Saffron Shadows and Salvaged Scripts: Literary Life in Myanmar Under Censorship and in Transition 9780231539296

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Prologue
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Literary Life Under the Censorship Regime
2. Writers: The Older Generation
3. Writers: The Middle Generation
4. Writers: The Younger Generation
5. Conclusion: Literary Life in Transition
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Saffron Shadows and

Salvaged Scripts

Saffron Shadows and

Salvaged Scripts Literary Life in Myanmar Under Censorship and in Transition

Ellen Wiles

COLUMBIA UNIVERSIT Y PRESS NEW YORK

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2015 Ellen Wiles All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wiles, Ellen. Saffron shadows and salvaged scripts : literary life in Myanmar under censorship and in transition / Ellen Wiles. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-17328-5 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53929-6 (ebook) 1. Literature and society—Burma. 2. Politics and literature—Burma. 3. Censorship—Burma. 4. Burmese literature—Social aspects. 5. Burmese literature—Political aspects. 6. Authors, Burmese—20th century— Biography. 7. Authors, Burmese—21st century—Biography. 8. Burma—Intellectual life. 9. Social change—Burma 10. Burma—Social conditions. I. Title. PL3972 W55 2015 895'.809—dc23

2014050246

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 COVER DESIGN: Michelle Taormina PHOTO © Brent Winebrenner / Getty Images References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To my parents, David and Gayna Wiles, who cultivated in me curiosity and a love for culture and stories; and to Win Tin, who inspired generations of people in Myanmar to believe in the power of the pen

Monk at a bookstall

Contents

List of Illustrations ix Prologue xiii Acknowledgments xv

1. Introduction: Literary Life Under the Censorship Regime 1 2. Writers: The Older Generation 47 Win Tin 48 Shwegu May Hnin 70 Pe Myint 93 3. Writers: The Middle Generation 117 Ye Shan 118 Ma Thida 132 Zeyar Lynn 150 4. Writers: The Younger Generation 171 Nay Phone Latt 172 Pandora 187 Myay Hmone Lwin 207 5. Conclusion: Literary Life in Transition 225 Notes 255 Bibliography 261 Index 265

List of Illustrations

Monk at a bookstall vi Poet Thet Swe Win burning a keyboard xii Shwedagon Pagoda 4 Yangon “phone booth” 5 Fruit seller reading 10 Man at a bookstall 14 Faded bookstall, Yangon 28 Bookstall stacking on Pansodan Road 29 Artist Aung Myint with his black, red, and white paintings 43 Win Tin with news of his foundation 49 Win Tin’s bookshelf and painting of Aung San Suu Kyi 50 Shwegu May Hnin 71 Shwegu May Hnin campaigning to be an MP for the NLD, 1990 72 Shwegu May Hnin giving a literary talk for the NLD 73 Pe Myint in his office 94 Pe Myint editorial 96 Old man on balcony in crumbling colonial building 109

X LIST O F ILLUSTRAT I O N S

Ye Shan demonstrating the points system 118 Soldier on a train 120 Ma Thida in the Independent News Journal’s office 133 Zeyar Lynn teaching at his Y.E.S. language school 151 Song lyric stall 169 Girl doing homework on the street 172 Nay Phone Latt in MIDO’s office 173 Pandora in her local café 187 Vegetable market 190 Public librarian 200 Myay Hmone Lwin with the memoir he published on U Nu 208 Myay Hmone Lwin’s first book marked by the censors 213 Construction site 226 Young people on the street 227 Water festival stage 228 Ma Ei outside The Book Shop 243

Poet Thet Swe Win burning a keyboard

Prologue

U

nder a roasting sun, in a small garden near a lake, in full view of a main road but without official permission, a man sets a keyboard alight. As the blaze takes hold, he pulls out a sheet of paper and begins reciting poetry. An audience clusters around him, leans in collectively to get a better view. The flames catch hold of some stray drops of petrol and shoot backwards, past the poet, multiplying tenfold, threatening to snarl into the door and engulf the building. There is a collective gasp. The poet continues unfazed. A quick-thinking man dashes inside, grabs a fire extinguisher, takes aim and expels the flames, leaving only a small flicker around the keyboard. The poet keeps on reading. Beneath a tree at the back of a garden, a young woman dressed all in black sits, gazing mournfully, perhaps at the poet, perhaps at the audience, perhaps into the middle distance. She is surrounded by broken flower heads, yellows, reds, and pinks, all scattered around her on the emerald grass. Slowly, she reaches down to pick up a carnation from the ground. She holds it softly, cradles it in her left hand. In her right hand are a needle and thread, and attached to the thread is a small chain of flower heads. She pushes the needle gently through the flower, and it joins the chain. Inside the building, a man tells a forty-year-old story, never before heard in public. The story is about Coco Island, a tropical paradise—at least until 230 political prisoners arrived there against their will and

XIV PRO LO GUE

were instructed to start manual labor. Denied writing materials, the writers amongst them began to use the boiled juice of a mango tree for ink, feathers for pens, and food wrapping for writing paper. As time passed, hope faded. A hunger strike was staged, lasting seven days. When nothing changed, a second hunger strike took place lasting forty days, and then a third lasting forty-six days.1 Several prisoners died. Finally, fearing a public backlash, the government conceded. It shipped the remaining political prisoners back to the mainland to serve more comfortable sentences in purpose-built jails. Writers in the audience, from the same country, and little more than a generation later, listened and murmured to each other: how did I not know about this before today?

R

The day was March 29, 2013: the first ever public gathering in Yangon (Rangoon) to explore Myanmar’s art in transition. It was organized by the comedian and political activist Zarganar2 and convened by Index on Censorship.3

Acknowledgments

I

have many people to thank for helping me to make this book possible. My first and foremost thanks have to go to the writers featured in this book, for your generosity and enthusiasm while it was still a nascent idea, and of course for your words which make up a major part of it. I’m also very grateful to filmmaker and translator Myat Noe for helping with initial translations; to journalist Kyi Min for introducing me to people and places in Yangon; to artist Ma Ei for introducing me to Aung Myint and sharing your knowledge of the visual arts scene; to filmmaker Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi for informing me about the world of film; to writer Chit Oo Nyo for explaining about Myanmar’s traditional theater and literature; to lawyer Hla Hla Yee and the YLC (Youth Legal Centre) team for educating me about the legal system and the myriad challenges for ordinary people; to Justice Base for giving me the opportunity to work on the rule of law in Myanmar; to the British Embassy for organizing the literary festival that sparked the idea for this book; and to everyone I met in Myanmar who enlightened me about their extraordinary country. Huge thanks to my editor at Columbia University Press, Anne Routon, for seeing the potential in this book and ably steering it toward publication. I am extremely appreciative of the time and effort expended by Anna Allott, David Wiles, Penelope Woods, and Sarah Polcz on reading sections of the text, and by Lucy

XVI AC KNOW LEDGME N T S

Coggle on editing the photographs. Finally, thank you to my husband Sydney Nash for making our time together in Myanmar such a delightful adventure and for encouraging me to persevere with this project, and to baby Noah for napping just often enough that I was able to complete a final draft.

Saffron Shadows and

Salvaged Scripts

1 Introduction Literary Life Under the Censorship Regime No matter what the state does, writers always seem to get the last word. The craft-solidarity of men and women of letters . . . can be surprisingly strong. And those who write the books, in an important sense, make history. —J. M. Coetzee (1996)

T

his book is an ethnographic investigation of literary culture in Myanmar (Burma) under censorship, and the new directions it is taking now that the country has entered a phase of transition toward democracy. At its heart are the fascinating life stories and literary works of nine contemporary writers, all of whom I met when I was living in Myanmar in the first half of 2013. This was a time of huge change in the country. Until the previous year it had been ruled for five decades by one of the most brutal military juntas in the world. The junta imposed a highly repressive censorship regime that curbed all forms of expression and profoundly affected three generations of writers in multifarious ways. Some writers were considered so dangerous they were imprisoned. All of them had to come up with creative ways to read, write, and publish what they wanted to, and simply to survive. Now that the country has entered transition, many are now brimming with new ideas for their writing and for the future, though still harboring a certain amount of fear or cautiousness. While some of the restrictive censorship laws have now been repealed, a number still remain, and a culture of self-censorship has proved hard to shake off. Nonetheless, all of the writers featured here were keen to share their life stories and work with the outside world after having been silenced for so long.

2 INTRO DUCT IO N

This book is one way of giving them a mouthpiece, as well as enabling English-speaking readers to delve into their extraordinary lives and writing. By doing so, and by painting a picture of the way in which these writers lived, operated, and created under censorship, this book has broader purposes too. It seeks to show, as J. M. Coetzee puts it, how writers “made history” in Myanmar; to paint a picture of the profound and intricate consequences of a repressive censorship regime on those subject to it; and to explore the ways in which a post-censorship society can begin to transform. My initial reason for going to Myanmar was in my capacity as a human rights lawyer: to work with a new NGO (nongovernmental organization) on a project to train community lawyers about the rule of law. A key component of the rule of law is the right to freedom of expression. Having studied and written about the anthropological aspects of human rights and freedom of expression across different cultures, and also about literary culture, I hoped to discover through my work as much as I could about the impacts of the country’s censorship regime on ordinary people’s lives, ideas, and imaginations. I wondered, what was it like to live in the closed confines of a censorship regime within a globalized, interconnected twenty-first-century world? To exist in a place where most people’s usual routes to accessing and understanding the world were blocked off, from search engines and social media to news and novels? To be part of a culture little touched by development and modern technology? To undergo constant fear of imprisonment without trial for expressing yourself in a way that crosses an invisible line? How did such restrictions affect people’s mindsets, identities, and tastes? What must it be like to be a writer under such conditions? What was available to read, and what was permitted for publication? What did censorship do to the literary culture and language, and to the arts in general? And what happens to a place after such a long period of censorship comes to an end? What would Myanmar look like now, what would it feel like, and what new dynamics would be circulating amongst its writers and artists? Before traveling there I sought answers to some of these questions through books. I was surprised at how difficult it was to find translated contemporary literature by Burmese writers, but I procured a handful of books including an evocative novel by Nu Nu Yi (Inwa),

INTRO DUCT IO N 3

Smile as They Bow (1994)1 about a gay transvestite natkadaw (spirit medium), and a contemporary poetry anthology, Bones Will Crow (2012), jointly edited and translated by the British poet James Byrne and Burmese poet Ko Ko Thett.2 A powerful novel by Canadian writer Karen Connelly, The Lizard Cage (2008), described life as a Burmese political prisoner. Illuminating nonfiction reads included memoirs of escape from the regime’s atrocities such as From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey by Pascal Khoo Twe (2003); histories such as River of Lost Footsteps by Thant Myint-U (2007); and books focused on the regime and its human rights abuses, such as Burma: A Nation at the Crossroads by Benedict Rogers (2012). An interesting book by anthropologist Christina Fink called Living Silence: Burma Under Military Rule (2001) told the story of the regime incorporating interviews with Burmese people in exile about their lives, but beyond that I found few personal accounts that might have been able to give me a tangible sense of what it was like to live in the country under censorship or in transition.3 I devoured Emma Larkin’s brilliant travel memoir, Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop (2005), which gave me a real sense of the weight of the country’s colonial history and the way in which repressive censorship affected readers of fiction. Interested to learn more about censorship, I found a fascinating report by Anna J. Allott for PEN American Center, Inked Over, Ripped Out: Burmese Storytellers and the Censors (1993), which combined an account of the operation of censorship in the country with some short story translations. But I could find nothing more recent about literary life under censorship, and barely anything at all about the recent transition. It wasn’t until after my arrival in Myanmar that I realized I could begin to fill some of these gaps through the writing of this book. I touched down in Yangon, still the country’s major city despite its surprise demotion in 2005 when the junta unilaterally moved the capital and the entire government to a construction site on empty marshland in the middle of the country, reputedly upon the advice of President Than Shwe’s astrologer.4 Naypyidaw has gradually transformed from wilderness to a strange beast of a city. It now boasts several grandiose, pagoda-style government buildings, a handful of five-star hotels, a vast golf course, a bar designed in the shape of a plane in the location of a fatal air crash, and a sixteen-lane highway

4 INTRO DUC T IO N

Shwedagon Pagoda

which generally lies empty except when humming with tanks on Armed Forces Day, and little sign of ordinary street life. Yangon could not be more different. My first evening gave me a sense of both the weight of the past and the speed of change in this extraordinary city. The humid taxi ride from the airport into the city was like a journey into a beehive. The sun was starting to dip, and hoards of pedestrians swarmed the streets. Street food stalls populated every corner selling noodle soups, pancakes, and deep-fried miscellany. Hungry diners perched on clusters of child-size plastic chairs, tucking into their evening meals. Men and

INTRO DUCT IO N 5

Yangon “phone booth”

women alike wore colorful cotton sarongs called longyis, a sight that immediately made the country seem saturated in tradition by comparison with its Asian neighbors. Some people walked along speaking into mobile phones, but on the side of the street I saw a woman sitting on a chair at a “phone booth” table, speaking into an old-fashioned landline rented out by the stall owner. As the sinking sun drew apricot and flamingo swathes over city, I caught a gleaming, golden glimpse of the Shwedagon Pagoda, the country’s biggest, boldest temple, its pointed spires piercing the sky. Along the main road from the airport I saw the occasional modern office block that might have been built in the last ten years, but these soon petered out, and it became quickly apparent that the foreign investment boom that was dominating news headlines had not yet altered the city’s outward appearance in significant ways. Rows of sagging, peeling midsize apartment blocks, which might have been innovative when they were built in the 1960s, certainly weren’t now. Reams of once-stunning colonial buildings with ornate balconies and elegant proportions were crumbling and blackening with pollution grime.

6 INTRO DUCT ION

I took in the aged brown and mustard décor of my hotel, then dumped my baggage and set out in search of food. The only place still serving at 8:30 p.m. seemed to be a street food stall selling mohinga, the national favorite fish and noodle broth. I sat down at a tiny plastic table on the pavement, feeling rather like a contemporary Gulliver, before realizing what an obvious practical solution miniature furniture was to the problem of fitting lots of diners into a small area. I was promptly served with a large bowl of the soup, together with a thermos of green tea and a barrage of beaming smiles. I sipped, smiled back, and nodded my appreciation. Looking around, I became aware that I was sitting in the middle of a teen hangout. At a nearby table was a group of girls wearing skinny jeans and heels, and boys wearing baggy jeans and trainers, some with smart phones on display. Clearly some of the younger generation was already interacting with the outside world in new ways and breaking away from old traditions. I even discovered an open-access wifi network on my phone. But by 9:30 p.m. the teens were gone, the unlit main streets were black and quiet, and the stray dogs were coming out to play. Most of Yangon’s residents had already gone home to bed. This early moment in the city proved to be representative. From flea markets and rainbow vegetable stalls lining the streets to new shops selling shiny smart phones; from traditional board games and chinlone5 being played on the pavements to kids playing computer games in internet cafes; and from maroon-robed monks and flamingo pink–robed nuns collecting alms and meditating reverently in golden pagodas to teens walking through sacred cave temples playing pop music through the speakers of their mobile phones—the coming months would reveal to me the fascinating ways in which old and new relate to each other in a state of constant interplay in Myanmar’s transition culture. It was fortuitous that the weekend after I arrived coincided with the Irrawaddy Literary Festival, the first of its kind in the country. Conceived by the wife of the British ambassador in Yangon and organized by the embassy, the event took place in the slightly bizarre setting of the Inya Lake Hotel, a five-star establishment built with money gifted from the Soviet Union to Myanmar’s military regime. Big-name international writers who had written about Asia were flown in, such

INTRO DUC T IO N 7

as William Dalrymple and Vikram Seth, and lots of Burmese writers were invited. Prices were kept relatively low to make it accessible to locals, though arguably not low enough for many. Still, it was fairly well attended, by both expats and locals. The biggest crowds poured in when festival patron Aung San Suu Kyi arrived to speak. The large conference hall became jam-packed, and people spilled far out into the grounds, craning for a glimpse, and listening avidly to her voice booming over the megaphone. Keen to learn more about the local writers, I attended a Burmese short story session and saw a charismatic lady called Shwegu May Hnin give a vigorous presentation about the form in its contemporary context. When I went to talk to her afterwards, she warmly invited me to come and sit and speak with her at more length by the shore of Inya Lake. As the sun set and mosquitoes came out to dance, she captivated me with her life story, from being a poor farmer’s child in Kachin State to being an elected MP and political prisoner, and with her descriptions of her literary writing. By opening my eyes to the extraordinary experiences that other writers in the country must have had and the myriad ways in which their work must have been affected, she unconsciously sparked the idea for this book. While the seeds of my research were germinating, I embarked on the legal work I had come to do. Education and training on sensitive subjects such as the rule of law and human rights had only just become possible in the country, and the authorities were still very cautious about granting permission to foreigners. This meant that the ideas I was sharing with local lawyers were as novel to them as the characteristics of their country and its legal system were to me. I was working with Yangon’s Youth Legal Clinic (YLC). Young, energetic, and determined, the group is led by their founder, Hla Hla Yee, a feisty and fiercely bright lawyer in her early thirties. She decided to practice law as a result of the unfairness she had witnessed as a young girl in rural Myanmar, when the authorities began to demand two thirds of her father’s crops for no payment, which meant that her family did not have enough money to feed themselves. She resolved back then that she would dedicate her career to fighting such abuses if she possibly could. The YLC lawyers are an inspiring group; based in a tiny, stuffy office in a ramshackle suburb, they go out regularly to Yangon’s poorest communities to teach people about their legal rights, as well

8  INTRO DUCT ION

as representing criminal defendants and poor people who would otherwise have no chance of a lawyer. In Myanmar this was still radical behavior. To my knowledge no other lawyers in the country were doing anything similar. YLC quickly came to represent for me a symbol of the potential for positive transformation in the country, and of the uphill task such transformation entails. Hla Hla Yee and her team gave me an insight into what censorship really meant for people in Myanmar, quite how restrictive life under the regime was on a day-to-day level, and ways in which it remains so while the system changes only slowly and creakily. I discovered how the country’s entire legal framework was carefully designed by the junta to prevent access to justice, so that ordinary people were unable to defend against any kind of abuse of human rights or fundamental freedoms. The court system functioned on a system of secrecy and bribes; you were likely to succeed only if you could pay a bigger bribe than the other side, and even the poorest clients would have to give the judge’s clerk some fruit or a longyi to stand a chance. You would rarely get any kind of judicial reasoning for a decision, certainly not in writing. I got a personal taste of the continuing Big Brother-esque challenges facing these lawyers one day when I was helping them deliver training to community leaders in a deprived Yangon township, across the river from the heart of the city. They had already been required to preapprove their training contents with the local military authority. The session took place in a yellowing community hall. A couple of hours after the start, two military intelligence officers sauntered in, wearing khaki trousers with guns slung on their hips, chewing betel nuts with open mouths. They interrogated Hla Hla Yee, who responded politely and passively. Afterwards, she told me that they had demanded to know what the white woman was doing there with them, and then questioned her intently as to what the training was all about, even though details had been submitted in advance. Meanwhile her colleague, who had been in the middle of delivering rule-of-law training to an audience, had spotted them enter and without batting an eye switched the topic to a routine matter of legal procedure. The country’s censorship laws were in the early stages of being rewritten while I was there. The government had announced the

INTRO DUCT IO N 9

previous year that it wanted to remove the old laws and replace them with new media laws that upheld freedom of expression, and had appointed a new interim Press Council charged with the task. Intrigued by what writers thought about all this and to what extent they were involved, I met with journalists, some of whom were sitting on the Press Council. I offered to help by giving legal advice and assistance on the law reform process. Through this side project I began to find out about the issues they were wrestling with in the course of this marathon task, which were cultural, political, and intellectual—how to define “public service media” for instance, and what powers a Press Council should have—and the degree of uncertainty amongst the members that the government would ever actually implement their proposals in any case. It was illuminating to be engaged in this work on the rule of law and censorship law reform while concurrently meeting and speaking with literary writers about their lives and work. The experiential information that literary writers were able to share gave me new and rich insights into the meaning and effects of censorship in Myanmar that I hadn’t been able to gain from the legal work, or from any book or source in my research, either outside or inside the country. And while I was learning from these writers, I was observing literary culture in action on the streets: the secondhand bookstalls splashing the Pansodan Road with color, where people would squat and leaf through all sorts of texts in Burmese and English, from Animal Farm to old chemistry textbooks; stallholders turning yellowed pages behind their piles of fruit; old men reading peacefully under trees on the main streets; and bookshops selling new stock, most prominently Buddhist self-help books and pop horror stories. I asked the writers I had met if I could read their work in translation. Almost all confided that they found it impossible to find decent translators in the country and asked if I could help. Uncovering their literary writing through translation gave me a sense of the way in which they expressed themselves creatively that I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to access. All this enabled me to begin to understand the country, its literature, culture, censorship, and transition in a completely new way, and it was quickly apparent to me that these insights could be usefully shared more widely in the form of a book.

10 INTRO DUC T IO N

Fruit seller reading

R As an ethnographic investigation, this book is intended to provide rich, qualitative insights into Myanmar’s literary culture, by foregrounding interviews with censored writers and translations of their work, and setting these against a sociohistorical context, but also by offering my personal perspective as a witness on the ground, drawing upon my experiences, encounters, conversations and observations. I bring to this book the combination of an academic background in human rights and the sociolegal aspects of censorship, and also in creative writing, literary culture, and ethnography. My hope is that the inclusion of my own descriptions of place and character in this book will make it more vivid, engaging, and meaningful to its readers, particularly for those who have not visited contemporary Myanmar themselves. Moreover, my ethnographic approach to this subject matter is based on the idea that there is a real connection between ethnography and literary art. As anthropologists James Clifford and George Marcus put it in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, “literary processes—metaphor, figuration, narrative—affect the ways cultural

INTRO DUCT IO N 11

phenomena are registered.”6 Drawing on their work, R. L. Sharman has argued that the “art of ethnography is to evoke the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feel of a place, connecting audience to field informers through the ethnographer.”7 Clearly some of the material in the book that is presented as current was so at the time of writing but will no longer be by the time of publication; that is an inevitability for a book that seeks to capture a historical moment like this one. But the transition moment is an important one to capture in terms of what it can reveal about literary life under and after censorship, and I hope that the temporal particularities of the material in this book serve to amplify broader ideas and generalities which readers may take away from it. Naturally, my own relatively limited time spent living and working in Myanmar, and my inability to speak Burmese, mean that others will have more expertise about certain aspects of this book than I do. An additional benefit of framing the material with my own personal narrative is to make the limits of my knowledge and subjectivity of my perspective clear, rather than purporting to present a comprehensive, factual account. Conscious that a major purpose of this book is to act as a conduit for others’ voices, I have structured it in such a way as to let the writers speak for themselves as much as possible, presenting their narratives and literary texts as distinct from my own. It is for this reason, and for readability and directness of communication with the reader, that I chose to present my interviews with writers in the form of continuous prose rather than in a question-and-answer format. I also included in the interview sections a lot of textured detail about the writers’ personal lives and opinions, which enriches and often explains some of the more focused descriptions of literary culture under censorship and transition. Almost all of this book’s featured writers were able to speak with me in English during the extended interviews. Only Ye Shan required a translator for his interview, and this role was performed by Shwegu May Hnin. This is not representative of the population of Yangon; of the people I encountered, those from the younger and middle generations tended to speak very limited English, whereas older people tended to speak it better as a result of the colonial history. However, the ability to speak English competently remains, in general, the preserve of a small segment of the educated middle class.

12 INTRO DUC T IO N

There are a great many contemporary literary writers in Myanmar, many of whom were keen to participate in this project, and so this book could have been a lot longer than it is. There had to be a limit. I selected these nine by asking numerous writers and readers for recommendations of authors based in Yangon whose work was well-respected during the censorship years, or who were breaking through old boundaries in the transition phase through their work. I sought to assemble a cross-section of contemporary writers: young, middle-aged, and old, male and female, writers of poetry and fiction, and writers originating from different parts of Myanmar, whose work represented various styles and forms that prevailed during censorship and transition. I am very conscious that my research funds and time necessitated the omission of writers currently working in other parts of Myanmar and writing in minority languages. Naturally, given the country’s history, I had the writers’ future safety very much in mind when approaching this book. All the writers featured were happy to have their interviews featured, and it is to be hoped that the trajectory of transition continues such that historical risks do not recur. Each writer’s personal account is illustrated by a newly translated sample of their literary work, selected by its writer after discussion with me. I did the translations by reference to an initial translation either by the writers themselves or by translator and filmmaker Myat Noe, and a subsequent consultation. The translations give the writers a platform to share their work internationally, give the Englishspeaking world new access to contemporary Myanmar literature, and illustrate how the writers’ accounts informed their work. I must address my approach to the country’s name, since “Myanmar or Burma?” is for many a vexed question.8 Interestingly, though, I found it to be much less vexed inside the country than out. Older people tended to refer to it as “Burma” and younger people as “Myanmar,” but almost everybody I asked directly about it said that they didn’t really mind either way. They would often laugh the question off as a trivial one frequently posed by foreigners who have got themselves overly worked up about the issue. Indeed, the etymology of the two names is the same. “Burma” was the name used by the British colonial government, and it remained the official name until 1989 when the military junta decided to rename it “The Republic of the

INTRO DUCT IO N 13

Union of Myanmar,” without public consultation, as part of a mission to shed the country’s remaining colonial skin. Many opposition groups and foreign governments including the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada continued to refer to it as Burma, following the lead of Aung San Suu Kyi, who was adamant on the subject. But now that over twenty years have passed and transition is in progress, the situation has become more fluid, with President Obama referring to the country as “Myanmar” during a Washington visit by President Thein Sein, albeit subsequently explaining the decision as a diplomatic courtesy.9 Aung San Suu Kyi herself, since becoming a part of the transition government, has chosen to refer to it more often as “my country” to avoid having to choose either name. “Myanmar” is becoming increasingly commonly used outside the country and is now used by many human rights organizations. The majority of writers I interviewed for this book tended to use “Myanmar,” and the new branch of PEN10 in the country has named itself “PEN Myanmar.” However, in the United States, where this book is being published, and in the United Kingdom, the vast majority of people still know of and refer to the country as “Burma.” After some wavering, and in light of all these factors, I decided to use “Myanmar,” except when referring to a time before the name was officially changed, when the writers themselves referred to it as “Burma” when speaking to me, or when other documents or quotes use that name. In the same way, I have generally used “Yangon” rather than “Rangoon.” I have, however, used “Burmese” to refer to the country’s principal language, which derives from the majority Burman ethnic group, though many people in the country now use Myanmar as an adjective and refer to it as the “Myanmar language.”

Sociopolitical History To understand the nature of literary culture under censorship in Myanmar, it is important to have a sense of the sociopolitical context. For fifty years no independent newspapers or journals were permitted. The regime did its best to block all foreign media, although many people managed to find ways to access the BBC’s World Service

14 INTRO DUCT ION

Man at a bookstall

Burmese radio station, which served as something of a lifeline. There was no access to independent justice. Political, ethnic, and religious minorities were targeted with impunity. Anybody who criticized the status quo in any form would be imprisoned or otherwise punished. Those who kept quiet, and were not in high military positions, tended to live in extreme poverty while economic development remained stagnant. There was just one credible democratic election, which took place in 1990, but the result was promptly disregarded (more on which below).

INTRO DUC T IO N 15

While I didn’t experience the military regime from inside Myanmar before 2012, I did see its direct consequences from the sidelines, when I worked on a legal project with Karenni refugees (from northern Myanmar) on the Thailand border in 2007. There were 40,000 refugees living in the camp I was working in, and around 150,000 refugees along that border alone. Many of the refugees I worked with had been in the camp for years, some for decades. Different in ethnicity, language, and religion from the ruling Myanmarn class, they had experienced extended persecution from the government, and finally fled after horrific experiences, some having had their entire villages torched. At that time there seemed no prospect of improvement. Many were grimly resigned to living in the camp for a lifetime, since few were lucky enough to be resettled abroad. One flicker of hope appeared just as I left the border, when the monk-led “Saffron Revolution” rose up in September 2007, but it died away as quickly as it came. I watched the dismal news emerge online of the protesters being crushed, Buddhist monks and ordinary people alike, with horrific brutality. Having reasserted its might, the junta remained firmly in place. But in 2008, whether for reasons of astrology, or as a temporary means of attracting foreign investment, or even with a genuine change of heart, the junta announced an intention to reform toward democracy. It released a handful of prominent political prisoners, including Win Tin, cofounder of the opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), who is featured in this book. It even published a new draft constitution, a document that was widely derided for— amongst other things—being drawn up without any public consultation, enshrining the military’s position in government, and excluding from the presidency anyone with children by a foreigner (a category which non-coincidentally includes Aung San Suu Kyi, who was then still under house arrest). A referendum was held on the constitution in the immediate aftermath of the devastating Cyclone Nargis, which had killed and made homeless thousands of people. Unsurprisingly, the conclusion was in favor of the new constitution. In 2010 a general election was held based on the new constitution. It was closed to international observers, boycotted by Suu Kyi’s NLD party, and widely deemed to be sham.

16 INTRO DUC T IO N

However, six days later, and perhaps in recognition that purported reforms had not proved convincing, the government released Aung San Suu Kyi, an event seen by the world as a landmark move. In 2011, further reforms were announced, and this time proclamations were followed by actions that genuinely seemed to begin dismantling the building blocks of the censorship regime. International news websites and social media such as YouTube were unblocked. Independent newspapers were permitted to publish material on political issues. Hundreds more political prisoners were released, including the outspoken comedian Zarganar who, having been imprisoned three times and a subject of Amnesty International’s campaigning, had become a global symbol of Myanmar’s repression. A Human Rights Commission was formed, although this proved to be a rather empty gesture since it was comprised entirely of military appointees, many of whom were military personnel. In 2012 by-elections were held and were open to international observers. This time the NLD decided to run. By then “The Lady,” as Aung San Suu Kyi had become known, had acquired a status higher than royalty and closer to national sainthood, and her election campaigns saw vast crowds of jubilant supporters, waving NLD flags and desperate to catch a glimpse of her in the flesh. Unsurprisingly, the NLD succeeded in almost all available seats, so that they now have a small representation in parliament, including Suu Kyi herself. Finally, in August 2012 the most stringent censorship restrictions were lifted, and prepublication censorship no longer applied. With these reforms came international attention. Sanctions were lifted, and businesses from the West and Japan started to swarm enthusiastically around the country, looking greedily at the untapped resources and markets of a country that many believed had the potential to become the next “Asian tiger.” If the government was really about to take Myanmar out of its fifty-year time warp and to free its people, the world was witnessing a breathtakingly important moment in the country’s history.

R However, these developments rode in on the back of a long and fractious political history, a history which suggests that achieving either democracy or national unity quickly would be a highly ambitious goal.

I N T RO D U C T I O N   1 7

The country had long been the subject of tugs of war between several kings and empires, and it was not until the twentieth century that the current borders were established. The following is a potted history of some of the most significant events. The Pyu were the earliest inhabitants of Burma of whom records are extant from AD 673, but their kingdom came to a sudden end in 832 when Nanchao tribes plundered the capital and deported hundreds of captives.11 There is no record of what happened to the unfortunate Pyu people, and there are few records of the region generally from the ninth to the eleventh centuries. However, it was during this period that the Burmese entered from the northwest of China.12 The Bagan empire then established itself as one of Southeast Asia’s major powers in the tenth century, and its rulers built tens of thousands of temples in its heartland, in a spot that is now the country’s major tourist site.13 It was not until the twelfth century that the Burmese language and culture became dominant.14 The Bagan empire was disrupted by Shan tribes from the north in the thirteenth century, until the Mon kingdom took over a large portion of the south. In the fourteenth century the Toungoo kings usurped the whole region, but by the sixteenth century the Portuguese had arrived to seek their fortunes and to attempt to spread Catholicism in their crusade against Islam.15 The disruption caused by their incursion allowed warring chiefs to seize, divide, and grapple over portions of the region.16 Undeterred, the Toungoo kings reinstalled themselves in the north of Burma in the seventeenth century.17 The Dutch and British East India Companies set up factories in Burma soon after, but withdrew their business without achieving much success, largely because of instability created by the Chinese raids.18 In the chaotic aftermath of those raids the Toungoo kings were finally brought down by the great revolt of the Mon people from the south in 1740.19 But after a decade of Mon dominance, a Burmese national movement surged, led by King Alaungpaya.20 By 1760, Alaungpaya was in control, and he founded what would prove to be the last Burmese dynasty to occupy the throne until King Thibaw Min was deposed by the British in 1885.21 The British presence in Burma began in 1795, when Captain Michael Symes arrived on a mission to reestablish relations with the country, with an underlying motive to prevent the French from harboring

18 INTRO DUC T IO N

designs on the place and potentially setting up a warlike stance against British India.22 After signs that the Burmese were contemplating intervening in Assam,23 the British waged the first of three Anglo-Burmese wars between 1824 and 1826, and they finally seized Lower Burma. A second war followed, and by the third in 1885, the royal city Mandalay fell, the king and queen were summarily evicted, and the British took over the country. Rangoon (now Yangon) became the capital city, and an important port, and many Indians were moved over by the British to help build trade. By the 1930s the Burmese made their dissatisfaction with British rule known through protests and riots. As a concession, in 1937 the British allowed Burma to become a separately administered colony, run by a Burmese premier, Ba Maw. But in 1941, Japan entered World War II and Aung San (father of Suu Kyi) formed the Burma Independence Army. Japan advanced on Rangoon in 1942 and defeated the British. But, after retreating to India, the British fought back, penetrating behind army lines into northern Burma with the Chindits force, and forging relationships with minority ethnic groups, particularly the Karen. Aung San’s army switched allegiance from the Japanese to the Allies in 1945 and over the next two years negotiated independence for Burma. Aung San was assassinated in 1947, but the following year independence was finally granted and U Nu was made the first prime minister of an independent Burma. Unlike other former colonies, Burma chose not to become part of the Commonwealth. Its republican parliament remained fractious and divided after all the conflict that preceded it, and it never managed to quash the multifarious, quarreling voices. Fourteen years later, in March 1962, it was usurped when General Ne Win, then Chief of the Armed Forces, launched a military coup, declaring that parliamentary democracy was unsuitable for Burma and instituting a new Revolutionary Council. Student-led protests took place in Rangoon University in July, but Ne Win ordered troops from the Tatmadaw (the army) to open fire on the protestors and dynamited the Student Union building. He banned the Student Union and all other potentially dissenting organizations and proceeded to launch a new regime based on a philosophical blend of extreme nationalism, Buddhism, and Marxism which he named the

INTRO DUCT IO N 19

“Burmese Way to Socialism.” To promulgate this regime he created a new political party called the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP), and banned all others. From then on the country was ruled by a military dictatorship. Ne Win drove the country on a steep downhill trajectory from being the wealthiest in Southeast Asia to the most impoverished. In a handful of uprisings the people of Burma sought to shake off the junta’s iron grip. Recognizing the country’s economic deterioration and the people’s dissatisfaction with it, Ne Win initiated a new constitution in 1973, but this only resulted in more protests. When the major student protests took place in 1988, he resigned and a “new” military junta took over, rebranded as the SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council). They suspended the constitution and removed the word “socialism” from their political documents and rhetoric, in an attempt to recharacterize themselves and reinvigorate the economy. In a gesture toward democracy, the SLORC’s chairman, General Saw Maung, announced that political parties could begin registering for elections, and Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD Party duly put themselves forward. The military created its own political party, the NUP (National Unity Party). However, Aung San Suu Kyi began to be directly critical of General Ne Win and the military, and she went a step too far for the military by ordering a march in honor of her father and the assassination of his cabinet in 1947. She was put under house arrest, and many other prodemocracy activists were imprisoned. Despite this, in May 1990 the NLD won the general election by a landslide. The SLORC refused to implement the election results and retained control of power, imprisoning more and more NLD and pro-democracy activists under the new leadership of General Than Shwe.24 After further student protests in 1996, leading to a prolonged shutdown of universities, the SLORC rebranded itself again as the SPDC (State Peace and Development Council) in 1997, nomenclature reflecting a more positive image that the regime wished to market to the rest of the world in a bid to attract more foreign investment, while Aung San Suu Kyi urged all foreign countries to resist funding the military in any way. Contrary to the regime’s new label, neither the rule of law, peace, nor economic development prospered in the country. The Saffron Revolution in 2007, triggered by a sharp price increase in basic

20 INTRO DUC T IO N

commodities such as rice and eggs, caused the junta to tighten the screws on free expression and to throw yet more outspoken activists and critical writers into jail.

Censorship and Repressive Rule No dictator is able to maintain absolute power and to quash dissenting voices for a significant time without a legal structure carefully designed to enforce social control, of which a key component is censorship. Before considering the complex ways that censorship operated in Myanmar, it is worth reflecting on the wider concept of the rule of law and considering the extent to which the military regime defied it. By the “rule of law,” I mean a legal system which operates fairly and justly, as opposed to “rule by law”: a form of dictatorship whereby the law is simply imposed from the top down. The rule of law is the foundation of a free and fair democratic society; it means that everybody gets access to justice and gets treated equally by law, it prevents abuses of power by governments, it protects the rights of minority groups and vulnerable people, and it protects everybody’s right to freedom of expression. The rule of law has six main, interconnected elements,25 which were largely absent in Myanmar during military rule, and by their absence enabled the continued operation of repressive censorship. One element is legality: in other words, no person should be punished by the state except for the breach of a law that has been previously enacted; equally, the law should be enforced in circumstances where it is violated. In Myanmar, people who were in favor with the regime or who paid bribes would get away with breaking well-known laws, creating a culture of extreme caution among the rest. A second element of the rule of law is legal certainty, which requires that all applicable laws should be clear, predictable, and accessible. In Myanmar, there was no public consultation on new laws or regulations, many of which would be published secretly. Published laws26 were then worded deliberately widely, which meant officials could interpret and enforce the laws as they wished. In terms of accessibility, legal statutes were hard to get hold of and difficult to understand,

INTRO DUC T IO N 2 1

and case law27 was rarely printed; the small amount in existence from the higher courts was kept in the Supreme Court library under lock and key. A third element of the rule of law is the prohibition of arbitrariness; questions of legal rights and liabilities should be resolved by the appropriate authorities applying the law, not by simply exercising their discretion. In Myanmar, the prevalence of bribing, combined with broadly worded laws, meant that arbitrariness prevailed. A fourth element of the rule of law is access to justice: the state should provide courts for disputes that cannot otherwise be resolved, to be accessed affordably and without inordinate delay. Judges should be independent and should act fairly toward both sides. To ensure that justice is seen to be done, most trials should be open to the public. In Myanmar, prohibitive cost—not least due to bribes—remains a major obstacle for most people who need access to justice. People with privileges often jump the queue. Judges are military men and very much part of the government, and when in court they rarely ensure fair procedures; for instance, defendants in criminal cases often get no say at all in court, judges rarely give reasons for their decisions, and courts are never actually open to the public. A fifth element is nondiscrimination and equality before the law: all laws should apply equally to everyone, unless objective differences between people justify differentiation. In Myanmar there have been and remain discriminatory laws, for instance favoring Buddhists over other religious groups and men over women. Perhaps most importantly, particularly when it comes to protecting freedom of expression, a sixth element of the rule of law is respect for human rights. Myanmar is still not a signatory to the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which requires every country to protect the right to a fair trial, freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and association, and the right to enjoy all human rights and freedoms without discrimination. While Myanmar’s constitution—which was written by the military—does refer to certain human rights, the document itself actually contradicts most of the rights it purports to protect, and the protective wording is inadequate. The NLD is campaigning for constitutional reform, but while the constitution still enshrines the military

22 INTRO DUC T IO N

as a core component of government, it is unlikely that substantial human rights protection will prevail; indeed, many in Myanmar still see broad human rights protection as the icing on the cake. Censorship is a vital tool in the kit of any totalitarian legal structure designed to prevent its citizens calling for change. It is worth taking a moment to unpack censorship as a concept, since its definition has evolved in conjunction with the academic discipline of censorship studies over the past fifty years. Some form and degree of censorship exists in every society, from film classification to self-censorship of inappropriate speech. Many contemporary experts assert that the essential question is not “Is there censorship?” but rather “What kind?”28 Some take the view that all societies feature “constitutive censorship,” an insidious form invoked by the most powerful (be that the state or markets), which enables them to “create, secure and maintain their control over the power to name.”29 In my engagement with Myanmar I have focused on censorship in the narrower sense of regulatory state censorship, or “repressive intervention,” which acts as “an institutionalized, usually legally sanctioned form of social control involving systematic state examination and judgment of expressions intended for public dissemination.”30 Myanmar had, for fifty years, established a particularly stringent form of state censorship that functioned at the “preventative,” prepublication stage, whereby a censorship board was given the prerogative of “inspecting expressions and either approving or prohibiting them (or approving them provided they are altered)” before public dissemination.31 It is this form of censorship that I will refer to in the rest of the book as “the censorship regime” unless otherwise clarified. While some of the harshest censorship regimes existed in the twentieth century, it is far from a new phenomenon. J. M. Coetzee has pointed out in one of his illuminating essays on the topic that regulatory censorship of writing is at least as old as the history of printing, and that “the history of censorship and the history of authorship— even of literature itself as a set of practices—are . . . intimately bound together.”32 Because the “word of the author echoes in the ear of the reading public,” Coetzee suggests, “it is no accident that, as habits of reading spread, state censorship takes on a more systematic, pervasive, and rigorous character, as though in printers and their authors

INTRODUCT ION 23

the state has identified not so much an enemy (though in fact that is what they were often labeled) as a rival for power.”33 This sense of rivalry inevitably leads to deep paranoia that becomes embedded in the language of censoring states in connection with authors. Prepublication censorship regimes globally and historically have varied in severity. Severity can be evaluated by reference to factors such as “levels of violence required to secure and enforce control, grossness of the inequalities and hypocrisies preserved, types of deviance produced, degrees of tolerance for heterodox ideas permitted, or frequency and intensity of the ritual purgations required . . . body counts, numbers of books banned or citizens ghettoed or gulaged.” While Myanmar never had the ghettos of Nazi Germany or the gulags of the Soviet Union, its censorship regime during the fifty years of military rule must fall at the high end of most indices. From 1962 onwards, those who dared to protest and call for change were brutally crushed. The violent suppression of the student-led uprisings in 1988 and the monk-led Saffron Revolution in 2007 were two events of which the outside world was made aware, though these formed just the tip of the iceberg. The military junta could not have kept a handle on power for so long without using censorship to exercise control by restricting the people’s ability to publish opinions and artistic expression, and to access information. Censorship was the key to creating an ingrained culture of silence and fear. By wielding it effectively, the regime maintained a stranglehold on the free expression of Burmese writers for fifty years. It affected journalists, poets, novelists, and short story writers, but extended beyond the written word to the work of visual and performance artists, cartoonists, comedians, theater directors, filmmakers, and musicians. In 2010 the country was ranked 171 out of 175 nations for press freedom by Reporters Sans Frontières, a situation which has only just begun to improve (Myanmar rose to 145 in 2014). When state censorship in Burma began in 1962 under Ne Win, change was swift. The country’s independent Press Council was shut down, newspapers were nationalized, and critical talk or writing about the government was vetoed. Laws were quickly created to “legalize” censorship, and these laws remained in force as pillars of the regime for decades. The legal lynchpin was the 1962 Printers and

2 4 INTRO DUCT ION

Publishers’ Registration Law. It stated that no person may engage in either printing or publishing without a “registration certificate” (in other words, a license) and in compliance with rules and requirements of the Ministry of Information’s Printers’ and Publishers’ Central Registration Board, which led to the establishment of the “Press Scrutiny Board” (“PSB”), otherwise known as the censorship board. Punitive consequences under the 1962 law included the power of censorship officers to enter, search, suspend, or shut down any printing press or publisher that is deemed to contravene the law or any bylaws or regulations made under it, and imprisonment of offenders for up to three years. Numerous sets of rules were issued under that law in order to create an increasingly repressive censorship environment. A particularly draconian set of rules appeared in a “Memorandum to all  printers and publishers concerning the submission of manuscripts for scrutiny,” in 1975. Some of the rules would be comical if breaking them had not been cause for imprisonment. They required all publishers to submit books, journals, and magazines to the censorship board in advance of publication, so that they could be “scrutinized to see whether or not they contain” (1) anything detrimental to the Burmese socialist program; (2) anything detrimental to the ideology of the state; (3) anything detrimental to the socialist economy; (4) anything which might be harmful to national solidarity and unity; (5) anything which might be harmful to security, the rule of law, peace, and public order; (6) any incorrect ideas and opinions which do not accord with the times; (7) any descriptions which, though factually correct, are unsuitable because of the time or the circumstances of their writing; (8) any obscene (pornographic) writing; (9) any writing which would encourage crimes and unnatural cruelty and violence; (10) any criticism of a nonconstructive type of the work of government departments; (11) any libel or slander of any individual. As Anna J. Allott has pointed out, “almost any written statement or piece of descriptive writing could be objected to under one or another of these headings,”34 creating a culture of uncertainty and fear, and discouraging risk-taking. To further deter publishers from risk-taking, the regime created cost implications. All books, manuscripts, or magazines had to be sent

INTRO DUC T IO N 2 5

to the censorship board for review after being printed en masse. This meant that any changes required by the censors had to be made subsequently, either by discarding all copies or by ripping out pages or by painting the offending parts silver or sticking tape over them. Because the economy was terrible, the cost of paper was exceedingly high and yet all amendments were at the monetary cost of the publisher, as well as the reputational cost of the writer. Publishers also had to send fifty copies of each book for the censorship board to “review” (and, many writers suspect, to distribute to various other arms of government as a result of the regime’s deep paranoia) and had to pay per page for the privilege of being reviewed. The implementation of these rules often had absurd results. Censors were known to interpret the libel rule to require a book reviewer to ask if the book’s author was satisfied with the review before permitting the review to be published, and a series of articles about legends surrounding famous pagodas in the country was turned down for failing to prove that the legends were true.35 A blacklist was created, prohibiting some writers’ names from ever appearing in print. The longer censorship lasted, the more oversensitive the censors became to hidden meanings in texts, and the more writers and publishers felt compelled to alter their approach, resulting in an ever-tightening stranglehold over free expression. A further oppressive law created by the junta, which remains in force today, is the 1975 State Protection Law, described by the Burma Lawyers’ Council as the “broadest law in the World.”36 It authorizes the government to restrict “any fundamental right of any person . . . who has committed, or is believed to be about to commit, any act which endangers the sovereignty and security of the state or public peace and tranquillity.” It then gives the government power to detain a person without trial for a period of up to ninety days, extend that detention to a period not exceeding 180 days, and if necessary, restrict the movement of a person for a period of up to a year. This law has been used to detain Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest, as well as to imprison many lesser-known writers and journalists. The power of the internet did not escape the notice of the junta as they entered the twenty-first century—at least not for a few years. In 2004 an Electronic Transactions Law was enacted in order to control

26 INTRO DUCT ION

internet publishing. This law provides that it is an offense punishable with up to fifteen years imprisonment and a large fine to use “electronic transactions technology” to do “any act detrimental to . . . community peace and  tranquillity  or national solidarity or national economy or national culture,” or to receive, send, or distribute “any information relating to secrets of the security of the State or prevalence of law and order or community peace and tranquillity or national solidarity or national economy or national culture.” The effects of this law are potentially strangulating for internet users at any level. It could be interpreted to mean that an email sent to a friend briefly mentioning a new art exhibition could be enough to get the sender imprisoned. The military government clearly designed this law to stifle the influence of young bloggers who had been starting to communicate news of military crackdowns on civilians to the outside world, such as Nay Phone Latt (featured in this book). The right to freedom of expression did appear in the 1974 Constitution; however, the right was only protected to the extent that any such expression was not “contrary to the interests of the working people and of socialism,” a typically widely worded limitation. The 2008 Constitution contained a minimally worded protection of freedom of expression, but again it was reserved only for “citizens” and allowed them to “express and publish freely their convictions and opinions,” but only if the exercise of that right was not contrary to the duty of all citizens to “uphold non-disintegration of national solidarity.” Again, this duty is so broadly phrased that it could be applied to practically any writing critical of any government actions. In contrast, the right to freedom of expression contained in Article 19 of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, which represents the international standard, provides that “Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference . . . [and] to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.” This right “may . . . be subject to certain restrictions,” but “only . . . such as are provided by law and are necessary . . . for respect of the rights or reputations of others” or “for the protection of national security or of public order or of public health or morals.”

