just a road like any other, crawling with buses and motorbikes with empty shacks and metal poles lining the road, the food stalls’ woks, shelves, tables and grills all packed away and driven off.  In the distance I could no longer detect the sounds of beating drums or the themesong of the vegetarian festival pumping out of car stereos and cellphones. Although I felt that the streets were sad and barren on the sixth of October, I know that next year, on the first day of the ninth lunar month in the year 2555, the Phuket Vegetarian Festival will begin again.