INTRO DUC T IO N 27

To the liberal reader used to living in a society whose laws conform with Article 19, constitutional restrictions upon freedom of expression like those that exist in Myanmar are likely to seem not only oppressive, unnecessary, and absurd, but bordering on evil. In order to engage with the process of gradual change that is currently taking place, it is important to understand these restrictions in the context of the censors’ minds, and to consider their intended rationale beyond simple repression. As Coetzee puts it, state censorship “presents itself as a bulwark between society and forces of subversion or moral corruption. To dismiss this account of [a state’s] own motives by the state as insincere would be a mistake: it is a feature of the paranoid logic of the censoring mentality that virtue, qua virtue, must be innocent, and therefore, unless protected, vulnerable to the wiles of vice.”37 Nevertheless, the effect of such protectionist impulses has very personal, emotional effects on individual writers: “Working under censorship is like being intimate with someone who does not love you, with whom you want no intimacy, but who presses himself in upon you. The censor is an intrusive reader, a reader who forces his way into the intimacy of the writing transaction, forces out the figure of the loved or courted reader, reads your words in a disapproving and censorious fashion.”38 After experiencing such intense intrusion and prolonged oppression, Burmese writers marveled at the announcement in August 2012 that the most onerous publishing rules would be lifted and that prepublication scrutiny would no longer be required. Many are still unable to believe it will last. Perhaps the skeptics will be proved right; many of the old laws that formed pillars of the censorship infrastructure still remain in place, the 2008 Constitution currently remains unchanged. Perhaps most worryingly (as we will see in the final chapter), some of the advances of transition have now been jeopardized by new threats to press freedom. Until the law is further reformed and the authorities become more tolerant of expressions of dissent, nobody can feel entirely secure about publishing freely in Myanmar. For this reason a high degree of self-censorship persists. It would therefore be wrong to say that the country is in a “post-censorship” phase—at least, not yet. Many more vital changes still need to be made to bring Myanmar in line with basic international standards for freedom of expression.

28  INTRO DUCT ION

Faded bookstall, Yangon

Literary History The contemporary writers featured in this book follow a long line of literary history, a history that is heavily marked by colonization as well as by censorship. The earliest known works of literature date from the Bagan dynasty in the mid-fifteenth century. Engraved on stone tablets, they include descriptions of acts of monarchical merit, religious texts, and poetry.

INTRO DUCT IO N 29

Bookstall stacking on Pansodan Road

By the end of that century texts began to be written on palm leaves and manuscripts rather than stone, the script became more rounded, and Burmese literature evolved. At first it was largely based on Buddhist texts, in particular the jataka stories of the Buddha’s past lives, which usually took the form of parables, but it grew increasingly secular. Poetry became the most popular secular form. Four primary genres became dominant: metaphysical poems, historical odes, poems based on the jataka stories, and royal lullabies. Courtiers also practiced the  myittaza, a kind of prose letter. One Buddhist monk, Shin Ottama Gyaw, became famous for epic verses called  tawla, which described the beauty of the seasons, forests, and travel; on a more practical note, a royal maid of honor, Yawei Shin Htwe, wrote poetry called aingyin about fifty-five styles of hairdressing.39 When the Toungoo kings went on to conquer Siam (now Thailand), Thai elements infused themselves into Burmese literature, including the  yadu, a form of emotional and philosophical verse, and the yagan, which was often addressed to sweethearts. The mid- to late-eighteenth-century, when most of Burma was reunited, has been called the country’s “Golden Age of Literature.” It

30 INTRO DUCT ION

was at this time that the Hindu text, the Ramayana, was introduced to the Burmese court and multifariously adapted, and this text inspired a flood of romantic poems among the royal class, and a surge in dramatic plays. Its imprint still remains today, after contemporary writer Chit Oo Nyo published an updated fictional version of the Ramayana to wide acclaim. In 1816 the first printing press was brought to Burma by British missionaries, spreading the reach of written literature beyond the royal classes and the pagodas. The monk Kyigan Shingyi became famous for writing and circulating jataka stories and love letters. But the British influence did not stop with missionary work and associated educational development. Tensions between the Burmese empire and the border of British-controlled India led to the first Anglo-Burmese war, which was won decisively by the British, and led to a gradual takeover of the country over the course of the century with two further wars. In the shadow of these conflicts and gradual colonialization, a more solemn literary tone prevailed in Burmese literature, with many texts seeking to glorify or document the country’s history. Historical chronicles called yazawin gained importance, and in 1829 King Bagyidaw appointed scholars to compile the Glass Palace Chronicle to cover Burmese history up to 1821. Faced by further encroachment of the British, in 1868 King Mindon commissioned what remains the world’s largest “book”: the entire Tipitaka canon of Theravada Buddhist texts, engraved in gold on 729 huge slabs of stone in the Kuthodaw Pagoda in Mandalay, which the king intended to be a lasting stamp of royal merit and the influence of Buddhism on national culture. But British influence soon manifested itself in Burmese literary culture with the penetration of Western literature and the novel form. So transformative were these changes that the early twentieth century is now thought of as the start of Burma’s “modern” literature. The first Burmese novel, by James Hla Gyaw and published in 1904, was a loose adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo in a Burmese setting. The writer and translator Shwei U-daung introduced Burmese people to a great many more translations and adaptations of Western literature.40 Traditional forms of poetry and literature floundered somewhat, and the royal infrastructure that had supported traditional Burmese literature was no longer in place to assist its continuity and

INTRO DUC T IO N 3 1

development. Recognizing this, in 1910 the British colonial public servant and writer J. S. Furnivall established the Burma Research Society, to encourage Burmese people to protect their cultural heritage through historical research. By the 1920s, a home-grown nationalist movement emerged and began to penetrate the content of literary work, with many novels of the 1930s expressing the injustice of being under foreign rule.41 The influence of nationalism began to penetrate novels, short stories, and poems, and prompted a search for a new national literary style and content. Writers such as P. Mo Nin encouraged Burmans to think for themselves, break with tradition, and write in more modern, direct prose.42 It was then that the Khit San movement (“testing the times”) was born. Led by Theippan Maung Wa and the poet Zawgyi, among others, in the decade before WWII, and cultivated in Rangoon University, its writing is characterized by short, clear sentences which represented a radical change from the flowery writing of the royal palaces of the past. Directly anticolonial literature soon developed too, led by Thakin Kodaw Hmaing, who wrote  laygyo gyi verses characterized by patriotism and satire. The modern novel, with its focus on individual character and plot, progressed from adaptations of Western novels to Burmese-born novels, through writers such as Thein Pe Myint. Women started writing novels as well as men, and some became very popular, particularly Dagon Khin Khin Lay, who wrote about the hardship of life under colonial rule.  The influence of the printing press grew apace, bringing literature to more of the general public, and publishers such as the Hanthawaddy Press began to publish works in large quantities. In the 1920s and 1930s, monthly literary magazines such as Dagon and Ganda Lawka were published to connect more readers with literature, and they often contained novels in installments. As a way to communicate their independent ideas to the public under Japanese rule, Burmese writers initiated the unique phenomenon of “literary talks,” or haw byo bwe, whereby they would take to the stage to speak to the public, in towns and villages all around the country, about literary matters and sociopolitical issues, particularly during the month of December, which became referred to as “Writers’ Month.”

32 INTRODUCT ION

During the parliamentarian period between the granting of independence in 1948 and Ne Win’s seizure of power in 1962, the influence upon Burmese literature of Western styles of writing grew. The Burmese Translation Society was founded in 1947 and received government subsidy to translate foreign works into Burmese, especially books on science and technology but also literary texts. Literary magazines proliferated, containing stories, serialized novels, poems, features, and serious literary articles.43 Library clubs popped up and began renting out books to local communities and putting on public literary talks. When Ne Win and his Revolutionary Council took control, though, this brief period of literary flowering and freedom of expression was cut off. At first, the Revolutionary Council chose to wield the carrot rather than the stick. Its first initiative intended to bend writers to its will took the form of a “National Literary Conference,” held in 1962 in Rangoon. At the conference, Colonel Saw Myint, the Minister of Information and Culture, proposed that writers should prioritize writing for peasants and workers, that literature should “participate in the great socialist revolution” supporting government aims,44 and that all involved with it should be considered “literary workers.”45 The Director of Policy at the Ministry of Culture, Lieutenant-Colonel Bo, encouraged writers to undertake field trips to rural areas to get practical experience of life working on the land, and offered government support for the kind of works it was asking for.46 Not wishing to appear too prescriptive, he insisted that it was not his job to “tell writers how to write”47 and in fact advocated for the importance of writers in society, stating that “at a time of change the strongest weapon for changing people’s attitudes was the pen.”48 It was perhaps ironic that this perspective that would come to underline the regime’s paranoid fear of independent writers. The government quickly became impatient with writers who refused to conform to its stated expectations. After the military suppression of student protests and the blasting of the Student Union building, some writers began to publish critical articles and to give talks about the dangers of military rule. This prompted the regime to announce that all library clubs and similar associations had to register or shut down, and it began to censor all publications and to nationalize or tightly restrict all newspapers.49

INTRODUCT ION 33

Over time, through restrictive laws and policies, on the one hand, and the funding of institutions to further its objectives, on the other had, the regime did its best to make sure that writers only produced work that conformed to the objectives and ethos of the “Burmese Way to Socialism” in content, form and style.50 Socialist realism was as strongly promulgated as it was in the Soviet censorship regime. Indeed, the influence of the Soviet censorship regime on Burma was so potent that it is worth recalling here. In 1929, Joseph Stalin gave the Association of Proletarian Writers, a militant collective that claimed “strong solidarity with the interests of workers and peasants” in their writing, control of a campaign to convert alternative elements within the literary community. This campaign soon became characterized by terror, inquisition, and vilification. In 1930, the “Year of Acquiescence,” the purges sent at least six thousand nonconformist writers to die in gulags.51 The writer Yevgeny Zamyatin was singled out as a leading “neo-bourgeois” element. In 1921 he wrote an essay, “I am afraid,” in which he asserted that “true literature . . . can only be produced by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers and rebels.” In the same year, he published a dystopian novel, We, set in the future, in which people, known only by numbers and wearing identical clothing, live under constant state surveillance in a structure akin to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a novel Orwell named as the inspiration for 1984 and Animal Farm.52 Zamyatin refused to renounce this novel upon request and instead wrote a strongly worded letter of protest directly to Stalin. Remarkably, he avoided trial and was allowed to emigrate, but he was an exception to the rule. The purges were followed by an expansion of the role of the state in the restrictive control of literature, which was extended to all “manuscripts, drawings, paintings, broadcasts, lectures and exhibits to be disseminated.” The Glavit censorship agency was empowered to circulate secret lists of items that could not be published, and to prepare indexes of published works that were to be banned or expurgated.53 The Communist Party announced that Soviet writers would be consolidated into a single organization, the Union of Soviet Writers, and that membership would be compulsory for all writers.54 Stalin co-opted the celebrated writer Maxim Gorky to promulgate the dogma of socialist realism among the literary community. Writers were required to

3 4 INTRO DUC T IO N

contribute to building proletarian culture as “engineers of the soul.”55 In place of a “negative and destructive form of individualism,” Gorky endorsed Friedrich Engels’s exhortation that the artist should depict “typical characters,” namely proletarian peasants, factory workers, construction technicians, and soldiers, in “typical circumstances,” which meant of course the triumphant resolution of class struggle.56 An official definition of socialist realism was ratified by the Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934: Socialist realism is the basic method of Soviet literature and literary criticism. It demands of the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic representation of reality must be linked with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism.

A writer’s nonconformity with socialist realism would result in his or her expulsion from the union and, in some cases, criminal prosecution for “anti-Soviet activities.”57 However, the Soviet authorities soon discovered that their proscriptions had almost wiped out imaginative literature, so later allowed symbols and metaphors provided they were “rooted in historical necessity” and have “social utility in building the new culture.”58 A slight thawing of restrictions ensued, but it did not last. The authorities were not perfect in spotting work that put their policies genuinely into question, and in 1962, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published. Like Ye Shan’s short fiction about railways in this book, ostensibly Solzhenitsyn’s writing fit into the prevailing socialist realist policy; Ivan Denisovich was a laboring peasant. However, his exertions took place in a camp setting, which turned out to be a powerful symbol to the reading public against the authorities’ conduct in relation to the gulags. There followed a flood of other writings about Soviet labor camps, and Solzhenitsyn’s work was promptly banned and his house searched. Very similar practices occurred in Burma, no doubt due to the direct influence of the Soviet approach. Many Soviet texts were translated and circulated in Burma under the Ministry’s guidance. As the

INTRODUCT ION 35

regime pursued its parallel ideological agenda, literary writers were lauded for producing socialist realist work and ignored or penalized for anything else. The most strongly encouraged literary form was the poignant realist short story about the struggles of the rural poor— provided of course that it did not go too far, or blame the government for the characters’ hardships. One famously banned short story in the socialist realist style was “One Little Longyi” by Nu Nu Yi (Inwa), which told the tale of a little girl whose mother has died, and so the girl has to cook for her three younger sisters. She goes to catch a fish while wearing her last longyi, but as she is struggling to get the fish out of its trap the longyi splits and gets washed away, and she runs through the village clasping the fish to her naked body.59 One of the most important institutions for entrenching the dominance of socialist realism was the Ministry of Information’s own publishing house, Sarpay Beikman or “Palace of Literature,” which was created to replace the Burmese Translation Society. Its mandate was to “improve and enrich the general knowledge of all the nationals of the Union.”60 Its management board was tasked with compiling outstanding works of foreign literature for translation, and with printing and publishing books—provided all books were in line with acceptable government policy. As a result, translated texts from abroad that were permitted and promoted were almost entirely in accordance with the stylistic and substantive requirements of socialist realism. More socialist and Marxist texts were distributed around the country by other, smaller publishing presses supported by the government. Sarpay Beikman also sponsored prizes, seminars, training courses, a book club, and a library. Indoctrination into the regime’s preferred socialist realist approach to writing was also enshrined in the system for literary training more widely. Young writers with any talent who submitted their work to literary magazines would usually receive lengthy letters from editors commenting on their submissions and providing writerly advice. The advice would almost always focus on content rather than form, and on guiding writers to ensure that their work represented the noble struggles of the people. In 1970 the annual National Literary Awards were launched to reward “meritorious” works of literature. The prizes were, predictably,

36 INTRO DUCT ION

handed out by government officials to writers whose works were not politically problematic and conformed with stylistic and substantive expectations. Again, this usually meant socialist realism. As a result, many independent writers disregarded the awards and remained deliberately disengaged from them. Many took Osip Mandelstam’s attitude toward writers who endeavoured to conform with such institutions put in place by the government: “I divide all of world literature into authorized and unauthorized works. The former are all trash; the latter—stolen air. I want to spit in the face of every writer who obtains permission and then writes.”61 In 1993, the Myanmar Writers and Journalists’ Association (MWJA) was set up to keep writing within permissible boundaries. Its tasks included “to actively participate in serving national interests by having  .  .  . the people imbued with correct concepts and high morale with the use of literature and journalism.” One of its activities was to restrict the content of “literary talks” to topics and people that had the prior approval of the MJWA. Only this and other state-sanctions associations were allowed. Writers who wanted to meet informally to discuss literature or ideas had to do so surreptitiously in each other’s houses or in teashops. The harshness with which Myanmar’s censorship laws and policies were enforced ebbed and flowed somewhat over the decades, depending on the extent to which the regime felt under threat. The tightest stranglehold came after the 1988 uprising. However, throughout the era writers were at risk of imprisonment, blacklisting, and onerous prepublication censorship. Books, stories, poems, and articles were banned or cut. Publishing houses were suspended or shut down indefinitely and without warning. Texts for “literary talks” had to be delivered in advance to be vetted and/or vetoed, and any events that were permitted to take place would be attended by officers checking up on participants. One such literary organizer, U Aung, told me of how one of his speakers was midway through his talk when a local authority officer handed him a letter ordering him to stop and terminate the event. Names and words such as Aung San Suu Kyi or “democracy,” as well as topics or allusions suggestive of government critique, were forbidden. Jail for breaching the censorship law was rarely preceded by any semblance of a fair trial. Many writers were sent off summarily

INTRO DUC T IO N 37

to prisons in far-off corners of the country, making it nearly impossible for their families to attend the fortnightly permitted visit that the prisoners relied on as a source of food and vital supplies, as well as precious contact with loved ones. Prohibition of writing materials was common; as his interview in this book reveals, the journalist, politician, and writer Win Tin had to improvise writing materials from the bricks of his prison wall while in solitary confinement for over nineteen years. If political prisoners were discovered communicating messages to other inmates or the outside world, they would be severely punished, even tortured. Writers who wanted to stay out of prison during the regime but remain practicing as a published writer had to satisfy certain requirements. Under the prepublication rules, before publication of any printed matter could be permitted, it had to be sent to the government’s censorship board for vetting. This process could take a long time, particularly if it was deemed likely to contain questionable material from known government critics. To speed up the process, the publisher would need to give “presents” to the officer, and these could range from money to large bottles of whiskey. These bribes could not, however, extend to the content of the material; nothing could persuade censorship officers to publish writing deemed unacceptable, since this might cause them to lose their jobs. Unacceptable material could result in certain words, passages, or sections being struck out, and books or magazines could be banned in their entirety; even imprisonment might await those writers perceived as the worst offenders. After gaining the requisite approval from the censorship board, all published books had to include mandatory propaganda slogans such as the following printed inside the cover, whatever the subject matter of the book itself, and whether or not it was in any way political (which of course it rarely could be).

OUR MAIN NATIONAL CAUSES Non-disintegration of the Union Non-disintegration of national solidarity Perpetuation of national sovereignty

38  INTRO DUCT ION

PEOPLE’S DESIRE Oppose those relying on external elements, acting as stooges, holding negative views Oppose those trying to jeopardize stability of the State and progress of the nation Oppose foreign nations interfering in internal affairs of the State Crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy

Censorable topics included not just politics but religion, sexually provocative material, or material considered contrary to acceptable (conservative) cultural behavior. Buddhism, the national religion, could not be criticized. Some writers who were reluctant to write to the tune of the socialist realist agenda simply ceased to write. Others devoted their attentions to uncontroversial genre fiction, principally love stories, thrillers, comics, and adventure stories.62 Writers who wanted to get around censorship restrictions and to point the finger of blame at the government would purport to work within permissible perameters, but would in fact employ techniques to communicate their dissatisfaction, most notably allegory, metaphor, wordplay, and satire. This mirrors the approach of writers under the Soviet regime. As Coetzee puts it, censored writers “grew expert at the use of elliptical language, at innuendo and allusion, at the art of not saying explicitly what they meant and not meaning exactly what they said”; he continues, “Allegorical modes, Aesopean language, and implicit references abounded [and a] difficult and complex style became a badge of honour.”63 Over time, in Myanmar, the censors became alert to the use of such devices, but they were not always able to detect the existence or meaning of concealed messages, and whether or not these were critical of the government or generally unacceptable. At first the censors tended to err on the side of caution; if they suspected there might be a hidden meaning to an image or allegory, they would tend to strike through it, just to be safe. But when these techniques became more and more widespread in literary writing, it became more difficult for the censors, few of whom were highly educated, to tell either way and to avoid simply banning all literature.

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Chit Win Maung, editor of New Scent literary magazine, told me about a harmless story he had wished to include in one edition about a man who was aging and plucked out his white hair using tweezers. Because the Burmese word for tweezer is “zarganar,” the name of the famous comedian critic, the entire story was banned. The short story ascended to become the primary literary prose form during the censorship era, and remains so today. The process of censorship was part of the reason for this; it took less time for the censors to review a magazine containing several short stories, and it was less time-wasting and discouraging for an author to have a short story rejected than an entire novel.64 Another reason was cost; people were poor, and magazines were cheaper than books and easier to get hold of, so were consumed in larger quantities. Magazines featuring several short stories were also particularly popular in the absence of independent journals or newspapers that were able to deal with politics in any meaningful way. As Anna J. Allott put it, people turned toward the magazines because they could “find in the short stories the same kind of reassuring reflection of the ironies and problems of their everyday lives that we in the West have in our daily tabloid press, and more especially in our radio and TV dramas and soap operas.”65 Short stories were also deemed low risk by editors; sending a mixed content magazine off to the censorship board, and having just one short story removed from it, would not usually prevent the rest of the magazine from being distributed, whereas a book of collected short stories by one writer would be more likely to be banned in its entirety. There were few free public libraries before censorship, and even these diminished over the course of military rule. Many people who could not afford to buy books and magazines procured them through private rental shops, which were often set up in people’s houses. Notably, most writers I interviewed had easy or free access to books as children, generally through parents’ or friends’ collections or rental shops. Because of the prevalence and acceptability of socialist realism in the short story, and also because of the comparative lack of exposure to international literature and new innovations, not many writers experimented with form during the censorship era. In the 1980s, magic realism managed to penetrate literary culture, with many writers reading the translated work of Gabriel García Márquez and his

40 INTRODUCT ION

contemporaries, and there followed some experimentation with this genre, mostly by expanding the existing use of allegory to make political points. The scope of translated literary works was relatively limited, even though translation was cheap for publishers as a result of the government’s failure to sign the International Copyright Convention, which meant they did not pay anything to the original authors. Most translated works were popular adventure stories, love stories, and detective stories. A handful of translators produced the majority of available classic literary texts, including Pe Myint who translated Chekhov and Turgenev stories, and Mya Than Tint who translated numerous classic novels such as Gone with the Wind and War and Peace, influencing many readers to become interested in Western literature that went beyond the bounds of socialist realism. While novels were not so widely read as short stories, certain novelists and genres became popular. Romances and travelogues remained two of the most widely read, perhaps as a form of escapism and wish fulfillment; for instance, The Ocean Traveller and the Pearl Queen by Thein Pe Myint, one of the country’s most revered novelists, is about a small ocean village and a romance between a traveling hero and an imaginary queen. Adaptations of translated popular genres were also widespread, in particular romance and detective stories. Novels dealing with contemporary issues were relatively unusual; one novelist who has won popular and critical acclaim within Myanmar for producing such books is Ju, a female writer whose novels deal with a wide range of social themes and often feature the role of women in contemporary society. Her novels have engaged people’s social and political imaginations, while never traversing into the realm of unacceptable political content under the regime. Across all genres of fiction under censorship, traditional literary language tended to prevail in printed prose over modern or colloquial language, certainly among Burmese writers based in Yangon. There is a marked difference between formal and informal prose style in Burmese, and the boundaries between them were rarely broken during the censorship regime, whatever the subject matter. Poetic culture under censorship mirrored the literary prose culture in many ways. Poems, like short stories, were mainly published

INTRO DUC T IO N 4 1

in magazines, and only later collected in books if sufficiently successful. Traditional poetry remained dominant. Featuring intricate, prescribed forms and patterns, it continued to be practiced by poets such as Tin Moe until the twenty-first century, but over time poets tended to use simpler forms such as the rhyming “four-syllabled line” form. Largely due to Myanmar’s insularity, few poets experimented with postmodernism when it was spreading around the rest of the world, save for a few independent-minded writers, most of whom had traveled and studied abroad, perhaps most notably Zeyar Lynn, featured in this book. He began to use complex postmodernist form and content as a way of confusing and confounding the censorship officers, and thereby disguising critical content, and some other poets followed suit. Certain forms of poetry were completely outlawed under censorship. The than gyat, for instance, is an ancient form of comic rhyme or protest poem, of which teasing or sneering at authority is the raison d’être, and it is historically performed at the annual thingyan water festival, but in 1985 it was banned and not permitted again until 2013. Writers pushed at boundaries during periods of relative leniency. For instance, in mid-1988 there was a brief relaxation of the powers at the top, which ultimately resulted in students’ pro-democracy protests. Sensing the change of mood, journalists began reporting accurately on the events, but after a month of increased press freedom they were once again suppressed, and the protests were violently terminated.66 Later, in 2005 a group of prominent poets staged a public recital at a Yangon café, asking the audience for donations to give to AIDS orphans. They performed a number of critical poems without censure, and the occasion was so popular it was repeated in Mandalay and was optimistically termed the White Rainbow movement. But in 2007, as the Saffron Revolution rose up and the regime cracked down once more, this movement too was banned.

Other Art Forms Under Censorship Alongside literary culture, other art forms and cultural practices suffered greatly during the censorship regime.

4 2   I N T RO D U C T I O N

Cartoons, a popular and frequently satirical art form in Myanmar, were harshly censored. Some of Myanmar’s best-loved cartoonists, such as U Pe Thein, were blacklisted and completely banned from appearing in print as a result of their pro-democracy associations. Censorable cartoon images included any depictions of men wearing trousers, as opposed to the traditional longyi, as trousers were considered possible references to the military personnel who wore them.67 Theater declined so sharply after Ne Win took power that it barely exists in contemporary Myanmar. Writer and historian Chit Oo Nyo told me about the strength of theater before 1962, and its role in the pro-independence movement. When Ne Win took power he created a theater council, under the guise of a drive to modernize and improve Burmese theater, but in practice members of the council began to ban plays they deemed inappropriate, and it soon became a tool of censorship. As with literature, the council instituted a so-called theater competition, purportedly set up to improve quality but which in fact promulgated politically acceptable work and thus became yet another vehicle of corruption. The performance art movement emerged in the United States in the 1960s, spread around the rest of the world, and eventually made its way to the Burmese arts scene, but it usually had to be performed to privately invited audiences behind closed doors. Burmese performance artists traveled abroad in order to perform in public. Veteran artist Aung Myint told me about some of his performance art pieces, which took place unannounced and before friends. “We had no money,” he said, “so my work had to be simple. For one piece I simply placed five cups of tea on the table. I took one for myself, and then I swept the rest of the cups off the table so they landed on the floor.” In another, at Chaung Tha beach, he tied a rope around his torso and ran from the sand into the water, but just as he entered the waves his friend would pull him back to the sand. A traditional performance form that remained popular throughout the regime, with official approval, is the anyeint—a combination of poetry, singing, and troupe comedy. However, when the comedian Zarganar pushed his anyeint jokes too far during military rule, he was imprisoned and the form began to be regarded from above with suspicion.

INTRO DUCT IO N 43

Artist Aung Myint with his black, red, and white paintings

Film experienced significant interference. Scripts of all films intended for cinema screening had to be submitted to a censorship board in advance of production, and once shot all films had to be submitted for review in advance of distribution. Political content was of course vetoed, but social conservatism also prevailed; at one point it was prescribed that women on film had to wear skirts at calf-length or longer. Filmmaker Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi told me of an example of bypassing censorship at a film festival in 2010. He made

44 INTRO DUCT ION

a film for the event called Uninteruptedness, featuring the text of a poem he had written about Aung San Suu Kyi and Bono’s song about her, “Walk On,” which he disguised in postmodern descriptions of cappuccinos in Starbucks. Behind this text floated an upside-down text of a banned book by the 88 generation leader, Min Ko Naing. Evidently suspicious of the film when it was submitted in advance, the censors did not give permission for the screening until the day the festival was held, but ultimately it seems they had not managed to figure out its meaning after all, and at the last minute they permitted it to be shown. The visual arts were also severely restricted. Every exhibition had to be visited by officials and scrutinized in advance of public opening. They would often demand that paintings featuring significant amounts of red, black, yellow, or green be removed, allegedly because red represented blood, black represented death, yellow represented monks, and green represented the army. Artist Aung Myint told me that, when the regime came to one of his exhibitions, they disliked a painting he had done of the Shwedagon Pagoda in green instead of gold. Not only did they tell him he was banned from exhibiting the painting, but the officer took the painting away and never gave it back. He requested that, in the future, censorship officers refrain from touching his artworks and instead accompany him to his home and watch him lock up banned paintings to languish in storage, and thankfully this strategy seemed to work. A younger feminist artist, Ma Ei, told me of ways she would justify her paintings to the censors by providing false explanations of their content; when censorship officials queried a painting depicting a girl trapped in a black spider’s web, she told them it was about the cycle of Buddhism— “and they believed me!” Unacceptable cartoons in magazines were initially censored using black ink, but later they began using silver paint because it “looked prettier,” and it could not be held up to the light and seen through. Music did not evade censorship either. All lyrics were subject to scrutiny before being published in audio form. Efforts were also made to maintain traditional, conservative musical forms. The government created a Musicians’ Organization that was controlled by its officials

I N T RO D U C T I O N   4 5

together with a few cherry-picked musicians, and which preapproved only certain forms of music for performance. Rock and roll musicians were named “destroyers of tradition,” banned from performing in public and depicted in state-run newspapers as rebellious miscreants with long hair.68 Universities were deliberately prevented from playing a role in creating an innovative generation of artists and arts intellectuals, right from the beginning of military rule when the Student Union building was destroyed and most students were moved out of the central campus. In the period leading up to the 1988 protests, any lecturers teaching students to be too inquisitive, or departing from acceptable traditional practices, or generally failing to exert adequate authoritarian influence over the students were fired or demoted to small colleges in remote parts of the country. Zeyar Lynn is an example: as a young, intelligent lecturer, placed in charge of the master’s degree in linguistics, he refused to leave his classroom and take part in curbing a student protest, so was promptly banished to a remote technical college in Upper Burma. After the 1988 protests most students were moved out of the central campus and dispersed to isolated townships. Terms were frequently cut short, with students forced to sit at home and wait for months until classes began again, thus often missing large chunks of the syllabus and sometimes being forced to take exams in their hometowns, then sending the papers in by post. From June 1988 to May 1991, all universities were completely closed, and in 1992 and 1993 they were only open for five months each year. The University of Culture was created by the junta in 1993 with the aim of promulgating the kinds of traditional art and culture regarded by the regime as acceptable and deserving of preservation. Literature, while steeped in tradition, was not included at all—no doubt due to its link to dangerous writing. Traditional music, visual art, sculpture, and the dramatic arts were taught, together with museology. Many of the brand new students in 1993 jumped at the chance to study anything at all when most of the university system had been falling apart around them. But they were disappointed; the quality of teaching for the limited range of subjects was apparently very poor, and one former

46 INTRO DUC T IO N

student told me that she was only too happy to cut ties with the place at the end of her studies. In this highly repressed environment, artists and writers faced an uphill struggle to keep on learning, creating, and hoping for freedom. Only now are they revealing quite how much they had to endure while maintaining their artistic drive and creative energy.

2 Writers The Older Generation You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you  .  .  . Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres in your skull. —George Orwell (1949)

C

ensorship prevailed for so long in Myanmar that three generations of contemporary writers have been affected by it. The older generation (aged sixty to ninety) has obviously seen the most, and many of them have experienced the most severe of consequences. The three older writers featured in this book had very different experiences of censorship and transition. Win Tin, veteran journalist, translator, poet, editor, and politician, was a political prisoner for nineteen years and saw the worst of the regime’s underbelly, refusing to sign anything promising that he would not take part in political activities upon his release and suffering torture and years of isolation as a result. He came out undaunted at 79 and became a national hero. Very sadly, he died in 2014, shortly before this book was published. Shwegu May Hnin (pen name for May Hnin), a former member of parliament for the NLD (National League for Democracy), radio broadcaster, and writer, was also imprisoned, though for months rather than years. Upon release she had to survive with her pen name banned, but she is now publishing book after book, as well as writing opinion pieces and a weekly advice column, and is a much-loved popular figure. Pe Myint, doctor, journalist, editor, and short story writer, judiciously avoided political activity or writing that would have sent him to prison, but still managed to maintain both his independence

48 WRIT ERS: T HE OLDER GENERAT ION

and his intellectual integrity while he waited for democracy to arrive, making him a respected force in Myanmar’s press and literary scene in these transition times.

Win Tin Journalist, Editor, Political Activist, Poet Win Tin, 84 years old when I met him, was a living legend not only in Myanmar but around the world. I was therefore a little timorous when I rang his phone number and explained who I was, but a wavering voice at the other end said graciously, “You may come to my house today at 5 p.m.” To get there required a forty-minute taxi ride away from downtown Yangon, out to the northeast of the city into a low-key suburban area, and a slow creep along several unmarked streets, searching for the place. The tarmac had crumbled at the edges of the dusty roads in which children ran riot. Wild greenery crept around the faded houses and threatened to turn the place back into jungle, and watermelon-red flowers splashed roadside bushes with color. When I finally found the house, a little girl answered the front door. She smiled broadly, revealing gappy teeth, and pointed behind me. I looked around and saw the tiny concrete cabin to the left of the leafy entrance gate, covered in ruby bougainvillea. I’d assumed this was where a security man might sit, or it could even have been an oversized kennel. But this was Win Tin’s home. He lived there alone. He couldn’t adjust to any other way. In his words, he had “no family life after spending almost twenty years in solitary confinement.” I knocked on the door and there he was, wearing the bright blue shirt he notoriously wore every day after his release, mirroring the uniform of the political prisoners who remain imprisoned, and whom he supported financially through the foundation he set up for the purpose. White-haired, bespectacled, and with twinkling eyes, he welcomed me in, apologizing that he was currently receiving massage but that I could talk to him while it finished. A smiling younger man materialized, nodded at me, and sat down to pummel at Win Tin’s back

WRIT ERS : T HE O LDER GENERAT I O N   49

Win Tin with news of his foundation

while we spoke; it turns out the man was not a professional masseur but simply a pilgrim to his political hero, and he came to the cabin to provide massage for free four times a week. I took a seat on one of the plastic chairs in the tiny living room and registered the décor. Spearmint walls, flaking slightly. An ancient, pale pink fan on an institutional table. A large, brightly colored painting of Aung San Suu Kyi on the wall opposite well-stacked bookshelves, and a faded, framed Amnesty International poster on the wall reading “Happy 75th Birthday Win Tin!,” showing that same face, only slightly less elderly, behind bars. Finally the great man came into the room and took his seat at the coffee table. The little girl darted in and brought us a thermos of tea, and we began to talk. I asked Win Tin after his health but he was not interested in that. Even though he had a pacemaker, chronic asthma, failing eyesight, back pain, and dental pain among other health problems exacerbated by years of minimal medical care in jail, to his mind there were more important things to think about: his foundation, his work with the NLD as an elder adviser, republication of his books, and his new ideas

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Win Tin’s bookshelf and painting of Aung San Suu Kyi

for the future. And despite all that, for over three hours in one evening, he regaled me in lucid prose with the story of his life, from his boyhood under Japanese and British rule, to his activism during the phase of fledgling independent democracy in the fifties when he set up an independent press council, to the arrival of the military junta, right through to the 1988 uprising, to his founding of the NLD party with Aung San Suu Kyi, and to his eventual imprisonment. He went on to describe in vivid and poignant detail his long incarceration, during which he defied a ban on pen and paper by improvising writing materials, set up a prison news bulletin service, and smuggled out information on prison conditions, as well as taming a crow. He didn’t mention this to me, but in 2001, while still behind bars, he was awarded both the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize and the World Association of Newspapers’ Golden Pen of Freedom Award. When I went to visit Win Tin again, shortly before I left Myanmar, the annual water festival was in full swing. The drive there through

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the mayhem on the streets was slow but exhilarating—an ebullient, chaotic mayhem, with children and adults alike spraying each other and every passing vehicle with water, chucking buckets of it over each other, and young people dancing on the tarmac as the sun went down. Inside Win Tin’s front door was another world of calm contemplation. I had been slotted in for a visit after the scores of young men who had come to pay their respects to him and seek his words of wisdom at the start of Myanmar’s new year. Despite all the exertion he was smiling, undeterred, and ready to talk to me about past lessons and new ideas. Win Tin died of organ failure while in hospital on April 21, 2014. Tens of thousands of people flocked to his home suburb in Yangon for a five-hour-long funeral in the roasting summer heat, many wearing blue shirts with his portrait printed on the front. Trucks rolled slowly behind the hearse, decorated with bouquets, wreaths, and red NLD flags at half-mast. In a eulogy, writer and NLD patron Tin Oo said that Win Tin’s death was “not only an immeasurable loss for the NLD but also for Burmese literature, national reconciliation and the peace struggle.” The Irrawaddy reported one NLD member from the crowds as saying: “I came here to pay my respects. . . . For us, he is a symbol of courage. There is nobody else like him.”1 Notably, in light of the troubling ethnic divides in transition Myanmar, the president of the Arakan League for Democracy, Aye Tha Aung, commented: “As an ethnic person, I feel very sad for his death, because he always raised ethnic issues and the ceasefire issue.”2 He was not only the preeminent representative of the wrongs and the futility of Myanmar’s censorship regime, and a passionate advocate of freedom of expression, but he was a force of nature. He was undoubtedly one of the bravest, most inspiring, and energetic characters I have ever met.

Win Tin’s Story I was born in 1929, in a small town where my grandmother lived, but after only a few months I was brought back to Rangoon and I grew up there until the Japanese came in 1942. When the fighting between the Japanese and the British began a few years later,

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we moved back to my grandmother’s house to escape from it. After that the British ruled, and those were very bad times. There were a lot of national uprisings and a strong Communist movement. I was eighteen when the country became independent, but even at that time we had a lot of civil war among the nationalities. For almost all my younger days there was some sort of fighting going on. I went to university, but only had one year there before civil war broke out. There was fighting everywhere then, especially Karen but even in Rangoon. What’s more, the country was poor and we didn’t have enough food. My parents were ordinary people, traders. But they were political, and I caught the political bug from them. My uncle, my mother’s brother, was a particular influence on me. He was one of the “thirty comrades” who went to Japan with Aung San, and he was Aung San’s personal assistant at the height of the resistance. I met Aung San back then, and I asked him if I should go for military service. He said I should not, because he had many followers who were keen to fight for him and had the ability to do so, but there were not enough who were educated. So he asked me to study instead. I took this seriously, so at university I studied hard. I joined one of the university journals and trained myself, so that I could become a journalist and writer afterwards. At that time we didn’t have any problem writing freely. When I left I worked as an apprentice journalist and then I became a magazine editor. I was an editor for the Burmese Translation Society, which published journals and magazines of translated work. I even published a book of poetry and short stories. I also published some translations of books about courageous journalists which became quite famous. Before long I joined foreign agencies. First I joined the French news agency, Agence France Presse, and then I went on to work for a Dutch publishing house, Djam Pattam, which was based not only in Burma but in Indonesia, Iran, and all around the world. It acted as a bridge between countries. They published all sorts of things, books, biographies, maps, a lot of things. With them I went to Amsterdam in 1954 and on to the Hague. I worked there for about three or four years, as an editor of nonfiction. I used to read a lot. I admired so many writers. Back then when I was young and free I used to read

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books like Gone with the Wind, War and Peace, and French books like Camus’ The Outsider. In 1957 I came back to Burma. At first when I came back I worked as a full-time journalist. I cofounded the Daily Mirror, which is still in circulation in Burma now. I wrote political comment articles on the economy, politics, and many things besides. If some people liked what I wrote and some didn’t, that was fine with me. It was quite normal back then. At that point in time there were not always political tensions, and student demonstrations. There was a comparative lull in fighting— except for Karen State and Shan State. Sometimes we would report on those ethnic areas. I remember in about 1959 I visited Karen State where there was unrest. I crossed to Thailand and met some of the rebel leaders who were living in Thailand, had discussions and interviews with them, and I wrote about it. We could write about things like that back then! Also I remember I went to Shan State in 1961 when there was a big meeting in Taunggyi about federalism, and I traveled to many of the towns in Shan State and met many political leaders and wrote about their views. In 1960 I went to Kachin State where there is so much conflict now. I went to places like Phi Maw, Gaw Len, and Cham Pham—three villages that were then located on the border with China. During British rule, these villages were claimed by the Chinese, but the British government didn’t accept that. The problem remained after independence. China kept asking for these villages, but the Kachin people couldn’t agree because this was their land and they wanted to remain in Burma—so I went there and worked on the mountain ranges for a long time. I was on foot, walking, for about two months, and I met people in many different places, had discussions with them, and wrote articles in the newspaper. Nowadays these three villages belong to China. I traveled abroad a lot too during that period. I was sent with a press delegation to many foreign countries—around Southeast Asia, to the Far East, to European countries. I went to England, in the late 1950s, with Burmese dance groups who performed at Saddler’s Wells and other places—I reported and I wrote a book on it too. I wrote an art history and criticism book in 1967 called In Search of Beauty under the pen name Paw Thit. I was very interested in the arts then. I visited a lot of museums. Not long before the military

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came into power, I was sent on a trip to Moscow, Hungary, Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, and I wrote many articles about politics and society in these different countries. When I came back in 1962 the military junta had come to power. I managed to publish my articles about Eastern Europe in a book called A Moment in the Red World, but because of the liberal ideas it contained it was banned—it wasn’t published again until last year, fifty years later! That was the beginning of big changes for writers and journalists. I was cofounder and General Secretary of the Burma Press Council (BPC), which was not government-run but an independent body, set up by and made up of journalists and editors. We drew up a code of ethics, published bulletins in magazines, and dealt with complaints such as disputes between workers and journalists about matters like a shortage of paper or salary, and we sent recommendations to the government. But we were only up and running for a year before the military closed us down. In 1964 the Burma Journalists Association (BJA) of which I was Chair was closed down. And straight after that my newspaper was nationalized—it was turned into the Hanthawaddy. In 1967 and 1968, disputes escalated between us journalists and the government officers at the Ministry of Information. We asked for more press freedom, because we’d heard about the press freedom movement in Czechoslovakia against the Soviet regime. We put up similar suggestions to the minister, but myself and three other journalists were attacked as a result. I was not physically attacked but I was banished to Mandalay for nine years. Mandalay was not a big city; it was not Rangoon. The Hanthawaddy was still in circulation there—I still take that name as a prefix for my pen name—but it was not so well read because people were more provincial. So, although it was nationally owned, I made it into a community newspaper. I met with local people and artists and journalists and we had discussions, with people reading aloud. We formed a Saturday literary circle. Every Saturday we had literary discussions and would read papers aloud. There were papers on culture and economics and literature—all sorts of topics. Scholars and writers would write treatises and read to the public. Some of the papers were made into books. Over time it became an increasingly political circle. And eventually,

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in 1978, one paper read out was about Aung San and it included some direct criticism of the government. That was it. I was sacked and my newspaper was closed down completely. I was sent back to Rangoon, until 1988. But I continued to talk about political reform with my contacts there. And then, in 1988 when the democratic popular uprising finally happened, Aung San Suu Kyi came over to Burma, I met her, and we decided to work together. In September 1988 we formed our party, the NLD, together with U Tin Oo. I am 83 now, an elder of the party. The only founder left who is still active now is Aung San Suu Kyi. I was first arrested and charged in 1989 for “helping outlaws.” The “outlaws” were two youth members of the NLD party who procured an abortion. I was accused of helping to hide them, which was not in fact true. At first I was sentenced to three years. But then, after about two years, I was summoned to the prison office. Speaking nicely and courteously, they asked me to sign a document to say I would never work in politics again after I came out. You are a journalist, they said, so you can write books instead. But of course I refused. Many young men agreed to this kind of thing, but I said I cannot, I am getting older, and I am in a senior position in politics, and I will not lie about what I will do. So then, in 1991, I was sent to a military tribunal inside the prison—they always used military tribunals for political trials. Because I was president of the Journalists Association, I had set up a strike center in downtown, where I had made a lot of speeches and talks, about democracy, before setting up the NLD with Aung San Suu Kyi. Because of this, they accused me of taking part in an uprising. There was no law I had broken of course—this was a military tribunal and they didn’t go into details about the law! It was chaired by three big brass military officers, and was just a short trial, when I was accused of participating, and asked whether I was guilty or not. I said no I am not guilty and furthermore I don’t accept your authority as a law court—and so they sentenced me to eleven more years. Later I got one year deducted from that sentence, but then I got more years added again. I was tortured a lot at the beginning of my time in jail. I was interrogated and refused to answer questions and then of course I was

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beaten. They put their foot on my head so I could not see who was beating me. I lost all my teeth in the upper jaw right at the start, and without any teeth I had to eat prison rice—which was so hard and old—for eight years. Eight years with no dentures. Such beatings could happen any time, simply because they don’t like your manners or if they feel you are not very obliging to them. I was kept in solitary all the time I was in prison. I never lived with other people, and I was locked up alone all day. I was never permitted to meet anyone else. We only got prison meals twice a day. In the morning we got rice and beans or vegetable soup, and a little fish paste, and in the evening we got the same thing. Once a week we got some egg or meat as well—one portion only, which was two ounces. We were not allowed to get any meals from outside. Only at the family visits could we get things like fried fish and dried chicken. Unless we were being punished for something, we were allowed family visits every two weeks, for fifteen minutes only. I did not have family come to visit me though. I was single, and my parents were dead. I have got one sister, but when I went to prison she was working as a teacher, and—this is a tragic thing—she dared not come to visit me because she was on a government salary, and she feared she would be sacked. So I was never able to see her. For six years one of my friends came to visit me. But then his daughter got cancer and he looked after her, and so another friend took over care of me for twelve years. Only when I was released did my sister come to me, and now she visits every month. She has children and grandchildren, and nowadays I see them too of course. When we went out for the family interviews they used to do full body searches on us. One of my friends—who is now in Australia— was so angry about this that one day he took off all his clothes and walked naked among the people. The officials were so shocked! They asked him to put his clothes on again. I don’t know what happened to him after that incident but I presume he was punished. One friend of mine, another political prisoner, was the father of a baby daughter when he was arrested. She was too young at first to come for family interviews. But when she was about two years old, her mother brought her to meet her father in prison. The child was

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so happy, and she was asking about her father, and where he was, but when she came to visit, one of the prison guards was making the mother fill out forms and so on, and asked her many questions before they would give permission for both of them to see the father. The child thought that the man was her father! Ah, she was calling papa, papa, papa, and the mother got so angry and upset that she beat the child, and from then on the child never spoke about it. Both father and daughter are journalists now. Apart from the visits from my friend I couldn’t make any conversation because I was in solitary the whole time. The only time I saw others to talk to was when I was hospitalized. But I found ways to pass my time. In prison I wasn’t allowed pen and paper. But I wanted to write, so I would grind bricks on the floor and make a paste with water, and then I would use that to make chalk, and then I would write poems on the wall and memorize them. But often I forgot the poems, and many got lost. I have only published a few since coming out. Others have been forgotten. One is called The Tiger. I wrote it when the weather was so bad and the roof was leaking and so many days were passing and I was suffering with my bad health and from brutality by the officials and so on. But I just thought: I don’t mind—one day I will be released—and until then I won’t be disappointed or lose heart, and nor will I change my political stripes—so I felt was living like a tiger in a cage. I would tell my friends to memorize my poems and articles when I was able to see them during the family interviews. I would also use my chalk to write quotations and recitations from political and religious tracts for myself to learn. There has been some change in prison life now. Prisoners are allowed to read and write. But when I was in prison, if they found a pen in your room then you would be punished—for instance they would stop you meeting your family for two interviews. Interviews were only every fortnight, so if they banned you, you could not meet anyone at all for a month. I haven’t written much poetry since I came out of prison—I cannot concentrate properly and my poetic aspiration now comes second to my concern with politics and giving interviews.

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I was not allowed contact with friends inside jail, but we found ways to communicate. For instance, I worked with Ma Thida in the NLD, and she was also in jail. Women are separately housed, so we had no chance to meet, but some of my friends whose wives were also in prison occasionally had the chance to visit them, and I would give them a pack of noodles to pass to Ma Thida, and inside the noodles I would put a message. We had to cut the noodles in a way that was not visible and slot a letter inside. In prison, you had to be very imaginative—you had to have ideas, and find a way to carry them out. We were not allowed knives for cutting, but I would wait until I could get a piece of tin from a can of food, sharpen the lid, and use that. You had time enough in there to come up with ideas. Very occasionally we could get paper for messages, using the slips in food packaging for fried chicken and so on. After a while we found ways to buy ball pens. The prison staff were corruptible. You could sell everything you got during family visits, even vitamin pills—there are always some buyers if you have something to sell. You even got real money in return. Political prisoners were not allowed to use money, but some prisoners were allowed to import it, as long as they gave 10 percent to the officer—they would just give word to their family that “the service man will come to you later, after the interview, and then you should give him 1,000 kyats.” After the interview, the service man would meet the family outside, the family would give him 1,000 kyats, then you would give 100 kyats of that to him, and then you could keep the money. We also tried to smuggle money inside edible things. You had to be ingenious. I used to write messages to Tin Moe, a poet who later went to live in America. Back then he was also in prison, but in a different place from me. I would send letters to him in a cheroot. At the end of the cheroot there were some rolled-up papers from newspaper as a filter, so we would take that paper out, and all the tobacco too, and put in some rolled-up paper with a message, then give it to my younger colleagues who could move around more. They would pass it on to prisoners in his quarter who would get it to him. Once I had a chain of contact like that, I could send out pretty much anything. I couldn’t write a lot because of the size of the cheroot so the messages would have to be short. I remember, I wrote just three words

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to him after my meeting with an American congressman. I had met this congressman and told him our political program is to release all political prisoners and Daw Suu—so I just wrote three words on the piece of paper: “Suu,” “Hluttaw” (this is the Burmese parliament— we had elections in 1990 and the Hluttaw could not convene because the government refused to hand over power), and “Htwe” (this is a meeting convened for political dialogue). As an alternative to paper for writing I also used the plastic wrapping of our food parcels. I would get a nail from the roof beam, grind and sharpen it into a point, and then write on the plastic by scratching, or if the plastic wrapping was very thin I would puncture the sheet with holes in the shape of letters. I would pass these on to other prisoners. But puncturing the plastic for messages was a laborious process. Sometimes it would take one or two days to write a message, especially since guards would be constantly walking around to check on us. I also spent a lot of time with animals of different kinds. There were a lot of ants who would come in and out and down from the ceiling. I would put some water in a cup, get a dry leaf, and put two kinds of ant on the leaf and in the water, so they had nowhere to go with the water around them, and watch them ant boxing! Sometimes we got bits of tan ye, palm sugar, and I would take a tiny crumb of that and put it in a place where ants were not looking. When a searcher ant found the piece of sugar he would report back to the other ants. I saw him not as an ordinary ant but as an intelligence ant. When there was a piece of sugar big enough, he would go back to other ants, and they would come down to see the sugar for themselves—and then I would remove the piece of sugar again so the intelligence ant cannot find the sugar, and I wondered if he might be punished or beaten for making the others look like fools. There were many crows around too. Once I found a baby crow, took it into my cell and fed it. When it grew up it was not accepted by the crow community because it had lived with humans, so it stayed with me. I named her Me Za: Me means black and Za stood for Zarganar—and in Burmese language the word meza means exile. Legend has it that this word derives from a famous poet called Meza

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Taunggyi, who was sent into exile but wrote poems and sent them to the king, and his poems were so great that he was pardoned and called back to the “nay pyi daw,” the kingdom. When I would go out to see my friend for the family interview I would put Me Za my crow on my shoulder, she would come along with me for some distance. When I went out of the compound for the interview she would fly back, but when I returned from the interview she would welcome me and sit on my shoulder again. You have to find ways to spend your time. There were lots of stray cats inside the jail too. Our cell doors were just iron bars so cats could slip in. Some of the cats asked for food. We would get a small portion of meat every week but sometimes it was too hard to eat so we would just give it to the cats. They became messengers too. I had an inhaler for my chest, so sometimes I would put letters inside the inhaler, tie it to a cat’s body, and send the cat out. The cat would visit another cell and so the message would get passed on. After a while I adopted two small cats. They were naughty and playful and they would always fool about together, and when one was up the other would be down, so I called one Zaut Hto (meaning downwards) and Moe Mhyaw (meaning looking upwards). When I was released, my crow and cats were adopted by Zarganar in another cell! There were snakes and rats around. Sometimes the snakes came into our cells. There were lots of bushes around the cells where snakes lived, and the rooms just had bars and not doors so they could get through, and at the back of the cell in the toilet there was a drainpipe which the snakes could climb over. When a snake came in I just had to throw my shoe at it so it would go away. I did not always have a toilet in prison. For a long while I lived in a cell where we had to put our night soil in a tray with some ashes, and then in the morning we had to take it out by ourselves and throw it into a big pot. The first cell was about 9 x 12 feet, and it didn’t have a bed. I don’t remember how long I was in the first cell—I was in solitary, but they worried about me making contact with people and didn’t want to let other people know I was there, so I was always on the move, from cell to cell—I don’t remember how many times.

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The worst place was the “doghouse.” I was sent there for seven months once as punishment for smuggling out a report on our prison conditions to the UN human rights rapporteur. The room was about 9 x 10 in size, with a small hole for light in the roof. I had already been in the prison more than seven years by then and I was over 70 years old, but I had to sleep on the floor, with no mat or sheet. I was given no medical assistance at all. I complained a lot of times, in particular I really needed dentures, but they didn’t agree to this for eight years. The whole time I was in the doghouse I was allowed no family interviews at all. Special Ward was much better. It was called Special Ward because it always housed some senior politicians or privileged or supposedly dangerous political people. We were very close to the intelligence HQ there, where all the interrogation was done, and we could be kept under close watch by military men. I lived there right at the beginning, and again for three or four years at the end. At the back of those cells we had a bathroom with a toilet. You could put water in the toilet and you could get water from the tap to drink. It even had a little outside space, a small courtyard, above which there was a roof of iron mesh. I would then be allowed fifteen minutes to go out in the courtyard and sunbathe! The courtyard was only 9 x 10 or so. The last time I was there I met Zarganar. The grandchildren of Ne Win3 were also sent there in about 2000 because the government said they were planning a coup—I met them once or twice on the short walk to the family interview. Although they are grandsons of Ne Win, they are young, and good and educated people. Two of them are still there, have been there for thirteen years. I have written kind words about them. We did manage to smuggle things in during our family visits other than food, mostly reading material. The prison guards helped— some were corrupt, so we would give them money, longyi or shirts to bribe them to help us. Some were politically enlightened so helped voluntarily, but very few political guards dared to come to me because I was already such a well-known name, being founder of NLD and the colleague of Aung San Suu Kyi, so they were afraid to associate with me. But anyhow I managed to obtain things and pass on messages through others.

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I smuggled in lots of periodicals—the Economist, Newsweek, Asia Week—a variety. One day I got TIME magazine and on its front page was a picture of Aung San Suu Kyi next to a picture of Khin Nyunt—the military intelligence chief, who was notorious and hated by the people. I translated this into Burmese on plastic sheeting to pass around for others to read, and I made a headline: “The Lady and the General.” In Burmese when you shorten general it can mean “death,” and I made reference to the cartoon story of the lady and the tramp. Other things I remember reading in prison were the biography of Mrs Clinton, a book about journalists working while Blair was prime minister in the UK—and then I read a famous book, by a Scottish woman—oh I know, Harry Potter! I read all of those books, I liked them very much. She is such a clever writer. After a long time, five years in jail, I smuggled in a portable radio. I called it Radio Parrot, because a team of us would send out messages to others to repeat what was said on the radio. We had a chain of people for transmission. The first person who had the radio in his cell at the time would listen to a program and take short notes about it, maybe on some plastic sheeting. That would be passed to the next person, who would decipher it into news form, and pass onto others, and finally one person who could get hold of paper and pen would make it into news bulletin form, then we would pass that bulletin on to other people, cell to cell. That way we got the chance to publish and read articles about Burma and America! My jail news bulletin was called D-Wave—I could not publish it regularly of course but whenever I got a chance to. D stands for democracy. The current NLD journal called D-Wave is named after my bulletin. The only way we could pass it around from cell to cell was during bathing time. Sometimes it could even get passed over to other blocks. But it was hard to hide the radio. The search officers would come to visit our cells early in the morning, about 5:30 or 6 a.m., and they could come in any day. They only found out about the radio when the UN rapporteur publicized the report we smuggled out to him on human rights abuses in Burma’s prisons. That is another story: over time we befriended the prison officers and servicemen, finding that many of them were corruptible,

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and I decided that we should ask their help to collect human rights violations in prisons across the country so that I could compile them into a report and get it to the rapporteur. There are more than forty prisons in Burma. Some are harsher than others, but in most there is hard labor, ill treatment, and torture. The officers and servicemen rotate positions so that they don’t have to spend all their time in remote prisons, so we were able to collect a lot of facts from them. The report took a lot of organizing, but it was not all done by me. The officials didn’t want to deal with me because of my position, so they dealt with young men, and gave them all the information, and then I wrote up the paper, and handed it back to the young men to be smuggled outside. Our friends outside gave it to the rapporteur. The report was announced in the news, and that was how the prison authorities found out. In 1995 they closed down the prison completely and searched all our rooms. All our flooring was dug up—and of course that was where everything we had was hidden in holes. They found all my writings, and the news bulletins. They were not kept in my room but in other people’s rooms who were not so suspect, but at that point everybody’s rooms were searched. They pinpointed twenty-four culprits, including me, sent us to the doghouse, and extended our sentences. I was sent to court again to be sentenced, with the others, but the court was inside the prison compound. We were not allowed to hire a lawyer. We complained to the officials about that and they said alright, you can hire a lawyer—just give money to your family and they can do it. But because we were all being kept in the doghouse, that meant, among other things, that we were allowed no family interviews for seven months, so of course we had no chance to meet our family. We complained to officials about that, and they said they couldn’t help because banning our family interviews was an “administrative matter.” So we spent some two months in the courtroom with no lawyers. We were all tried together, while handcuffed. They did not ask us many questions. The chairman of the judges usually used to go to meet with military officers in a small room, and after a while we would be sent back to the cells again. Sometimes we would be sent to court at

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about 10 or 11 o’clock, then after an hour we would be sent back to our cells. We had no chance to make submissions to the judges. I was boycotting the trial anyway on principle so I refused to say anything. Some of the young men would shout and so on, but it didn’t do any good. Altogether the group of us was sentenced for 117 years. I was sentenced for five more years. So altogether my sentence was twenty years, out of which I served nineteen years and a few months. I was never tried in a court outside the jail, and no hearing was ever open to the public, even to family, and no lawyer was ever allowed. I got many other punishments when I was in prison. One was over my relationship with Aung San Suu Kyi. Early on the military said I was her “puppet master” because I had been a very close colleague with her in the party. They just wanted to show that she was being manipulated by someone, so as to minimize her influence, and so I refused to admit it. This saw me punished further. There were lots of different punishments, like putting people in the stocks in the middle of the prison courtyard. They did not care how much they degraded us. I remember one official, making a speech to prisoners, who said: “we don’t care whatever you do, we don’t even care whether you die or not, but just die intermittently, not en masse—that way we don’t have to report to higher officials.” I had bad medical problems, so I was occasionally sent to hospital. That was the only time I got to meet other prisoners and talk. If they found my blood pressure was too high or my heart beat irregular, I would be hospitalized in the jail’s hospital, but if I was seriously ill I was sent to Rangoon hospital in the Guard Ward. The jail hospital was not too bad—it was a two-storey building, wooden, but quite good, built many years back, by the British government, so of course the timber was good and strong, and it is still used as a hospital. It was better than the prison cell anyway! I received some medication there but I don’t know if it was good medication or not. I remember when I was sent to the jail hospital in 1987 I met a Thai businessman who had been arrested in Burma, and he gave me TIME magazine, Newsweek, Bangkok Post, and others, because he is a businessman and he knew I was a politician.

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Finally I was released. But when I came out I had nowhere to live. Before prison I had my own house in downtown Rangoon, but when I was arrested I was evicted. Now I live in my friend’s house. His daughter built this small cabin for me, with a toilet and dining room and living room and a television room and my bedroom, so I can live alone. My life is simple. I didn’t eat dinner in the evening in prison for many years. So they just give me breakfast in the morning, and I am not much trouble for them. When I came out I started to work again with the NLD immediately. I had to—I was a founding member. On the very first day I was released, that evening, I met with the media men in my house and told them that I feel that although I am free now, I don’t feel I am really free because there are still restrictions on what I can do and say, and also because people as a whole in the country still feel as if they are in prison, even though there is no wall around their houses or streets. So I told them I would work for all these people to be free as long as I live, and that I would wear blue shirts like prison uniforms as a symbol toward the political prisoners left behind. Although I am a politician I still feel even now as if I am a political prisoner. I still show solidarity with those political prisoners, and not only that, I actively help with all my earnings. When I sell my books I give them my royalties. Last year I also formed a foundation for political prisoners—the Win Tin Foundation.4 Many people send money and I put all my personal money into it. So far we have helped nearly 100 political prisoners with more than 400,000 kyats. There were more than 16,000 political prisoners in Burma in the last fifty years—many are very old like myself, some are very young, so of course they have some difficulties; when they come out they can get no job, and so on, so they need help and so what we are doing is helping the ones still in prison. Now there are about three hundred still in prison. I have no grudge against the military rulers and junta members, but I cannot forgive and forget, as long as they don’t change their minds, practices, political ambitions. How can we forgive? Thousands of people are dead, in prison and so on. Nowadays there are people including Aung San Suu Kyi who would like to forgive the military—but I said I cannot do it so long as they don’t change their philosophy and don’t give assistance to ex-political prisoners.

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I am happy that more of my books are being republished now so that I have royalties to give to my foundation. I wrote a lot of books. I can’t remember how many. Recently some of my translated short stories were republished, and some of my journalism. I cannot remember very well how much has been republished. But this art history book of mine was republished recently. I think my favorite artist is Van Gogh—especially his early period. I love his picture of the Potato Eaters because it makes me feel so sad and tragic for those poor workers who didn’t have enough to eat. When I was living in Holland I found people to be rather affluent and rich, but when I saw that picture I admired how much human kindness was in Van Gogh’s heart. Nowadays I cannot read much because of my bad eyesight. I have to use a magnifying glass. I listen to some books with audio and watch some with actors—what is that called? Ah yes, films. I have other problems, yes, some back problems, and I have a pacemaker, so nowadays I cannot move very far or work for very long. But my most important priority is still democracy. I want to achieve that. I want freedom and liberty in our society, because we lost this for such a long time. Most people in the country have had no real experience of democracy. So nowadays what I care about most is liberty in society, freedom of press, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and an end to oppressive laws. Recently the government’s Ministry of Information announced that they are going to reform media law and get rid of the old laws that were in place under censorship. They instructed the Press Council to draft the laws, but their work is not yet complete. Another law was then produced by the same Ministry, which they called the Printing and Publishing Enterprise Law. It is not concerned with the press directly, but even so they should wait to send it to parliament at least until it has been discussed with the Press Council because it overlaps with their work. Some elements of the government, the hardliners, still want to have their voices and ideas put into new law. I think the Press Council should be more independent too—it was appointed by the government, not like the Press Concil I formed fifty years ago. I am afraid that the current progress of media law reform

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is showing that press freedom can’t yet be achieved in a country like Burma, which has been ruled for so many years by a military junta. While the government say they are changing, their mentality has not actually changed much. They are still not happy about the prospect of free expression. And even though the censorship board is now scrapped, censorship is still in the minds of Burmese writers. They have lived under the censorship laws for such a long time that they have it sitting there on their backs, weighing them down. So nowadays they are practicing their own censorship. That’s a problem. There are journals, about three hundred nowadays, but most of the writing they contain is still about trade or health and so on—just reporting facts. There is not much expression of thought, and few leading articles that express opinion. Not only that, but the journals rarely produce other people’s opinion articles either. There is little op ed. They just report the facts. The reason is that they are anxious about the implications of expressing their opinion. In Burma, although it is said there is no censorship law anymore, and that there are now many journals, presses, and some semblance of a free press, actually there is not much real freedom. This is not only because of the government but also because of the restrictions lingering in the minds of writers. The constitution is a big problem. As it is now, it is just expressing the old principles of the regime. Every aspect of it needs to be changed, including on matters of demonstration, judiciary, and nationality. There is a movement for constitutional reform now, and I think it will be reformed, but I don’t know how much. Even if it is reformed, many things that are already mentioned in the constitution can’t be practiced in reality. For instance, the constitution mentions the right to demonstrate, but in fact legislation in place says that you have to get advance permission from the police to do so, and they never give permission. And the constitution still contains principles such as non-disintegration of national solidarity. I have been in the media world for more than fifty years now, and I remember when this type of wording came in. It has been normal for a long time now, and it still reflects the mentality of the old military rulers. And as long as all such word-

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ing remains in place, there will continue to be oppression. So I say please try to reform the constitution and to make news laws that support the media, instead of laws that restrict our movement and our expression.

R The Tiger The sun might be searing, Or it might be smothered by fog. The air might be chilly, Or it might be piping hot. But in this narrow room, Light cannot enter, Air cannot enter, You cannot see the sun, You cannot see the moon, You cannot see anyone. You can sit and stare, You can sleep or think, But you cannot sing a tune, let alone get the news. You cannot write a poem, let alone read a few. You cannot even talk, let alone state your views. Excluded from the hubbub of life, My world is a tiny cell. I pace round it and gaze through the bars, All day and half the night as well. Yesterday was a waste, Today is a waste,

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Tomorrow will be wasted too. Waste. Waste. A waste of all I could do. But be it a day or a lifetime, A month or a week, a year or an era, I will never submit. While an anvil I may be beaten, But once a hammer I will hit. Truth is on our side. People are on our side. God is on our side. But when will they realize? See that tiger in the zoo, Rolling in a cage, Do they think it has turned harmless? How wrong, and how hilarious! I ask you to remember this. As long as it bears black stripes on gold, Vivid and distinct, It will always be a tiger. Fearless and fierce.

R This poem was written during one of the darkest times of Win Tin’s time in prison. Typical of literary writing during the repressive censorship era, it combines realism with the use of metaphor to make a political point. It is a simple piece, formally and linguistically, but it cuts to the heart of his experience, and indeed evokes the experience of many other political prisoners in Myanmar and elsewhere in the

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world. It powerfully illustrates the courage required to survive such an ordeal with an intact spirit.

Shwegu May Hnin Novelist, Short Story Writer, Essayist, Radio Broadcaster Bright-eyed, feisty, opinionated, and generous, Shwegu May Hnin has the energy and dynamism of a woman a third of her seventy-four years. Her laughter says it all: it’s frequent, raucous, and occasionally a little wicked. When I first encountered her at the Irrawaddy Literary Festival, she was giving a talk with some other Myanmar writers on the short story form, and while I didn’t understand most of what she was saying (it wasn’t translated), I could appreciate that, small and slim in build as she was, and elegantly dressed in a tailored bluepatterned longyi with a fitted top, she had a giant presence and spoke with fiery energy. When I went to introduce myself afterwards, she gave me a beaming smile, told me she would be delighted to tell me anything I wished to know about Burma and her life and work, and informed me that she has ambitions to win the Orwell Prize for her book about her experiences in jail, provided she can get it translated. The following week she took me on a tour of Yangon University (or “Rangoon University” as she determinedly calls it), driven around by her friend Kyi Min, a kind, enthusiastic, and generous journalist who was Chair of the MWJA (Myanmar Writers and Journalists Association), Yangon Division. The two of them giggled and teased each other throughout the day, in between educating me about all the places we passed. Despite their high spirits, it was an eerie experience, driving in through the grand entrance gates, to a long, tree-lined drive, with grand buildings on either side which, in the middle of term time, was now almost completely deserted. They told me that almost all students except a few postgraduates had been expelled from the main campus, because of fears of rebellion, and so were still forced to study in various dispersed mini-campuses far away in poor and remote suburbs. Indeed, a girl of eighteen whom I later met through Shwegu May Hnin told me how, in order to get to her university classes every

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Shwegu May Hnin

day, she had to take a two-and-a-half hour bus ride each way, which was jammed with people, so there was rarely a seat, and no air conditioning in the sweltering heat. At the end of the drive we got out of the car, and they showed me the convocation hall, where Obama had given his speech on his landmark visit in 2012. In between reminiscent giggles with U Kyi Min, Shewegu May Hnin showed me with evident nostalgia the lawn outside convocation hall where she had danced as a student celebrating the completion of her exams, and across the road her favorite tree in the world—a vast sculpture of nature rising higher than all the buildings.

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Shwegu May Hnin campaigning to be an MP for the NLD, 1990

Further up the road, their voices hushed as they pointed out a large, fenced-off area of grass, in the middle of which a small, white monument sat. “That marks the spot where the old student union used to be,” they said. I peered out of the window, and Shwegu May Hnin encouraged me to take a closer look. I hopped out and walked up near it with my camera. I couldn’t have been there twenty seconds before I heard a loud shout behind me and saw two security men brandishing large guns. Shwegu May Hnin told them gaily but firmly that I was just a tourist and they backed off a step or two, but their intent look quickly persuaded me to get back in the car. Amid nervous laughter we drove past Aung San Suu Kyi’s fortress-like, flag-bearing house, and went to have lunch. Soon after that expedition Shwegu May Hnin and I met at her favorite café by Inya Lake to eat deep-fried gourd with chilli sauce (an oily delicacy, light on flavor to my taste, but which she lusts after as it reminds her of old times). She talked nineteen-to-the-dozen for the next hour and a half, and we arranged to meet again soon. Before long she was calling herself my Burmese mother. A former political prisoner, an NLD member of parliament whom Win Tin and Aung San Suu Kyi had appointed leader of the women’s

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Shwegu May Hnin giving a literary talk for the NLD

division, and before all that a well-known radio announcer, Shwegu May Hnin now appears to be scaling another late career peak as a writer, speaker, and political commentator. In the month I met her, she scored a film deal for her first novel and published two new books, as well as writing numerous articles for the Irrawaddy news journal on political topics, producing two weekly Q&A advice columns for a magazine. She says she has no time or wish to write fiction any more, now that she has the chance to communicate “directly” with the people about politics after so long being kept silent—a theme that would recur among other writers. One day she told me she was going to give a literary talk to an audience of over a thousand people that evening, and asked if I wanted to go. Of course! I said. Where will I find it? Organized by the NLD, the talk took place in the notorious township of Insein, just round the corner from the prison where Win Tin, Shwegu May Hnin, Ma Thida, and Nay Phone Latt (all featured in this book) had been incarcerated

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under the regime. To get there I sat in a taxi for one and a half hours, crawling through the clogged, stinking Yangon traffic that has resulted from liberalizing the policy on car imports without upgrading the city’s infrastructure or road network. Shabby office blocks, small shopping malls, and occasional hotels and embassy buildings gave way to huts, shacks, and markets only just discernable in the dark, when the streetlights ceased. The taxi driver dropped me off on a main road in pitch dark. It might have been a little nerve-wracking, but as soon as I stepped out I heard Shwegu May Hnin’s unmistakeable voice booming through the trees. I headed toward the sound and found myself at the top of a long, dark avenue, then walked down a narrow gap between endless rows of people sitting on plastic chairs. There were over a thousand in the audience, young and old, and all sat silent, gazing with rapt attention at the stage, tiny and distant at first, but growing bigger as I approached. The stage was bright red and adorned with vivid yellow flowers and larger-than-life photographs of Aung San Suu Kyi and General Aung San. From a podium in the center, Shwegu May Hnin delivered an hour-and-a-half long fireworks display of words with no reference to her handwritten notes. While I did not understand 99 percent of it, I too was mesmerized at what appeared to be a master class in the art of old-school rhetoric and explosive expressivity. The 1 percent I did understand comprised a regular scattering of English words articulated with verve and deliberation: “Happ-i-ness,” “De-mo-cracy,” and “Imagi-na-tion.” According to my translator friend, Myat Noe, there are Myanmar translations for “happiness” and “imagination,” though both are rather long strings of words, so the use of English words sandwiched into Burmese sentences has become a “hip” habit, rather like Spanglish (and a horrible one, in his view). But there is still no Burmese word for democracy—a revelation that brought to mind Orwell’s “Newspeak.” When she descended from the stage, I slipped around to the front to say hello in a transition moment between speakers. She was so delighted to see me that she demanded that I be seated next to her in the packed front row, but when an important-looking man was asked to move, I insisted that I was happy to stand. Nonetheless, the beginning of the next speaker’s talk was delayed, and lots of phones

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and cameras were focused on me. I had nothing to offer the occasion except awkward smiles and gestures of apologetic embarrassment. This didn’t faze Shwegu May Hnin at all; she was in her element, a revered writer at the front of adoring crowds, determinedly proving to the assembled audience that foreigners were genuinely taking an interest in what she had to say and in the wider progress of Myanmar society.

Shwegu May Hnin’s Story I was elected to parliament as an MP for the NLD in 1990. The junta disregarded the election result, and then found a spurious reason to arrest me. The truth is they feared me because of my writing and my influence on the radio, and because I was in charge of the women’s section of the NLD. After Aung San Suu Kyi was put under house arrest I was the most powerful woman in the party. So they sent me to prison with no opportunity to read or write. When I came out they had banned my pen name and put it on a blacklist, and I found that my husband had left me for another woman. I had no relatives except my young son. I had nothing. I had to rebuild my whole life as a writer. I first started writing in 1955, when I was 15 years old—just a little girl in eighth grade—so I have now been writing for over fifty years. My first publication was a short story called “Chocolate.” “Cho” in Burmese means pretty, and “colate” means a flirty girl, and I liked chocolate a lot! It was just a love story. But then we were trained that we had to write about subjects that benefit mankind. We were trained by correspondence with The Ladies magazine. It was a very popular magazine back then. We would send in our poems, writings, and short stories, and they would reply to instruct us, with comments like “your short story is not so bad and you must do so and so.” I followed that discipline and those principles. When I was young we lived in Kachin State. I was just nine years old when my father died, and I was the fifth of six children. My mother was very poor and uneducated. A formative event happened

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to me when I was in fifth grade. My mother and I had to go to a remote village to sell things. My brother was only one and a half years old and my mother was still breastfeeding him, so we had to carry him. I was a very thin girl and could not carry a heavy yolk properly. As a writer, even back then I had feelings about the world. I was walking back from the village, and I was quite a long way behind my mother, when I heard a cuckoo. I felt sad because it was happy and I was not. I longed for my dead father. And then I collapsed on one of the paddy fields. For a while my mother did not even realize I had fallen, as she was so far ahead. But then she was very wise: she dropped her son and her things, and walked back to me. She did not embrace me, but just put her hands on her hips and laughed at me for being weak. “You will not be able to work hard like me,” she said, “so you had better pass your exams at school and learn your lessons well.” I took this seriously. I worked hard and passed all my exams. But even so, if you are poor then you could not go to university, only teacher training college. I was taking the exam for this college— with my knot of hair on top of my head, writing very fast—and so the district commissioner noticed me. When I came to him to apply for teacher training, he asked why I was not applying for university as he had seen how well I could write. I was so surprised to hear this that I just sat down and cried. The headmistress talked to him in English, and all I understood of the conversation was that I was very poor. He sympathized with me, and after two years in teacher training college he sent me to Rangoon University on a full scholarship. How I loved the university! We would have dances on the lawn outside convocation hall, and we learned so much. I graduated at 22, and by 23 I had married a drunkard. How foolish I was! After one year of marriage, I had a baby and kicked him out. I was given the position of high school headmistress, but I really wanted to work in radio. So I got a job as a radio announcer. Soon I was reading the news. I have a very clear voice, and I used to sing songs on the radio. I also wrote scripts, directed radio plays, and even acted in them. There in the radio station I met a vocalist who was to become my second husband. He was very beautiful and talented, and he could play every instrument. But he did nothing much else, and we were always fighting. He thought I didn’t love

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him enough and that I loved my son more. I retired from radio age at age 40, and the story of that is also funny! Around that time TV emerged and it was very popular. I wanted to participate in it, but the company did not let me—they said I was not beautiful enough! That made me angry. While I accepted that some of my friends were more beautiful, I knew I had the talent to write and produce for TV. Anyway, I felt bored of radio by then, so I just retired. That was when I became a full-time writer. Not long after that, in 1988, the whole of Burma began rising up. Many people were speaking at public rallies. I was not bold enough to do it, but one day a friend dragged me to a strike and made me speak. In the end I spoke out boldly, and people listened. But at last, in September, the military seized power. I stayed in the house and stopped speaking out. I was afraid. But then I saw that Aung San Suu Kyi had come, and I trusted that she would be a strong and true leader. So I went to the NLD headquarters on the first day and signed up as a member. Win Tin made me the head of the women’s division. When the elections came around it was my duty to take a constituency, and I was elected—but of course, I never went to parliament. When Aung San Suu Kyi was put under house arrest I became very prominent indeed. I knew the military wanted to arrest me, but I was careful, and I always stuck to my principles and did not enter into any violence or confrontation, so for a while they had no reason to. But then, as my profile increased, I think they said to themselves that they had to take action. Some generals checked our accounts. In my constituency, a relative had donated me a little money, saying it was for me and not the campaign, because she wanted to keep distant from party politics. My assistant entered it into the cashbook, but it was not entered into the accounts book, and I did not check. The generals found this discrepancy, and they said I was a liar and had broken rule 193 of the Election Law, and they sentenced me to three years in jail! When I was in Insein Jail we had no right to read or write. We were not even allowed a pencil. But while normal prisoners have to do labor, we political prisoners were not made to do such work. We just had to do nothing. I was in one of the women’s buildings. We were let out of the sleeping area at 6 a.m., out into the yard, where

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there is a big pool for washing faces. We planted vegetables around, and I decided to help with the gardening. At the time I was already 50 years old, so I decided my first duty was to keep myself healthy. I did running exercises in the path along the yard every morning, for thirty minutes. I became fit! For breakfast the prison provided us with hot boiled water for making coffee or tea. For mothers and babies, they provided wild rice. Some little mothers who boiled rice would sell it to us. But we had no right to keep money. We had to get cigars and trade them. We got things to eat and trade from our families. We were allowed to meet for fifteen minutes twice a month. My son, who was 18 by the time I went inside, would get me milk powder, fried or dried chicken or fish, and things that would keep. He took good care of me. I am a little stubborn—for instance, I don’t like using shopbought shampoos or powders, I like only traditional herbs. My son would prepare and chop these herbs for me, and he would do it at the front of the prison so they were fresh. He only earned 400 kyats per week, and he would spend a lot of it on me and would not have much for himself. I still regret that because of my work, my son had to starve. But he did well. He tried to fulfill his mother’s needs. Now he is a manager. Some mothers gave birth in prison, and had to keep their babies inside because they had no family members to look after them. Children were permitted up to the age of four. There was no hospital in there, but there was a regular nurse and a narrow birthing room. I spent a lot of my time in prison knitting. I learned this skill from my mother. It gets very cold in Kachin State, so we had to knit clothes to keep warm. When I was a little girl I knitted and charged money for sweaters. We were very poor then. So in the jail, I asked for needles from my son, and wool. When I began to knit, girls and younger women would cluster around me, wanting to see and learn. I used my knitting to trade. I would make one man’s sleeveless sweater, and charge one packet of milk powder for it. That way I received four packets of milk powder a month. I would drink two, and donate two to poor or ill women. There was a lot of illness inside. Some women suffered from typhoid. The women’s prison warden, a smart lady, asked me—through her servants—to make a sweater

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for her husband. I told her, back through her servants: fine, but you will have to queue—I will do no favors for you! She was afraid of me because I was an elected MP, so she respected me, and she agreed. We sang a lot during the daytime too. I knew many songs, songs from when we struggled in the past. Some songs were about the hidden spirits and the weizza Bo Bo Aung,5 asking them to save us. Some were about our Mandalay palace, and throwing out the Englishmen. Some were maternal lullabies about mothers and parents. These songs were very sorrowful and would make many older women weep. I can sing very beautifully, and I knew many songs, so the young girls and students in prison came to me and asked me to teach them political songs. We were still living, even in prison. There was no time to mope or to waste time. I set out to use my time to work, support others, sing, and to counsel and encourage people. The other women called me Auntie—most were younger than me. The youngest, a girl political prisoner, was only 14. She hadn’t even started her period yet when she arrived in prison, and she was sentenced for three years. They arrested her for a game she played at school, when she led the other children to stage a pretend strike, carrying rags instead of flags. One woman my age was a poet. When I was inside with her, she had already been in prison a number of times for her actions as a member of the Burmese Communist Party. When they released us, a group of political prisoners and students, she was left inside. One day she shouted out in protest, and they put her in a small cell and beat her head. When she came out she was half-cracked, and she could not recognize me. I hear she is still alive but she is living with relatives in a rural area. Fortunately, from what I saw there was not much violence like that in jail. But I think there was sometimes more violence in relation to the prostitutes. There were quite a few prostitutes inside. Most of them were illiterate and uneducated, so they were a little rough and violent in their behavior. I never saw an officer beat them up, but I noticed that they were very scared of those officers. Going to the toilet in jail, now that was a funny thing. In the daytime we all had to go to the toilet outside in a long concrete gutter. There were no covers or walls so we had to go openly. At nighttime

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it was very funny. We had no right to leave the room to go to the toilet, so they left in the room a very big pot, about three feet high, with a wooden platform in front of it which we had to climb onto to use the pot. We called it our stage! It was not dark, because they left the light on all night, so everybody could see each person go. We would smoke cigars while we were up there and laugh. Washing in jail was very difficult. We were only given eight cups of water per day to wash with. There was no privacy for that either, of course. And if we needed to cool ourselves down we would just have to wet our sheets a little. In the evenings, we had to finish dinner by 4 p.m., because we were forbidden to eat in the sleeping room. After that, until 5 p.m., we would walk along the path by the plants. The Christians would push beads around their rosaries, and others would meditate. By 6 p.m. we would all have to go back to the sleeping room. The door would lock and the day was ended. By 9 p.m. we all had to lie down and stop talking. At first I found it hard to sleep. For the first six weeks I could not sleep at all. I was a newcomer, so I had to sleep by the water pot, on concrete that was very wet. After a night of that, my left side would not move well, and I could not even tuck in my longyi or comb my hair—I had to get someone to do it for me. But on the plus side, I only had to pay five cigars for one hour of massage! My son brought me cigars that I could trade. But after a while I developed a way to get to sleep. I would tie a little muffler around my eyes so that my eyelids were stable, and then I did meditation exercises as I lay on my back, by concentrating on my breathing. I concentrated so hard that I had no chance to think about my affairs and my family—I just noticed my breathing. When I was released in 1992 and found out my husband had gone off with another woman, I returned to live with my son. My husband actually came back after eighteen days to apologize, but I told him he was not true to me and I did not let him stay. After that, I just took lovers! But for three months after I came out I could not write at all. I had writer’s block. I went to see my guru and confessed. He gave me a book, a spiritual book, and told me that if I read it I would be cured. I did read it, and I was cured: I began writing again in July. That was when I started writing about my time in prison. I called it

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Insein Chronicles. I was popular, and so the publishers were ready to try to publish my writing, but the government had banned my pen name and put it on a blacklist. I couldn’t appear in any journals or magazines, because they did not allow me to publish anything with my pen name. We writers, especially those with a political background, had to pay bribes to publish anything within a reasonable time back then. It was all very difficult, so many people took other careers to make a living. Even now, many writers now are also doctors, vets, and merchants. As for me, I was retired from the government, and I wanted only to write and to live on my writing. So at first I was rather poor. In that situation, I was lucky to be invited to a launch of the PEN American Center in Yangon. They were producing books in translation, and they wanted to hire translators to translate and publish their books. One day I went there and told them I had no right to write in the press and I needed work. They knew I had been a politician, so they said okay, come to our office and we will give you a political book to translate. The first one I was given was the biography of Thomas Emerson. At first I was not actually very good in English. If rain was coming I would only say “rain, rain!,” like that. But after translating and learning for ten years I became able to speak it very well. Unfortunately, the American Center didn’t continue this work for very long. They changed their policies from translating writing about politics and biography to writing about economics. I was not very familiar with economics so I stopped working for them. But because people knew I could translate by then, private outside companies started hiring me. When I finally published my Insein Chronicles in 2009, would you believe: it was in the prison’s magazine! Shortly before this, the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] came to inspect the country’s prisons and the authorities tried to reform them. In Burma you have government ministries, and every ministry has to produce a departmental magazine which gives them the chance to show off their works. Insein Jail got an opportunity to produce a magazine, to be sent to all the other jails, and the jail authorities decided to use the magazine to prove to the ICRC that the jail was improving. This magazine naturally got past the censorship rules

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easily because it was a government magazine. The censorship board just told us writers that the only rules were that we could not mention the NLD, Aung San Suu Kyi, or political prisoners. Apart from those subjects, they said, you can write all about it. It was a monthly magazine, so I decided to rewrite the chronicles, so they were not published chronologically in terms of date, but using times of day. So 5 a.m. was one month’s column, 6 a.m. the next month, and so on. I would refer to a range of different events that happened in the prison at that time of day. The censors would often take things out, but most of it stayed in. The other jails let their prisoners read this magazine, so then all the people who came out of jail after me said oh, Auntie, I have read your writing! Of course I put all the censored material back in when the book was published in 2012. And only a year later, the book’s fourth edition is about to come out! Before my Insein Chronicles were published, soon after prison, I wrote a novel. It was about a young woman who was trafficked to our neighboring country, Thailand. There she was forced to be a prostitute and sex worker. She said she was sold for a thousand baht, and then she had to work for 2,000 baht. Eventually she was released. When she came back to Burma she told the police about it, and she was accused of being a trafficker herself, not a trafficked person! And she was convicted. A terrible story. I met this woman and she asked me if I would write about her, so I did. The title of this book is A Wild Rose with Thorns. But at that time of writing I could not publish it either because of censorship. I had to wait nearly twenty years before it was published. And now it is going to be filmed, and I am getting money! I am publishing a lot of my writing now. Publishing a book is very fast compared to the way it used to be. I write in handwriting, and then of course I can’t type so somebody types it up for me, which usually takes just one week, and then I take it to a printer; my books can be published in just five weeks. And I am the publisher. It is easier to be a publisher now. I only publish my own work, but I have many things I want to publish. And with my novel, A Wild Rose, we just took it to the filmmakers and gave them a disk with my writing on it and they said they can make a film out of it. Just like that. It is amazing!

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We Burmese find it very easy to laugh, you know. We have the ability to endure. Our Buddhism has helped us to endure. We who are left alive are not ruined, despite everything. But over the years, in jail or in the forests, many lives were ruined, and so we think ourselves very lucky. I now have five books out. One of them is a novel set in Insein Jail about the lives of women prisoners. I wrote at the end of this book that my handwriting will survive after my death. I did not believe then that it would get published in my lifetime. So we writers are very happy that censorship has been lifted so that we can publish. We have kept everything written and stored up in our minds, and we are relishing the new chance we have to write and publish more. My most recent two books are both memoirs. One is about men who loved me! Not all of them of course—there were a lot of men who loved me—but just seven of them. Most of them I did not love in return. My husbands will not like to hear this but I only had one true love, and he died when I was a student. The other book is about my parents. I am not writing fiction any more. When I became older, after having had so many experiences, I stopped writing fiction and started writing articles and nonfiction books instead. I feel that with articles we can talk to the public directly. Now we have new freedoms to write and talk, the public need to hear from writers directly. Fiction is imaginary and it is ultimately a form of entertainment. So these days most of my writing is in the form of articles. But I have never written purely from my imagination or my dreams. I have always got my stories, essays, and articles from looking at the world around me. I am a realist. I still do translation. The publisher lets me pick from a selection he offers me. Last year I did a great job: I translated Einstein: His Life and his Universe, by an American writer, Walter Isaacson, who has been the CEO of CNN. Generally I find that American writers are easier to translate than English ones. English writers are too complex. [She takes a phone call.] That conversation was about my next public question-and-answer session. I do a radio question-and-answer session for Ruby FM. I also do question-and-answer columns for two magazines, each of which asks me five questions per week.

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I get 120,000 kyats for doing that! I’m the only woman in Burma to be doing it. It started off as an entertainment feature for the magazines, and still I always get asked questions about love and marriage—things like: “My husband has started ignoring me, what do I do?” etc. But I’m also a patriot, a teacher, and a writer, and my goal is to educate. So I also like to include some questions of my own, and try to make my answers address issues of society and education. Our education system now is far from perfect. [She takes another phone call.] That was a university lecturer congratulating me on one of my essays recently published. I have written about twenty-five essays on a variety of subjects. An example is an essay about roosters. As children we used to get presents of tiny chicks in our village. Our neighbor had a very loud rooster. When it started to crow, all the others in the village would follow. But my brother and I had a little chick that would not crow. One morning, we two children were sleeping under our shared blanket while our mother was preparing breakfast. The chickens were sleeping on a tree. We got up when the neighbor’s rooster crowed, and saw our little chick trying to crow too. We laughed at him, while the master kept crowing with a grand “cocka-doodle-do,” and he kept on trying but emitting only a silly little sound, like “cockaw.” My mother remarked to us that everything in life is like this. She was very pleased when I turned her remark into this essay. You can read it as saying that you have to work hard to succeed. Or you can read it as a boast by the big rooster that you can never be like me. But the point of essays is not to give answers but to think freely and to remark. I think an essay needs to make one point, and if it does this well it can enhance your mind. The last essay I wrote was about Inya Lake. For thirteen years I used to walk by the lake very early in the morning for exercise. But for the last two years I stopped as I felt I wasn’t getting enough sleep. But recently I went back again. I sat on the bench. It was very misty. The sun was rising in the east, but the mist rolled in so heavily I couldn’t see the trees, I couldn’t even see my own hands. It was like being in a white balloon, and the air tasted very fresh. I could see nothing! How strange it was. I was very delighted with this nothingness. I spent thirty minutes sitting there like this, in whiteness. But

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then I felt hungry. My habit is to drink a hot coffee early, and eventually I could not stand my stomach’s desire for this coffee, so finally I left the lovely white balloon and went home. Read this as you like. This Friday I’m going to do a big literary public-speaking event in Insein township. The NLD Working Committees, groups of young people, invite literary figures to give public talks on literary matters and political topics. This week there will be four of us, each talking for one hour: me, a cartoonist, a love story writer, and an NGO worker who provides free funerals. I never decide what to talk about in advance, now that I don’t have to tell the authorities what I am going to talk about. I take a few notes on several items that I might wish to talk about, and then I weigh my audience up and decide which topics to go for. This literary public speaking was an old tradition in Burma, but it has only been permitted again over the past two years. My next book is going to be about my ex-husband Maung Maung Khin and me—and the quarrels we used to have. It will be very funny! He was a musician. He used to play the xylophone and many other instruments. I would sing. He was too beautiful for a man so he went with many other women. I have made a book cover with a cartoon on it of a man playing the xylophone, and a woman singing with a microphone but timing the songs wrong so the husband gets very angry with her. I still see my ex-husband occasionally, but he tries to avoid me because he feels guilty. He will be happy to read this book, I’m sure. He is still a friend of Zarganar, and Zarganar is always making jokes about us. It is not a literary or serious book, but it is about men and women’s relationships, and the nature of marriage. I am also writing many articles at the moment, serious articles, about politics. I think Aung San Suu Kyi is losing power. She made the wrong decision as head of the commission about the Letpadaung Mine, letting the Chinese company go ahead, not holding the police to account for shooting firebombs at protestors, and not listening to the people who are losing their land. She just said it was a case of maintaining friendship between nations, and that whether our people love China or not they must stick to contracts that have been signed. She didn’t even mention about villagers being made to sign

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documents agreeing to renounce their land without understanding what they were signing. I also doubt that the government will agree to change the constitution so that she could become president or even vice president. They will make a show of changing it, but I suspect only some less important articles will be changed. If I could change the constitution, the first thing I would do is eliminate the requirement for the military to be part of the government. This is not democracy. I agree with Aung San Suu Kyi about that. I want the younger generation to engage in writing freely about ideas and political opinions, but I worry that not enough are doing that even though they have the opportunity now. Magazines here have become too commercial. They are full of advertisements for hair products and things, and there is not enough literature in them, not enough essays, and not enough comment.

R The following excerpt comes from the beginning of Shwegu May Hnin’s autobiographical novel Insein Chronicles (Yangon: The Book House, 2009) and describes the first hour of a typical day in the women’s section. The structure of the rest of the book follows that same day, with a chapter for every hour—an interesting device that she decided to adopt to fit its original form of publication over twelve issues in the prison magazine, some years after it was written.

Insein Chronicles 5am Daung . . . Daung . . . Daung . . . Daung . . . Dauuuung… Five strikes of the gong. Each strike was firm, and the sound was strong and true, never mind that the gong was made out of an abandoned car wheel and the beater was a broken bit of iron railing. The striker’s hand was an experienced one, and his beater swung smoothly

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into the air, tracing out a perfect arc before every strike, in a rhythm he knew all too well after many years of practice. Tawtee taw! Tawtee taw! Before the sound of the final strike had died away, the bugle intervened with an ear-splitting blast. The instrument was old and battered with broken valves, and its player was no musician, but its sound was a signal understood by all. “Hey! Get up! The taw-tee-taw’s already finished!” The tawtee taw was loud enough for all living souls in the place to know that it was time to get up, but that didn’t mean any of them wanted to. “Get up! All of you! Get up now!” roared the three-to-six monitor. This at least made Khin Mar roll over and push herself up to a sitting position. If she procrastinated any longer, the three-to-six monitor would take the bamboo whip to her legs, and Khin Mar could not bear to be whipped in this way. It wasn’t about the pain; she was stubborn. She had always been that way. Even her name means “the hard one.” Without yet opening her eyes, Khin Mar could tell that on her right-hand side Htwe Htwe was sitting up too, silent. Khin San Ngwe, who slept to her left, was rolling from side to side, putting off the inevitable. Khin Mar folded up her blanket, still without opening her eyes, but when she tried to pull the bed sheet towards her, she found she couldn’t. Bed sheets had to be shared, and Khin San Ngwe was still half rolled up in theirs. Khin Mar decided to let her doze on as she wished. Opening her eyes, she found that the whole sleeping hall had come alive. She looked up and watched the white ceiling flicker as it lit up with electric bulbs. The ceiling was so clean and white that if you didn’t look around you might think you were traveling on a steamer somewhere. In fact, there were so many women jammed into such a small space in the sleeping hall, all of them lying on the floor next to their bundles of possessions, that it was not unlike an overnight journey on one of the boats on the Irrawaddy river, which were always jam-packed with passengers. At the top of the sleeping hall stood a statue of the Buddha encircled with flowers—real ones, artificial ones, any flowers that could be got hold of—and fresh green leaves. Above the statue hung a large painting of the Shwedagon Pagoda, in all its golden glory. But the windows

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in the ceiling revealed the truth. Each one was shielded with iron bars. After all, this was building number 8, in Insein Jail. “Come on, move it! Do you think you are lying there embracing your husbands?” Daw Htaik shouted. “This is a prison, you know. You can’t indulge in luxuries here.” Her voice was raucous enough to ensure that those inside the nearby office would hear it, as well as the people she was bossing around. She was only a monitor, a prisoner just like the rest of them. The monitoring job she had been allocated was supervising the 3 to 6am shift, but she appeared to believe this role carried weight and prestige akin to that of a District Commissioner. “Hey, flat nose, get up!” She shouted to Hnar Pi, a younger woman who had been unable to shed this unfortunate nickname since she arrived. “And you, five years, are you still lying down like a corpse? Do you want us to bury you?” Such a racket was emanating from Daw Htaik’s mouth this morning that Khin Mar wondered if the woman might not wake up the walls. Rumor had it that Daw Htaik had been convicted for cutting the ear off a little girl so that she could take her earring, and she certainly liked nothing better than to shout and curse at people. It had to be said that the duty of a monitor was not an easy one. They had to be tough enough to make the other prisoners do their bidding, and that was not always easy. But Daw Htaik was not the kind of person that could attract much sympathy. Despite all her roaring, Htay Htay Than still had not got up. Even Daw Hteik was not able to make Htay Htay Than do anything she didn’t want to. She had killed her own husband and had been sentenced to twenty years, so she was queen of the pack. Nobody could touch her. Khin San Ngwe finally sat up, and Khin Mar pulled in their shared sheet and folded it up. Tidying the pillows was not a problem since there were none—the only way of getting a headrest for the night was by rolling up a few clothes. There was no question of a mosquito net. Anybody caught trying to take one of those into the prison would have it confiscated at the gate. “Okay, let us pray!” called Ma Thein Htway. She was the most senior of all the monitors, in overall charge of all two hundred women in the building. She had been through many trials in her time and had undergone terrible punishments, but despite that she was not an aggressive

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woman like Daw Theik. Everyone respected her, and knew her to be fair and kind. She was a tall, stout woman with brilliant eyes, fine skin, and neatly curled air. She always put thanaka on her cheeks.6 She was not a talkative woman, and she would never swear or shout, but when she did speak she was firm and direct. In many ways she was the ideal mediator between the authorities and the prisoners, and unlike Daw Theik’s role, hers carried with it real power. In Insein Jail there were three buildings for women prisoners—two for convicted women and one for women yet to be tried—and five buildings for men, as well as a few special buildings for VIPs. The buildings were separated by thick walls, and once you were in one there was no way of visiting another. The two convicted women’s buildings were very different. Building number 7 was one of the oldest ones in the jail. It was built by the British Government, and had been famous even before the war. It was tall, contained two spiral staircases, faced east so that the sun flooded it in the morning, and had windows on the walls that opened to let in fresh air. Unfortunately, Khin Mar found herself in building number 8. This building was constructed by the military junta after 1988 to deal with the influx of new prisoners after the uprisings. It was low, square, and dark. There were no windows in the walls. Even the windows in the ceiling did not let in much sunlight because of the position of the surrounding buildings, so most of the light inside was artificial. It was far too narrow for two hundred women to sleep in, but they had to sleep in it anyway. After hearing Ma Thein Htway’s voice, Htay Htay Than conceded and got up after all, and prayers began. Everybody had to get into the prescribed position, with feet tucked underneath and arms folded. They were expected to assemble in the middle of the sleeping hall to pray, but they were not compelled to move there. Being stubborn, Khin Mar decided to remain in her bed space. She did not like to chant her prayers aloud with others just because she was told to, in the way she was told to, and so early in the morning. She preferred to spend this prayer time meditating in silence, with her eyes closed. She inhaled, drinking in the sweet fragrance of jasmine. The jasmine came from the courtyard at the front of the prison building, and flowering branches of it were picked and twisted into rings to lay around the Buddha for the morning prayers. While smelling this scent and listening to the

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sounds of chanting, you could almost deceive yourself that you were in a serene and peaceful pagoda. You just had to avoid opening your eyes and looking up at the windows. “Let us pray! Mee . . . Mee . . . Do . . . Mee . . .” San Dar Linn was the prayer monitor. Before her imprisonment she had been a model and was training to be a singer and an actress, but in 1988 she joined the protests, and quickly found herself inside. She made the most of her vocal skills in prison and performed this job with pride. Khin Mar remained silent, however. Daw Lwin Lwin Mya stayed silent too. One day Daw Lwin Lwin Mya had confided in Khin Mar with a giggle that she had been spotted opting out of the chanting early on and had been accused of disobeying orders, but she told the wardens that she had converted to Christianity—and they believed her! The praying went on, but with so many sleepy, growly voices taking part it was less than harmonious. Khin Htar Yi muttered to Khin Mar that she felt sorry for the Buddha, because he had to sit there and be worshipped through her dirty mouth that needed swilling out. They laughed, and Daw Tint turned around and whispered that she could do with washing her face as well. Some of the women were more assiduous about their prayers and approached the task in earnest. Myai Myai and Daw San Yi would race to get up as soon as the gong sounded to wash their faces and mouths with a little water, provided they had managed to store it safely since the previous evening. Water was precious in the prison. Each woman was allowed just eight cups per day to wash with, and there was no access to any water in the sleeping hall. Storing water overnight was no mean feat. The women would have to carry a cup in with them at 6pm when the sleeping hall door was locked for the night, but there was no space inside to keep a cup securely upright, so the only way was to place it on the floor between the tight rows of sleepers. If it was knocked over, as often happened, the water would slide straight down through the floorboards and splash onto the mothers and babies who slept on the floor of the basement downstairs. When that happened, everybody would hear about it. Khin Mar did not care much about small things like the lack of water for washing. If her face became dirty, she would just wipe it with her sleeve. But she did care about having to sit for so long in that

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prayer session, morning after morning. The sessions always went on and on for ages when she would far rather be asleep. But at last she heard the prayer monitor chant: “Very good!” At this she finally did join in, chanting “Very good!” along with the rest, while thinking how very good it was that the end of prayer time had arrived. After prayers, it was time to line up in two seated rows. The top row was for political prisoners. At the front of this row stood Daw Lwin Lwin Mya, and beside her Shwegu May Hnin. Nobody could know whether Shwegu May Hnin was still meditating in the row or whether she was daydreaming; she would shut her eyes and stay still, with a blanket wrapped around her body and a wool cloth on her head. These two were older ladies, and they were fighting harder than the others against the winter cold, but they were strong personalities, and their arrival in building number 8 had emboldened some of the younger ones like Khin Mar and her friends. Khin San Ngwe decided to take a chance today: she lay down next to Khin Mar, shutting her eyes again. Htway Htway followed suit, using Khin San Ngwe’s slim hip as a pillow. They were roused by the great voice of Daw Kyi Htawg, adding to the prayers that had gone before: “May all prisoners escape!” Diana, grinning, chimed in: “Yes, and if we don’t manage that: may my husband come to me regularly and not even think about getting a new wife!” This made even the most religious women laugh, though one of them stayed stony-faced. “Why do you talk about escape?” asked Daw Kyi Htay, gruffly. “It’s not going to happen. And who would dare come to you here? Not your husband. Not your sons or daughters either.” The joke died, and everybody went quiet. “Ahh, my stomach.” Khin San Ngwe broke the silence, getting up quickly. “Oi, why did you have to move?” Htway Htway moaned at the loss of her pillow. “I was comfortable.” “Oh god, my stomach!” Khin San Ngwe repeated, more loudly, screwing up her face and clutching at her belly with both hands. “The toilet pot might be shut,” Htway Htway warned. Khin San Ngwe ignored this and made her way through the rows of women to the back. She was a determined person: she had gone to the camp of outlaws, was one of the student union organizers in 1988, and

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was only caught when she came back to Rangoon to fetch some more comrades. “I really need to ease myself, please,” she said sweetly to Hna Pee, the toilet pot monitor. “The pot is full,” Hna Pee replied. Her monitoring job was the most loathsome of all. There was just one large toilet pot in the sleeping hall, and it was located on a stage, about three feet high, that you had to climb up to reach. At first, newcomers found going to the toilet horribly embarrassing, but after a while it ceased feeling shameful and became something of a joke. They started to call it “performing on the stage,” and sometimes, after a woman had completed a bowel movement, some of the naughtier girls would clap their hands and shout: “Ta da!” By the morning, the pot would be filled with waste and would be closed, ready for emptying. It was then the job of Hna Pee and her partner to pick the thing up and lug it downstairs and to the back of the building. That was a filthy task as well as a heavy one, and for that reason the toilet pot monitors were the lowest of them all. But Hna Pee did her job without complaint, since the other prisoners would give her cigars in return. Cigars were the equivalent of money in jail, since all cash was forbidden. The prisoners were allowed family visits twice a month, and the lucky ones’ families would bring cigars in for them then, as well as food and other permitted items. When they could, the other prisoners gave Hna Pee not only some of their cigars but other gifts too, like curry and fried chillies, because they were all so grateful to her for doing such a vile task on their behalf. This morning, Khin San Ngwe was facing another difficulty: not only was the toilet pot full, but the toilet paper had run out, as it often did during the night. Sometimes women would rip up bits of cloth to clean themselves with instead, but this morning there was none available. But today Khin San Ngwe was in luck. Hna Pee agreed to open the toilet pot up for her, even though it was nearly brim-full, and even found her a piece of paper that had wrapped up a packet of medicine. She received a grateful smile in return. “The warders are coming! Quiet!” Dan Htick shouted. All the prisoners quickly returned to the prescribed prayer pose and fell silent once more. Khin Mar was always so uncomfortable in this pose, and it seemed so unreasonable to have to sit in it every day, she wondered if one day she should dare to sit cross-legged instead.

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The key turned in the lock, and the warders entered, shoving the door back with a bang. They walked up and down in their heavy boots, counting the rows: thud, thud, thud, “two, four, six . . .” Finally, they got to the total number of women: “Two hundred!” Then, joung: the door slammed shut again, and the warders marched off down the stairs. The prisoners were still not allowed out. They would have to wait until the warders had counted all the prisoners in all the other buildings, including the men. If the total number was not exactly the same as it had been the previous night, the counting would have to start all over again, in every building, in case someone had gone missing during the night. Some of the women changed position. A few lay down again. Khin Mar looked up through the bars of the window in the ceiling. A few rays of light were struggling through, as the sky too prepared for the day ahead.

R

This extract paints a vivid, realist portrait of life in prison. It is not a straightforwardly autobiographical work; this section is recounted from the point of view of a woman called Khin Mar, though it features a character called Shwegu May Hnin, and later sections of the book are recounted from various points of view, including that of Shwegu May Hnin. The book has been widely read and appreciated in Myanmar and was largely responsible for shifting her public identity from politician and radio broadcaster to writer.

Pe Myint Journalist, Editor, Short Story Writer Among all the writers I spoke to in Burma, Pe Myint was consistently singled out as a writer worthy of utmost respect, both in terms of his literary output and his political and intellectual integrity. The same is true of the general public, many of whom told me they admired his short stories, or had listened to his literary talks, or admired The People’s Era news journal that he edits.

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Pe Myint in his office

It was at his journal office that we met first, to talk about press and media law reform and how I could help. It was located in the midst of the criss-cross network of residential streets at the heart of downtown, around the corner from a main road lined with green mango carts, coconut juice sellers, and umbrella and sunglasses and secondhand booksellers who covered half the pavement with their wares. I eventually found the right building with the help of a neighbor and climbed up the narrow stairs to the third floor. After removing my shoes, I was led into his personal office and seated on

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a sofa, while one of his assistants ran out to get us thick, sweet “coffee mix,” a powdered concoction to which many Myanmar people are addicted. At 64, Pe Myint is a little younger than Shwegu May Hnin and twenty years younger than Win Tin. Unlike them he never went into politics, and his manner could not be more different. He speaks quietly, hesitantly, cautiously, and has a serious but gentle, bespectacled face that occasionally breaks out in an unexpected smile. We went on to spend many hours working on law reform together in that little room, over the course of several visits. But when I asked if we could talk about his literary views and his personal life, he suggested a change of scene— the restaurant at the top of the nearby Sakura tower. With a miniature Yangon and a tiny jewel of the Shwedagon Pagoda as our backdrop, he opened up. Hailing from the now deeply troubled Rakhine State, Pe Myint has had both a varied and an illustrious career, qualifying and practicing as a doctor, publishing translations of English-language stories, and then becoming a journalist, setting up his own journal and publishing house, and publishing many of his own short stories. While he has always been aligned with liberal writers, he told me firmly that he has never declared allegiance to a political party; and while never writing anything that could be considered supportive of military rule, he has just about managed to avoid being blacklisted or imprisoned under censorship by never quite crossing their political or cultural boundaries. He is an exemplar of the wiliness needed for a writer and journalist to survive unpunished during a censorship regime without either becoming sycophantic to those in power or compromising any more than necessary on his principles. Appointed as a member of the new Press Council last year, he has been working on drafting new laws for the press and the media more widely, together with a press code of conduct. In this phase of democratic transition, he confesses, like numerous other writers, to have stopped producing literary work. He has a lot on his plate—but also, he says frankly, he felt he reached his literary writing peak in the 1990s and wanted to leave on a high rather than produce bad stories. He has not given up literary ambitions, however, on behalf of the country’s future writers. In May 2013 he hosted a literary conference

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Pe Myint editorial

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for writers to discuss ways in which Myanmar, and the intellectual culture surrounding it, can survive and thrive with the new legal freedoms that he is endeavouring to secure through law.

Pe Myint’s Story When I was little, about 9 or 10 years old, I found a large trunk in our house that was kept under lock and key. I asked my father what it was, and he opened it to reveal a whole boxful of books and journals. They had been entrusted to him for safekeeping during the civil war. It was 1958, and at that time my father was a government employee. He did not have a literary or academic job, he was a clerk at a surveyor’s office, but he was very interested in books and reading. There was a public library in our town, and it was not a bad one, for me as a child at least, and I read many stories there. But its scope was limited. So my father organized a private library with his friends in town. When I say library, I do not mean one library with its own building, but just a collection of books kept at a group of friends’ houses. And that is how the village library made a connection with him when war broke out. Many book lovers from the villages sent their books to our father to store in our house, because their village libraries were not secure. In the trunk I discovered many magazines and books and journals which I had never seen before. They opened my eyes to literature. The journals were published during the early days of independence. There were lots of copies of the Dagon magazine, which was very popular in those days. In there I read all sorts of stories, short and long. The books in the trunk were mainly Burmese translations by Shwe U Daung of works like Sherlock Holmes. There were also some original works by Burmese writers, but those mainly related to Buddhist stories. We Buddhists have many jataka stories, telling the life of the Buddha in around 550 different reincarnations. Most traditional Myanmar literature is inspired by these stories. Myanmar writers in the nineteenth century created literature around them in various forms, including poems and prose. This did not change until the

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early twentieth century, when translations and interpretations of Western literature began to influence Myanmar literature. This tied in with the beginning of the colonial period. In 1904 the first novel appeared, and it was a Myanmar writer’s adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo. From that time onwards other Myanmar novels began to come out interpreting and adapting foreign literature. I come from a big family. I was the second of five siblings. It was not just my father who loved books; my mother read novels and stories too. But literature was not discussed very much in the house. My siblings were not so interested, and my parents were not people of letters, they were just appreciative readers. The first thing I wrote, when I was about 11 or 12, was a humorous short story about a general election, mocking the people competing in the caucuses, with preelection speeches and talks. I became interested in politics as well as writing very early on. The politics in Rakhine State then were very different to the way they are now. At that time there was not much ethnic conflict. Rakhine is in the northwest of the country, next to what is now Bangladesh. We lived at the south end of the state, which is much closer to Burmese culture and language than the north end. The civil war in Rakhine, in the early years anyway, was not based on ethnic division, or religious division between Muslims and Buddhists; it was ideological, based on party political conflicts, Communist parties, near-Communists, socialists, and several other factions and political groups. After independence, and in the few years before Ne Win came into power in 1962, there was a parliament with a multiparty system and associated competition, and I remember being riveted by that. Unfortunately it did not last long. At medical school, when I was 20 or 21, I started writing properly. Ne Win was in power by then, and there were restrictions on what you could write. I started with translations from English. My first published book was a translation of a U.S. bestseller called The Final Diagnosis, by Arthur Hayley, which I liked because of its medical topic. I also published a Chekhov translation, because I read it and liked it and wanted to share it with others. At that time there were many Myanmar people who could read English books, of which I was one, but now there are far fewer people with the capability to

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read English and translate it. The decline in the education system in this country has accompanied a decline in English skills over the years. I continued to translate other international writers, including Turgenev. I also started writing my own stories while I was at medical school but I didn’t get any of them published until later, in the mid-1980s. After ten years of medical practice, the first six in my native town in Rakhine State and the last four in Yangon, I stopped practicing medicine so I could become a full-time writer. The community of writers in Yangon was very important for me as a writer. Around 1985 I lived in Insein township, near the prison, and I was one of the original members of a group of writers in our locality. We called ourselves the “Insein Group.” We met regularly in teahouses, and soon became known as a group. At first there were about ten or twelve of us, but it grew to about twenty or thirty people. Our regular discussion meetings happened regularly for three or four years. We mainly talked about literature, but also about politics. We would share our work and ask for comments. One person moved to Mandalay and a similar group got going there. We all felt that such discussion groups were important for the promotion of literature and for writers. Actually, when I first started writing seriously I wanted to write nonfiction even more than fiction. But my nonfiction articles and books were not as well accepted as my fiction in the mid-1980s. At that time stories were more popular. I think this is probably because of all the censorship restrictions; nonfiction writers could not write their ideas openly, on issues that were most likely to stimulate readers’ interest. We were only able to write scientific or general interest articles, which did not have much appeal to the people. Fiction writers were better able to write stories that criticized the state of society and politicians, and people were more interested in reading that. I saw that a writer could become popular with even just one good piece of short story writing. So I thought, if I am to stand as a writer I must write some fiction. I started reading international writers intensively, like Chekov, Maupassant, Somerset Maugham, the American short story writer Brett Hart, Conrad, and several others. I read short stories for one or

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two years before starting to publish my own, so perhaps those writers influenced my style. I would say that all my stories have a hint of humor in them. I am not a comic writer as such, but I always like to include traces of humor, especially self-deprecating humor. One of my stories that was very well-liked by readers is about a bookworm, and perhaps I was criticizing myself there. I would say my general style is humorous satire. I like to write about social issues and problems, but there are some problems which cannot be dealt with too seriously in fiction, and which we cannot be one-sided about. A short story about a serious issue cannot be written by setting out the pros and cons and ending up with a conclusion like in a nonfiction article. You have to focus on one point to grab the attention of the reader, and I feel I have to dilute the seriousness of the issues I write about using humor, particularly issues that interest me, where there is not necessarily a right or wrong. One of my favorite stories is about selling body organs—again, a topic connected to my previous life as a medical doctor. I had been reading about organ transplants and medical technology, so I wrote my story based on the idea that, with the progress of technology, especially transplant technology, there will emerge a market for selling body parts, and those sellers are likely to be the most impoverished people, who will then become the storehouses of spare parts for rich people. I think this is quite a dismal topic, too much so to write about seriously, so I wrote it as a humorous satire. My collection won the National Literature Award in 1995, and this story won the Southeast Asian Writers Award.7 Another story I wrote which most of the readers said they liked is about being a writer. I was a medical doctor and switched my profession to full-time writing. From the viewpoint of livelihood this was a wrong decision for most people in this country. So I decided to write a story about myself—or those people who decide to become writers when they could be other things. In that story also I tried to put in some humorous words and scenes, and the writing is dryly comic or ironic in style. It is about a man who is sitting in his study late at night trying to write but finds he can’t put words on paper. The story doesn’t come. He has an imaginary debate in his mind with his wife, who had allowed him to become a writer, or to try to become

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a writer. His wife never really said such critical things to him, but he knew very well what she really thought. In the middle of the night his wife wakes up and asks why he hasn’t come to bed yet. The title is “The Slave of Letters.” My stories have always been in a realist style, even when they are satirical in nature. By the late 1980s I felt I had mastered this style and I didn’t want to try the modernist and postmodern styles that were around at that time. I don’t enjoy reading postmodern fiction much. I would not call myself a stylist as such, though readers tell me they like my use of language. I wanted to write about topics and issues rather than experimenting with the writing itself—my focus was on content rather than form. This was true of many other writers in the mid-1980s and 1990s in Myanmar, many of whom knew less about modern and postmodern developments. But most of them were writing in a more poignant kind of realist style about the struggles of the poor in our country. Some of us used to say that those writers were competing to prove whose characters could experience more poverty and struggle than the others. I didn’t engage in that. I was different. For example, I would include humorous remarks in my stories, and at the same time I would include critical remarks about the social status of the people. For example, one story I wrote was about AIDS. At that time AIDS was a big problem and several people were writing about it. In fact, tuberculosis and malaria were much more serious diseases— many more people were dying of these than AIDS at the time and still are, but people were not talking about tuberculosis any more because it was an old disease. I wrote a short story in which I included some imaginary monologues by a man who was feverish and delirious with tuberculosis. His wife has died of TB, he contracted it from her, and his son has also contracted it and is going to die next. In his delirious monologue, he argues about whether it would be better to die of AIDS or TB, and whether he would have more social status if he were now dying of AIDS. He looks at a very small blurred picture of a movie star in an advertisement and he thinks she has come to see him to talk about AIDS. I included some serious discussion about the present government policy on the two diseases, some humorous sections, some reflection. Some people thought it

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was written in a postmodern or magic realist style, but I don’t think so—I meant it to be a realistic story about somebody in delirium. One of the “competing” realist writers whose stories were always about the struggles of the working poor was Moe Moe (Inya). She was writing in the 1970s and 1980s, and she was very popular—her stories are still read by many people. Many other writers tried to copy her style or at least to choose the same themes and issues to write about. For instance, a famous Myanmar woman writer, Nu Nu Yee (Inwa), became known in the literary circles after she wrote a short story depicting the poor life of a young girl from a poor fishing family who lived by the Irawaddy river. The girl tried to catch a fish but couldn’t catch any that day, but she saw a big fish in the net of another fisherman who had left his net temporarily unattended. She stole the fish, and in trying to steal the fish she lost her sarong—her only clothing—in the water. She had to run all the way back to her house naked. Nu Nu Yee became famous overnight with that story, and continued to write many stories about poor people. Others followed her, all through the 1980s and 1990s, and even now. I personally never experienced being advised to write in a realist or socialist style, though I know other writers were, when they sent stories in to magazines. This leftist approach to fiction has its origins around 1940. There was a book club in Myanmar then called the Red Dragon Book Club, which was based on the ideas of the Left Book Club in London, founded in prewar London to educate the left about politics and fascism, and the Red Dragon Book Club became very popular. Those who organized it were young, left-wing writers and politicians including U Nu, the late prime minister of this country and Thakin Than Tun, chairman of the Communist Party of Myanmar. The club published nearly one hundred books, mostly translations of political theories, left-wing books, and biographies of leftist political revolutionaries like Michael Collins. It had a huge influence on young people in Myanmar before World War II, spreading and ingraining left-wing ideas. It only lasted four or five years though, before the Japanese occupation. After that, when U Nu became prime minister, he started a translation society, which translated a lot of literature. By that time he was no longer a left-wing socialist but a

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democrat; but many writers remained socialists, to a varying degree of severity, and many continued to write based on that ideology. After the war, toward 1962 when Ne Win took power, ostensibly as a socialist regime rather than a military regime, writers threw themselves into socialist realism. Ne Win fostered this: his Burma Socialist Programme Party encouraged the development of leftwing ideas in literature, publishing, and promoting thinkers such as Gorky. Mao’s policy speech on literature became a bible for some writers. This lasted until 1988, when the uprisings happened, and around the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when communism became unpopular. There was a degree of change amongst writers earlier around 1985, which manifested itself in the form of modernism and postmodernism, mostly poems and short stories rather than novels. Some literary magazines experimented with form then, publishing poems that were a little more modern and diverse. In the later 1980s there were some debates among writers about modernism and postmodernism that were predominant elsewhere in the world, but the writings and the debates were not well-matched by the practice. Published short stories were rarely modern in the sense of form or technique. They continued to criticize the government in symbolic ways. Modernist, stream-of-consciousness style, like that of Joyce and Woolf, came into fashion here for a little while in the 1980s, but it never really took hold. Perhaps the most influential international figure for literary change in Myanmar in the late 1980s was Gabriel García Márquez. After his work was translated here, writers began to investigate magic realism, to write about it and to experiment with the form. However, while some would say they were writing magic realism, they may not actually have been writing like Márquez! Many of them were still using simple allegories to tell similar stories as before. In 1988 I was a founding editor of a literary journal, which I named accordingly: The Literary Journal. A publisher and a poet worked on it with me. I tried to include in the journal not only literature, literary theory, international writers and ideas but also some political ideas, through articles on books related to politics. For instance, I wrote an article on Henry David Thoreau’s Civil

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Disobedience. In that book, Thoreau argues that individuals should not permit governments to take over their individual consciences, and that they have a duty to think for themselves and not to enable the government to make them agents of injustice and oppression. My underlying objective was to introduce those political ideas into our national culture. But our journal’s timing was interesting. Our first edition appeared in August of 1988, just the time of the student uprisings—only a week or two before. As writers we are all involved in politics to a greater or lesser degree. Several writers in my journal have since become politicians, most of them in the NLD party. The majority went to jail, and some have died. For example, Win Tin from NLD was one of the writers, before he went into politics. Personally, I decided to remain as a writer. I did not get into party politics, and I still do not. Still, using our journal, we pushed the boundaries of censorship as far as we could. For example, with our first edition, we went to the censor office with a draft copy, before we submitted it to them. Two censorship officers looked at it, the senior officer and the checker. The senior officer told the checker that you have to scratch out this part and allow that part, and several articles were removed. The final product was very different to that which we had submitted. There were many more times when we submitted material and they edited things they did not like. We began to get more and more warning signs. One sign was delay. We were unable to publish monthly as we wished to, and sometimes had to wait two or three months before we could publish the next edition. So we became very careful about our drafts. Several times I was made to sign a letter to say that I know what I have written is not compliant with the law and I know that it will lead to serious consequences. That was concerning, but I was never imprisoned. I never went that far. Poems were the most likely kinds of work to be edited. Poets used symbols and metaphors much more than other writers—most of them were trying to write about the political situation in an indirect way. But the censors were alert to that, and they would try to interpret the poems in far more various ways than the readers would do, and would often ban or edit poems even if the poet hadn’t meant to suggest anything beyond the literal meaning of the words. They

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were about the poems. But sometimes the censors allowed poems or stories through, even if they knew these were intended to criticize the government, provided that they thought the material would be too difficult for a reader to understand. I continued to write short stories. I mostly used my own name when I published them, not a pen name. I used another pen name for translation and some articles, not to conceal my name but just as a different name to associate with a different genre. Back when I translated Western stories, I used the pen name Zaw Nyein. It has no particular meaning for me, but I felt it was just a little different from other writers’ names. It is difficult for us to choose names in Myanmar. Many people’s names are traditional. Pen names are used by so many writers here. This is perhaps a matter of tradition alone. Writers have used pen names since the beginning of Myanmar’s modern writing history in the early twentieth century. It is not linked to censorship; it is just about an artistic persona, like the name of a movie star. A very famous writer in the early twentieth century for instance was Shwe U Daung, meaning “Gold Peacock.” His real name was U Pe Thein, but he always used this pen name as a writer and journalist. Many writers like to use as part of their pen name the place they come from, or another place meaningful to them. For instance, Dagon Taya’s real name is Htay Myaing, but Dagon, meaning Yangon, is the name of the magazine he published in. There was a decade when I was very productive in writing short stories. I wrote about sixteen or seventeen stories from 1985 to 1995. But after that my fiction writing slowed down. I felt by that time that I knew how to write short stories, and I was confident—but I also felt I was somehow contriving—that I was making up a story out of something. I always wanted to write about issues, about topics, to inform readers, our people, and to talk about my views. By then I felt I did not always want to pack my ideas in a story. I wanted to write something direct. Perhaps as a short story writer I had reached the peak of my creativeness. Anyway, in 1995 I went to Bangkok to study journalism. By this time I had already become an established, full-time writer and journalist. I was 48 years old. But journalism was not studied by Myanmar writers at the time, and I decided I wanted to learn it academically.

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That was not my only reason though: I was also just keen to leave the country for a while, to go out and meet with the international community of letters. The connections in Thailand helped, and I was later invited to Iowa in 1998 to participate in their International Writing Program. Again, I went there to get out of the country for a bit. At that time it was not easy for any of us to leave Myanmar to visit the United States, or even Thailand. They made it very difficult for people to get a passport, never mind a visa, particularly writers. So whenever we got a chance, we took it. Exposure to international experiences was quite important for me, in that it enabled me to visualize and meet with people, but in fact most of the ideas I had already encountered through reading here in Myanmar. As an avid reader I had read American magazines for decades, so I knew what was going on there. I had been a regular subscriber to both Time and Newsweek since 1979–80, and the Reader’s Digest too, which was very popular in those days. I have a collection still; I have collected about 600 old copies, some as old as 1937, and I frequent old bookstores to collect more. That’s why I think I had more knowledge of Western culture and practices than others did. When I came back from abroad, I set up my news journal The People’s Era. I also set up a publishing house, called Sarpaylawka, meaning “Burma Treasure,” which was run by a friend. It used to publish both my work and other people’s work, but now I mainly use it to publish my own books only. My wife runs it now. Print publishing is still central to Myanmar book culture. There are no e-books here. And not many people are using online publishing yet. The internet is changing things to some degree. Many middle-aged and older people still don’t have internet access, but younger writers are certainly using the internet. Nowadays, I think many people are fed up with the same old political ideology manifesting itself in literature, together with clichés and old forms. A few writers have embraced modern and postmodern forms, but those writers are not all that influential for the general public. Many writers complain that literature has been in decline over the last few decades. And since transition, people now have even less interest in literature and creative writing. They are more

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interested in reading nonfiction, political writing, because politics has opened up and such writing is now possible. I think this is a phase that will pass in time. While political writing has opened up and become popular, there is still self-censorship in writing, especially in journalism. Perhaps we still take care not to offend some people in power. And where events are particularly sensitive, for instance the ethnic conflicts in states such as Rakhine, we still take care not to incite hatred or to side with one party or another. As to the extent of self-censorship in fiction at the moment, I don’t really know. I am not writing fiction at the moment. The last short story I published was three years ago. Instead, as well as editing my news journal, I write literary articles about things like storytelling techniques and aspects of good practice. In time I would like to speak more freely than I do, in both my fiction and nonfiction. I spend a lot of my spare time giving literary talks to the public. I talk about books, reading, how to read, the influence of books on people, and self-improvement through reading. More recently my talks have become less literary and more political; I tend to talk about journalism and the importance of freedom of expression for a democratic society. I am a member of the Press Council and am currently working hard to ensure that this becomes a reality, so it is at the forefront of my mind right now. As yet there is no culture of performed short story reading here, not like there is for poems. I think it is easier to read poems aloud. And also there are more poets around than short story writers. This does not mean the poetry that gets performed in Myanmar is good! We have a word, a “poetester,” for someone who wants to be a poet and tries to imitate good poets but actually writes bad poems and yet wants to recite them to the public! I once wrote an article about poetry reading and story reading. It was a kind of history of reading. I wrote about readings in ancient Greece and Rome, where houses were built for the rich with special rooms for poetry recitation, and the history of poetry reading. Then, at the time of Voltaire and Rousseau, they had literary salons. That’s why I was interested when I was invited to the book slam recently, organized by a British writer who was visiting Yangon. I would be interested in reading my stories

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aloud if such a culture existed. I would like to introduce that kind of culture here. I’ve been talking with my friends about organizing a workshop to promote Myanmar literature. We all feel that our literature has been weakened and become malnourished through years of censorship, and we need to try to rehabilitate and reinvigorate our writers in several ways. We need to promote cultures like short story reading, workshops, and translation. Before the military regime set in, there were several intellectual societies to promote literature and ideas and thought—for example, the Burma Research Society, which was founded in 1910. There was also a society to enrich and promote Myanmar literature, and a translation society. They all became well known and respected. Back then, Myanmar writers and journalists thought a lot about promoting our literature around the world, and making sure that our people knew about the world and vice versa, so there was a lot of translation of literature, and publication of articles about writing. But these societies were suppressed by Ne Win in the 1960s and then totally abolished around 1975. We are thinking about renewing them now. But despite the changes in this period of transition, to organize such a workshop is still difficult under the current government. It is classed as an assembly, so we have to apply for a permit at least a month in advance or it would be illegal. If we get a permit, we plan to talk about literature, book culture and the book business in general, and the decrease in the quality of Myanmar writers in both fiction and nonfiction, and also about language. Young people are becoming decreasingly efficient in writing, speaking, and pronouncing language. We want to discuss what measures to take about all of these things. So another thing we want to organize is a think tank to focus on Myanmar politics and journalism. I want to make intellectuals and people interested in Myanmar know more about it. The details are still to be discussed. But I want to get our people better-connected among ourselves, so they are regularly sharing ideas and discussing, but at the same time to be making contact with international organizations and experts so we can learn from them. There is a lot to do.

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Old man on balcony in crumbling colonial building

Human Parts for Human Use Maybe it was maternal instinct, or maybe it was just the nature of her body, but my wife started to say more and more often that she would like to have a baby; that she wanted to hold a baby; that she wanted to breastfeed a baby. Surely she had enough on her plate. She was busy all the time doing household chores, urging our children to study, and scolding them for

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all the things she wasn’t satisfied with. Still, whenever she had an idle moment she talked about wanting another child. But when I said to her: “Well, if you want another baby so much, then let’s have one,” she wouldn’t agree. I know she didn’t dare. She was afraid, but didn’t want to admit it. She said that while she wanted another child, when she actually faced the prospect she felt disheartened by the thought of caring for it and bringing it up. I know that isn’t what frightened her. What she was really afraid of was pregnancy. Her fear was not without cause. My wife was not like most other women when she was with child. She would retch and vomit, and she couldn’t eat or swallow a thing, from the early days of conception until the final week. She developed a history of delivery by Caesarean, and she was worried about having a surgical operation again, and the attendant dangers caused by injections. Lately there had been too many stories of accidental infection with HIV. That’s why, when I mentioned the word “surrogacy” which I’d read in a magazine, she sat up sharply and said: “Read me that. Read me the whole thing.” So I read: “A woman who couldn’t get pregnant because of having her uterus removed due to a disease went to a doctor with her husband. The doctor was a specialist in extra-uterine fertilization. He took out an egg from the woman and fertilized it with the sperm of the man, creating a test-tube fetus which he placed in the uterus of another woman. The fetus grew inside that woman, nourished with her flesh and blood, and at full term the woman gave birth. The child was taken away by the genetic father and mother, and the surrogate mother was paid for her labors.” My wife smiled. “Amazing. She found a way out! It would be great if this could be done in Myanmar.” “Don’t even think about it. That woman had to pay ten thousand dollars to the woman who hired out her uterus. Calculate that in Myanmar kyats. I can’t even imagine how much they would charge for the doctor and hospital services. “ “Oh, it would not cost that much here,” she said. “I am going to start buying lottery tickets this month. By the time I win, maybe this procedure will be available in our country.” With that, she went to bed.

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By the time I had finished reading the magazine she was asleep, making strange, contented sounds. Perhaps she was dreaming of giving birth to a child through a surrogate. A man is driving me home. He may be a servant or a rich man’s chauffeur. Along the way I can see skyscrapers, elevated roads, and gated compounds of the rich. Then we pass through the outskirts of the city and cross a hot, barren plain beyond which is a huge mound of city waste. Hidden behind that rubbish mountain is a settlement which spreads out far and wide. It seems to be as large as a town, but there are no big houses or concrete structures there, or even well-constructed wooden buildings. Only small huts, mostly with bare ground as flooring, and roofs and walls made up of discarded materials. The car stops and the driver says: “We’re here. This is where you live.” I get out of the car. He turns back and drives away. I look at the place, bewildered. I recall what the man said. This is where I live! So what am I? Which country is this? Which part of the world? Is this possible? I walk on, distressed and confused. But before long I begin to remember things. Yes, this house in front of me is mine. The building looks a bit like an old shed, but somehow I know for sure that it is my house. When I get into the house I find her. A woman. She happens to be my wife. She is dark-skinned, scrawny and sickly. How did I get to be with her? I say to myself. She is sitting quietly on a low small bedstead wearing a long face. I feel sure it is not unusual for my wife to look cheerless. But today her cheerlessness seems a little deeper. I don’t bother to ask her why, because she might not tell me anything even if I asked, and I know we would only quarrel. So I just go to sit beside my son who is lying in bed, unwell. My wife gives me a miserable look and stands up. She is heavily pregnant. Although it is only seven months her belly is enormous. She always gets a relatively large belly compared to other women when pregnant. This pregnancy is nothing to do with me. In fact, she has already been pregnant seventeen times, and only two of the babies were mine. The rest of the time she was hiring out her womb to other women.

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I can’t figure out how we’ve got ourselves into such a way of life. But that’s what it’s become. My wife has worked as a surrogate since we married twenty years ago, carrying without interruption other people’s children. In the beginning it was not so bad. The owners of my wife’s pregnancies usually paid close attention to the health of my wife so that she could nourish their fetuses to grow strong and healthy inside her body. As well as the fees for nine months of work they also gave her nutritious foods, vitamins, and other gifts so that she could have good thoughts and pleasant sensations while bearing their children. Those were happy days. We were helping others, and they provided for us well. The choice items of food and fruits they gave my wife were far more than enough for her, and I too got to have my fill. At that time, women who hired others’ wombs for their fetuses did so with maternal love and compassion. They would only seek the help of surrogates if their health demanded it. Later, it became the vogue for women who wanted to have children without damaging their smooth and firm belly; those who were scared of labor pains; those who didn’t want to carry around a baby for nine months; and those who were filthy rich. A large number of women rolling in money live in the city. They started coming to our area to hire surrogates like my wife, the number of whom increased gradually. After a while it seemed as if all the wives in our quarter were bearing the babies of those city women. Before long the surrogates, including my wife, got into the hands of agents. They were asked to sign binding contracts which they didn’t understand. After a few successes, things started to go wrong. My wife had two miscarriages. Both times she was sued for negligence by the mothers, who claimed that she failed to follow the instructions of doctors from agency clinics. The judges imposed heavy fines, and my wife had to take four more pregnancies to pay for them. And so, here we are. How can we escape from this vicious circle? My wife comes and sits near me. Her face is strange. Whenever she looks at me with this expression the words that come out of her mouth are bound to be frightening. I try to keep calm and turn my face to the other side as if I had not noticed that she wanted to speak. This means I have to look again at my poor, sick son.

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As I have told you, we have had only two chances to bring forth our own flesh and blood during all these years of marriage. Out of those two children, we are left with this only son to show for our efforts. Of course, we used our son to get money. We had no choice. One of his kidneys was sold last year. We got a good price for it. It was sold to a rich man’s son, of our son’s age, who had a kidney disease. We didn’t find out how the rich boy fared after the operation, but our son has been unwell ever since. Now his face is puffy and his whole body bloated. He didn’t blame us at the time. He was willing to sell his kidney. It was sold so that we could provide three or four years of school fees for him. We hoped that with education he could escape this downtrodden life; and everyone advised us that removing one kidney would make no difference to his body. We discovered there were a lot of people with only one kidney, young and old, living in our quarter, and we hadn’t heard any complaints from them. In fact, it was extremely difficult to find someone in our neighborhood who had all their body parts intact. We seemed to have been born to serve as spare parts for the rich people in the city. Some people had sold out almost everything that was saleable. I myself am no different. Just look at me. A plastic eyeball takes the place of my left eye so that no deep hole is visible. A lobe was taken off my right lung. I too have only one kidney. I sold part of my liver once. I can’t even remember how many times I have sold my blood or my bone marrow. We are eating our own flesh. My wife says: “Listen.” I can’t avoid facing her. “I don’t want to tell you this. I really don’t. I’m sorry. It may sound cruel. But we have to do something for our son without delay.” She is right. In fact, when we arranged to sell our son’s kidney, the doctors at the hospital should have examined it carefully. If we had known that the remaining kidney would not be very healthy, we would never have sold it. What’s more, it would have been against the law. Surely. But now that we are desperately in need of money we both know we will have to deal with those people again. Our son’s illness is unlikely to be cured by simple means. It will require a kidney transplant, an

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extremely expensive procedure. And then there is the cost of the kidney itself. I sigh, deeply. My wife looks sadder than ever, but continues to say what she has to. Circumstances have made her thick-skinned. “An agent from the hospital came home this morning and said that a girl wanted to change into a boy through transplant surgery. The laboratory matched her tissue with the samples they have kept and found that yours—your part—would be the best for her. Just by reading what was mentioned in the computer records she liked it a lot and she has offered the best possible price without even seeing it. The agent said that the money would not only cover all the expenses, but we may still have some more left to rebuild our house. He guaranteed it. He also said they wanted to close the deal quickly because the buyer is not a stable type and could change her mind easily. So he asked us to reply tomorrow and if we agree they will pay the money within this week and take—the thing—on the day of payment.’ I feel cold and clammy. She is saying these things in such a serene and steady manner. Does she no longer know what is important and what to value? Furious, I stand up and bump against the beam of my roof . . . It was not the beam, but the edge of our bedside table. I must have rolled off. Oh God, I was dreaming. I was much relieved at this realization, but my heart went on throbbing, and I felt a pain in my head. I wiped the sweat from my face and switched on the light. My wife was sleeping soundly beside me. My wife, my genuine wife. She is nothing like the one in my dream. While I was sweating and stressing, she was asleep, and she remains so, utterly peaceful, revealing to me now all her natural beauty. With a trace of smile on her face, she looks as if she may be dreaming of meeting a deity, whom she is asking for a baby son. My heart still palpitating, I drained a glass of water, switched off the light, and forced myself to sleep counting one, two, three, four, . . . . . . one hundred and thirty-four, . . . . . . one thousand two hundred and thirty four . . . . . . 

R

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This story was first published by Sarpaylawka (“The Literary World”) in 1994, and later by Pe Myint’s family’s publishing house (Myanmar Yadanar) run by his wife, Daw Khaing Nwe Oo. Pe Myint’s short stories are widely admired in Myanmar. They largely fall into the realist vein of prose fiction that was popular at the time he wrote them in the 1980s and 1990s. This S.E.A. Writers Award–winning short story is one of Pe Myint’s personal favorites and was extremely well-received in Myanmar, though this required some drawing-out as the author is extremely modest and self-deprecating about his writing. It reflects typical aspects of Pe Myint’s fiction during the censorship years. His tone combines gentle irony and dry wit with surgical precision and a lack of sentimentality, while making the story human and engaging. Like his other stories, this one is not directly political.As a qualified doctor, Pe Myint often uses medical themes in his writing, and this story exemplifies that, probing into the moral, ethical, and emotional quandaries surrounding the topic of black market human-organ trading with acuity and a lightness of touch. On its face, it is the story of a marital relationship set against the backdrop of an imagined growth in human-organ trading in Myanmar. It is written in a realist style, but uses a dream device to push gently toward science fiction, and to create the final plot twist. It is not a conventionally “socialist realist” story, in that its protagonists are middle class. However, the author intended to point toward social inequality, by exploring the idea that, in the context of a growing black market, sellers of their own organs are likely to be the most impoverished people in society and will eventually, as he described it, lose their sense of self along with their physical parts to “become the storehouses of spare parts for rich people.” Indeed, through the subtle way that this story engages with ideas of social inequality, and points to the tendency of the powerful to treat people beneath them as if they were mere physical objects, it can be read allegorically as alluding to the hardship of life under the regime, particularly for the least well off, and by exploring the way that poverty and inhuman treatment causes people’s belief in themselves to be gradually undermined. But by avoiding heavy-handed or obvious allegory, and by incorporating irony and humor into the darkness of this story, Pe Myint creates an engaging central character and an involving narrative that entertains and works on its own terms.

3 Writers The Middle Generation These books  .  .  . [make] men’s minds to be at variance one with another, and diversity of minds maketh seditions, seditions bring in tumults, tumults make insurrections and rebellions, insurrections make depopulations and bring in utter ruin and destruction of men’s bodies, goods and lands. —Sir Nicholas Bacon (1567)1

T

he middle generation of Myanmar writers (aged 40 to 60) also suffered under the repressive censorship regime, when they too were subject to severe restrictions on their work as well as their lifestyles for more than a decade. But for them the challenge to become good writers was in some ways greater than that faced by the older generation in the sense that, at least until now, they had never known life outside the regime. The strictures of repressive censorship, and their lives, reading material, and access to ideas from the outside world were restricted accordingly. It is perhaps unsurprising that many of the best-known and most innovative writers in Myanmar from this generation are those who were fortunate enough to travel and live abroad. Of the three writers featured here, two of them, journalist and writer Ma Thida (who has used the pen name Suragmika) and poet Zeyar Lynn (pen name for Myint Aung), have had extensive contact with the outside world and have lived in other countries for long periods. One of them, Ye Shan, is entirely “homegrown,” though he had unusual access to books through the shop in his father’s railway station.

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Ye Shan demonstrating the points system

Ye Shan Short Story Writer, Railway Superintendent The superintendent of Yangon Railway Station beams with pure glee as he demonstrates the workings of the 1914 points system (installed by the British colonial government) while I click away on my camera. We are in the middle of my own personal tour of his domain. The office we are in doesn’t seem to have changed much either; the clock is vintage, the tables and chairs are vintage, and there is nothing computerized in sight. He takes me through to a tiny balcony outside which affords a view down to the platforms and tracks, where tiny clusters of people are waiting and children are frolicking, beyond the station in either direction so you can watch the trains come and go, and gaze far out over the rooftops of downtown. Trains have rumbled and chugged

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steadily (no train in Myanmar moves in any other way) through Ye Shan’s entire life, from his childhood as a squatter in a remote rural station where his father was a clerk, to his adulthood in his role as both station superintendent and a well-known writer. Unlike his peers in this chapter, literary success has come to Ye Shan not from pushing at conceptual boundaries or experimenting with form. It has come from producing short stories that epitomize the popular socialist realist form in Myanmar in the censorship years by depicting the lives of the suffering poor in a moving and evocative way, and by setting almost all of them in and around train stations. Because of his life experience, Ye Shan is able to describe the scenes and the minute details of the daily lives of all kinds of workers and people connected with the railway in vivid prose. There is also something about the railway that represents Burmese life over the fifty years of censorship and which must have pulled a collective heartstring among readers: there has been no progress and modernization of the railway by the government, hence the points system and everything else remains unchanged since the colonial era, trapped in a time warp; all kinds of people use the train system and are collectively confined by its age-old customs and the domination of the few terror-inspiring inspectors and managers at the top of the pile; and while trains pass regularly through the stations and on their way to new destinations, the poorly paid staff remain, hungry and struggling, exactly where they are. When I traveled around the north of the country on a train myself, I spent long days in horribly uncomfortable seats amongst rural farming folk with huge sacks of supplies and disgruntled soldiers in uniform, with chattering children and elderly ladies puffing at huge cigars, as we chugged pedestrianly through flat plains and up into dramatic forested hills. We stopped at tiny villages where passengers and supplies were offloaded and piled on, and before the train drew to a halt women would flock to the train windows to try to sell us cooked chicken legs or fried patties, and children would thrust fruit or water bottles through the window. This journey gave me a tangible sense of the multitude of lives that depend upon the railway and the consequent fertility of the subject for a writer. Ye Shan was awarded the National Literary Award for his second collection of short stories, all of which are set around the railway.

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Soldier on a train

This is an interesting accolade in itself, since many consider it to be an award that was given out solely to government apologist writers. While Ye Shan’s work apparently conformed to the approved socialist realist style and content, he confided that he always intended to criticize the government in subtle ways with his writing—sufficiently subtle that the censors would not realize what he was doing.

Ye Shan’s Story I was born in 1961, in a very poor community. I lived in Mandalay as a railway squatter. My father was a station clerk. Now I am the superintendent of Yangon Railway Station, but back then life was very different. We lived in a small station compound in a small town in Shan State. My parents had seven children—four girls and three boys. We were all educated, because at that time education was not

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very expensive. Every middle-class family could afford to send their children to school. My father trained us all to read when we were small. He loved books. There was a bookshop in the station. Because my father was a member of staff, we had permission to borrow the books and return them whenever we pleased, even though we were too poor to rent or buy. I read short stories, novels, and art books and poems. At Mandalay University I studied geology. I could not choose which subject I studied, or I would have chosen English literature. Every student was only able to take certain subjects according to their grades. We would apply for major subjects, giving our priorities. I wanted to go to university because the education was better, even though I knew I might get less money. From 1964 until now, unless you go to university, boys’ only option to get further education is to go to the military academy, and girls’ is to go to teacher training schools. As a boy, if you choose to go to the army, you can get a decent high-paid job by age 19—no university graduate can get that. After several years of military service, men can change quickly over to the civil service and get the same pay as graduates who have been working in the civil service for years. But military rules are given the highest priority in the military academy—the academic training is poor. I spent all my time at university reading literature. I read lots of books in the Razak library. U Razak was one of the fathers of independence together with Aung San, who was killed in a cabinet meeting2 by an assassin along with six other cabinet ministers, and the university built a library in honor of him. I read many writers who influenced me, but the best I think was Mya Than Tint, who died ten years ago. He translated many books including War and Peace and Gone with the Wind, and he received the National Literary Award four times. He’s more famous for his translations, but he wrote three or four original novels, Maya Bon (Tricky world) and Bah Tong Go kyaw Ywe, Mee Pinle Go Phyat Myee (Whatever hardship comes we can get through it, We can cross hills of swords or seas of fire)—also the title of a Chinese poem. I started writing poetry in my first year of university. I remember my first poem was about a flower. The flower was a political symbol. It was on the surface a flower, but underneath that the symbol meant

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that we, the people, were waiting for the bud of democracy to open and the flower of freedom to bloom. After that I started writing short stories. I tried to submit manuscripts to editors of magazines but they got turned down. In Myanmar at that time most magazines had literature in them, as well as many other kinds of articles. Each magazine would have ten poems, five or six short stories, a novelette, one or two essays, and lots of articles. It wasn’t until 1972 that about 179 journals, magazines, and weekly publications were banned, and fewer magazines were circulated. One magazine that was very popular from about 1985 until a couple of years ago is Mahethi (“Beautiful Lady”) magazine. It contained poems, short stories, literary articles, celebrity profiles, and essays. It was owned by one of Ne Win’s associates, Colonel Saw Myint. The owner passed away last year, but the magazine was losing influence anyway over the last four or five years. There are few magazines left now that focus on literature. When I graduated in 1981 there were no jobs for anybody. I did private tuition to make ends meet. I opened a small school where needy students in their teens could come to get training in English, chemistry, and math. I kept on writing. After some time, friends of mine thought my stories were getting better so they selected some to present to editors. My first published short story was in 1985 in Sabe Oo (“The First Jasmine”) magazine. The chief editor, Daw Khin Swe Oo, was the most famous writer in Myanmar at the time, and I was happy to be selected. My story was called “Lu Te Twe” (Newcomers). It was set in a Mandalay railway station. There were many workers there. Some worked with job contracts, but some were just laborers—people who travel around and work on an ad hoc basis. My main character is such a worker. He has to compete to get work and finds it difficult to make enough money. Another short story I published is “Nga Wun Pu Sa: Ma Nar Thar” (Because I am hungry). It’s about two Mandalay university students who are very poor so cannot afford to eat meat. They decide to steal a chicken from the university science lab in the zoological department, where it was being kept for dissection, and take it home. One

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of them gives it to his family for dinner. This story was a criticism of the price of chicken. I continued working while I was writing. After being a tutor for seven years, I decided to go into public service as a deputy stationmaster. I took promotion after promotion until I reached superintendent. My first collection of short stories, published in 1993, featured several stories set around stations. The title was Heartbreak Shunting. In this collection I established the style I now always write in, which is contemporary realism, and occasionally satire. My second collection, Small Station, was published in 2010, and it won the National Literary Award. It is made up of fourteen short stories, all of which are set around a railway station and about the lives of people engaged in associated labor. A few of the stories are about a stationmaster, and others are about a driver, an officer, a security guard, an electrician, an engineer, administrative staff, and passengers. All the stories first appeared in magazines, spanning altogether about twenty years. The story of mine that readers have liked the best is “Heartbreak Shunting,” the title story from my first collection. But I have a personal soft spot for the title story of the second collection, “Small Station.” It is about the life of a deputy stationmaster working in a station far away from any town, in a little village. There is no water in the village, so he has to get large water bottles from a big station in town because he is very poor. One day an express train comes through the station. The deputy stationmaster gives a flag signal to the driver, who then drops a packet of food onto the tracks as a present as the train goes through. The deputy stationmaster waits until the last coach goes past, and is about to go to pick up the food, but then a stray dog gets to the food first and runs away. The deputy stationmaster dashes over to the dog, throws a rock at it and threatens it, so the dog drops the packet of food. But it has already eaten half the food. All the same, the stationmaster eats the other half. This actually happened to me! That’s why I like the story. The National Literature Award has been going a long time. It was founded in 1955. The Burmese Translation Society, headed by Prime Minister U Nu, formed a literary body for Burma called

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Sarpay Beikman, which started to give out the award. Governing academics of that body chose a selection from the books published within one calendar year. Categories have included poems, novels, collected short stories, nonfiction, plays, and translations. But in some years the body only awarded two or less awards if there was not enough quality. In 1964, during Ne Win’s government, the award was transformed into the National Literary Award. They only made minor changes to the award, nothing major, but the main thing was that under Ne Win’s rule and subsequently, books were mostly written to gain political favor, and authors would only get rewarded if they were not writing anything against the political leaders. I got the National Literary Award for writing realistic stories about poor people. Actually I think my stories are secretly political. But they were never regarded as opposing the government. Some suggest that writers changed their writing style so that they could win the award, and that they don’t care about it, but I don’t think many writers did this. I certainly didn’t change my way of writing to try to win the award. I didn’t want to see my community poor, so I always wanted to write short stories about their lives. Now I have written about 150 short stories, thirty essays, and fifty works of literary criticism. Since 2010 I have written more essays than before. I have published four short story collections now. The third collection is called Clean Laughter and was published in 2011. These stories are about villages and markets in Shan State, where I am from, and some are again about railways workers. The title story is about the life of a stationmaster who is very strict towards the subordinate workers. One day some inspectors arrive at the station, and the workers are afraid of the officers. But in fact the officers don’t criticize any of them, and instead they go to the stationmaster’s office to criticize him. This makes the workers very happy, and they laugh. My fourth collection was published in 2012. It is called Stem and Bud and contains about twenty stories of many kinds. The title story is about all the homeless people who live around Yangon station where I work now. There are many such children, who have no parents and can’t go to school—so the idea of the story is that they

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are buds that can’t open. At this station I see many rich, international school children arriving because they study near here, and when they arrive I see the homeless children going away from the station so that the officers cannot see them. Once the international school children leave, the homeless children come back to the station. This moves me. The other stories are varied. One is about a station worker being posted to a distant station and getting homesick, one is about married life, one is about Yangon station in the early morning . . . one is even about small children playing computer games, and what the games symbolize about society. Another story that readers particularly liked is “The Bird with a Stolen Nest.” It’s about an old woman who has been abandoned by her own son and daughter-in-law. They put her in a small room and close the door, and people pretend not to notice. It’s about how the nests of old people these days are getting stolen by their own sons and daughters. I have had occasional difficulties with the censors in the past. For example, when my story “A Cup of Tea” was submitted to the censorship board as part of a magazine, they removed some of it. It is about a station clerk who drinks tea six times a day. After his retirement he cannot drink tea more than twice a day because he does not have enough money. After a while he cannot drink any tea. The censors removed the conclusion of the story; they did not like it to be publicized that pensioners cannot afford a cup of tea. They took out the last paragraph, which was the main paragraph of the whole story. Another story of mine, “The Ruler,” again about station workers, was removed completely from the magazine it was supposed to appear in. The workers in the story were very hungry. The stationmaster used to get a meal every day, and they would steal half the dish for themselves because they were not getting enough food. But one day the whole dish was stolen. The government could not accept the concept implicit in the story, that the country was starving. But this story was actually about the censorship board too. Over the last two years, as the government has been changing from a junta to a civilian government, they have been getting much softer about writing. They would not have liked some of my more recent stories criticizing higher ranking officers if those had been

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published in 2008, but I often write now about officers from a higher rank oppressing those from a lower rank. I still don’t make direct criticisms of people, but I do sometimes express generalized comments in my stories, like “the higher rank are always xyz”—and at such points I am in fact critiquing the government. Apart from making government criticism in my stories a bit stronger over the last year or so, I have not changed the way I write fiction very much during transition. I want to continue to write realistic stories, and I never want to write romances or pop fiction. But I am also writing many more political essays now, though alongside my stories—now that I have the chance to.

Heartbreak Shunting When he clambered down from the railway control cabin his heart was fluttering. He was so exhausted that he could barely breathe. It seemed as if all his strength had been swallowed up by the switch rod. He had attached the adjacent track to the main line so that the express train could pass through. He had interlocked the track. Finally, he had a moment for a smoke. Slouching back on the battered bench in the station, he drew a long lungful from his cheroot. He used to be able to shunt the trains easily with only his right hand, but these days he had to yank the rod with both hands. Even when he planted his feet firmly on the iron rail and pulled hard, the track would remain unchanged for several attempts. He had thought perhaps this was because the track-changing devices were not working properly, but now he had to admit to himself that his muscles were not what they once were. For a man his age, muscle wastage was not unusual. He was already of pensionable age, and in only three years his time would be up: he would have to be pensioned off. At least he was still in good enough health to have kept his job so far. But he could not afford to retire, not now, and not in three years’ time either. Not only would he lose his salary as a shunter, but he would also lose the extra money he made informally as a porter, carrying passengers’ things. Only with the income from both these jobs at the station were he and his family

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able to eat regular meals. After retirement, he would no longer have the right to work as a porter, and his pension would not be enough to feed his family. This scared him. What’s more, he knew that once he had left he would miss the work he loved. He doubted he was among those people who could easily cease the habits and patterns that had become ingrained after thirty years, and glide into a new phase of leisurely living. Even if he had no choice but to retire and take his pension, he thought he would probably keep on visiting the station. It wasn’t as if his work allowed him to live comfortably. He and his assistant took turns doing the night and day shifts, and the trains kept coming and going all the time. They had to concentrate hard, and often work at speed so that the trains could travel safely. Sometimes he felt so exhausted by the burden of the work that he worried his health was about to collapse. But never once did he cease to enjoy it. He had to shunt the train to stop onto platform 1, so that it could pass through without pause onto platform 2, and the other train could be coupled or uncoupled onto platform 3. He would rush to and fro with two flags—one red and the other green—and attach the rolling stock. While the stationmaster was selling tickets or writing freight receipts or sending a Morse code message or talking on the phone, he would be rushing about, exhausted, but often with a satisfied smile on his lips. Before he had smoked half of his cheroot, his conscience prompted him to look at the clock on the wall. The stationmaster was about to finish writing out some railway clearance information onto a piece of paper for the next train driver. He placed his cheroot carefully on the arm of the bench and stood up. He got a cane ring from the ticket seller and tied the sheet of paper onto it. When the train horn sounded in the distance, his assistant turned the semaphore arm to signal for it to pass. He took the cane ring and the paper, rushed outside the station, and jogged about 150 feet along the track before handing it to the train driver’s helper at just the right time. The train passed through the station, and bids it goodbye with a few loud blasts of its horn. He experienced the tiny sense of rejoicing he had always felt after performing one of his duties successfully, on time and with precision.

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Over the course of his long service, he had shunted and coupled tens of thousands of trains and given as many semaphore signals. Not one train had been late or deviated from its intended track as a consequence of any mistake he had made. Even the cane ring with the clearing sheet tied onto it never once slipped out of his hand. He was due to be off work in the day; he would be on night duty again later. This should have been his chance to take a rest. But just as he was about to go off for a nap, the head stationmaster called for all the station workers’ attention. All of them, including the assistant stationmaster, the shunters, the car gate man, and the sweeper, he ordered to stay on duty and be prepared. The inspector was coming! This meant he must go back home for a while to change his uniform and make it as neat as possible. Back at home, he decided to take a bath. Splashing himself with water, he recited the railway mottos silently to himself. He felt that these mottos and practices had become a part of him, that they had seeped into his flesh, his bones as well as his memory. He worried about one of his fellow shunters who was rebellious. If that young man did not answer and behave better soon, his performance would start infecting the others. It dawned on him that he should teach the boy to recite the railway mottos by heart, like he did, to try to get his mind focused in the right place. Back at the station, everyone including the head stationmaster was dressed neatly in uniform and ready. The sweeper had swept both the inside and outside of the station so thoroughly that not one piece of litter could be found. Puffing on his cheroot excitedly, he listened out for the Morse code that was due to signal a request for the right of way. To the other shunters, Maung Hla Maw, Aung San Tun, Htay Aung, and Ko Tin Maung, he read aloud the ten objectives of the railway: increasing income, decreasing expenditure, making trains run on time, paying attention to the staff rights, health, and happiness . . . Once he had finished, he recited them again to himself. He was certain he could perform well today. He needed to keep calm. But his heart was beating fast.

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This was not his first experience of inspection. He had experienced such things three or four times. Why was he so nervous now? Surely he would pass easily. He looked at Maung Tun Yee and Maung Kyaw Win. Maung Tun Yee was grinning as hard as a betel nut, which made him look uneasy. Maung Kyaw Win was looking at his watch now and then, restless. Ko Tin Maung, Aung San Tun, and Htay Aung were sitting motionless at the corner of the ticket table. He wanted to reassure them all, but found he could say nothing. He trembled as the Morse code sounded. His heartbeat was now echoing in his eardrums, and his head felt as if it was vibrating. He heard the head stationmaster send a message back in Morse code and pick up the telephone. He got up, and with a sweaty palm smoothed his trousers, which had started to crease. “Don’t go anywhere. Please speak politely as I have said.” Even the voice of the head stationmaster sounded cracked and dry with nerves. Maung Tun Yee climbed into the cabin, and got ready to turn the rod for the semaphore signal. Aung San Tun, who never closed the junction gate until he heard the sound of siren of the train, rushed out. What will happen to us? He felt another wave of anxiety, which infuriated him. Damn it. It is not as if we are sheep lined up for the slaughter. After telling himself this he felt a little calmer. They all stood stiffly in line with their hands behind their backs. A man dressed in a pale orange sports shirt strode in. He gave everybody a long look and then left the station, nodding. A man no older than his son came in. He was dressed in a white short-sleeved shirt with a name badge sewed onto it, and was not smiling at all. Maybe he never smiled. “Request for right of way,” his voice seemed to roar. The assistant stationmaster turned at once to move the machine table, and delivered a message in Morse code. “Alright, stop now. Imagine the train released from the other side has come in, without pausing. What will you do next?” “I will signal with a green flag and let it go,” replied the assistant stationmaster. “What! Tell me your training-course number.”

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He could not imagine how the assistant stationmaster felt at being scolded by this man in such a voice. He felt as if he had just been pierced by an arrow on the assistant stationmaster’s behalf. “Er . . . Did I make a mistake?” “Shut up. You will be sent on a refresher course.” Watching the assistant stationmaster’s face fall, he swallowed. The man in the white shirt turned his gaze away from the assistant stationmaster and walked slowly across to the shunters, first to Maung Hla Maw, then Maung Tun Yee, and then to him. When the glaring eyes landed upon him, he cast his eyes down. He had goose bumps on his forearm, his knees were trembling and they nearly buckled. He bit his lower lip hard to steel himself, but he couldn’t stop shaking. “Come, step forwards.” He stepped the left leg forward first and then the right leg, and stood stiffly, all the time muttering the words of the Buddha in his mind. “So, if the railway in the station is clear and the other station lets the train go, what will you do?” This made him smile. To him this was a child’s question. Trying to control his tone, he answered: “As soon as I receive permission from the head stationmaster, I will change the track and interlock it. Then I will report everything to the head stationmaster.” “Is that all?” His brain whirred frantically as he tried to figure out whether he should add anything. But he was pretty sure that was the most succinct answer. “That’s all.” “But if you change the track as soon as you get permission from the head stationmaster, that doesn’t leave you time to go outside the station and get into the cabin first, does it? Are you somehow able to change the track from inside the station?” He felt his face grow pale. He must give an explanation. “You didn’t order me to carry it out, just to explain . . .” But the man stopped him with a wave of the hand. “How many years’ service do you have?” he demanded. “A total of thirty years, sir.” “So you are of pensionable age.”

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The utterance of the word pensionable out loud was nearly enough to make him collapse. He felt a prickly sensation in his chest and hot tears welled. The man left the station, and all the staff lined up in order. A little later he reentered with the man in the orange sports shirt. “You all must work hard,” the orange man told them. “It would be extremely regrettable if innocent passengers were killed by your negligence. This is your last warning.” The man gave a quick look at the others’ name plates and ranks, before focusing upon him. Under the man’s gaze and his frown, he felt his heart race faster than ever before. With its new cargo, a sack of onions and a sack of chillies, the train left the station without sounding its horn, and without saying goodbye. It was as if the station were no more to the train than a tree among many on its route. When the train was out of sight, the head stationmaster, assistant stationmaster, and other staff laughed about their experience. But he remained distressed. Why did he ask my years of service? Am I going to be pensioned early? No. No. Nothing bad will happen to me. Even the assistant stationmaster is laughing. But no . . . he stared at me for so long. He must have noted my name in his mind. It was a very small station in a very small town. An old shunter was sitting on a bench and smoking his favorite cheroot. He sat there, still, just gazing at the trains passing through, to and fro. Occasionally he shouted out things like: “Hey, Tun Yee, get onto the cabin and interlock. Kyaw Win, give the semaphore signal. Aung San Tun, rush to the gate . . .” This old railway worker had been pensioned off when his mental health collapsed during an inspection. Do not be surprised.

R

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This story is the title story from Ye Shan’s prizewinning collection. It is typical of his work: it is in written the socialist realist style, illustrating the noble suffering of a poor worker; it is set in a railway station; and it is poignant, vivid, and immediate. However, while his adherence to socialist realism won Ye Shan government approval, he is clear that the relationship between the protagonist and the inspector in this story, as in his other stories, represents a veiled critique of the authorities that he managed to get past the censors. In the case of this story, he did it by showing how the military authorities bullied and patronized ordinary working people like his protagonist, the train shunter; and by painting a picture of the effects of the deep economic decline the country was experiencing, which meant that vulnerable people who had worked hard all their lives, like this train shunter, were rewarded less and less, and faced entering into old age physically broken and in poverty, with no hope.

Ma Thida Short Story Writer, Novelist, Journalist, Editor, Political Activist Ma Thida embodies self-determination. As well as being a fiction writer she is a qualified surgeon who continues to practice operating one day a week on a voluntary basis, while for the other six days she coedits not only the Independent News Journal but also two literary magazines, and regularly works late into the night. In between all that she delivers regular talks and writes articles. She has a political past, and survived a harrowing ordeal as a political prisoner after her activity as a prominent youth member of the National League for Democracy (NLD). While locked up she suffered critical ill health without medical treatment, at one point having a high fever for six consecutive months and suffering acute liver failure. She only stayed sane and alive during that time, she believes, by practicing Vipassana meditation. We met in a small room in the Independent News Journal office, which is on the sixth floor of a building on a main street in central Yangon, near the Sule Pagoda. Ma Thida spoke quickly, abruptly, concisely, in a manner that reflected her general attitude to life: since

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Ma Thida in the Independent News Journal’s office

her release from prison there has been no time to lose. She has never abstained from speaking her mind; as a youth member of the NLD party for the 1990 election, her vocal presence caused her to be seen by the junta as highly dangerous, hence her imprisonment and harsh treatment. But since surviving and emerging from jail she has disassociated herself not only from the NLD but from all party-political activism so that she could voice her opinions as freely as possible through independent journalism and writing. She has not shied away from

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criticizing her old friend and NLD colleague Aung San Suu Kyi in her journalism, and as a result they no longer communicate. She does not let that bother her. In the realm of literature, her forceful mind makes her impatient with those writers who are not progressive, and do not experiment with new concepts and forms. She is bored with socialist realism, the prevailing literary ideology for so long in Myanmar, and bored with what she sees as the same old veiled criticisms of the government disguised through fiction in what to her has become predictable ways. She has no time for writers who prefer to remain in their comfort zone. She wants to move on to new topics, new forms, and new approaches and has tried to set an example in that respect. Her Prison Journal, published in 2012, departs from conventional narrative prose and incorporates fractured, bleak sentences that are intended to reflect her harrowing experiences. She wrote it while a writing fellow at Brown and Harvard Universities, and she subsequently published a work of “documentary fiction,” The Road Map, which addresses the sociopolitical failures of the junta on the basis of their own “road map” to democracy (which they never followed), using a metaphorical road map as a literary device. Some of her short stories have sought to experiment with postmodern formal techniques. She told me frankly that such fiction is not yet popular with the general Burmese readership. She has done her best to rectify this, but the Teen literary magazine she edited, which sought to give a voice to experimental younger writers, was (when we met) just about to stop circulating because it failed to sell enough copies. You can be certain, just from the steely look in her eye, that she will never compromise in her own literary writing for the sake of populist demand. For the moment, though, just like Shwegu May Hnin, her priority is journalism and nonfiction writing. “Right now we need direct information,” she says. “We haven’t had access to it for too long.”

Ma Thida’s Story Since transition began, in both literature and journalism there has been a conflict between the old and the new. We have two literary

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worlds. Under the socialist government, there were gangs of writers who wrote entirely pro-government material. They received the National Literature Award many times, but nobody actually read their work. Many people on the street might say they haven’t even heard of them. The people administering the National Literature Award now are from the same group as administered them under censorship. The person presently in charge has won the award himself seven times! Yet people who have really won wide acclaim for their literature in this country and even abroad have never won the award. Fiction is my passion, but I also want to write nonfiction for the public. Now that we are in transition I am writing more nonfiction than ever, because I believe we need to talk more directly to our audiences. I am an editor at the Independent News Journal and nowadays I mainly write comment pieces and essays for the journal. The short story is an important form, and I really appreciate it and literature generally, but right now I believe that we need more nonfiction, because we haven’t had access to direct information for so long. For that reason I only write short stories infrequently now, but I still comment on about a hundred short stories per month from new writers for the magazine Shwe Mu Te. I also give literary talks all over the place on several topics, to general audiences, most in the public arena. I’m so busy! No holidays for me. My talks are often political. Last night in Hledan junction, near the University Avenue—a place that used to be famous for university students’ protests—more than 1,000 people appeared to hear me talk. I talked about equal opportunities since I believe that is the only way we can guarantee peace. I gave Sri Lanka as an example; there they abolished the Tamil tigers, but they have not yet got peace. In such talks I also focus on people who say that we need free clinics and health care. I ask: do we really need it? Because I think we need to ask what free access means, and about the opportunity to choose quality health care. If it’s not good health care then what’s the point? Quality health care should be freely accessible. Mostly I encourage young people—I tell them that you are able and responsible, so be smart and confident about your ability, and don’t rely on anybody else. You should be the leader of yourself.

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I think this is much needed after so many years of conformity to the dictates of power. Censorship was quite ridiculous. At the height of it, writers could not even publish any opinion articles in news journals that appeared to be their own work; we had to insert references, to demonstrate that we were just referring to the opinions of others, in order to get them published, even if we didn’t need or want to put in the references. Of course we couldn’t write anything controversial. And there was no news media then, so writers were mostly limited to writing aesthetic literature like short stories and poems, on apolitical subjects. I was born in Yangon in 1966, and I started writing fiction as a teenager in the 1980s. I wrote for about four years until 1988, and during that time I wrote more than sixty stories. I had no writing community when I started. People around me, parents and friends, rarely read. But I used to give my draft manuscripts to some of my friends at medical school to read. They could not give me critical comments, but it was helpful that they read them. I didn’t go through the learning process some writers have of sending manuscripts to magazines and having them rejected with comments. My stories were selected from the start. I think that’s because I’ve always thought independently. In fact, when I first started writing, people didn’t believe I was only a teenager. They thought my mum might have been writing the stories for me. My first story I got published was in a weekly journal, Bawa Medu. At that time a lot of people just focused on the socialist writing style and said that short stories should reflect the lives of the people—in a sense, they just all wrote about the lives of all poor people. None of the characters in their stories were rich. My first story was about a middle-class girl, so she was not poor, but she was in a way without life—the title of the story was “The One Who Has No Life.” It was about how middle-class young girls were dealing with the situation in the country. Even at that early stage I wanted to say that we needed to cover other things, not just take a uniform approach to literary topics. But it is fair to say that first piece of mine hasn’t been recognized much.

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Another early piece of mine that has been recognized is a story called “Under the Shadow of the Indian Almond Tree.” In front of my apartment there was such a tree, and as children we used to enjoy playing underneath it. My main character was a girl who moved into an apartment with such a tree outside it, and at first she wished it was a mango tree instead so that she could enjoy eating mangoes. But then she joined the children playing under the tree, and began making sand cities under it. Later they were all asked to move out of the area, away from the tree. They started a restaurant, and they used some leaves from the tree to chop up and eat with food in the restaurant. The girl learned that, after all, she could enjoy eating the Indian Almond tree. The message was that people should learn to make the best of what they have. Before I went to prison, I usually wrote about the daily struggle of ordinary people, and the things I saw. The angle of my stories was always critical of the government in some way. The presentation was not particularly creative; it was just normal compared to the literature of that time. I tried out some creative ideas, but I didn’t make them very obvious. At that time, in the late 1980s, at least until 1988, people just weren’t exposed to creative forms of writing, so they didn’t appreciate such things well. The literature available to read at the time was very limited; it was almost all of a socialist realist nature. Formal experimentation in fiction is still rare. Even more recently, when my Brief Biography was published last year, writers kept telling me: we didn’t even know we could write in that style! Another reason that only very few people experimented with form back then was the approach of literary reviewers of published short stories. Most were leftist socialists and they didn’t appreciate the literary value of experiments with form. They put writers on the wrong track: they only used to comment on the content and the sociopolitical message of the stories, and never the form. Even now, they still keep talking about whether a story or novel communicates a message that is wrong or right, and they don’t appreciate literary value enough. That did change a bit, but only after 1988, when there was a bit more exposure to the outside world. Before that it was very difficult

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to get a passport. Afterwards, people started crossing the border and were exposed to more literature. But there were still a lot of restrictions. And even now, the literary culture is still a bit stuck in its ways. When I was young I managed to read beyond that kind of socialist realist literature. I tried to avoid it. Writers I was influenced by include Tolstoy and Chekhov . . . but I read so much back then. The translation work of Mya Than Tint and Nat Nwe was very important for me: they translated many foreign works of literature, and without them we could not have accessed it. I always tried to read their translations. I got these books from libraries—not public libraries of course, but private libraries of relatives and acquaintances. My parents didn’t have a library, as they rarely read. But my grandfather read a lot and he had some good books. As soon as I found that somebody I knew had a library, I’d ask if I could read from it. Reading gave me confidence and a sense of exploring the world in an instant, so I have always enjoyed reading. In 1982 I became a medical school student. My father told me to choose a different subject—he said we need scientists, so you should study chemistry or physics—but I said no, and I chose my subject. I do love the career of taking care of people. It is partly because I have been so ill myself in the past. People I knew from childhood still ask me: are you still ill? I was always weak as a child, so I really appreciate medical professionals. Also, for me health care is high politics, and I have a passion for that. I still practice medicine: every Wednesday I go to the clinic and practice for free—at the Thu Kha clinic. That clinic is run by the Free Funeral Service Society. They gained a lot of public trust by providing free funerals, so they began getting lots of donations, and they decided to set up and run a free clinic. I have worked there for a long time. The first place I worked as a doctor was at the Muslim Free Hospital in Yangon. I worked there from 1992, and at that time I started a novel, but then I was arrested in 1993, before I had finished the novel, and then it was banned anyway because I was sent to prison and my name was blacklisted. My first novel was called Sunflower. It is about an actress who has to do a fight scene on the set and is injured. She goes on to be

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awarded an Academy Award for her acting, but because of the accident she can’t attend the ceremony. The story represented Aung San Suu Kyi, who had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but couldn’t attend. Aung San Suu Kyi and I worked together in 1988–89 in the NLD, when I was a youth member, before both our arrests. We still know each other now but we keep away from each other. Ultimately I just wanted to be a medical doctor and a writer, and that was all. I too wanted to change my country, but through my professional work. I told her I don’t necessarily need to be an activist, and I wanted to be independent as a journalist, and not always have to write in support of a particular party. I was in prison for five years and six months, until 1999. I was not allowed to read or write. I was in Insein prison in the years before the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] came to inspect, so conditions were very bad. I was put in a cell by myself, because the authorities thought I was too dangerous and too rebellious, and that I would be a bad influence on other people. I was left there alone, even though I was critically ill and many people thought I might die. I had pulmonary tuberculosis and endometriosis. In 1995 I had fever for six consecutive months, and I got acute liver failure. At one point I weighed only 80 pounds. I couldn’t even walk to the interview room to meet my parents; I had to be carried, and even then the authorities didn’t give me medical help. I asked them for someone to take care of me, but this request was refused. They asked people to sleep near me, a nurse and a guard, in case I did die, but the key to my cell was kept six or seven minutes away from them, so even if something had happened they couldn’t have done anything quickly. I was given a little medication, some painkillers, but not enough. It was not the medication I needed, and there was never any proper medical investigation. I only stayed sane by practising Vipassana meditation. I did a little of that meditation before I was inside, but not so intensely as I had to then. When I was released and wrote my memoir, I wrote a message at the end to say “thank you for putting me in prison.” I wrote this to the guards of Insein prison, and to the guards of the prison of Myanmar: the generals. It’s a sentiment borne out of meditation, but it was also a joke. It’s good to keep a sense of humor—but those men cannot laugh.

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When I came out in 1999 after I had recovered, I rejoined the Muslim Free Hospital for a year. I was working seven days a week, in both the clinic and the hospital. I was just so happy to be doing something. After that I left for the U.S., and it was when I got there that my focus turned to writing. I was an international writing project fellow: first a writer in residence at Brown University, and the next year I got an offer from the Radcliffe Institute and became a fellow at Harvard. That’s where I wrote my prison memoir. I then went back to Brown until 2009, where I wrote my work of documentary fiction, The Road Map, under the pen name Suragamika, which means “Brave Traveler.” The situation in Myanmar was still very sensitive then. I didn’t want to save my physical freedom, but I did want to save my works. I knew if I published the book under my real name they would say I couldn’t edit a newspaper and that would ruin my whole life back in Myanmar, and that was why I used a pen name, and also metaphorical references in the novel itself. For example, each chapter starts with a Burmese word relating to a road, e.g., “road block,” to represent the stalled situation in Myanmar, and other issues like the condition of the roads in Myanmar. In such a way the book is a work of documentary fiction: it is based on true facts and real political events, but I turned them into fiction. My prison memoir was banned at first, but it was finally published in Burmese three months ago! Happily it has been very well-received, and it got onto the top ten list and stayed there. I am glad that now people are able learn about the prison experience during those years. I don’t have a fixed presentation or writing style now. For me the form depends on the content. I sometimes use realism, and sometimes symbols. Most people are unable to catagorize my writing, even to say whether it’s prose or poetry or what, sometimes—it’s just my writing. I think it’s very important to experiment with form in literature, compared to the news. Literature for me is a creative thing. I want to be an independent creator and I really appreciate creativity. I believe strongly that we have to use our creativity, and to write in aesthetic ways. And it’s so boring to write in a fixed format. Let me give you an example. In my Road Map book, I don’t give the characters any names. It’s written as a series of travelers’ monologues—the readers have to discover who the characters are and

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how they relate to each other and to the narrative. This way I show how Burmese people are isolated: they can open up only when they are alone. Also, at the end of that book, I used the second person to confront the reader, to make you, the reader, ask yourself what your response to the work will be. As a writer I love to manipulate language like this. The style and form of my writing has changed as I have got older. Most of my old writings are more or less in the realism genre. But now I might not even have any real characters or plots in my stories—they might just appear as a train of thought, or they may feature vocabulary or sentences with hidden meanings. I love to convey ambiguous meanings through my vocabulary. In 2002 I wrote a short piece called Brief Biography. In Burmese the title is Ko Yay Akyin, and if you put spaces between those words, it translates as “I Write Prison.” I was born in 1966, so I started this piece by using formal, news report–style phrases, about what was happening all around the world at that time—particularly on women’s achievements, like the first woman president in India. Very journalistic things. Underneath that, in italics, I wrote all about my own experiences in prison—by which I meant Insein prison, and/or the prison that was Myanmar. Because this book was written after the anniversary of 9/11, I also used that event as a metaphorical theme in order to talk about the funeral of my body parts, and about how all my body parts and organs had been dead for years. At the time when I tried to publish it, we still had to submit our work to the Press Scrutiny Board. The first time the censor read it, he deleted all the women’s achievements I had put in—for instance, the fact that Agora Mia became the first female minister. Ironically they left in the material about the funeral of my body parts, but only because they didn’t understand it! It was too complicated for them. One of the publishers put the story in another collection, but that collection was only published after censorship ended, nearly a decade after it was written. A lot of the short stories being written these days in Myanmar are not very good. Many are too simplistic. People cannot seem to change their style and presentation; they cannot get out of the rut of self-censorship. I try to encourage writers to open up. Otherwise, how can we change? But they still keep writing as they have always

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done. Because of the extent of the repression, people now want to criticize the government, just like they wanted to before, so the content of their writing stays the same too—they just tweak the plot and characters. I really want them to change, not just the form of their writing, but the content too. I’ve tried to work to do this but it’s hard. Readers don’t easily relate to more experimental writing or content because they’re not used to it. My last piece of writing was an attempt to exemplify the way forward for experimental fiction. The first paragraph of it describes someone writing a short story. The next paragraph describes the editing process, of the same story. It’s set in the middle of a town, on a very big road, where many shadows are floating. There is a smell of blood and guns. The floating shadows are overwhelming. Some of them are bald, and some are shooting guns. This is supposed to be reminiscent of the Saffron Revolution, to give the reader a sense of those monks and armed soldiers. But I also wanted to comment a bit on the fact that people now have access to movies and DVDs, and many of them enjoy watching comedy and horror. So if writers want to write for success these days, they have to think about creating both of those emotions in the reader: fear and amusement. It’s all about manipulating people’s emotions through art and language. A lot of people don’t get how grammar and linguistics can do this, so I point that out in this story, in order to raise awareness about the power of writing. Few people appreciate this, and this story was not well-received by readers, but I love writing in this way. I think it’s both satirical and inventive. The younger writers around are really the only ones who are being more experimental with form than they used to be. An example is Myay Hmone Lwin (my publisher for the prison memoir). He is only 26 but he’s very good. I edit a magazine called Teen for young writers. It is a literary magazine, and it features all genres, modern, postmodern—anything. I don’t want to maim anything people want to try, because I think fertile aesthetic and creative ideas are the key. Young writers love the magazine because they can write whatever they like in it, in any style. But sadly we are not going to be able to keep the magazine going any longer because we don’t have enough readers. It is such a pity that so few people here can appreciate this

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kind of writing. They still prefer realism, and reading stories about poor people. The other magazine I coedit, Shwe Amyutay, is more famous for literary writing here, but almost all the writing it features is realist and straightforwardly narrative in style, and it isn’t very descriptive. To be honest I’m fed up with it! I will keep on trying to change things, but so far I haven’t been able to. I have some editorial influence but it’s not only me. Senior editors who are older than me like to keep things the way they have always been. I was looking forward to the first literary festival in Myanmar as a way to promote Burmese writers. Before the festival we had lecturestyle literary talks, but those talks are designed for the general public, not for writers and readers and stimulating interactions between them. But the Irrawaddy Literary Festival wasn’t well organized enough. We needed more interaction between international writers and Burmese writers, and we need to let the audience know more about our writers and their worlds. We needed to be more careful about choosing topics too, and to give Burmese writers more of a chance to discuss their events in advance. I have been to other international writers’ festivals and I felt more comfortable there because I had more advance interaction with other writers. I really want to run a festival here myself. I enjoyed the first Book Slam that happened the following month in Yangon with the British writer Patrick Neate, but I prefer a format with more question and answer than that. Also, there is not really a culture of doing readings of literature aloud here, so when I read my work to the audience at the Book Slam I found it quite embarrassing. I don’t know why there are not more public readings here. I would like to see more of them. I think the audience wants to listen to writers. Also, most of the time we writers aim to write our work just for the eyes, not the ears, and when we read it aloud we see how much we can improve. Access to books here has widened in some ways, but it is also more difficult to reach readers. The old rental shops have largely disappeared, because of other multimedia entertainment now in the market, like Korean soap operas and pirated Hollywood DVDs. Those are cheap compared to a book and can be shared among

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family members. Another reason for the difficulty is the poor education system here. In the past, students knew that if they read more books they would become better students. But now the curriculum is bad. We also have less translated fiction here than we used to. Most translated writing now is nonfiction, about politics and religion. In the past there was more translated aesthetic writing, but now people are hungering for knowledge and news. So I think now there are actually less international fiction writers in the Burmese book market even though censorship is over. Also, we used to have great translators like Mya Than Tint, but now we have very few. Of the Burmese fiction there is in the market, pop fiction is very popular. There are lots of adaptations of Korean movies, and romances/ thrillers in set genres, but little original work, and the literary value of it all is very low. There are problems in journalism too. We might be in transition now, and censorship restrictions might have been lifted, but we are a long way from having free speech. One of the key things we need to achieve is to stop the licensing of publishers. We used to have to apply for “licenses” under censorship. Now we have what’s called a “registration department,” but it’s not actually registration—it’s still licensing. You need to apply for a certificate to publish anything. I have applied for licenses many times in the past, but I have never got one. As a former political prisoner I have been blacklisted. That’s why I still can’t own a news journal, I can only be an employee. I was the one who raised the issue of licensing for the first time, when media law reform was proposed. Back then I was the only one who said we don’t actually need a new media law now since there is no prepublication censorship, we just need to get rid of licensing. I wrote an editorial on this for the Independent News Journal. The mainstream papers disagreed. But they are all crony papers that have been in the market for years now, so they have an effective monopoly. They all have a lot of money to manipulate reporters, and to advertise, and they all want power. Some monthly magazines don’t even aim to have subscribers who are readers; they just want to feed them advertisements. That’s why none of the established news journals fol-

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lowed our position on licensing at first. They said: “We who have practiced for so long are the ones who deserve to have licenses.” Luckily the new Minister of Information didn’t agree with them. But licensing still hasn’t gone away, and we don’t know what the new law will do. We have to wait and see. The Ministry is not sharing the law reform process with us. As well as an end to licensing, we also need freedom of information. Without that we cannot cover the news in a balanced way. We can never interview any minister on the government side of an issue. But nobody in Myanmar has started to talk about freedom of information yet; at the moment it is only me. It is a major problem. We simply can’t rely on the accuracy of the government information we do get at the moment. For example, last Sunday, at the government newspaper, they confessed they printed the wrong picture next to an article on the incident in Kachin State—they had claimed it depicted a rebel bomb, but it was actually just a photo of a motorcycle accident. Journalists’ associations are not so restricted any more, and there is now even a Journalists’ Union, but I am not an active member. I like to be independent and I will do anything I can to make sure I stay that way. I just hope the new media laws don’t push people back into the old ways.

Leaving the Horror The main avenue that was bustling just a moment ago is as silent as a desert. What is happening? Fear rockets through my chest and I can’t even walk straight anymore. A spine-tingling shiver runs down my back. Hmm . . . I’d say that’s at least as good as a standard horror film. It’s been a while since I’ve written a dramatic piece. Popular taste now demands that whatever you write must be either funny or scary. Since I’m not yet able to make people laugh, I might just as well scare them. I’d better read what I wrote again, carefully! Let’s see. The great minds say that showing is more effective than telling. A writer is a carpenter of grammar and words. Words must be put

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together in their proper places. What else do they say? Back in the day I memorized so many snippets of writerly knowledge. But now that I’m actually trying to write myself, I can only recall the most trite of them. But here’s what I think. Writing dramatic prose is like preparing a noodle salad. Even in your shortest pieces, you must incorporate as many feelings as you can in the right proportions. So . . . let’s reread. The opening is always important, even in a nondramatic, nonfiction piece like a news article, right? So how is mine? Oh my God! Did I write that? My opening is like a fistful of noodles being slapped in a bowl! I haven’t shown anything, really. I just blurted out whatever came into my head. “A spine-tingling shiver runs down my back”? What laziness. Let’s fix this salad so that it’s edible. Bang Bang Two gunshots. This is not a Hollywood action film set. This is not the NYC Bronx where people with guns (legal and illegal) roam around. This is a main avenue of a Burmese city where peace-loving people move about on their daily business. This is a main thoroughfare used by public servants, civilians, pensioners, youths, students, teachers, street vendors, monks, nuns, and more. This is a road bustling with the noise of cars, chatting, blaring music, advertisements, pigeons and stray dogs. But in an instant, these two gunshots have transformed the place. Now, not a single person can be seen on the avenue. Only scattered sandals are left behind. Not even a pigeon or a dog can be heard, let alone people’s voices. Even the crows seem to have stopped cawing. It’s just after noon but the sky is gray and dirty, already threatening rain. The familiar scents of frying food and fresh fruit from the street vendors have vanished, replaced by the smell of smoke and bullets. Avoiding smoky corners, the steps can no longer keep a straight course. An urge to glance backward every few paces is slowing down progress. Even though the steps are moving forward, the back of the head is demanding to swap positions with the front of the head. While looking backward, the forward-moving body is afraid it might get pierced by something from the front. That thought hastens the steps once more. But since the eyes are now at the back of the head, the body,

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although moving fast, is dragging itself sideways from the pavement to the middle of the road . . . Hmm  .  .  . now it’s flowing a bit better. But isn’t this too heavyhanded? I need to cut the noodle strands one by one to make each one the same length. Get rid of all that isn’t necessary. . Don’t go overboard with oil and soy sauce. The silence of the avenue is not absolute. Nor is the stillness. A very faint breeze is discernible. And then, under the blinding sunlight, a thick wave of smoke bursts upwards like dry ice at a concert, darkening everything. I shut my eyes. Blood. The smell of it makes me open my eyes again. A man? No, a ghost, a shadow. I’m not sure. A bald head, a saffron complexion, and a hole in his chest exuding an overpowering bloody stench. His hairless face is laughing amidst the smoke. “Go away! Go away!” But my voice won’t sound. Or I can’t hear myself. His bellowing laughter fills my brain. Warm liquid streams down my leg. I stop breathing . . . “Don’t be scared,” he says. “You are looking for a story and I am here to give you one. Are you writing a horror story? Don’t you want a bestseller?” Must cut. Write two sentences. Strike out one. Write another sentence. Discard two. Reread, repeat, revise. You can’t just dump the wafer-thin slices of onion and lettuce into a bowl, toss them up and be done with it. Just before mixing them together, you should dab them with tangy tamarind paste. Only then will the diners start drooling in anticipation. The art of presentation. Let’s continue. By now, the readers should be fairly uncomfortable from a fear of the unknown. They should also be curious to find out who the villain is. But don’t give in just yet. Hold out for just a bit longer. That will make it taste better. That voice is familiar. Yes, I heard that very voice, not long ago. But then I felt safe. Now I feel the opposite. But I will make myself face anything if it means getting a story.

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“So tell me what sort of story you have.” My voice sounds dry, but the relief of finding I am able to muster audible speech steadies my trembling body. “I am . . .” But then that familiar voice simply fades away. The saffron shadow drifts away. But the smell of blood remains as strong as ever. At this moment, another wave of white smoke rises up like a tide. It does not occur to me to ask why an avenue in the middle of this city has become a channel for smoke waves. My whole attention is focused on trying to discern what it is that I can see moving towards me in the smoke, what shadows are gradually emerging . . . Not so bad. But the sense of horror that had been gaining momentum has now dipped. Make it more colorful. Try adding some green herbs, and a few diced nuggets of red and green chilli. Make it more colorful, more presentable. Another wave of white smoke rises up like a tide. It drifts to and fro between the pavements as it rolls along the avenue. Amidst the smoke, more bald shadows emerge, their saffron color intensifies, and they float about, reeking of blood. When I get closer I can see some of the other shadows have donned black jeans and emo haircuts, and others green longyis. But they all have three things in common. Each has a gaping hole in its chest. Each smells of blood. And each bears a story. He needs to set aside his fear for the sake of the stories. Now he has got used to the strange sensation of the smoky avenue, he is becoming used to the fear. Don’t people want to be scared? Aren’t they demanding horror? Yet here you are, talking about setting aside fear and getting used it! Let’s reedit. I have to confront my fear and ask for their stories. But no sooner than one of the shadows drifts towards me, it abruptly floats away again, back to the other side of the road. “Please, tell me your stories,” I call out. “Only then will I be able to write a story of my own.”

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But, just as the shadows begin to mutter “I . . .” or “We . . .” they are carried away on the smoky waves. It is impossible for me to talk to them. Despite being nauseated by the bloody odor, I decide to approach. “Can you all please just stay here long enough to finish telling your stories?” “Hey! You were peeing in your pants when I approached you a moment ago. Now you have changed your tone. All of you are just like that . . .” but the bald one with saffron skin vanishes before he’s finished chastising me. The smoke thickens. The smell is turning rotten. The holes on their chests are becoming larger and wider, so wide that I can now see what’s behind each shape. A booming noise breaks the silence. The randomly drifting shadows are forming neat rows. They are materializing, marching toward me. The rotting, bloody, smoky smells have intensified. I can now see blood seeping out of their hollow chests with my naked eyes. The rows are aligned so precisely that the holes in the chests form a row, a line, the long nozzle of a gun aiming at me. And inside the hollow of that nozzle, I can see more images. The images deep inside the nozzle are gradually approaching my chest. I can see them now, I even know what they are, but I don’t have the capacity to define them, not yet. I embrace the fear. I try to embrace the horror . . . even the kind of horror that is so popular with the masses. But ultimately I don’t have the courage to express that kind of horror. The images are still approaching toward my chest. “Stop! Please stop!” I scream in silence and shut my eyes Enough. I no longer wish to continue writing this story. Please, respect the courage it took to make this request, and let me leave the horror.3

R

This story by Ma Thida, written during transition, is one that she particularly likes herself, but that she admits was not well-received in Myanmar when it was published. In her view “it is too experimental for people’s taste here still.” It is a satirical, postmodern piece about genre horror fiction and the writing process. It reflects at least four key things about her: her wish to educate the younger generation about

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how to write better as well as more adventurously, in this case by the use of an extended metaphor of making a Myanmar noodle salad; her desire to move away from socialist realism and experiment with postmodernist, self-reflexive content and form; her wish to challenge the dominant pop fiction genres of comedy and horror through writing satirically about them; and the way she remains haunted by the shadows of the Saffron Revolution and military oppression that saw her imprisoned so cruelly.

Zeyar Lynn Poet, Essayist, Teacher Zeyar Lynn (the pen name of Myint Aung) is like Ma Thida in one sense: he barely ever stops working. Unlike her, he is a poet and a trouser-wearing maverick, who has neither entered politics in the past nor had the slightest interest in doing so; he has always been too obsessed with language. He is a human dynamo of words, creating poems with them, translating them, interrogating them through literary criticism, and teaching their meaning and grammatical organization to classes of eager students. He is arguably the most influential poet in Myanmar today, having spearheaded postmodernism and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry in the country. Despite that, he does not spend the majority of his time writing. He teaches at his own private English-language school six days a week from 10 a.m. right through to 7 p.m., and somehow manages to mark students’ work and do his own creative and critical work on the side, as well as edit a new poetry magazine. He is one of the few Burmese writers whose poetry has reached a global audience through translation, via the Bones Will Crow anthology, being invited to London to read in the 2012 Poetry Parnassus, and a recent trip to the United States. I only managed to corner him at his school on the second floor of a busy downtown street near the main market in Yangon after he finished teaching at 7:30 p.m. Before the interview, he told me he had a poem to finish editing, so I sat on a chair and waited. There was no

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Zeyar Lynn teaching at his Y.E.S. language school

air conditioning or fan in the room. Beads of sweat oozed from my forehead. Zeyar Lynn paced up and down, his graying ponytail hanging down his back, reading aloud from a sheet of paper, pausing, and dictating to an earnest, bespectacled girl of around 17 who typed at speed onto a large old word processor. Finally he sang out: “da-daa!” It’s done. He must have been exhausted by that point in the day, but he didn’t show it. We talked for three hours about his life, his travels, and for the personal consequences he experienced after refusing to compromise on his individualist approach to work and life. In the aftermath of the 1988 uprisings, when he was convener of the master’s course in linguistics at Yangon University, he refused to leave his classroom midlesson when told to help quell a peaceful student protest, and was banished to a faraway technical college. He grew his hair, prompting them to demand he cut it, whereupon he quit teaching and started up on his own, keeping the hair. Pandora (featured later in this book) later let on that he would also play his guitar during class and teach the odd lesson in a local teashop; the students adored him. The traditional poetic elite of Yangon had more difficulty with his quirks. An early abandoner of traditional literary forms, he managed to publish postmodernist poetry critical of the regime for a long time

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during censorship because the meaning of his poems was so dense that censors simply had no idea what he was talking about. Many poets have since started to follow in his modernizing footsteps, but he refuses to stay still, to conform, or to become part of any poetic elite that might curb his intellectual individualism. But despite the frenetic energy of his mind, at 53 he is no longer young. He admitted to me that after censorship restrictions he found it hard to know where to focus his poetry now that he no longer has to manipulate his poetic forms to combat the ogre that was trying to suppress poetic voices. He finds himself still trying to hide messages in his poems when there is no longer any need. Still, that hasn’t stopped him producing, as the new transition poems in this book show.

Zeyar Lynn’s Story I do a lot of poetry translation. Today I have taught classes all day, and I have also translated three poems by Donald Revell. Actually, I never liked Revell’s poems much before today, but this morning I was browsing Wartime and I decided I liked it after all, so I translated it and went on to do two more. I think people’s feelings might be touched by Revell’s poetry at the moment because the regime is still so fresh in our minds, and more atrocities have been coming to light recently. Sometimes a review prompts me to read or reread a poet’s work. I read a lot of online reviews—like Poetry Today and Jacket 2. It has been a long day already! My first class at 10 a.m. was an academic preparation class for the IELTS [the University of Cambridge’s International English Language Testing System], for which I have about fifty students, then I taught intermediate English proficiency to about forty students, then the American SAT tests to about twenty-five, then TOEFL . . . I’ve been teaching like this since I started the school in 1994. Gosh, that’s nineteen years! We’ll be twenty next year. I’d better write a poem in celebration. Again I was teaching morning to night. I call myself a person living in two caves. My office at Y.E.S. is one of them. I don’t have a secretary here at the school. I run everything

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on my own. There are ten other teachers. They are all female. There is a teacher’s room where they socialize, but I usually leave them there and stay on my own here in my office, at my writing, reading, and drinking table. When I finish here I might go out—say for drinks with friends—and then I go home to my second cave. I might have dinner there, talk with my wife, and play with our cats, and then I retreat to my room to read, write, sometimes drink again, and read again. I go to bed around 1:30 a.m. But I have insomnia—I can’t sleep. I’ve had this for my whole life. It’s not fun. But nobody lives forever, so I’d rather do things and not waste time sleeping. When you’re dead you can sleep for a lifetime! My wife always accuses me of having a teacher’s life and a poet’s life but no family life. She’s right in a way. Most of my time is spent teaching all day, and then reading and writing at home, and she accuses me of ignoring her. We have a son, but he’s in Perth now, learning computer science and working. I might be a bit selfish, but to be honest I’d rather read and write than talk about mundane things, especially after talking as a teacher all day long. I started writing poetry as a university student in 1978. At that time this country was still under the socialist system, and university students would produce gestetner poetry. (Gestetner is like a wax paper you type on and then roll out on a drum.) Back then you could be imprisoned for producing these poems, but the authorities would turn a blind eye as long as what was written didn’t attack the government. For that reason a lot of students would write love poems, but if you read between the lines the poems weren’t really about love. By the time I was a third-year English major, I was one of those writers. I was educated in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. My father was posted there as a diplomat—he was the Minster of Foreign Affairs—so I was a diplobrat! We stayed there for seven years. I passed the university entrance exam there, but then my father was posted back again, so I resumed study in Rangoon. By that time I was already reading the modernists, like Eliot, Cummings, and Pound, but the only poetry being taught in English major classes in Myanmar was old stuff like Tennyson. I hated that, so I stopped attending poetry or novel classes. I spent most time at the library reading books on

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poetry and translating instead. I started translating back then because my poet friends had no idea about modernism and what it meant. I translated poetry so that they could see the difference between what they were writing and the great stuff out there. I didn’t publish my translations at that time because it was the 1980s, and at that time the mainstream was still traditional poetry. So-called modern poems were not accepted by magazines. But since I considered myself a born poet, along with my friends, we would boycott the magazines—we didn’t send any of our poems out, so I wasn’t known at all. At the university we shared a building with Burmese major students. Some poets from that class were already becoming recognized in the poetry world here, by writing traditional-style poetry, which I hated. I didn’t care about them, because I was doing my own stuff. I shared poems with them, and they liked the poems, but they didn’t emulate me at the time because they knew if they wanted to be accepted into the mainstream they’d have to keep writing in the traditional style. So for a while I was the unknown famous poet. Many of those people are now established poets in the mainstream, and they acknowledge me as someone who was doing new things early. From the 1990s, the modern movement became mainstream. Those other poets moved on to the modern style then, but the sense of their work remains very traditional. The poetic world today is mainly khitpor, which means modern, but against that we have the contemporary stream, which I am part of. Our poems differ in style, organization, and poetics—everything. The “modern” style is more lyric, and is based on the poets’ feelings. The poems include images conveying the poet’s emotions, and they always end with something meaningful in the last line. We, on the other hand, write more disjunctively, jumping from line to line. We don’t aim for a final line that gives the reader a message. We say that our “message” is in each word and every line. A lot of people hate us, because they don’t get it—they ask: what are you trying to say? I introduced a lot of international poetics into this country, starting with post–Soviet Russian poetry, and all eight schools within it. I introduced the New York School, with writers like John

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Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. And of course I introduced the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school, with writers like Charles Bernstein. After that, there were all sorts of other “genres” like hybrid, elliptical, and lyric postmodern poetry. I translated a lot of poems from former East European countries, because I wanted people to see what kinds of poems Eastern Europeans were writing when the Wall came down. We were hoping for that to happen in Myanmar then. It’s happened now, in a way, but we are still experiencing an aftershock. We didn’t expect it to happen in the way it did. We thought there would be another revolution first. Now we have a so-called civilian government, but actually most of us, poets anyway, still don’t feel that we are in the kind of world we want to be in. It’s like we still have one foot stuck in the past and we don’t know where to put the other foot down. The more established poets who have been writing for twenty to forty years are using our newfound freedoms to write more directly. In the past we would not write about political events because we would not be allowed to. Now people are addressing issues face-on like the conflict in Kachin State4 and the mining problems. Now I notice poets even giving their poems titles like Letpadaung. That’s a case where a Chinese mining company has been given a sixtyyear permit to mine and has got rid of all the rural farmers who had been living there; they became internally displaced because they no longer owned the land themselves. The farmers started to protest peacefully, and monks joined in, as well as students from the 88 generation, and there was a violent crackdown by the police. Poets are writing about that now. They are not hiding things any more. That’s one strand I see appearing. I call it “documentary poetics”—in a way it’s like poetics of witness. These poets are writing these poems as a message for the future generations. They are using facts, documentary facts, and putting them into poetic form. I actually innovated the journalistic documentary style in my poems: taking news stories straight from the papers and putting them into poetry. It’s difficult though. We have to juggle between content and poetic value, and sometimes we fail. If we focus too much on the poetic, we have to sacrifice the factual and vice versa, especially when a poem is trans-

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lated. The risk is that poems can become a bit like a news article that’s been cut and pasted. But at the same time, some of the modern poets, who at one time were totally against me, have started writing poems in my style! I try not to be direct. I try to balance the factual stuff and the poetic stuff because I want my poem to be, first of all, a poem rather than a piece of documentary, so I have to play with the technique and the language. For example, the poem I read at the Irrawaddy Literary Festival is based around the word Laiza. Laiza is the HQ of the Kachin Independence Army; and Liza was also a pop singer when I was much younger. So the title I gave the poem was Sister Liza have you been to Laiza?, and then I spliced song lyrics with the facts about Liza. When I read out the facts it was in my normal voice, but when I read the lyric snippets I would turn it into a song. The audience had never seen that done before. Another influence on my poetry now is journals. The absence of the Press Scrutiny Board has been a major influence on journals, because people can write their views about different issues and events. Newspapers are still dry, but journals are far more interesting. We get all the juicy news and views in journals. At one time, I said journals are sexier than poetry; why read poetry when you can access the excitement of journals? Journals have influenced the creativity of all of us, one way or another. Creative people are jealous of journalists, because they can write every day, when we can’t write anything. We are bombarded with journals. I am addicted to them. I have about seven or eight on my table every day. I don’t care which ones I read. Whatever I see, whenever I’m free, I read them. I’m interested in how different journals present the same facts. Some are against the NLD and are published by the military and their cronies from the ruling government, but a few now are genuinely owned by independents, by the public. From these journals we get the same news from different angles, and a lot of modern poets have given up their linear approach to reflect this. They have started writing apparently unrelated stanzas, which appear as a collage or mosaic of different points of view. It’s a technique that’s catching up here now. It’s difficult for us contemporary poets, of which there are only a handful, because the “modern” poets are making use of our tech-

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niques, so we have to think of other ways to keep being one step ahead of them. It’s really difficult, especially for me, because I have to teach the whole day. I keep my laptop to the side of me, and whenever I’m free I dip in. Sometimes I take a political event as the backbone of my poem, but between certain lines I splice that with other indirectly related stuff, or I play with words for the sake of the music of the language. Another approach I use is not taking the event as a whole but taking particular descriptive phrases from journals and playing with them, juxtaposing them with more poetic flowery lines. I started doing this only when writing politically in journals became possible. Before, we had to depend on word of mouth to hear the truth about events like the conflicts in Rakhine State. Now we can read about events online. The main remaining difference between us and the “modern” poets is that they take such events as their poetic backbone now, whereas we take the language aspects of these events. We have two kinds of readers: those who are focused on content, and those who are focused on language, and how it is constructed in a poetic way. We are the constructivists. I was part of a community of contemporary poets. I used to have Thursday evening get-togethers here at the school—about ten poets would come here, and we would drink, read out poems, and discuss poetics. That started around 2005. But later on, I think we each matured in our own individual ways, so those people started writing on their own and we don’t meet so often. I think you can distinguish the way these poets wrote pre-2005 and post-2005. Before that, they wrote in a more linear style. After that, since they came across the New York poets and others through me, they started experimenting and innovating, and they are now gurus on their own. There are too many big personalities here! I was writing in a nonlinear style long before 2005. For one of my classic poems, written in 2004, I took an English-Myanmar dictionary and turned to page 617, selected some Burmese phrases, and jumbled up the words. The title was Silt left after a flood; the words and phrases were the silt, and the flood was the inspiration. Today, people call this conceptualist poetry—the latest poetry of this kind is known as “Against Expression.”

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My greatest poetic influences were part of the anti-lyric movement that occurred throughout the world in the 1960s. People were turning away from lyricism, saying: look, things are happening in the world, so who cares about emotions? I was interested in that idea, so I read those poems. I encountered them first in Hawaii, in 1987–89. I went there to do my master’s in English as a second language [ESL]. Since I had to spend a lot of time in the library there, I came across L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, and the New York School, and although I was officially studying ESL, I unofficially began studying poetics. If I hadn’t gone to Hawaii, I don’t think I would have come across new poetics, so it was lucky I found myself there. But even there I was ahead of the mainstream. I took a course in twentieth-century American poetry and got an A for writing about L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, but my professor had never mentioned anything about it, because even there the faculty were a bit more conservative than that. But I think they admired my gumption. Another key point for me in accessing poetry was in 1995, when I was back in Rangoon. I gained access to some more great information on a computer at Rangoon University. It wasn’t the internet—I don’t even know the term anymore—oh yes, a database!—of postmodern poetry. You could search for text and copy it onto a floppy disk. I’d bring these back home and read them on my computer. I collected stacks and stacks of floppy disks. I would read the poetry and translate it. After my master’s, I started teaching. I became an English teacher as soon as I graduated in 1980. A professor needed a teacher to go to Sittwe in Rakhine State, so I volunteered for three months and then came back. By 1982 I was doing my master’s, but I also officially joined the department as a tutor. I was supposed to do a second year of my master’s degree, but I was so well-read that my professors said they couldn’t give me any lessons because I knew too much. But then they didn’t give me a degree because they had nothing left to teach me. In a way this was a blessing in disguise, because if I had got a master’s in Rangoon at that time, I wouldn’t have been able to go to Hawaii. I was able to go to Hawaii because I came out on top in the scholarship exam in 1986. Of course, coming back in 1989, I missed the

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whole show. But actually, I think I saw more footage on the 1988 uprisings than people here did because it was on the TV, free. People here could only see their own street, but I saw pictures of people being shot and killed around the country. Others heard it, but I saw. When I came back to Rangoon, the chancellor told me he wanted me to set up a master’s program in linguistics in the university, so I did. But in 1991, when there was a student demonstration in the university, the vice chancellor came to my class when I was teaching and told me to go to the recreation center where the students were protesting, to help stop them. I refused. I said my job is to teach. Later there was a departmental meeting and I was formally accused of disobedience. As punishment I was sent to a provincial town in Hinthada, a small college in Ayerwaddy, where they only taught first and second year undergraduate classes – when I was supposed to be running the Rangoon MA program! I went there. But I came face to face with the hypocrisy of university faculty members who had no backbone. They wouldn’t speak for themselves, they would just obey whatever the generals said. That was when I started to keep my hair long, as a symbol of rebellion, and I also started wearing trousers. I was summoned by the head of the college, who said: “either get your hair cut or prepare to be fired.” I said: “thank you for the choice!” I piled my belongings up and left. They waited for me for three months to go back, as they had no teacher, but I didn’t go. After six months they sent a letter, saying I’d been sacked from the Ministry of Education for disobeying authority, breaking rules and regulations, etcetera etcetera. That was when I opened this school in 1994. I have kept my long hair and trousers ever since then—as a symbol, not just of rebellion, but of individual freedom. It was the only freedom I had back then. Who was my hair harming, after all? I had had some freedom in terms of curriculum before that. When I designed the master’s course, I had a free hand in it, because at that time it so happened I was the only person who could envision such a program in the department. So then I started giving talks on how to change certain things in the curriculum, how to change teaching. People higher up started to feel uneasy about me early on. And then these student demonstrations were always going on. As teachers we

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were ordered to stop any student who threatened to start a strike or a demonstration. Students from my class started demonstrations though, and I didn’t stop them—I just said: “know your limits.” One of those students now has a PhD from America; another is a doctor who came back from Sweden and is now the leader of the Chin State political party. When I was still in charge of the MA program in Rangoon, it was in linguistics rather than literature. I wasn’t able to touch the literature component. The old hands considered literature to be theirs. My colleagues in literature were hard-line conformists. They didn’t try to push the boundaries. They were so hard-line they wouldn’t even allow any interpretation of any poem that went against their own, never mind criticism of the government! The teacher would explain the poem, paraphrase it, put it into prose, talk about theme and metaphor, and students had to take notes, learn them by heart, and write them out in exams. At that time I was also giving tuition to students, and what I did was turn a poetry class into a translation class—I made them translate a poem, and then discuss what it was about in Burmese, try to look at it in different ways, and then try to write it in English. I was teaching students how to approach poetry, translation, and writing. But whereas other kids regurgitated their notes word for word and got distinctions, my students barely passed their exams. So some students turned against me because they were expecting higher marks—and instead these diehards said “this is not according to what I said  .  .  . ahh it’s by Myint Aung’s student, so penalize him!” My sister suffered because of me. She passed her BA with honors. But there was then an interview for a master’s program. This vice chancellor who had told me to go and do something about the student demo was head of the interview panel, and he said to her: “Are you Myint Aung’s sister? You may go.” Just like that. Now she is working for the UN. But if she had been able to do the master’s, she could have been a university teacher. At the time she was angry with him. That man, Dr. Myo Myint, is right now the Deputy Minister of Education. He always had a knack of knowing which boot to lick. I was against all that, so we had departmental politics. He stood for the status quo, and I stood for the right to think for myself.

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“If it is against my values,” I said, “I will not do it.” He said: “Shove values; if I am ordered to do it, I will do so loyally and willingly.” It was because of this difference in attitude that I was posted off, and then I quit. I think all that is reflected in my poems. If you become a rebel, then why not go all the way and rebel in the poetry world too? I try to stay away from autobiography in poems though. I don’t convey much emotion—I write cerebral poems. That’s also why many older poets hate me, because the younger generation found my poems innovative intellectually. Younger poets in their 20s now write in my style. Now that they have access to the internet, some are already having contact with poets in New York and elsewhere in the worled, which is great. I think access to the internet has widened access to poems. I publish on my own website zlcontempo.com, and we also have this Burmese edition of the PIW—Poetry International Website. A group of younger poets I particularly admire are Pem Skool. They are still in their twenties, and are always doing new things, and learning a lot. I perform poetry very rarely. Mainly because I don’t have time. And also I only perform when I’m invited. Most of the time I’m not invited because people know I teach so I don’t have time. On UNESCO World Poetry Day every year we used to hold a little festival in my room and we would invite other poets, for readings and papers. Now that associations are formally permitted, the UMP has been formed—the Union of Myanmar Poets. They are not formally recognized yet, but they have started hosting their own events now. They want to replace the old Writers and Journalists’ Association that was allowed under military rule. They invited me to take the post of liaison secretary, to be a go-between with international organizations. At first I accepted, but later I quit because I saw it really belonged to the modern poetry scene and they hated me really, although they knew they needed to use me. I only allowed myself to be used for the greater good of Myanmar poetry but it led to a lot of backbiting. I don’t have much time to go to other events in the poetry reading scene, but they do send me CDs and videos, so I can see and hear. I do like to perform. I am a natural performer I think—a teacher has to be a performer. And also I have Spanish blood.

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My mother is half Spanish and half Shan. When my Spanish grandfather was still alive, Albert Gonsalves, we would joke that he was “Speedy Gonzales.” He was in charge of the railways and built all the railways during the British era. In World War II when the British were retreating, lots of Eurasians moved out of Burma, but he stayed on because he loved the country. He was already married to my grandmother, who was related to the Shan chief of Hsipaw— she was his youngest daughter. When she eloped with this “white Indian,” her father disowned her. She didn’t care. So we lost contact with that part of our family. My father was a Burmese diplomat, but he also has a streak of Armenian blood. His ancestors can be traced back to the Burmese kings. The second last king, Mindon Min, had an Armenian wife, and my father’s side comes down from that. I have one elder sister, two younger sisters, and a younger brother. My father worked in Yangon until 1966, when in ’68–74 he worked in Malaysia. Malaysia had just gained independence when we went there. A developing country, it was the reverse of Myanmar at that time; Myanmar was a great country and KL [Kuala Lumpur] was poor and dirty. But I saw Malaysia develop so fast in those few years. It was part of the Commonwealth, so Britain and America pumped in a lot of investment. Myanmar was starting to go down the drain because of Ne Win’s terrible policies. My father was employed by the government—so up to now, as we speak, we keep a respectful distance in terms of politics and there are lines we do not cross. He still has this mentality of the wage slave and he is still scared of the regime. If I challenge him about past actions of the government, he will only say “we did good things”—and I say: “you lied! ” My younger sisters and brother took part in the ’88 uprisings and saw a lot. It was lucky they didn’t die. They came face to face with army shooting on the streets. They too hate the government. My father is the only pro-government person in our household; the rest are against. I disappointed him, because he was a party member of the socialist party, but he was denied a very high position because he wasn’t able to recruit his own son to the cause. I was eldest and I said no, and my younger siblings all followed. My connection with my father hasn’t helped me in my work at all. I became interested in writing at school in Malaysia—I remem-

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ber this English teacher, a Portuguese-Indian man, of mixed blood. He would make us write poems and essays, and I started enjoying it—he was a good mentor. He gave me the love of poetry I still have. When we came back to Myanmar, we had been better educated than our peers. During those seven years, education in Myanmar went down the drain. I started my English major degree, and the level of English teaching was so low that I would always bunk off [play hooky] from class, and sit in the library or canteen. I think having been educated in Malaysia helped me a lot in terms of my literary and general knowledge. I was a head above the other students all through my schooling in Burma—even the professors. My poems and articles got sent to literary magazines, not because I wanted to send them, but because friends would come to me and ask me for copies of them and would just send them to magazines themselves. I personally have never sent one to a magazine. One friend of mine, the publisher Moe Way, has now published sixteen books of mine. He believed in me staunchly, so he encouraged me and made me write. While we were drinking I would tell him poem ideas I had thought of that day, and he would say “why not write it down”—I would say “why should I?”—but I did write them down, he sent them to magazines, and I became notorious and famous! I have written so many articles on poetry. I have published a pamphlet on Futurism, Surrealism, and Expressionism in 2009; another collection of essays in 2009; and a collection of poetry in 2012. Overall I write more poems than poetry articles. What gets published depends on my publisher, Moe Way. He comes over to harvest all my things, and archive them—I didn’t even know he was going to make some of the books he has published! I have also done translations of Sylvia Plath—I love her and keep her photo above my desk. Other photos I have in my office are of Bernstein, John Ashbery, and Thakin Kodaw Hmaing, a Burmese political writer of the twentieth century who was the father of political poetry in this country and who died in 1964. He used verse in the classical style and mixed it with prose, and he wrote a lot of satire criticizing politicians for arguing amongst themselves when they should be fighting colonial rule. He also wrote a novel called the “Letter of Mr Maung Hmaing” in 1916, where he mocked Burmese people for taking the English

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“Mr” in front of their names, and it worked: they stopped doing it. We all respect him a lot. I never experienced difficulties with the censorship board directly. We writers didn’t want to face them directly so we would avoid them. What we did was censor ourselves so we wouldn’t get in trouble. There were many poets imprisoned, but this was almost always for their political activities rather than their poetry—they just happened to be poets, but the headline would be “Poet Imprisoned.” The only person imprisoned for a poem itself was Saw Wai with his acrostic poem criticizing Than Shwe. So when Westerners ask us about poets in prison, I say they were not inside because of their poetry. They took part in strikes, demonstrations, and underground activities. The West have the wrong idea about this: they think that any poet who wrote politically controversial poems would go to jail. But mostly the censorship process prevailed. Usually censors couldn’t understand the meaning of my poems, but they suspected I was being critical, so sometimes lines or whole poems would be censored, but I never went through any interview procedure like others did. Others didn’t write very subtle stuff. The censors would make them sign documents to say that they must not write such poems again, but this didn’t happen to me. They didn’t know what I was on about. I think later on they knew who I was, and my poems became more and more political—but I still wanted to keep them as poems rather than political tracts so that poetry would come first and foremost. Increased censoring went hand in hand with my increased notoriety, but I kept trying to move one step ahead of the regime by writing poems in new and disjunctive styles, so they still couldn’t figure out what I was writing. They got so annoyed they said it was not even poetry. I didn’t care, as this was a tactic I used to get my poems published—but I lost quite a lot of my audience. They couldn’t understand my poems; they just knew I was political. Bernstein talked of politics of form rather than content, and I like that idea. Recent poems of mine include Breaking News, which I wrote in 2012 after news of dealings between the military regime and North Korea. They were trying to build a nuclear lab in upper Myanmar. Instead of hitting out against the regime, I compared Kim Jong Il to Václav Havel, just after he passed away. Censorship had only ended

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six months ago, in August 2012, and this poem was published before that. I managed to get around it. I can’t stop self-censoring. Other older poets find it very difficult to do. It’s for the younger generation to come up with new things now. We were brainwashed by censorship. We can’t just change overnight. We had to spend so many years constructing our poetic selves, through those times, it’s a great challenge to be different. As for younger poets like the members of Pem Skool, I think they are beyond self-censoring. Until last year, there were three key taboos in poetry: don’t say anything against the government; don’t say anything explicit about sex; and don’t say anything about religion— either against Buddhism or about other religions. Now, Pem Skool are writing very explicit stuff and challenging all three of these taboos. Last week I read a poem by an 18-year-old girl, Moon Thu Ein, about her own sexual experiences. We are embarrassed to read such poems, but then we question ourselves: why? What’s wrong with us? In the structure of their poems Pem Skool follow this disjunctive style, where some lines cohere then jump around, and they are kaleidoscopic, with multiple themes in one poem. That keeps them apart from mainstream. They don’t publish in magazines; they keep strictly to the internet, and publish online. In my daily life I have always stayed away from anything directly political. I’d rather join hands with civil society than any political party. As a teacher of English I choose political themes for students to read and discuss concerning gender discrimination, equality, etc. Two weeks ago, I sent them an essay topic on to what extent gender can overcome culture. I like to discuss with them questions like “Should the government privatize health care?” I believe in cultivating grassroots politics through education.

R My Heart Beating on a Plate Such bliss! My Lord is shining his gun barrel I’m on the floor, on all fours,

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Licking clean my Lord’s boots. With gratitude, I lick both sides simultaneously. My Lord appreciates industriousness. While shining his barrel He occupies a land. Makes two kings go to war against each other. In a minion state, orders munitions factories to be built, And systematically breeds his clones. I am loyal to my Lord, who procured me as an extra thrown into The bargain at a slave market. My Lord is my universe. He had me Scalped and left to dry in the sun. A splash of water and then, again, My brains were cooked up ’til tender. My Lord approaches the window and whistles. A child runs out of the enclosure. My Lord never misses. Straight In the middle of the forehead. Before I have finished growling They come to take away the prey. My Lord goes into the bedroom. A woman with musk at the ready. My Lord closes the door and signals the end of my day. I look up at the moon And howl. I sit on my bamboo bedstead. Take off my clothes. Peel off my skin. Unlock each bone from its joint and place them all neatly in a row. From a hole in the wall I slip out. I am free as long as my Lord is asleep. The lawn outside is cold as ice. A dark forest. A soundless village. I enter A hut and wash my face With water from an earthen bowl.5

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Whale To let in some fresh air, I opened the window There on the street lay a blue whale, dead. People and vehicles moved over and under it, On the left and the right of it traffic flowed Along just as usual, without obstruction. No one saw the dead whale, or else They took it as part of the air. Outside the window were the usual scenes: Pavements, trees, buildings, people, Sounds of engines, voices, horns, all as per the script. I opened the door, but it wouldn’t budge. I applied some pressure, and there through the opening I saw the white belly of the blue whale. When I looked closely A beating heart seemed to be swelling and shrinking Deep down under its skin. News spread that municipal workers had got rid of the dead whale, and City dwellers could carry on their daily lives in peace. To let in some fresh air, I open the window. What is that Stench coming into the room? Something dead Between roof and ceiling? Under the bed? In my hair? Behind the cupboard? Hear that? That heart beat beat beating? The whale? No, it isn’t. It is coming from your heart (on the left side of your chest) Are you suffering from some urban psychological disorder? The phone rings.

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The dead whale’s mouth opens. “Hello, it’s me. I’m still lying on the road.”6

The Returnee After packing him up neatly, They sent him home as a gift. When the package was opened Everyone gasped— His whole body was in stitches. What on earth happened? Some ask with sympathy. Even his lips were sewn. His eyes, left open, welled with tears. Maybe In the stitches of his memory lay a dark night. He just stared At the brightly colored, beautifully designed Packing paper that had wrapped him, That made a crackly sound when touched.7

I Am Silence I look coldly at your retreating hullabaloo From the top of the abyss. Below I see your wanton destruction Your steel objects flashing in sunlight. Sparks flying off the anvil, Texts, flags and pennants, enormous myths, A desert snake whose stomach is stitched up in zigzags, Sounds of hooves, diseases, lusts, Compilations of indescribable victories.

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Song lyric stall

Not getting what you wanted, you laid waste to everything in your way. Fragments of words, shards of syllables, dried and twisted bones of Consonants, stains of vowels. Dare you touch me, your hands will sizzle, For I am Silence. The poison darts in your heart are my couriers. All invisible frozen shadows belong to my language. I am always here. Come search for me in your multitudes. I will be here. I am always here. I am Silence.

R

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All but the first of the poems featured here were written before transition. Like many poets, Zeyar Lynn is loath to explain in detail the meaning or significance of his poems; however, all these poems can be interpreted as critiques of the regime. “My heart beating on a plate” is a wonderfully strange and evocative poem alluding to the personal experience of domination. Of “Whale” the author said: “this poem could stand for corruption or dictatorship—we didn’t want to describe it, or face it—we were just living inside the belly of the whale, refusing to acknowledge what was happening, and learning to be good hypocrites.” “The Returnee” was composed following a visit Zeyar Lynn paid to friend after his release from prison, upon being notified and invited over by his mother. “It was awful,” he told me glumly. “He went through such torture he couldn’t remember his mother or sister any more. I was careful not to mention the word prison.” Finally, in the context of censorship, “I Am Silence” speaks for itself.

4 Writers The Younger Generation He forges decrees like horseshoes—decrees and decrees: This one gets it in the balls, that one in the forehead, him right between the eyes. Whenever he’s got a victim, he glows like a broad-chested Georgian munching a raspberry. —Osip Mandelstam (1933)

W

hile the younger generation of writers, aged 20 to 40, in Myanmar (Burma) has seen the least of censorship, they have all been affected by it. Of the three writers featured here, one was imprisoned, one saw his publishing house shut down, and one left the country for a while to get a decent education and work. A key difference for this generation has been the role of the internet. It is representative of the current youth literary culture in Yangon that two of these three writers first began publishing their writing online through blogs—a means of achieving anonymity in an environment of close personal scrutiny, and also a way of testing to see if your writing attracts popularity before you have the confidence or ability to get published in print. Of these three writers, the best-known internationally is Nay Phone Latt, who was jailed for his blogging about the Saffron Revolution. Pandora is a poet who studied and lived in Singapore for many years and came to some international recognition through having her poems published in the Bones Will Crow anthology. Myay Hmone Lwin is still in his mid-twenties, but has already caused shock waves inside Myanmar through his groundbreaking novel that smashes accepted social, cultural, linguistic and political boundaries.

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Girl doing homework on the street

Nay Phone Latt Blogger, Short Story Writer, NGO Director, Internet Educator, Political Activist If you had to pick out from a crowd a single person who was one of Time magazine’s top 100 heroes, a PEN / Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award winner, the founder and director of an internet communication NGO, a journalist, the online media adviser to the National League for Democracy (NLD) Party, and an ex-political prisoner for five years, you might not immediately land upon Nay Phone Latt. The soft-spoken, square-spectacled, longyi-wearing 31-year-old seems on a first impression to be an ordinary, courteous, and even slightly geeky young man. But a quick Google search for his name and a short conversation with him reveals that he is an extraordinary achiever, and is intelligent, determined, articulate, confident, and dedicated to freedom of expression, particularly online. As a writer, blogger, and youth leader, he is respected across Burma by

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Nay Phone Latt in MIDO’s office with photos of his internet heroes

young social media users, political elders, and writers alike, as well as by advocates of free speech around the world. We met at the office of the NGO he founded—two small rooms in a gorgeous but crumbling colonial building in east downtown. The NGO is called MIDO, which stands for Myanmar ICT for Development Organization (ICT standing for Internet and Computer Technology), and it aims to promote internet and computer skills, awareness, and potential across Burma, to its most remote corners, as a means of democratic empowerment. The office walls were decorated with photos of internet icons like Bill Gates. Several young people in their twenties were sitting

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buried in their laptops at 8 p.m. with no sign of finishing soon. Talking to Nay Phone Latt, it didn’t seem that he took much time off work either. He wasn’t initially drawn online with an intention to provoke political action or drive the cause of computer literacy, but because he saw the potential of the blog as a space to publish his short stories. When the Saffron Revolution began, though, he said he just had to write about it. He got away with it for a while, but eventually the authorities cottoned on, arrested him, and forced him through interrogation to give them his passwords. Through more violent interrogation he found himself unintentionally educating the officials about the internet, about which they seemed as scared as they were ignorant. During his imprisonment, Nay Phone Latt continued to read and to write short stories by bribing prison officials for writing materials, and to smuggle his writing out to his parents for publication. When he was released, blogger fans flocked to his house, and with a select few of them he set up MIDO. Now they travel the country, training communities to use computers and the internet. Nay Phone Latt is also very politically engaged these days, and active in the NLD. Like many of the other writers featured in this book, he told me he has been too busy since his release to write much fiction, but he is about to publish a collection of letters he wrote while in prison. If and when things quieten down, he hopes to start writing fiction again, and to kick-start informal literary events where the younger generation can feel free to ask difficult questions and provoke debate, unlike the lecture format of the traditional literary talks in the country that are still delivered by the older generations.

Nay Phone Latt’s Story I got into blogging in January 2007, and was imprisoned for doing it later that year, for political reasons. I didn’t actually start blogging because of politics though—I did it so that I could write and publish whatever I wanted without having to get my work past the censorship board. When one of my friends introduced me to blogging, I immediately liked it because I saw that I could post anything: short stories, articles, poems, and more. I soon set up my own blog and got

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an audience. People got to know me as a blogger. I set up the Myanmar Bloggers’ Society (MBS) and I met friends through that online. When I was released from prison, some of us met in person and set up our NGO together, to promote ICT knowledge in Myanmar. I was born in 1980, in Yangon. I grew up surrounded by books and politics. My grandparents had a big home library which I used quite a lot, but most of the books in it were Buddhist books. My parents read a lot and encouraged me to read. They used to buy me weekly children’s journals and books. I learned English at school, but the teaching was not good, so I had to have private tuition to be able to speak it well. Both my parents are NLD members and politicians, as was my grandfather. At the time of the 1988 revolution, I was eight years old. At that time we lived in downtown Yangon, close to City Hall, so I saw everything that happened in those events, all the protests. That meant even as a child I was very interested in politics. I went on to participate in the 1996 protests as a student, in tenth grade. Fortunately I was not arrested then. As a teenager, my favorite writer was Tayar Mima Wai, a political prisoner. He wrote poems, short stories, and novels. His long poems are very famous. He wrote about the 1988 protests before he was arrested and imprisoned, and he also wrote some political poems, with another pen name, Shwe Paung Luu. After his release he stopped writing about political things. He writes novels that are good for young people, by encouraging and motivating them with characters that can be role models. I became an NLD member myself when I was an engineering student. In my final year, 2003, Daw Suu did a speaking tour around the country. I worked as a guard of her house, and it was my duty to stay there and watch over it. I was there on the day she left the house to speak at an event and there was a crackdown. Daw Suu was imprisoned for three months and was then returned to house arrest. Again, fortunately I escaped arrest at that point and managed to get my degree. It was because I was so involved in politics, as an NLD member and with connections with so many politicians, that they sentenced me to so many years in prison—not just because of my blog. It is true that in my blog I often wanted to criticize them, and occasionally I did criticize them, but I never did so directly. They

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were also afraid of the new technology and the power they feared it could have. I was already publishing short stories in magazines by the time I was arrested in January 2009, but I was not able to write any articles that were critical of the government. The censorship board just vetoed everything. I had posted about the Saffron Revolution in September 2007, but I never posted direct photos in my blog. If I actually wanted to show the world anything graphic, or to say anything critical of the government directly, I would send photos or articles to people I knew who were abroad, and other bloggers I’d connected with. The authorities didn’t know about any of those links, even after they had arrested me. They just sentenced me because they took my computer and they found a cartoon of the military general Than Shwe somewhere in my email inbox. They didn’t hack into it—they are not that computer savvy—I had to give them my password after a long interrogation. I was violently interrogated many times. If they wanted to know something or I refused to say anything, they would hit me. If I said something about their question, or made a comment that wasn’t what they wanted, they would hit me. I underwent this for two weeks, nonstop. At the beginning they asked their questions very politely. But as time when on, after two or three days they weren’t getting anything from me. They wanted to know: Where is Kyaw Ku Pho, and Ni La De—who are both 88 generation people. At the time they were in hiding. The officers wanted to know where but I genuinely didn’t know. Another line of questioning was about MBS. They found out from my email that we had a plan to get together for another seminar like one we’d had before, a few months later. They asked me: What will you do when you meet? What is your plan? At first I didn’t answer. I was worried for my friends. But after two to four days, I explained that the seminar was not going to be for politics, just for ICT education and development. They believed this, so they didn’t arrest my friends. It was a very fragile period though—I know that if I had said a name they would have arrested the person immediately. They kept on coming to me with names and asking me about my relationship with the person. Most of the names were online friends, people I didn’t know in person. They spent a long time

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going through my emails. They would check them, then come back and ask me questions. I had many different interrogators, but usually about four people. At first one would ask me a question for the afternoon, then change places with another person who would ask me questions through the night, so I didn’t get any sleep for the first week. There were two teams of investigation: one was the military, and the other one was the police special branch. The second team let me sleep a bit. But the military were the worst. Most of them are soldiers. I gave them some information, carefully, which I thought could not harm anyone, like my friends. I was met with violence from both. Sometimes I had to kneel down and they hit my back and chest, and sometimes they handcuffed me and I had to kneel down for long periods. It was not the worst violence I heard about during interrogations compared to others. Some got much worse treatment than me. I think that because my field was ICT, and the interrogator didn’t know much about it, I was in a way superior to them when we were talking about it. Whatever I said about it, they were surprised! Once I was in prison I didn’t suffer violence from the officers, but I did have some medical problems which weren’t treated properly. I have an eye problem, and I have to take some medicine for my eyes, and sometimes I need to change the power of my glasses, but I couldn’t do this, so tears would often come when I read because of poor lighting and the environment. My cell was very small, and lighting was very dim, so it was hard for anyone to read. Fortunately for me, my parents could bring me some medicine. I spent time in two different prisons. For the first nine months I was in Insein prison, and then I was sent to a more remote prison, in Hpa’an. Insein was much bigger, and it was packed with people, so the prison authorities were very strict and the conditions were harsh. For four months I didn’t have a chance to go outside at all—I just had to stay in a cell by myself, and I had to switch to several different cells. My cells were about 10 feet by 5 feet. I had no toilet—we just had to use a big bowl. After four months I was allowed outside my cell, but I was not allowed to talk to others. My parents could come to visit me once every two weeks for fifteen minutes. They would bring me books, journals, and food. Even though I wasn’t allowed to speak to people, sometimes I knew there was someone in

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the next cell, because I could see through a small hole at the door. Occasionally we would shout to each other if it was noisy in the daytime, but no shouting or talking was allowed at night. Even so, I managed to meet many politicians in prison. I met Min Ko Naing, Zarganar, and other leaders of the 88 generation group, and they made me stronger. I knew Zarganar before, because I had helped him with blogging, and I also had a previous connection with the ’88 generation group relating to ICT—I helped them with websites, technical support, and other such things. My trial didn’t happen until six or seven months in prison had passed. It was held in secret. For the first two or three days my mother and family were allowed to come, but then they stopped letting anybody in. They didn’t want anyone watching them sentencing me to so many years. I didn’t have a lawyer, because my lawyer was sentenced himself to six months in prison, just before the trial began. I was not allowed another lawyer, so I had to make submissions myself. For me this was not so difficult because they just asked me about ICT, and whatever I said to them they didn’t understand anyway. I already knew that they were going to sentence me for many years, so I wasn’t worried about the trial process. Sometimes I asked judges questions myself about ICT and, as I expected, they could not answer them. Hpa’an prison in Karen State gave me much more freedom than Insein. I was in a cell by myself still, but in our ward there were fifteen narrow cells with nine political prisoners in them, so in daytime when they opened the cells, we would talk and play football and chinlone with each other. We were not allowed outside at night. At 5 p.m. they would close the cell door. It would open again at 5 a.m. until midday, and then open again at 1 p.m. The cells were better. I was able to buy a lamp for my room and change the lighting, which helped my eyes, and we were able to buy mosquito nets. We still had to take great care of our health because it was not easy to go to clinics there, and the prison doctor only came infrequently. I did exercise and yoga. Fortunately I didn’t have any big health problem there. But some of my friends had problems, with various things like their eyes, and it was difficult to go outside to specialists. We would have to wait at least a month to get approval.

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We might have got diseases if we had eaten the prison food, but we never did. We only ate food from outside. Sometimes my parents would buy me ready-made food, or if we wanted to buy food ourselves the prison staff would buy it for us. We befriended them. They let us cook, illegally, using their cooking equipment. Actually, I can’t cook, but we were able to grow vegetables and herbs in the prison courtyard and sometimes we fried these things up. The prison food was not hygienic at all—and they just put in anything they could grab. Most of the criminal prisoners didn’t have family visiting them, so they would have to try to survive with prison food, and they would often get food poisoning and stomach problems. Writing was difficult. I was not legally allowed to write anything inside except letters to family, and I was not allowed chairs or a table, but I wanted to write short stories. So I managed to get a pen, and I would hide this and bits of paper in holes in the earth in the area outside our cells where we were allowed to walk. The officers sometimes saw us digging holes, but most of the time they weren’t watching. After a while I managed to get books from the prison staff. It was not so difficult to get books because they weren’t illegal inside, but still I wanted to write. I made a table out of a pile of books. But to get paper and pen was more difficult. I found that the prison staff felt sorry for political prisoners like us. And when I got to know the staff well they helped me, just to help, and not even for money. I became friends with most of them after a while. Not all political prisoners did this. Your approach to prison staff depends on the person you are. Some politicians were very hard-line about it. They thought that the authorities and all the staff are their enemy, so they cannot be friends, but I didn’t think like that. So I was allowed to get and keep things inside my cell. Sometimes I gave my poems and stories to my parents, by slipping them under the table during family visits, and they gave them to friends who would post them in my blog. It was easier to get poems to them rather than stories, which were longer. But I did manage to pass through some stories, and my parents gave them to magazines. Some published them but obviously they couldn’t use my name, so I had to create a new pen name. I chose Phone U Maw. Phone means power, U means the first one, and Maw means confident.

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My short stories were about the government, so I used metaphors to disguise this. For instance, in one story I wrote about a village. There is a forest outside the village, and a tiger from the forest turns up one night and goes into the pagoda, but the pagoda was not an appropriate place for the tiger, so the villagers wanted to kill the tiger, but the head of the village didn’t want to kill the tiger, they wanted to send him back to the forest instead, and so they did. Fortunately the censors did not know what I meant and so it was published. And then I found out that the people who read it also didn’t know what it meant! I also used to write that kind of story before the Saffron Revolution and my imprisonment. Many people at that time would write short stories using metaphor. In general, if I want to write a short story or an aesthetic essay, I prefer a postmodern approach—no need for a plot, no need for an epicenter, so decentralization; and also freedom for the readers who can read what they like into it. Of course, I write intending the piece to mean a particular thing, but readers can read it as they want. I don’t want to write realism—personally, I find it very boring to do that. But the thing is, now that we have more freedoms I have begun to write more directly. I just have so much to write directly that there is no time for fiction yet. When I was still in prison in 2010, I heard the news through my parents that I had won the PEN and Time magazine awards. I was happy, but it was not about me; they gave me this award on behalf of every blogger. The bloggers played a big role in the Saffron Revolution. Not long before it happened, in 2007, we organized the Myanmar Bloggers’ Society, and held a seminar for the public, introducing them to this new technology. That meant that when the Saffron Revolution began, we were able to have an impact, because this whole group of people knew about blogging, and so they took photos and posted them online to the world. After I was released in 2012, I published two short story collections. Some were written before prison, some in prison, and one or two afterwards. But I had other things to do too. It was just a month after my release that I started up my NGO. My blogger friends all came round to my home and welcomed me back. Some of them I had never met in person before. We talked about the changes that

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were happening and what we would like to do, and we all decided to organize an NGO that would enable us to use ICT in order to support our nation-building process. I didn’t want to use the old name MBS for that, if nothing else because nowadays blogging is not so popular as Facebook, and if we had used MBS our range would have been too narrow. So we chose the new name. We are now mostly comprised of volunteers—we have ten core members. I’m the Executive Director, we have two paid staff, and altogether there are twenty-five to thirty people involved. They are mostly based here, and we have some donors from overseas. Most people were my old friends from online. Last year I went to America to the International Writing Program in Iowa, for three months, where I met the Myanmar community living out there and explained about our organization, and they are supporting us too. I spend most of my time these days working on my organization. I also write for The People’s Era journal [edited by Pe Myint]. They published the letters I wrote to my younger brother in prison. I am the middle brother, and I wrote these letters to him when I was there, but they were not only for him, they were also for everyone else out there in the young generation; I just used my younger brother as an example. I also write political articles for D-Wave, the NLD Party’s journal. Our main MIDO activity is training. We travel around the whole country, often going out to remote areas. We give three kinds of training. In some places there is no internet at all, so there we can only give training of computer basics using our computers. Those people can be very afraid of computers, and they don’t know how to use them at all, so we teach them what a computer is and we make them familiar with it. The problem is that when we come back they don’t have a computer to practice on or do further learning. Now we are trying to get funding for that. I want to create a local computer resource center for those people. That is our plan, but it’s a very expensive plan. Another form of training is, when we can get the internet, we give presentations on how to use different websites effectively, how to communicate via email and how to blog. And the other kind of training is focused on citizen journalists. In some places local people want to share their news with others, they want to be

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journalists themselves, and so we show them that if they can use ICT to publish a picture and write news, they can do this. We give those people training on Facebook, blogs, gmail/gchat, and also journalism—how to write a news article and basic journalism ethics. There have been so many changes over the past year. The best change is that there is no more censorship. In the past you could not use gmail, gtalk, blogs, or news websites, but now we can access everything and post things online ourselves too. There are several interesting writers publishing now, like Myay Hmone Lwin. A lot of this happened after the Minister for Information changed; U Kyaw Hsan was a hard-liner, but when censorship was lifted he was shifted to another ministry, and the new minister, U Aung Kyi, seems to be more flexible. So now we have some freedoms, but we are still not that safe. That’s because there are still some laws that were made by the military which we need to change—for instance, the Electronic Transactions Law and the media laws. I’ve been appointed to an NLD panel to look at reviewing the Electronic Transactions Law. Me personally, I don’t care about the risk from those laws. If they really want to transform this society to be a democratic society, they have to give us that kind of freedom. So use it. But while I do criticize government and parliament, I never use hate speech or criticize individual people. If I need to mention a person I will do it, but normally I focus on the system or the events. As for literary talks, it is good that they are happening again now, but I want to change the nature of them. We need to educate audiences so that they will interact with the writer who is speaking, not just listen and clap. How it works now is that, at most of these talks, the writer comes to the stage and he or she says what they want to say and then it’s finished. I don’t think that’s the best way of doing it. I want to get the audience to participate, to ask questions or talk back to the writer. But it’s not easy to change that nature in people here. It’s a nature that was borne out of censorship. Another issue with literary talks here is that many people attend them, but most of the writers criticize the government and don’t talk about literature! The people like listening to them do what they do, but it’s not about writing. Still, it is still early days, and for a long time we have not had even that kind of freedom. I myself have a plan to give a literary

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talk, maybe next month, when my book Letters to My Brother comes out. I want to make this talk different: I will invite anyone who is interested in my books to come, and if they want to discuss something I will invite them to discuss it freely. I went to the Irrawaddy Literary Festival this year. I thought it was a new experience for everybody, and a good first step. But there was only a certain kind of audience there, because you had to buy a ticket and the place was not so easy to get to. I would like to organize another festival in a more easily accessible place and make it free of charge. I would like a literary festival in future to be more interactive, and to encourage the people to speak out—I want people to realize that writers are not teachers and they don’t need to accept everything the writer says. But I am not sure older writers have this attitude. They are set in their ways. Younger writers have a new kind of attitude. They welcome audience feedback. I think the culture of online feedback has encouraged this. Most younger writers write on Facebook now, and they welcome comments. But some older writers don’t like feedback. They think they are superior. None of my writing has been translated yet. I cannot write in English even though I can speak it a bit. We have a language problem in Myanmar; we don’t have good English translators. There are a few professional translators but they are very expensive.

Actor, Audience, Performance The auditorium darkened. The pwe dance performance was about to begin. In the gloom, I made out expressions of unease and discomfort on people’s faces. It was roasting hot, with the body heat of the audience intensifying the heat of the weather. Air conditioning and mist fans had been set up around the stage and were blowing cool air onto the crowd, otherwise it would have been unbearable. I managed to nab a standing-only space, but it was so far from the front that I could barely see the tiny figures on stage. A sea of people lay between. Suppressing my irritation, I tried to concentrate. The stage set was mainly green, but it gave out none of the coolness of a forest.

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Finally, clapping exploded around me. A man next to me gave me a dirty look for not clapping, but I ignored him. Then an actor appeared on the stage with a flapping headdress. “Bless you all, dear audience,” the actor greeted us. His voice was clear and sweet. He formed his hands into a lotus shape and he bowed. My interest piqued, I jostled through the crowd and slowly made my way forward. The actor continued speaking, and each line he delivered was met with loud clapping and whistling. Although I was trying my best to advance, I was still quite far from the stage when the actor started singing. His honeyed voice calmed the rowdy audience a little. The loud booming of the pat ma gyi drum joined in, setting off the elegant melody. Like a blooming flower, the actor added elegant gestures to his song and precise, beautiful moves. He alternated seamlessly between song verses and dance sequences, and every inch of his body appeared to be in harmony with the rest. The audience became breathless, mesmerized. The actor sang, danced, sang again, danced some more, then bowed to the audience. More applause. He proceeded to entertain them all, single-handedly. I kept on pushing forward, getting ever closer to the stage. Now he was singing again, and dancing. What beautiful lyrics! What elegant moves of his fingers and joints! What lightness of feet as he leapt around the stage! The audience was bursting with delight. I joined in the clapping, thumping my hands together. This performer was awesome. I could see that from where I was, but still I wanted to take a closer look. I kept on pushing forward, I was soaked in sweat by now but progressing—and then, to my surprise, I ran into a barbed wire barricade. I could go no farther. This seemed to be a boundary for the audience. But it was still quite a distance from the stage. A no-man’s-land lay between the audience and the performer. I attempted to break through the barbed wire, but a security guard stopped me. The performer was still singing and dancing. He appeared tireless. The audience was enthralled with his performance, and he was indeed a beautiful sight to behold. But I was still dissatisfied at not being able to move closer.

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Then I remembered a pair of glasses in my shirt pocket. I had recently ordered a new pair with increased power. I put the glasses on, and I could immediately see more clearly. “Will you give me even more of your affection?” Although his singing voice was still crystal clear, I now noticed that the actor’s mouth was not actually moving. I spotted a black speaker in the back corner of the stage. Feeling like I was beginning to understand something, I focused my attention back on the performer. In case I had imagined it, I took off my glasses, wiped, and put them back on again. But there was nothing odd about my vision. It was the actor that was odd. I looked more closely and saw that tiny strings were attached to his legs, hands, head, waist, and many other parts of his body. He was about to reach the finale of the dance. The musicians’ beats grew quicker, more intense. His dance moves became breathtakingly fast. But now that I knew about the strings, it started to look a little ridiculous. Others didn’t seem to think so. To the sound of a loud drum beat, the actor finished his dance and bowed, and claps erupted once more. “You are our man!” shouted a man standing nearby. But when his face turned toward me, I saw it was lifeless. “Give us another song! Another dance!” people in the audience demanded. Breathing fast, I pushed my way out as fast as I could, and left the noise and the theater behind. For whom was the audience clapping? A part of me felt bad for another part of me that had even gone to the performance. But wasn’t I also mesmerized by it? Hadn’t I also clapped? I uttered something that I wanted to shout out, but that came out only as a muttering to myself: “If the man you are all clapping and cheering for turns out to be a puppet, this whole performance will be a waste of your time.” Winlathan said: “True. So much time wasted!” A Theatergoer said:

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“An actor should only entertain his audience with his true skills. He should avoid the kind of spectacle that can be achieved only through someone else controlling his moves. Even if you have done that sort of thing before, it’s time to cut the strings and dance for yourself.” OA6 said: “Let me share this on gtalk custom message.” Thurein06 said: “Very pleased. So much to think through. Thank you so much.” Mabaydar said: “If you cheer for a puppet, nothing real will be achieved.” MANDY MAW said: “It seems that there are more clappers in that audience than observers.”1

R

This story was written while Nay Phone Latt was in prison, and smuggled out by his parents on a family visit. An allegorical story, it reflects the work of many literary writers during the censorship era. On its face it is an account of a stage performance, but it also constitutes a critique of the false face of power in a dictatorship and the way in which the censored media distances people from the truth of the society they are living in. At the end, the author includes responses from online readers. This is significant for several reasons. First, posting stories via blogs online was the author’s only means of publication during the censorship era. Second, online communication and social media are the backbone of his charity and are for him the keys to education and social development for millions of Burmese people and for the country as a whole. Finally, online reader interaction is an integral part of current and future fiction publishing in Burma and indeed in the contemporary, digital age, so naturallyforms part of the story Nay Phone Latt wants to tell the world.

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Pandora in her local café

Pandora Poet, Short Story Writer, Former Public Servant (Singapore) Like Nay Phone Latt, Pandora’s writing career began through blogging, while she was living as a Burmese émigré in Singapore, working on public policy in their government, but wishing that she could publish her poetry. She had cultivated her love of literature from an early age, when her parents owned a book rental shop when she was a small

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child. At 31, she has only been publishing her poetry for a few years but has already risen to prominence, through a mixture of online engagement, print publications, and more recently, public appearances. Unlike most Burmese poets who use traditional forms and engage with traditional topics in a realist way, Pandora’s poetry is formally experimental and deals confidently with an eclectic spectrum of issues, from Burmese politics to identity, globalization, and commercialism. While still relatively unknown in Burma, she was talent-spotted by the editors of Bones Will Crow and included in the anthology. She was subsequently nominated to attend the International Writing Program in Iowa City, where she says her eyes were opened to many new things. We met twice, both times in her local café, a swish, middle-class place with wooden furniture, Italian-style cappuccinos, and filtered leaf tea. She was shepherded there by her husband as she was in the early stages of pregnancy and assiduously taking it easy. She has long hair, a soft voice, a warm smile, and a quiet demeanor. Her quiet, gentle manner belies her writing and her thinking; she is bursting with ideas, critique, and creativity and does not hesitate to express strong, articulate, and intelligent opinions about literature, poetry, politics, and culture.

Pandora’s Story I first I became known as a writer online. In 2005 I set up an email account with the nickname Pandora, and I used that name to chat with people in forums about writing and to post some of my work. I chose Pandora because I wanted an English name so that people would not know which country I’m from, and a name beginning with P like my real name, Pyait Hlaing Oo. In the forums I met people and had conversations, and I posted a bit of my work. I was nervous. But online friends told me it was good, and so I thought okay, maybe it’s not so bad. So in 2007 I set up a blog. I posted poetry on it, but also stories, essays, everything. It became quite popular. Then I sent my work to some online magazines, and through that I also got to know writers in local print magazines. My friend Eaindra, another female poet, helped me send a story to an established Burmese print magazine,

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Padauk Pwint Thit, and it was published in 2010. This was a turning point for me. Then, in 2011, an unexpected thing happened—some of my poems were selected to be included in an English anthology, Bones Will Crow. The editors were looking for young female poets, and some established poets recommended me. They translated some of my work, thought it was good, asked for my permission to publish it, and I said okay. This was another turning point. It was also controversial in Myanmar at the time because not much of my work had been published in print magazines here yet, and so published poets were saying—is she really a poet? I would have been happier to see a bit more criticism of my work itself, but they just talked about why was I selected. They asked me: why didn’t you send work to magazines before? Of course, I would have been happier if my previous work had been published! Anyway, soon I became more widely accepted in the poetry scene, and now I have several poems and stories published in print magazines in Myanmar. I haven’t always lived in Myanmar. I left to do a master’s and work in Singapore, and I only came back in October 2011. The main reason I came back was to try to have a baby here. We tried for two years in Singapore with no luck, so thought maybe a change of climate would be good—and also it was transition time. I grew up in Myanmar though, in the Irrawaddy Delta. I was born in Pathein in 1974, but after that my family moved to various small towns and villages. My father was a schoolteacher. In the 1980s my family started a bookshop, named after me. We rented and sold all sorts of books, magazines, journals, and we sold stationary too. It was in a way similar to a public library, and there wasn’t a proper library available in the village. We all knew one another there. So if strangers wanted to rent something we would ask for a deposit, but if we knew them there would be no deposit. The rental fee was a tenth of the price of buying the book, and it was charged per day. At that time we didn’t have TV. It appeared around 1984, but not everyone could afford it, so most people still spent their spare time reading—people in the market, even the people selling fish and vegetables would rent and read books and magazines.

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Vegetable market

My dad was a poet, a writer, but he couldn’t write much when he was working and busy with raising the family. He wanted me to become a writer too. It was my mother who mostly managed the bookshop, and that shop was very important in nurturing me to become a writer. Unlike other kids in the village, my parents placed no restrictions on what I could read. Many parents prohibited kids from reading because they thought the kids would start to imitate adults and what they were reading about—so if they read love stories they might get a girl or boyfriend too early. My parents didn’t believe

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that. When I was six or seven years old, I read my first novel. It was just a translation of a Chinese martial arts story, but it was very attractive to me. Eventually I read other novels as well. My mother was very important for me in my learning journey, because she taught me how to write and read early. I learned at the same time as my older brother—so by the time I was three and a half I could read and write. Many people thought it might be my father who taught me because he was a teacher, but the truth was he was not very patient with us kids. He taught long hours in school. He was interested in administration and politics, and he volunteered in village affairs. We had a socialist system back then, and he took part in local elections. He got elected as township administrator, but then that township administration was abolished so he was returned again to the Ministry of Education where he worked as a schoolteacher. Then in 1986—the last election before the ’88 uprisings—he was elected as a township judge. The whole family moved, and the bookshop had to close. He served as judge for two years, until the countrywide demonstrations. Then he went back to teaching again. When I was little I mostly read magazines. Short stories were very popular at that time. We even had some magazines then like Sabe Oo (“The First Jasmine”) with only short stories in them—nothing else. There are none like that anymore. There were lots of specialist magazines then. We even had a Tha Bin [traditional dance] magazine, because this used to be very popular, and the concerts would travel from town to town, before ’88. We had another magazine specializing in fine art, giving basic drawing lessons. Now magazines are full of advertisements. The quality of the paper might be much better, but the content has little about the arts any more. It’s mostly about popular culture, celebrities, actresses and models. There are fewer short stories. During the time we had the bookshop, I read more and more. I also read some books saved by my father from his university days in the 1950s-1960s. I liked reading Takatho Phone Naing’s university campus novels, and the work of Chit Oo Nyo, who writes historical fiction—though he has used inventions as well as facts, and some have criticized him for ruining history for kids. I read Mya Hnaung Nyo, who is more into love stories. I also enjoyed the work of Maung

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Thar Ya, Nu Nu Yi, Ma Sandar, Moe Moe [Innyar], who are realists. I liked to read Pe Myint’s short stories too. And then the mid-1980s I noticed a very striking female writer, Ju. I felt her writing stood out among others. I kept all the magazines with her stories in them for some years, until we moved and I eventually had to sell them. Her first novel, Ah Hmat Taya [Remembrance], was controversial as it contradicted traditional culture, because the main characters were a couple who stayed together as university students without marrying. This was frowned upon by society. Ju came under a lot of criticism then, but her writing was so smooth and appealing that people kept reading. She has changed now though—she is more into social issues and environmental awareness, so her stories are more educational. She still stands out for me because, like other international writers, she plans properly and does proper research for a novel. It seems to me that she must take at least six months or a year to write, and she has produced a lot. She must have thought about messages she wants to give out to people in her novels—first breaking through cultural norms, then feminism, then social issues and environment. I admire that. She’s a realist writer though, not particularly experimental. Many of our famous writers are into realism. I think that is because in a developing country like ours, there are many social issues to deal with. Postmodernism tends to come from more individualistic cultures. But here people are more concerned with surroundings and the real lives of the people. And also, if you want many people to appreciate your work here, you cannot be too advanced in your style. Poetry is different. Poetry uses a special language. Under censorship, poets tried to hide their meanings. They would use images and play with language, in a way that sometimes made their poems more mysterious and more experimental in terms of their use of language. In general, I think poets are more advanced than prose writers in Myanmar these days. As a child, the first poems I became interested in were traditional poems, poems with particular rhymes and rhythms. At school we had to learn those kinds of poems with traditional forms. And even now, no modern poetry is taught in schools. But because of the bookshop I was lucky: I had the opportunity to read poems that were outside the school curriculum, by Burmese

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writers and in translation. That was how I got to know more about poetry. The first translated poem that drew my attention was a poem by Pablo Neruda, translated by Mya Than Tint (with his other pen name Maung Thit The). I noticed how Neruda used a lot of images and how the language was very free. It made sense and is still very striking to me. Then I discovered the work of the modern Burmese poet Tin Moe—though these days he is considered quite traditional. In the 1970s, poets like Aung Cheimt came on the scene, though I discovered him a bit later, in the 1990s. His poems are quite philosophical—you have to think about them and find hidden meanings in them. Within different poetics there are different groups too, and which one is better depends on your taste. I haven’t always read Myanmar literature. Our bookshop had some translated novels and short stories that I would read when I was little. I remember reading Pollyanna—that was one of my favorites. But after we moved away from the bookshop I had to rent the books from other shops, and then I couldn’t read any book I liked any more because I had to pay, and so my reading became more and more selective. During matriculation I read fewer and fewer books that were not on the curriculum. In 1993 I came to Yangon to study at the university, and I specialized in English. There I got a chance to study the basics of English literature and linguistics. For undergrad I studied Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, Wordsworth, and other classical stuff. The syllabus was not very advanced, but it did cover the basics. We started reading James Joyce’s short stories. But unfortunately at that time there were frequent closures of the university because of demonstrations, and we couldn’t finish the curriculum. We were supposed to learn four to six Shakespeare plays, but this got cut down to two. I never got a chance to learn from Zeyar Lynn, one of the leading poets in Myanmar, who was teaching in the University of Yangon when I was admitted there. He was very rebellious—I remember, he had long hair, and played guitar in the classroom, and sometimes he took his entire class to the teashop to teach them. The students loved him so much! But I just missed the opportunity to learn from him. In the first and second year I was in Hlaing campus, which was far away from the main campus. And then in 1995 when I got to

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attend Honors class, Zeyar Lynn had resigned. I think some of the conservative teachers might not have appreciated his style—most independent-minded teachers like him resigned around that time. I had one outstanding teacher there, U Kyaw Kyaw Naing, who was good at linguistics, but he also resigned when the authorities transferred him out to Moulmein for some reason. After he resigned he started learning maths by himself, then learned programming, and managed to get admission to Singapore to do a master’s in computing without any formal academic certificate, and now he is a computer programmer in Singapore! He had such a high IQ. It is such a shame—our English department lost so many good teachers. One of the problems with the current education system is that there are not many professional writers or poets teaching in the English Department and Myanmarsar Department. Most teachers don’t write. In the U.S., some writers are academics as well and do research, but we don’t have institutions that allow that. Universities are purely academic—there is no MFA or courses in creative writing. We do have some fine arts teaching in the University of Culture, but literature is excluded. During my university days I sent my poems and short stories to the university magazine, and several were published. I didn’t send my poetry outside to other magazines or journals though. Being a student from the countryside, I didn’t have any connections. And as I was staying in the hostel, I wasn’t that free to go out and make contact with people myself. When I was in the first year of my MA in English, my classmates and I published a small poetry book. I didn’t get involved in the student demonstrations myself in the ’90s. I wasn’t able to. All girls in the hostel had to stay indoors from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. In 1996 a very significant demonstration was led by students, but again the warden and hall tutors didn’t allow us to go out. We could see the student demonstrators from the window, but they were being guarded by the teachers. Initially, teachers tried to stop them, but they couldn’t, and they were afraid police would open fire after the ’88 experiences, so they just followed along. We watched them from the window. All wardens and tutors and even senior students were told to control the other students. I was a senior student, so I was told to also. I was in my final year honors class

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then, and just before our exams came along, the school was closed. I was sent back to my hometown. All the students were asked to take the exams in their hometowns, in the high school classroom. Due to English Department policy, my entire class was only awarded a C grade, because they thought the terms were so short we could not get any higher. I got second place out of sixty, but everyone got a C. When the university opened again in 1997, those who wanted to do a master’s had to take the exam again, so I had to take another year in the qualifying class. I passed, and attended English MA. Before this was finished, I got a scholarship to do a public policy master’s in Singapore in 2001, so I went for it and took a hop out of literature for a while. It was cool in Singapore. It expanded my outlook. The subjects in my course were very interesting—like economics, statistics, and political science. And the classroom culture was different. People were more mature and participation was more interactive—there was a two-way interaction with the teachers, not one-way like it is here. The class involved students from Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. The classes were taught in English. Fortunately my English was good enough because I had got a bursary to study at the British Council in Myanmar. When I got to Singapore, I pretty much stopped literary writing—except occasionally for myself when I was inspired. My husband and I got together there, in 2001. We were two of four from Burma who got scholarships to study public policy, and we understood one another. I finished studying in 2003 and started working. In 2004–2005 the internet became very popular. That helped me to resume my writing, and that was when I started blogging. My husband and I got married in 2006. He trained as a medical doctor, and now he is running a pharmaceutical company. I think spouses are important in a writer’s literary journey because their support can help to make life smoother. My husband didn’t realize at first that I was serious about my writing. I had to try a little bit hard to make him understand. But now he’s very supportive. I still have to ask him to read my work, though. He won’t ask for it. Sometimes he gives me comments, and they are helpful. He is a pure reader, not a literary one. He gives me very truthful comments.

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My first book, published locally, was an anthology of Burmese women poets. It came out in August 2012, within a year after I came back from Singapore. I talked with my husband in Singapore, when I had nobody to publish my own poetry collection, and he suggested that I might want to edit a collection of other writers first. We thought publishing women poets would be a good idea. Then, back in Yangon, I met with Zeyar Lynn and Moe Way, who is a leading poet and a publisher, and a few other poets over a dinner. Zeyar Lynn said: if you have the idea of publishing a collection like that you should, because it hasn’t been done in this country yet. So I approached Ma Ei, a senior lady poet, who gave me the contacts I needed, and some other lady poets helped me too. I assembled the work of thirty-five female poets. It took me about a year. It has been well-received in terms of reputation and quality. But financially no poetry book makes money. What is different is that in other countries institutions help you to publish, but here everything is out of your own pocket—either you do it or nobody else will. We need more poetry magazines. Together with other two coeditors, Zeyar Lynn is now doing the Kabyar Lawka (Poetry World) magazine, which contains everything about poetry, poems, and articles.2 In August 2012, I went to Iowa for three months for the International Writing Program. James Byrne, one of the editors of Bones Will Crow, nominated me. It was wonderful! As I am both a poet and a bureaucrat, in the U.S. I noticed not only the beauty, and the scenery, but the amazing infrastructure too. I learned about Iowa City, which is very peaceful. I was fortunate that I was there during the time of the best weather too. I produced a lot of work there. I drafted many poems, but I spent most of my time talking with people and finding out about the literary scene of other countries, and decided to write more about it when I got back. I’m currently writing a memoir of the trip, which is being published in serial form in a magazine. There are a lot of discussions in Myanmar at the moment about the reform of the old censorship laws. The government recently proposed a watchdog to root out poisonous literature, but what does poisonous literature mean? If it is defined by the government, we will just end up with the same problems as before. To me there should be a free market. I think the authorities should get rid of the laws

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on publishing completely, and instead focus on updating copyright law. Musicians, filmmakers, and the publishing industry really need that. At the moment, the law is very unclear and there is a lack of precedent cases. The change in censorship laws so far has changed the poetry scene a lot, especially when it comes to poetry reading events. During censorship we had to get every event officially approved in advance, and we couldn’t be certain whether we would get permission. It is easier now. There is a Poets Union that organizes poetry reading events. It appears quite leftist, or at least it is descended from leftist ideas, and I am not very involved in it. I am familiar with the people doing it though, and since I became better known in Myanmar, they have invited me to come to read at their events. There are now regular poetry reading series and also ad hoc events. I have also read at gallery openings and at the book launch of my anthology. I enjoy public readings. Reading aloud gives you a different feeling to when you see your published poems in print. When you read it aloud you hear the power of the words, the intonation, the pauses, and the stress of the sounds. All this can complement the beauty of the poem. I still publish online and interact with readers. In my earlier days online, that kind of contact was mainly through my blog. But since around 2010 most people have moved to Facebook. In some ways, Facebook is more effective as a form of communication, and it reaches out to more people too. With blogging, you post something on your page, then a new post comes up on top, and only if people scroll down will they see your work. Also there are many other people using blogs, so people change affiliation quickly, and unless you post every day people will start to read new blogs. But at least as long as you know a good proportion of people reading your blog, you can be sure that they will appreciate literature, whereas on Facebook hardly any people do. The crowd on Facebook is more crazy. In any case, if you want to remain relevant online, you have to go to where the people are. People in Facebook use the “note” function or just post on “status” to make their message appear on their timeline. Readers can comment on the posts. And while you can count the number of likes you get for a piece you’ve posted, it

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doesn’t necessarily mean your work is any good. Still, now I try to post on both Facebook and my blog. In the past, I had to be careful what I posted online, because I belonged to a Singapore government agency. One other reason I started using the pen name Pandora was to be anonymous and not to expose myself. We have a code of conduct as a civil servant, in relation to political affairs—and everything for a Burmese person is political. For instance, if you say your parents are sick and don’t have social security—or comment on literacy in the country—it can all be interpreted as political. The other reason for hiding my identity was that I didn’t want people to judge me just on my background. I wanted to get a true, genuine opinion from readers. But the internet world is always dangerous. People can shoot at me with arrows because their identity is also hidden. Now that I am better known in the literary community here, my identity has been revealed and I feel that I have less privacy. In the past I experienced more freedom from posting online. Partly it’s just about expectation. Before I became a professional writer, people’s expectation of me was low. When I was just a blogger, if the quality of my work was bad it didn’t matter. But now . . . now I have to be more careful and make sure it’s good. Thinking back to my online history, maybe I was too carefree. Now I look back and think some of my prose and poetry childish, and I should have been more careful. But in some ways I was more sincere then. Many of my short stories can be considered realistic, at least on the surface, but I try not to give a direct message to readers, but instead to let them think by themselves and to interpret the message by themselves. For example, one of my latest stories is about the life of a child in Singapore. His parents were separated, and both had to work, so the child’s life was lonely. The father was in Yangon chasing money and doing business, and the mother was in Singapore taking care of him and doing her work. I narrated it from the kid’s point of view and used images he used as metaphors for people around him, so he referred to his mother as a butterfly, and in the presentation it’s like he is really talking about the butterfly. The father was like a bear, and his best friend, a little girl, was like a rabbit. The first part is the kid narrating from his point of view about his

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parents and environment using those symbols. There is no real plot, it’s just random talk, with no climax. In the second part, I remixed sentences from the first part, even subject, verb, and object. The title was “Placing the Crystal Under the Sun.” The first part was subtitled “The Sun,” and the second part “The Crystal”—so you see the reflection in the second part is like a rainbow you would get from a crystal under the sunlight. I received some comments from readers, who said it was not like prose—they said when poets write prose it often turns into something different. My work has not changed all that much since the democratic transition started. The lifting of censorship has caused some very obvious changes in the publication industry—there was a time when Aung San Suu Kyi’s picture couldn’t even be published—but many people still feel unsure whether or not their writing will be out of line if they comment on things like bribery and corruption, or even aspects of culture and religion. One or two people are breaking boundaries in their writing though. Recently, Myay Hmone Lwin published his novel which broke through a lot of cultural norms—including a disrespectful conversation between a father and son, rebellious teenage behavior, and language that would be considered rude. It’s also quite political, since it’s set around the 2007 Saffron Revolution. Whether or not it’s good literature depends on your taste, but the content really stands out. I don’t think writers have that much cause to worry now. The authorities just ignore the small stuff. Unless you’re obviously attacking their ideology or writing about secret information that impacts on national security or defaming someone with wrongful facts, they are unlikely to take action. But then I’m not like other writers. Even before censorship was lifted, I was saying what I wanted to, mainly because I didn’t write in a direct way. Because of that, censorship didn’t affect my writing quite as much as it did others’. In the poetry scene, writers now are using metaphor less and giving more direct messages, even political messages. There are more new young poets who are publishing their stuff online, and are freer in their style and presentation. Unfortunately, one of the main changes in literary culture since transition, and to some extent before, has been declining readership.

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Public librarian

Some young people read mostly international literature, original or in translation, and never the local stuff, and many people do not read at all. Many people who do read local writing only read news and updates about celebrities in magazines. A poet friend of mine, who also runs a book rental shop in Yangon, told me that most of his customers look for pop novels that do not have a serious plot and contain just a few lines per page. In rural areas, I’ve heard that some people don’t read at all now, which is very different to the time when we ran the bookshop. And there are very few fiction writers

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from the young generation.. To survive these days, magazines have to include a lot of adverts to sell, there are very few book rental shops left, and very few public libraries. There are still quite a lot of bookshops in town, but people who are struggling to make ends meet can’t afford to buy books. For people who do still read books, the most common genres of novel here are mysteries and ghost stories. Maybe this is because of censorship. In the past, ghost or fantasy novels were not allowed by most censors because they were deemed too unrealistic. Motivational books and “Chicken Soup”-type stories are now very popular in Myanmar. Some are written by Buddhist monks providing a layman’s interpretation of Buddhist teaching for daily life, releasing stress. Nowadays young people are more interested in politics and economics, and read things like Thomas Friedman’s books. Overall, people don’t read fiction so much any more. They seem to want books that are educational, and that give them direct messages, and help them develop a wider knowledge which was unavailable to them in the past. This also has to do with the economic situation of the country. People want to know what is happening in the rest of the world, on the one hand, and to relieve themselves with motivational readings, on the other. This leaves no time for appreciating literature—fiction and poetry. The socioeconomic situation has also shaped our literary culture. When people get access to modern culture, they want to use their money to play computer games or watch TV. And how should you spend your time? Time is limited. There are only twenty-four hours in a day. And the forms of entertainment are expanding. If people have an hour free in the evening, most nowadays would prefer to play a computer game or watch TV than read a novel, because it’s easier, more relaxing. As the environment is more and more competitive, people appear to be more materialistic and pragmatic too. When they think about what to read, they will ask: what will I get out of this book? If the returns are not obvious, they won’t read. If you suggest that they should just appreciate the language or enjoy the story, they might say they don’t have time for that. I think this is a universal problem though, not just a problem for literature in Myanmar.

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Poetry is developing a bit differently from other forms of literature here. It is more advanced, and it’s expanding and diversifying, mainly because poets find it a release to write and just do it for their own enjoyment, regardless of monetary return. They don’t feel the need to be famous either. The poetry world is a community in itself. Most poets don’t even try to aim their poems at the people. Poetry is widely published online to be read within the community. As for novelists, you have much more chance to do well here if you are a pop novelist. Pop novelists here publish a novel a month—and people read them. They sell well but they are not innovative. When I was in Iowa, a writer asked me what was the best thing for my writing—and I answered, half jokingly, that it was censorship. Censorship can sometimes be a blessing in disguise if you dare to face its challenges. As a poet you have to try all possible ways to be innovative and break barriers without being noticed by the government, and this can help you avoid bad poetry; if the meaning of a poem is too open and direct, it can make the poem weak. Like T. S. Eliot said, poetry is about exceptional sensibility. Sensibility works well in a restricted environment. But maybe in the future, after transition, our focus will shift more to the individual self and to the use of language rather than political messages. But censorship can be harmful to writing too. A real problem with prose here, under censorship and now, is that the most popular or recognized pieces were so similar to each other. Using realism, writers tended to describe the details of an individual’s life, almost always a person who was suffering in a rural area or in poverty. I would like to read more experimental novels about a range of topics. Postmodern novels! I hope that a while after censorship has been lifted there will come a point when people get bored of traditional realist writing and will want something new. As far as I know, nobody in Myanmar is writing novels like Paul Auster or Murakami yet. We have to hope for the new generation. And I think that, if novelists want to go to another level, they have to challenge their readers a bit more, like poets do. I want to write a novel myself, but I haven’t started yet. I’d like to write a serious novel like international writers, something postmodernist. To me, the short story lies between the novel and the poem in terms of the level of innovation. One or two writers, like Min Khite

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Soe San, write postmodernist stories that are well regarded. Taya Min Wei was also successful, but he passed away a while ago. But most short story writers write realist stories in the same vein as before. I think it would be good to have more literary festivals here, to engage more with international writers and readers. The Irrawaddy Festival was great in that it drew the attention to the international community and of young people in Myanmar to literature. But there was a lot of room for improvement. I don’t think the organizers had a clear picture of the literary environment inside the country, and who to invite or not to—it would have been better if more Burmese people were organizing. In the future, the main thing I would like to change for literature in Myanmar is the education system. I believe in training. If we can modify the education system, I think we can produce more good professionals. I would like creative writing to be taught, and included in curriculums. But the government has to be willing. I hope universities from other countries can assist us in this. Also, for professional writers, I want to see more translated work. We need more translators. In Korea the government has started translator training courses because it wants to make its work known to the world, like its films.

R Stuck at This Spot We enjoy traffic jams Daily life is our education Have a bath and wash your clothes while it rains Blow out and save candles while the moon shines Do your business while waiting for the green light We have all sorts of news in our arms Eleven, Voice, Modern, Myanmar Times What really happened in Letpadaung Mine? What’s happening to the price of getting online? Several murders already this month Hooligans wreaking havoc downtown

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The more horrible the news, the more sensational Or how about these to hang in your car: Sabei, zun, ngwe, or shwe flowers? Fresh, at least after being watered last night, And by the way right now thazin is fresh too I’ve got parts 1, 2 or 3 of her new CD What! I don’t mean a thazin flower I can see that you have no idea So what’s your line, politics, economics? Then here’s the draft Telecommunications Law Or the Constitution, that’s also available Printed some years ago but still on sale No, I don’t really know if it’s still in good shape But the Foreign Investment Law has just been released You can get it in English and in Burmese Or we’ve got maps, Myanmar maps, Yangon maps You could easily get lost even in your own street And a roadmap will always be handy Until it’s replaced by a new one of course Will you buy at least something, brother? You will be stuck in this spot for a while yet At least, take a Daw Suu Calendar Or a fighting peacock flag Just a souvenir

Note: In the Burmese language, “thazin” is a type of orchid, and also the name of a popular singer. The “roadmap to democracy” was a document containing a set of steps for transition published by the military junta in 2003.3

R

Catting the Bell How to explain? The bell is mute No sound to warn of the slightest move

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How to explain? Free time has arrived They salivate for cheese Scratch walls with their teeth When they see a shadow, they stop and peep Some of them hide in holes and squeak Others are squashed by big, squashy feet How to explain? Untied and at large The upside-down milk pot The scattering of rat skins The claw prints and blood tracks And yet, the next day it’s licking its lips While snoozing on its owner’s lap How to explain? Everyone knows it’s the Cat. No-one can say it’s the Cat.

Note: “Belling the cat” is the title of a fable in which a group of mice have to defend themselves against a cat. They come up with an idea: if they can put a bell around the neck of the cat, they can find him when he moves— but they can’t find a way to put this scheme into practice.4

R Long Lost Brother After more than a decade. I came back to the hill. My elder brother and I Used to roll down that hill. I was fond of porcupines, pangolins and turtles And back then my brother was my hard shell. We braved pain and dirt For adventure and thrill

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Whenever we both rolled down that hill. If we were late back for our meal our mother Would usually beat my elder brother While I would grab a book and be gone And so my brother was my hard shell. He continued to be. He supported me. I supported my ego. My ego supported What I believed was the future of the earth. Later, the earth: land, water and trees, Supported my brother to make his living. All those years later when I returned The hands of my brother embracing me Felt much rougher than hands I had shaken overseas. On that evening, the wind was strong. We no longer had a mother, waiting with our meal So we lingered a while on top of the hill. I, who was under the soft shell of a suit, Did not this time roll down the hill.5

These poems were newly composed when I met Pandora; they are all transition creations. Like Zeyar Lynn, she enjoys experimenting with form and language. Her use of wordplay made some of these poems difficult to translate, but we worked on them together. “Stuck at this Spot” is a vivid and multisensory portrait of one of the city’s interminable traffic jams, and the young touts who wander barefoot in between the cars and try to persuade the occupants to buy all sorts of things, from plastic hangers to the texts of new laws. She told me she got the idea for the poem when she was stuck in traffic, and she felt it represented the situation of the country in transition. “Catting the Bell” turns a traditional fable on its head, playing with words even in the title, and provides sly commentary on the military men that still run the current regime. “Long Lost Brother” conveys something of the dislocation of returning to Myanmar that the author felt upon her return from life in well-heeled, well-connected Singapore.

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Myay Hmone Lwin Publisher, Novelist, Short Story Writer, Poet At only 26 years old, Myay Hmone Lwin (pen name for San Mon Aung) is a young literary radical who has broken extraordinary boundaries in the world of books, just as his older brother has done in the world of music as Myanmar’s first hip-hop star. Despite his youth, he has already made his mark as both a writer and a publisher, and has been a precocious voice on the literary scene for almost ten years. Not only that, but he has become a husband and father, after marrying the manager of his own publishing house, Ngar Doe Sar Pay (“Our Literature”). In light of his achievements having been made at such a young age, and having heard much older writers talk about him in tones of admiration, I expected to meet someone oozing self-confidence with a big presence. I was rather surprised to find a sweet, quiet, roundfaced, and respectable young man, still displaying the last remnants of teenage acne. I later discovered his nickname is “Honey.” We met at a trendy coffee shop, in Yangon terms; it has brightly colored décor, plays Myanmar pop (when I was there, all the rage was British nursery rhyme tunes with Myanmar lyrics set to frenetic-paced electro beats), and serves real cappuccino. Myay Hmone Lwin picked out a strawberry milkshake. He confessed quietly and with a conspiratorial smile to his love of hip-hop, and alluded to a more rebellious, jeans and hoodie-wearing youth. Now he wears the ubiquitous Burmese longyi with a shirt and dotes on a tiny baby whom I met later, cooing amidst piles of new books being stored at his mother’s house. Still, Myay Hmone Lwin continues to rebel through his writing. Because of his own efforts as a publisher to get controversial work through the censors, he is one of very few fiction writers who can give personal insight into what the censorship board was like to deal with, and what happened when they were pushed over their limit. He talked with the confidence of youth about how he used to bribe them, and how he kept trying to publish fiction that was clearly going to cross the invisible line. His first novel was promptly banned for breaking all sorts of boundaries in Burmese literature—from protesting during

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Myay Hmone Lwin with the memoir he published on U Nu

the Saffron Revolution, to literary and cultural taboos such as using swear words, employing slang and nonliterary language, describing nightclubs, drinking, and premarital teen relationships, and exposing nonrespectful interactions between father and son. Soon after, his publishing house was shut down. But Myay Hmone Lwin was unfazed; as soon as transition began and censorship restrictions were lifted, he got back in the publishing saddle and brought out not only his book, but other banned books too.

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Myay Hmone Lwin’s Story My first novel, Engraved, is different from the kind of fiction you usually read in Myanmar. It caused a lot of controversy when it finally came out. It breaks with a lot of traditions as well as describing the Saffron Revolution, which was not allowed before. The protagonist is a teenage boy. When he was young he was not interested in politics. He was always wasting time at teashops, he liked hip-hop and wore a hoodie, and he wasted a lot of his time in nightclubs and bars. But then the Saffron Revolution happened, and he got involved. It changed him. Before that he was not political. He didn’t even listen to radio. He had a plan to go abroad because his mother kept punishing him for wasting time. In the Burmese tradition, before going abroad, we must go to the pagoda, so the boy went to the Botataung Pagoda to pray. But when he got there, he encountered a lot of protesting monks on the street in front of it. He listened to their voices and they made a great impression on him. He followed them on their march over several days, but after four or five days the government fired at the monks and he was arrested on the street. He was sent to jail for five years. There he met ’88 generation students. He began to understand their politics more and more and realize its importance. He read lots of books. When he comes out of prison, he becomes a political person. The last chapter is called “Beginning,” because he has been born with a new life. The protagonist of my novel is quite similar to me. Before the Saffron Revolution, I was not very engaged with politics. But I joined in the protesting—I just saw them walking on the street and joined them, and then I saw a lot of gunfire and fighting with government. I wasn’t imprisoned myself, fortunately. At the time, I was a student and working. I was studying business English at the American Center—I was bored with Burmese novels and wanted to read English books, and the American Center has a huge library. Experiencing those events made me want to write about them. I had been writing for a while already, since my early teens. I first started writing poetry at school. I have always been interested in books. Our house was full of them when I was growing up. My

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parents and siblings all love books. I was born in Yangon and I have two brothers, one older, one younger. My father and mother run an ordinary business selling handicrafts. My uncle is Maung Swan Yi, one of the most influential poets in Myanmar—but he wasn’t an influence on my writing particularly. I don’t actually like his work very much. He writes poems in the old, traditional style. Also he didn’t accept us kids, and he always blamed the younger generation for breaking traditions in poetry. After I finished high school I decided to write more. I wrote forty to fifty poems and a few stories. I sent them to magazines, but none of the magazines accepted my stories. Actually, looking back now, I can see that my stories were not very good at that time. I was reading a lot of Kafka and other writers in translation, I thought I knew what I was doing, and I wrote sentence by sentence, in a kind of jumbled stream of consciousness. The editors couldn’t understand what I meant, and sometimes I couldn’t either! Very few of my stories were realist. I was already so bored with realism. I still am. Even back then there was so much more out there I wanted to read and to write. Now I really enjoy writers like Murakami, Mark Haddon, and Dave Eggers, and a few Thai writers. I don’t like Chekhov or Russian writers much, as they were really influential on Burmese writers in the 1970s and 1980s who were Communist and realist. I wanted to be different from the start. And I really wanted to create something, and get it published, and so I got serious, and I started the publishing house. I did it so that I could publish my own writing and other interesting writing which was not available from other publishers in Myanmar. I used to use allegory and metaphor in my stories. One short story of mine I remember writing back then was inspired by a news article about a seal that had escaped from Yangon’s zoo. It wasn’t a big story at the time, but lying in bed I kept thinking about that seal—where he lives, where he goes, and how to live in a city when they only live in nature. I felt this was a bit like me and publishing. A real problem with publishing here is that most publishers always go for the commercial stuff. Comic novels and stories are very popular here, so they all want to publish that—and they don’t tend to publish political books. But I don’t want to be like them in my publish-

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ing. I want to go with my principles and publish what I want. I don’t want my work to be about making money. In that way I thought of myself like that seal who escaped from the zoo but was finding it difficult to survive. Some people were surprised that I started a publishing house so young. I was only seventeen. It wasn’t an easy ride. To start with, during censorship, it was very difficult to get a license, but I managed to rent one on the black market. I had nine writers at the beginning, all short story writers. I was the youngest one. It was not difficult for me to attract writers despite my age—my uncle Maung Swan Yi is one of the most influential poets in Myanmar and my brother Thar Soe is a very famous singer—the first hip-hop artist in Myanmar. My brother’s friend mentored me. He showed me how to publish and how to distribute books. In the first two years I published fifty books. But I am very bad at management. I mismanaged the finances and went bust twice during the first two years, but my father helped me with money each time (I paid him back later). It’s difficult to be a publisher here and to make a profit. Our distribution system is very poor. We can’t distribute our books to most of the country because of the transport and the terrible mailing system. If you live in Kachin State, for instance, you can’t order any books. It takes two or three days to get a boat to some parts of the country. There is no door-to-door delivery system. And the distribution fees are very high too, sometimes higher than the price of the book. I don’t think the Saffron Revolution was that important for my literary life—but it definitely changed my political thinking. I was already reading novels before that, and I think my reading was more of an influence on my writing than the political environment. Older writers were already saying my style was different. Maybe the structure was too. Traditionally, Burmese stories are written in a straight line; the structure is very simple. But when I write, I often use different styles in one piece and sometimes start with the end at the beginning. I also do experimental things, like leave a blank space in the story when the writer leaves to go to the teashop and then comes back to write. I use more informal language than other, older Burmese writers too, like slang. There is so much slang in my first novel, Engraved! The protagonist likes hip-hop and always uses

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words like “shoddy” and “buddy,” the Burmese word lan meaning cute/gorgeous, and rude words like “bullshit,” “motherfucker,” and “sonofabitch.” In a way, Engraved is just a different kind of realism from traditional Burmese novels. I actually think it’s more realist than the Burmese “realists.” I write about young people and their mindsets, which are real but are never dealt with in fiction here. When people are angry, they use rude words—but they never do in older Burmese writers’ stories, because of censorship, or tradition, or for whatever reason. Even now that we don’t have censorship, other writers still don’t use these words in their writing. They stick to traditional ways. They think Burmese readers are very simple, but I never think like that. That’s why I use rude words and my characters get angry. I always complain to older writers who criticize me for this: I say I am just being realistic! Another way I am different from other writers is that a lot of Burmese writers always try to write about the lowest, poorest people in society. Most of their stories are very sad, and they are very proud if they manage to make somebody cry after reading them. My stories are a little different. I also write about rich people. One character in my novel, a friend of my protagonist, is very rich. He buys new cars and wastes money a lot in nightclubs and sleeps with lots of girls and gives them expensive presents. My protagonist is not very rich, but he is a close friend of his and so is influenced by that attitude to money. I don’t meet with older writers very often. Occasionally I will meet them in a teashop—but I don’t want to meet with them too much because we are different and I want to keep it that way. Older people here always want respect, for themselves and for how they do things. Sometimes I am too free in the way I live my life, and they don’t like it. And sometimes I address older writers without the formal prefix “U” and they don’t like that either. As a publisher I have had so many experiences of sending things to the censorship board and having them banned over the years. All of my books had something banned, be it the title, a paragraph—I could never get complete permission! Never. I have published more than a hundred books now. More than ten books I sent them were

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Myay Hmone Lwin’s first book marked by the censors

completely banned. Only one of those was written by me though— my first novel. I only kept one copy of a censored manuscript: my first book. I was just attached to it for sentimental reasons because it was my very first. All the others I threw away! I was seventeen when I sent this book to the censors, in 2003. It was a collection of my and my friends’ stories and cartoons. They struck out several of the stories completely and removed paragraphs of others. Censored stories included my friend’s story about people on an island who have no tongues. They didn’t give any reason for cutting it, but I know they thought this was really about censorship (and it was). They put diagonal lines through the whole thing in blue biro. All they say in their letters to me is that “you have to obey the law.” For my story in that book, they just removed the first paragraph, which they circled in yellow highlighter pen and then struck through it with a pen. The paragraph said that no hero should ever attack from the back; heroes should fight face to face. In this era a lot of people “kill from the back” and bribe the police with money

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to get away with it, and they didn’t like me alluding to that. The rest of the story is about all the fakery in society, but they didn’t seem to mind that. In one other story in that book, about a stranger, some words were circled but ultimately they were not struck through and banned. In that case I think maybe a junior staff member in the censorship office thought it might be problematic, but the more senior officer cleared it for publication. They took against certain words in it too, like “stranger.” There were various words you couldn’t ever include. No mention of a rose was allowed because it represented Aung San Suu Kyi. In another story I submitted, the writer wrote about the hip-hop star Eminem and U.S. presidents and some other famous people—it was a bit of a jumbled story—and they banned that. I don’t know why that was, as nothing about it was political, but sometimes they just took against stories that seem to go against Burmese tradition. Anyway, I just took the banned pages out after getting conditional permission for the rest, and the whole thing was published later on. I had a ridiculous experience with the cover of one of my books. It was a story about fishermen. The illustration was a cartoon of some men in a boat, and one of the men had a bald head. The censors thought this was a depiction of Zarganar, so they didn’t allow it. I didn’t even know Zarganar then—he was still in prison! Another book I sent them was called 9 Stars. The title was supposed to refer to the nine writers who contributed stories, but in the end only seven of the nine writers’ stories were included because they banned the other two. I still kept the title out of principle, and published it with “9 Stars” on the cover! I sent them many other stories that were censored, and not just for political reasons. In 2010 I sent them a story where a girl proposed to a boy—in Burmese tradition this is not allowed, and so they forbade its publication. That time they phoned me up and said they could not give permission. They did not ban a whole book I had written until my novel Engraved. When I sent the manuscript to them, they not only refused to publish it but they closed down my publishing house and took the license away. It was quite dramatic. Five people came into my

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publishing house and asked me a lot of questions: Are you involved with the NLD, or the Communist Party? How involved were you in the Saffron Revolution? Have you been to prison? I hadn’t. For the prison experiences described in the book, I just asked friends who had been to prison. The censors asked me nothing about literature; they didn’t want to know about that, they just wanted to ask about political things. The interview lasted around two or three hours. After that, they sent me a letter, saying I was encouraging protests, and the publishing house would be suspended indefinitely. In the end they suspended it for three months. I did nothing but write for those three months. Luckily, they didn’t ban my pen name Myay Hmone Lwin, which I used for stories in magazines. Another book I tried to publish that was banned in its entirety was the memoir of U Nu, the former prime minister of Myanmar. He wrote it in the 1960s, and the government then didn’t allow it, so it was only published in India, not Burma. I read the Indian edition and liked it very much, so I went to U Nu’s family and asked to publish it myself, nearly fifty years later. They agreed, but the censorship board refused. The censorship process was not just tedious because of the amount of material they would ban. It took time and cost money too. During the censorship years, if you wanted to publish your book, you had to send it off to the censorship board and wait at least a month. If you wanted it done more quickly, in say one or two weeks, you had to go to the censorship office to meet the book director and give him money or a present. That was sooo tedious. You were required to wait in front of his office, on the second floor, often for hours before he would meet you. Sometimes I wanted to jump out of the window rather than get his sign-off for my book! I never gave him money. I always gave him a bottle of Johnnie Walker, black or blue label. That was my signature! And there were no questions asked. Once I gave him the whiskey, I would go away and wait, and that was it. When they sent the censored books back to me, they usually sent a letter too, but it wouldn’t tell you much. If you were lucky, you would get a phone call as well to explain why they censored it. I don’t have records of any of those conversations, unfortunately. In the early days, if they didn’t want to publish parts of the book, they

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would ask me to cut out the paragraphs they had censored, and sign a document, and then if they accepted this I could distribute it. Later, when technology advanced, we just amended the documents on the computer and reprinted the books. Since the Saffron Revolution, I have become more political, at least in my own mind. I have read more political books, but I am not a member of a political party. I don’t want to enter a party. I want to live freely and independently. I do write a few political articles though, for publications like the Independent News Journal, on topics like the 88 generation and the student unions, which are still not allowed. I don’t think my writing has changed much since censorship lifted. I never thought about censorship or tradition in the first place. I was never scared of either. I got to know the censors quite well. As a publisher I was always going to their office. They did try to intimidate me. They made me sign things—statements like “I will never write like this again.” But I always signed them and then went ahead and did what I wanted to do anyway. I knew they were just trying to neuter us, like cows they didn’t want to mate—they wanted to cut off our literature and stop it developing. As a writer I don’t want to have to get permission from anyone else to write. Now that I have the chance, I am publishing lots more work that was banned under censorship. I recently published Ma Thida’s prison memoir, and I am just releasing a book by a monk who was banned for his speeches criticizing the dictatorship with open words to his audience. Over 1,000 people used to attend his talks, so the government was very afraid of him. Even now, he lives in Yangon but cannot speak here yet—he can only speak in a few remote townships. His book is mostly made up of Buddhist stories—but the government didn’t like it anyway because it’s written by him. I’ve printed 5,000 copies of it to start with. Books about religion are very popular here. Even though prepublication censorship is over, for now, the same people are still working in the renamed censorship office. Now their work is only to read books after publication. We still have to send them twelve copies of every book. But we used to have to send them fifty! I don’t know what they do with all those books. Maybe they keep them if they think they might be dangerous for the government

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and they can ban them later—but so far they haven’t announced anything. We are just grateful that for now it’s only twelve! Maybe someday they will reduce the number. A lot more has changed for publishers to make our lives easier. It’s very easy to get a license to publish now. You can just get it online. And you can pretty much publish freely. But I think the censors are just biding their time. They are waiting for the new law to come along, and delaying taking any action for the moment. The MOI [Ministry of Information] has written a new law which is very restrictive, and not very different from the old law. I’m against it. Now the Press Council is writing another draft. I just hope the next law is better than the last one, so we can carry on writing and publishing what we like.

Engraved (Extracts from the novel) Colorful strobe lights, pumping music, expensive booze, bare thighs, cool air, swirling cigarette smoke, partying youths, wide grins. “Happy Birthday!” Today was Belu’s nineteenth. Earlier in the evening, we had eaten at a BBQ place. When that closed, two bottles of whiskey had been emptied, and Belu asked who wanted to go home. Except for Moe, nobody did. They all wanted to keep the ball rolling as long as possible. Moe had looked at me with a pleading expression on her face. Out of this group, I drank the least. I had only drunk two glasses that night, both forced on me by Belu. I offered to take Moe home but Belu objected adamantly. The others joined in. I don’t know how Belu sweet-talked Moe, but she was now in the club with us. Moe had never been to a club before. Like a kid in a fairground, she was staring at everything wide-eyed. My buddies started jumping and dancing around like horses let loose from a stable. Moe and I were left at a table. “So, do you and your friends come regularly to this kind of place?” Moe asked. “Sometimes.” Actually, tonight was the first time I had been to this club. Clubs I had been to before were not posh like this one. This was

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not the kind of club that you could enter just by paying the entrance fee. It only opened its door to those with connections. And we could only enter tonight thanks to Belu. “But all the staff were greeting you guys when we came in.” “Staff here are all like that. And not just to Belu. They’d bend over backward to anyone who tips them generously enough. Have you seen Belu’s stack of 1,000 kyat bills? Nobody would bother to talk to you here unless you can spend money like that. So they are not exactly greeting you. They are greeting your tip.” “I see.” We fell silent for a while as I stared at a group of cavorting people. “Sorry, what did you say?” I could not hear Moe well over the loud music. “Oh, I just said the girls are very young here.” I nodded. “Do you think their parents know that they are at a place like this, dressed like that?” Moe was looking at a group of gyrating young girls on the dance floor. How to answer? Moe must be the only person asking such a question in the entire club. The others couldn’t care less about such things as long as they could drink what they like. Simple. “By the way, why did you agree to go out with Belu?” I had been wanting to ask her that question for a long time, and now I’d just blurted it out for no good reason. Moe looked confused. She was obviously not expecting such a question. But after a moment’s hesitation, she answered carefully. “Right, Thura,” said Moe, deliberately calling Belu by his real name. “There are several reasons I agreed to go out with him. I have considered him from every possible angle. He always listens to me. He has fixed most of his bad habits. Also, he’s honest and good to his friends. Sometimes too good.” Her answer sounded preprepared. The last part was true though: Belu would never say no to his friends. “I also think, if I had let Thura keep on doing what he pleased, he would have got to a point of no return. As his girlfriend, I think I can help mold him into being a better person. Anyway, I swear I have no interest in his money like people think.” “I didn’t mean to suggest that.” I was not sure if Moe heard my response. She kept on staring at the dancing people. It was difficult

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to make out one person from another under the strobe lights. “What I meant to ask is whether you actually love him,” I added. Moe shifted her eyes from the dance floor to me and flashed a smile. No need for further explanation. “Sorry, I don’t know what the hell I was asking.” The guys came over and asked me to join them on the dance floor. I refused, saying that I was looking after Moe, but it was no use. Belu dragged both of us over to dance. Just at this moment, Htein Lin and his buddies came in. They knew it was Belu’s birthday, so they parked themselves near our table. Belu ordered a bottle for them. I knew there must be some sort of historical bad blood between Lin’s group and Ar Pote’s group, though I still didn’t know what. Once they sat face-to-face, sly insults always sparkled. “Friends should be treated nicely. Only then can you boss them around.” Htein Lin couldn’t resist sniping about how Belu always had to pay for everything when he went out with us. “Don’t hang out with guys whose meals you have to pay for. They will end up bossing you around,” Htan Oak added. Since Belu had got together with Moe he had settled down a bit, and Lin’s group was not too happy about this. They would badmouth Belu behind his back that he was already afraid of his girlfriend even before she became his wife. “Hey Belu, I’d say just stay away from a so-called friend who would steal your girlfriend if he got the chance,” Ar Pote retorted with a laugh. Htein Lin had once made a move on a girlfriend of Belu’s. It hadn’t caused a problem then. For Belu, girlfriends were as plentiful as mosquito larvae in a pool of stagnant water. But now Htein Lin’s face turned crimson. His buddies got noticeably tense too. “What’s with your attitude? You are all just Belu’s minions.” “That’s funny. At least we don’t pick up Belu’s girls after he’s dumped them.” Htein Lin and his two buddies stood up suddenly. A glass at the edge of the table fell over and smashed on the floor. “What do you want to do about it, you punks?” They picked up ashtrays and bottles. Security arrived. Belu came over, put his hands up and asked security not to get involved. They retreated.

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“Dudes, all of you sit back down! Stop being dickheads! This is my birthday!” Both sides sat back down. Everyone was silent. “Why can’t you just let me have a fun night,” Belu grumbled. Moe reached out to hold his hands. “Sorry, man.” “Sorry as well.” “It’s getting late. Happy birthday, Belu,” Htan Oak said and left. Others prepared to leave as well. There was no way these two groups could stay harmonious for long. “Hey, Hnin Khar, let’s go.” Htan Oak was calling me to leave with them. I glanced at Moe. I didn’t want to leave her with Htein Lin’s group. She looked at me and shook her head as if to ask me not to leave yet. “I don’t wanna go home yet. You guys go ahead,” I said. I walked them to the exit, explaining to them that I didn’t want to leave Moe with Lin’s group. They were cool with that and left in a taxi. Once I went back in, there were some girls sitting near Lin’s group. Probably his groupies. “Drink up, sis, it’s no booze. Just fruit punch.” One of the girls was shoving a drink in Moe’s hand. Belu took the glass and placed it near Moe’s mouth. She frowned at him. “You sure it’s just a fruit punch?” “Of course, Moe. Why would I lie to you?” Belu said. “Everybody, raise your glasses. To me and Moe!” All raised their glasses and clinked. I had no choice but to drink a glass. Moe was drinking hers too, with a grimace. A glass after a glass after another glass . . . Both Moe and I kept on drinking. How could I let her know that a punch is liquor mixed with fruit juice? Belu summoned us all to the middle of the dance floor. The DJ announced “happy birthday” and put on a dance tune. Moe hugged Belu tightly. The upbeat tune made my body groove. Colorful strobe lights made my spirits merry. Booze was flowing happily through my veins. “Hey!” A girl with bleached blonde hair greeted me.

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“Hey.” I grabbed her slender waist and spun her around. She giggled and did not try to remove her hand. I no longer remember how many more glasses were drunk. I no longer remember how Moe and Belu were going about. I no longer remember how and when I left the club. All I remember is the lips of that blondehaired girl. * * * Soldiers aimed their guns at the people. The people clung to their hearts as they marched, chanting sutras of compassion. The two groups met face-to-face on Sule Pagoda Avenue. Among the protesting crowd, the number of the monks had declined sharply. No good news was forthcoming. Instead, a rumor was circulating that the leading monks had been arrested the previous night and the remaining monks at the Shwedagon Pagoda were now sealed off. Not wanting to get sealed off ourselves, my younger sister and I went straight to Sule. “General Aung San’s military didn’t kill the people!” hundreds were shouting. There was no movement from the soldiers. They were still just watching the expanding crowd. Their cries grew louder. “No more dictatorship!” Reporters’ cameras flashed. Peacock flags flapped wildly. Shouts from youths wearing red headbands were reverberating between the buildings. A soldier came forward brandishing a loudspeaker. He started saying something, but because we were in the midst of the crowd, I couldn’t hear what. My sister was screaming her lungs out. Waves of protesting people were still filling up the avenue. Suddenly, swear words flew out of people’s mouths as the crowd from one side of the boulevard swerved to the other side. Army trucks were driving through the crowd at high speed. As the confused crowd stared at the soldiers . . . Bang. Bang. Bang. The sea of people collapsed. Some tried to hide, some were running, some lying face down. The gunfire continued. Fortunately, we found a

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place to take cover. No more people were on the road. They had scattered in all directions like fragments of a glass smashing on the floor. A short while later, people started to re-emerge in small groups. “A foreign reporter has been shot.” “Bastards! Cannibalistic bastards!” “Lightening should strike them down.” “Motherfucking military.” Rage. Every returning protester now carried rage in their hearts. The same hands that had formed lotus shapes now carried bricks and rocks. The sutra-chanting lips now spewed out curses. Singing the national anthem, the crowd regrouped with peacock flags and banners waving at the front line. This time, instead of the now-blockaded Sule Avenue, they headed toward Ye Kyaw along Bogyoke Avenue. No matter how loud the gunfire became, people kept on clapping and cheering from the windows of every house. Their claps were so loud it seemed as if they could melt away the bullets. A small group on the street became a big crowd once again. Both my sister and I were re-energized, and our voices matched the loudest of the lot. More singing of the national anthem. No more sutra chanting now. Nobody now wanted to communicate compassion any more. The battle that had started with the monks’ sutras had morphed into a determined battle for democracy. From Pazuntaung, we marched to Yuzana Plaza. People clapped, handed out water, distributed dust masks, cried. We kept on marching along with our peacock banners. In front of Tamwe High School, the youths of the neighborhood blockaded the streets to fend off the army trucks. They greeted us heartily as they saw us marching toward them. The peacock and people were one. More soldiers donning red capes aimed their guns at us. We responded by cursing at them. They started marching forward. We did not back down. Curses became louder. Just when the crowd was concentrating at the front line, army trucks appeared from the rear. Gunfire broke out again. They were firing at the crowd sandwiched in the middle. This time there was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run to, no escape. “Climb over!”

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I hoisted my sister onto my shoulder so she could get over a wall into the school. Chaos was all around, people were getting beaten up and lying on the ground, clutching their injuries, soldiers were swinging guns and batons and hitting everyone in sight. “Climb quickly!” Just as I had finished hoisting my sister up and was about to jump up the wall myself, I felt a thud on my head. I yelled in pain, turned around, and a rough hand slapped my face. “Don’t look up. Lie face down!” I did as they commanded. Those who tried to look up would get a kick in the back. Before long they put us in a truck and told us to keep looking down. With frightening speed, the truck took off. It stopped at a building and we filed in. There were already tons of people in there. We felt like a school of fish caught in a small net. Sleeping at night was nearly impossible. There wasn’t enough space to lie down, so we had to attempt sleep in piles with our heads on other people’s thighs, unable to move or stand. For breakfast we were given one bowl of rice and a boiled duck egg. In the evenings, we got steamed lettuce and a piece of cold, leftover rice. You couldn’t ask for more. The rice was so hard I thought I would have to install a motor on my teeth to be able to grind through the grains. The worst part was the toilet. There was just one. It was not designed for a crowd that large. Making us use it was like forcing a crocodile to lay its eggs in a crab hole. The word “overflow” took on a different meaning and we sometimes laughed about that amidst our troubles. How was Hnin Cho? I worried about my little sister. I didn’t know whether or not she was able to escape. Whenever I had a chance, I would look around the women’s quarter, but I never found her. I was not allowed to contact home either, and I knew my family would be worrying. After a week it became less crowded. I didn’t know when I would get out. Different people interrogated me every day. They went easy on me because I confessed to everything. I just said “yes,” over and over again. Those who did not do so would get beaten up. Many had swollen faces.

22 4 WRIT ERS: T HE YO UNGER GE N E R A T I O N

One day, a truck took the last remaining people out, including me. As before, we had to keep our faces down. After a short journey, the truck stopped. When I looked out, I saw a sign saying: INSEIN PRISON

R This example of Myay Hmone Lwin’s writing comprises two extracts from his controversial novel, Engraved.6 He picked these sections out in order to illustrate the previously taboo subject matter that he dared to tackle. The first extract, by describing a scene in a nightclub, where middle-class youths drink alcohol, dance, and spend money, covers several topics that were previously unheard-of in Burmese literature. Even though they do not concern overtly political matters, they represent a revolution against the prevailing conservative culture, which was also protected by the censors. The second extract, by describing the protagonist participating in the Saffron Revolution marches, confronts another subject that was vetoed during the censorship years for obvious reasons, and one that remains sensitive and largely avoided by many other more cautious writers who are still self-censoring. The literary style is simple and direct, with a lack of detailed description or use of imagery. Its tone is radical, however, by reason of its informality and the inclusion of a liberal scattering of slang. This provoked disapproving reactions from the literary establishment in the country, as well as the censors. (I note that the extent of the difference between his informal tone and the traditional, formal tone used in other extracts, does not come across as clearly in the translation as it would in the original language, since there is no comparable difference in English literature.) As Myay Hmone Lwin explained to me, he wanted to embrace a new kind of “realism,” departing from the old socialist version of realism, because he felt this represented a vision of social reality that excluded many groups and perspectives in the country. Instead, he wanted his version of realism to convey the way in which young, middle-class people in Myanmar really speak, write, and see the world.

5 Conclusion Literary Life in Transition Three men are on an airplane: America’s President Obama, China’s Hu Jintao, and Burma’s U Thein Sein. A naga [dragon] threatens to take the plane. Obama said to the naga: “I will send my Navy and they will shoot you.” But the naga was not afraid. Hu Jintao said to the naga: “I will send our Chinese People’s Army after you.” But the naga was not afraid. U Thein Sein whispered something in the naga’s ear, and he immediately ran away. The other two men asked what U Thein Sein had said. He replied: “I told him this plane is bound for Naypyidaw.” —Zarganar (in 2011)

M

yanmar’s transition has already generated radical social and cultural change. It has finally allowed people to speak out about the censorship era and how it affected them, and to engage their creativity in new directions. But, as this book has illustrated, its progress has been uneven and sporadic, and its consequences for literature and literary culture have been as complex and multifaceted as the impacts of the censorship years. Just as the first chapter of this book provided political, legal, and sociocultural context during the censorship era, this chapter contextualizes the material by providing an overview of key events and characteristics of transition. It reflects on the interviews, translations, and observations in the body of the book, and draws out common themes, apparent contradictions, curiosities, and questions that arise about literary life both under censorship and in transition. Finally, it considers how the ethnographic method of combining my own observations with writers’ interviews and literary texts, and with secondary research into the wider context, is able to convey the subjective experience of repressive censorship and its aftermath in a rich and unique way, and to create new perspectives on Myanmar’s literature, its literary life, and its culture as a whole.

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Construction site

I begin by zooming out from the particularities of the last three chapters to look at the broader context of transition, before gradually honing in on the effects of both censorship and transition on literary life as manifested in the interviews, translations, and observations. While transition has already had profuse and significant effects, it could not be said that the country has suddenly modernized. Yangon still contains more colonial buildings than any other Asian city, most of which are sadly slipping into a state of crumbling disrepair. People still wear longyis and continue to engage in a rich seam of ancient sociocultural traditions, from religious practices such as the theatrical monastic initiation ceremonies for little Buddhist boys and the retreats subsequently undertaken by all Buddhist men throughout their lives, to practical ways of making a living such as the balletic paddle fishing on Inya Lake, and traditional ways of shepherding with wooden staffs on the dusty plains of Bagan. But even during the four months I was living in Myanmar, a lot was visibly changing. In Yangon,

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Young people on the street

demolition and construction sites seemed to spring up every week, and new internet cafés, mobile phone shops, cash machines, cocktail bars, and branded trainers were fast transforming the look and character of the city and its inhabitants. I was particularly struck by one loved-up young teenage couple I came across in the street who were proudly embracing globalization by wearing white T-shirts with international symbols on them; however, while the girl’s T-shirt displayed a British Union Jack flag, her boyfriend’s featured a swastika. When I asked him why he chose to wear the Nazi symbol, he earnestly told me

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Water festival stage

that I was mistaken, and that his T-shirt displayed the Hindu symbol of good luck. Below the symbolic T-shirts he wore jeans while she wore the traditional longyi, another representation of the juxtaposition of old and new visible everywhere in Yangon. Some people I spoke to bemoaned some of the losses connected with modernization—for instance, pesticides poisoning the fish in Inya Lake so that locals could no longer eat them, while the tourists were fed fish imported from the coast. Older people complained of increasing commercialization, making events like the annual thingyan (water festival) into a drunken teen-led carnival. Still, most people I talked to were very clear that the political changes brought about during transition to date had been overwhelmingly positive. The release of political prisoners, the relaxation of censorship restrictions, and the opening up of much of the country to imports and exports, NGOs, journalists, businesses, and tourists are all widely celebrated developments. Despite that, few felt unbounded optimism about their country’s political situation. The same men who held power under the military regime remain in

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the driver’s seat, memories are long and vivid, and censorship is far from over yet. The road to development has been rocky. Violent conflicts continue in states populated by groups who feel they have not been treated fairly by the majority Burman government. In Rakhine State, Rohingya Muslims are denied citizenship and have been subject to persecution which many believe is government-fueled. The fatal wave of violence in Meikhtila between Buddhists and Muslims in March 2013 was attributed by many to government forces. I glimpsed the effects of this myself, arriving at a nearby village soon after the worst violence, to find martial law in place, a complete curfew after 6 p.m., and a terrified Muslim guesthouse owner hoping he wouldn’t be targeted himself. Bribery, corruption, and land grabs are common. The government is pushing ahead with numerous controversial mining and energy projects, mostly sponsored and partnered by China, at the expense of the livelihoods of thousands of rural farmers. Peaceful protests about such projects have been violently suppressed by police. As for the welcome announcement that the government would be spearheading a move away from censorship and protecting people’s right to free expression, its actions have yet to match its words. While censorship is one area of law that has seen significant reform, there is still a long way to go. It seems clear that censorship was such an important means of social control for the military junta, and has been so deeply ingrained in Burmese culture for so long, that those in power have been finding it difficult to shake the habit. The sagas that have occurred in the course of developing a new legal and regulatory framework to protect freedom of expression are illustrative of the way in which the government has set out to take what appear to be positive steps, but then proceeded to disappoint. The Ministry of Information began by announcing that it had formed a Press Council to protect press freedom and to draft new laws to replace the old ones underlying the censorship regime, only to anoint for the task a group of cronies who had been at the center of the old regime. After a torrent of complaints, it dissolved this group and appointed a new Interim Press Council: a hybrid body

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including a handful of independent members, but retaining enough of the old, trusted men that they would not be expected to push liberalization too far. The council was duly tasked with drafting new laws, but all did not go according to plan; the members turned out to get on rather well with each other, and the old “crony” men turned out to be far more interested in the ideas of the liberals than had been anticipated. They proceeded to prepare a series of draft laws relating to media and publishing, and were engaged in consultation with journalists around the country and international experts, when they were ambushed: without warning the Ministry of Information released a new bill of its own, the Printing and Publishing Enterprise bill, without consulting the council or the public, and promptly submitted it to parliament. The Ministry’s new bill purported to replace the 1962 Printers and Publishers Registration Law, the legal symbol of censorship. In reality it replicated many of the old oppressive provisions. It provided that any form of publication could be declared unlawful for broadly worded reasons like “disturbing the rule of law” or “violating the Constitution.” It gave government officials the power to issue, suspend, and revoke licenses, and even created criminal offences which could result in imprisonment for up to six months and fines of up to ten million kyats (roughly $11,000). The draft triggered an uproar. All the media associations in the country issued condemning statements, and the Press Council wrote an open letter to the president and parliament complaining about the Ministry’s unreasonable interference with its own functions. Parliament delayed discussion of the bill, but ultimately decided to go ahead and consider it after all. The Press Council threatened to resign en masse. The government conceded to some amendments, including the abolition of prison sentences and the reduction of fines, but the oppressive restrictions on publication were enshrined in the final law. At the time of writing, the Press Council has submitted its own media bill to parliament, but it stalled in the lower house, and a new Public Service Media bill, drafted by the Ministry, was rejected by the Press Council and has also stalled. Many more of the old, oppressive laws and rules remain in place, and while some are still being considered for replacement, the

CONCLUSION 23 1

process has been fraught and remains unresolved. There is still nothing constitutional or entrenched in human rights law to stop the government imposing new, oppressive bylaws or rules and renewing the old practices. Prepublication scrutiny for printed material might be over, for now, but postpublication “review” of printed material is still required; twelve copies of every publication must be sent to the government office free of charge as part of this process. Unfortunately, the future of legal reform to protect free expression remains hanging in the balance. Nevertheless, the removal of prepublication censorship and a lack of enforcement of retained laws restricting free expression has led to numerous positive changes in the media as well as the literary and arts scenes. The most obvious transformation has been in the realm of the press and news media. After being officially permitted to cover politics, independent news journals quickly began publishing articles on a range of controversial issues and conflicts, including the ethnic violence in Rakhine and Kachin states. Pro-democracy news journals such as The Irrawaddy1 and Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB)2 were permitted to set up offices in Yangon and distribute print versions of their articles. Daily news journals were permitted to circulate again in April 2013, a market that had previously been monopolized by the government’s own New Light of Myanmar. There are still certain topics that are considered off-limits; and critical opinion pieces, particularly about named military politicians, are still rare. This is partly because there is still no kind of freedom of information law, and so it is almost impossible to get information from government or public bodies, save that which is released in a selective and controlled fashion through press releases by the president’s personal public relations officers. Another transformation in transition Myanmar has been the high public profile and presence of literary writers, now that they have greater freedom of expression. They are held in particularly high esteem by a society that has regarded them for many years as the only independent voices of truth and wisdom in a context of governmental suppression, concealment, and distortion. This paradoxical side-effect of censorship, for repressive governments, was identified by J. M. Coetzee, who observed:

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The more draconian the state is in relation to writing, the more seriously it is seen to be taking writing, and the more attention is paid to writing; the more attention is paid to writing, the more the disseminative potential of writing grows. The book that is suppressed gets more attention as a ghost than it would have had alive; the writer who is gagged today is famous tomorrow for being gagged. Even silence, in an environment of censorship, can be eloquent.3

As a result of this phenomenon, literary writers who were well known during the censorship regime in Myanmar are now in great demand to speak out, to finally make their voices heard. They are regularly asked to give “literary talks” to huge crowds, like the one I watched being delivered with such gusto by Shwegu May Hnin. However, at present most of these talks are not in fact “literary” at all, but are better characterized as educational, inspirational talks about the values of civic democracy and free expression. This reflects a major theme in transition literary culture: that revered literary writers who were previously prevented from writing critically about politics and government have now begun to do so. Many literary prose writers have produced essays and news articles engaging with the political issues and developments. Of course, many writers around the world do not restrict themselves to the category of either “literary author” or “journalist” as they are more prone to do in the United Kingdom and the United States; in regions such as Latin America the boundaries between journalism and literature is particularly porous. But what is notable in Myanmar is that many of the writers known for literary prose, such as Shwegu May Hnin, have completely ceased writing fiction as a result of transition. They explain this by reference to the new “hunger” of the people for engagement in political discourse after such a long period without, and their own desire to plug into this hunger by communicating their views “directly,” without the need for the circumventing techniques they had to employ to deal with political subjects previously. This reflects the stance of writers in post-1989 Germany, such as Christa Wolf, who took a self-imposed break in their literary activities in favor of political speaking and writing.4 Some of the writers regret the extent to which the political has so far been usurping the literary. As Pe Myint’s interview reveals, while

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he acts as a news journal editor, and is one of those formerly literary writers who is currently prioritizing news and opinion over his short stories, he is worried about the way in which Myanmar’s literary continues, as he sees it, to decline, despite the new freedoms available to writers. Chit Oo Nyo, another veteran literary writer and historian who is very much in the public spotlight for literary talks, told me how he traveled around the country relentlessly, delivering multiple talks a day to audiences in their thousands, to his wife’s great dismay because she was very worried about his health. I could see her point; in the twenty-four hours before he met me at his home, he had already traveled hundreds of miles around the country, given three literary talks, and had no more than four hours’ sleep; and although he had great energy for twenty minutes of conversation, he soon began coughing and had to be ordered to rest. He told me he felt he had no choice but to work at such intensity, that it was his duty to give back as much as he could to a public that had long been deprived of access to ideas. His talks not only impact upon the large audiences that attend them; they are subsequently reproduced on cheap CDs and sold on the roadside to consumers in droves. However, he explained that while he sees it as his imminent duty to educate the people about democracy and politics, he confessed that “sometimes direct criticism is not beautiful,” and he said he believes passionately in the importance of literature and literary history. He is one of the few performers at these talks who has never stopped singing the old songs and reciting the old poems of his literary ancestors, alongside taking more didactic and overtly political lines, and he expressed his hope that as people become more educated and the need for his politically educative work lessens, more of his talks can focus on literary matters. The contemporary poetry scene is somewhat different to that of prose fiction; the year 2014 has seen an increase in live events featuring poets, but these have largely been small-scale poetry readings. Poets have tended to wade less into the political or journalistic fray. A Union of Myanmar Poets has been permitted to form although, being led by older poets with a traditional socialist mindset, it is perceived by many from the middle and younger generations as rather reactionary. There has also been proliferation of poetry publications, albeit mixed in quality. Both Zeyar Lynn and Pandora talked about the boom

23 4 CONCLUSION

in online publication by young poets, and Zeyar Lynn spoke enthusiastically about groups such as Pem Skool breaking away from the more conservative poetic culture being led by the older generations, and engaging with a whole range of subjects beyond politics. However, taking an overview of literary culture as a whole, the dramatic relaxation of censorship restrictions has not yet resulted in an opening of floodgates to a rush of daring literary events and publications that would have been banned under the regime, at least not from the majority of writers. Many of the writers and artists who have resented censorship so fiercely as a form of repression are finding it difficult to break free from some of its shackles even after they have been loosened. With a few exceptions, such as the work of Myay Hmone Lwin and a handful of young poets, the emergence of daring publications and events has largely been cautious and creeping. The pace of it is akin to the gradual thawing that took place in the Soviet Union after Stalin died in 1953, when only one or two novels emerged confronting taboo topics, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). It is also comparable to what Britta Lange has called the general “speechlessness” among literary writers in reunified Germany immediately after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.5 This reticence is understandable in the early days of increased freedom, when a culture of self-censorship still remains so prevalent, and when the law has still not reformed enough to guarantee sufficient protection to writers who defy old prohibitions. Self-censorship is still so widespread that it extends to positive acts as well as omissions; the old government propaganda slogans are still sometimes published in the front of books out of habit, even though there are no longer rules requiring this to be done.6 However, there is no longer the same sense among writers of an urgent need to dedicate themselves to mounting veiled attacks upon the military regime. This has led to a sense of loss, and a lack of purpose or meaning. Older literary writers and poets, even those who have previously been the most innovative in terms of form and content and the most challenging in terms of techniques for hiding political subject matter, such as Zeyar Lynn, now say that they are at something of a loss to know what to write about in their literary work. Even younger writers such as Pandora have said (albeit half-joking)

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that the single best thing for their writing in the past has been censorship. Many therefore continue with their writing in the old vein, and conversations about their work during transition still tend to revolve around sharing past experiences and struggles as a censored artist. This issue of censorship as both artistic driver and limitation was emphasized at a landmark symposium on “The Art of Transition” in March 2013, convened by Index on Censorship and organized by Zarganar, at which artists from a range of disciplines were invited to speak about their work in transition. In fact, most talked about their experiences under censorship, and ways in which they pursued their artistic work in both conjunction with and in opposition to it. It is both inevitable and healthy that such collective discussion forums should begin to be held at this point, in order to enable memory-sharing and evaluation of and communication about the still-recent past. Such freedom has not previously been accessible to artists—at least in the context of public, officially permitted gatherings—and the legacy of the regime and of terrible events such as the crackdown on the Saffron Revolution and the censorship remain at the forefront of many minds and memories. These memories have started to come out in literary, published form in Myanmar in the form of memoirs, such as Shwegu May Hnin’s Insein Chronicles and Ma Thida’s Prison Journal. When they are not writing or speaking about current political issues, these literary writers appear to feel the need to concentrate on recounting their personal history through this more factual and confessional form of writing in this early phase of transition. Unsurprisingly, more of the younger writers and artists I talked to said that they felt able to move on to new pastures with the content of their literary work. Myay Hmone Lwin, with his fearless novel about topics like violent crackdowns on democracy protesters, is deliberately setting out to break old boundaries and seems unfazed by the legal uncertainty surrounding publication of such material. In the last few months, Zeyar Lynn has observed an increase in poetry publications by young women engaged in socially challenging subject matter, in particular explicit writing about sex and sexual behavior. This is anathema not just to those in power but also to the conservative older generation of writers. However, many of the younger generation of literary writers are still not yet maximizing the new freedoms that are

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now available to them in the literary arena. Some, like Nay Phone Latt, are too busy with other work connected with spreading democracy and internet skills to engage much in literary writing. Others remain afraid of the consequences of pushing boundaries too far. Residual fear and the self-censorship associated with it derives partly from old habits, partly from the continuing existence of old repressive laws, and partly from the fact of continuing military oppression and violence around the country. It is entirely possible that the authorities could rely upon the existing constitution and take action against publications highlighting the conflicts it would rather keep in the dark and the ethnic and religious divisions giving rise to them, on the basis that such writing would harm the aim of “non-disintegration of national solidarity.” These factors at least partly explain the otherwise perplexing fact that few of the writers featured in this book are yet (at least, at the time of writing) engaging with the troubling issue of violence and hate speech against ethnic and religious minority groups in their work. Such violence has played a horrifying role in the transition period so far, but is rarely talked about by the government, and has been largely overshadowed in the media by the more positive political and economic developments. Even Aung San Suu Kyi, previously seen as the country’s staunchest defender of human rights, has exercised deliberate restraint when asked about the rights of the Rohingya Muslims, or indeed about the violence involving government forces and other religious and ethnic minority groups around the country, refraining from any criticism of the government’s conduct in this regard. Meanwhile, a poisonous and virile strain of hate speech against Muslims has spread around the country, largely via Facebook and YouTube, but also by word of mouth, driven by a campaign waged by Buddhist monks entitled “969.” The 969 campaign directs people to avoid associating with Muslims and to boycott their shops and businesses.7 One radical monk, Wirathu, calls himself the “Burmese Bin Laden,” and in hatefilled rants before large crowds and on social media has warned the people to be wary of all Muslims, whom he calls “cruel and savage,” and alleging that they “target innocent young Burmese girls and rape them” and “indulge in cronyism.”8 While all the writers featured in this book passionately advocate the importance of free speech as a

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human right, it is notable that they have so far omitted to deal with such issues in their work. They also tended to brush over them as topics of conversation with me, when they were otherwise very open about censorable topics such as their dislike of the regime and their defiance of censorship itself where possible. Notably, all the featured writers are themselves Buddhist and ethnic Burmans (save for Zeyar Lynn, who is of mixed Spanish and Burman heritage). This reflects the vast majority of published writers and publishers in the country, and of course the current government is comprised almost exclusively of Burman Buddhists. Given the high profile of and respect for literary writers in society, it will be interesting to see whether, how, and in what manner they eventually do write or speak about these issues. The same applies to continuing patterns of discrimination in the country based on sex and sexual orientation, which are currently subsumed in the national debate by issues considered to be more pressing and were not issues that particularly preoccupied the writers featured in this book. Another cause of limited literary productivity during the period of transition is the flurry of commercialism as markets have opened up. This is manifest in a plethora of fashion and style magazines capturing people’s attention with glossy pictures and celebrity stories. In the realm of prose fiction, pop fiction—a safe option during the censorship regime—remains prevalent, in particular romance, horror, and comedy. This dominance by popular genres is a subject of satire by Ma Thida in her short story in this book, “Leaving the Horror.” There are also other internet-based distractions from literature that were previously unavailable to people: news from hitherto banned sources such as the Democratic Voice of Burma, and social networking sites such as Facebook and YouTube. All these factors seem to have detracted from literary readership and productivity. There remain a few “literary magazines,” though none are exclusively literary. One is New Patauk Flower, which remains fairly well read because of a popular monthly feature of a famous writer or journalist. Another is New Scent magazine, which includes political as well as literary articles. Finally there is Gold magazine, which aims to feature the work of new writers. The readership of these magazines is relatively small, and sometimes too small for the

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publications’ survival. For instance, Teen magazine, which aimed to publish work by young writers that was innovative and experimental in terms of form and content, had to close down recently as it was taking a loss. Formal innovation is currently far more prevalent in poetry than in contemporary fiction, with young groups of poets like Pem Skool posting experimental poems online. The reason for this, says poet Pandora, is partly because poets are less concerned with making money; it is harder to get poetry published than a novel or even a story, and composing and sharing an innovative poem takes less time, so poets are happy to do so for the love of it, sharing the work between themselves at readings and in small pamphlets, without expecting to be able to sell it to a commercial audience; as such they do not have to conform to the constraints of “constitutive” censorship imposed by the marketplace, as Sue Curry Jansen would put it. No doubt certain individual innovators are another reason why poetry has been more innovative, most notably Zeyar Lynn who, having studied abroad in Hawaii, brought news and translations of foreign poetry schools and movements back home and began to incorporate them with panache into his own work. Prose fiction lags behind, with realism remaining the most prevalent form, though a scattering of middle-aged writers like Ma Thida, and several young writers like Pandora are keen to push literary form in new directions.

R This leads me to consider some of the themes that emerge from the particular literary texts selected by the writers to be translated for this book. Interesting patterns, overlaps, and contradictions can be discerned both between all the individual texts and the groups of texts that are representative of the three generations. Of the older generation, represented by Win Tin, Shwegu May Hnin, and Pe Myint, two out of the three were former democracy activists and elected politicians for the NLD Party, and it is notable that they both chose to include in this book literary texts that describe their own experiences of imprisonment. This demonstrates their preoccupation with speaking out about the brutality of the regime and the

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sharp end of censorship. Win Tin did this through a poem he wrote while in prison using the metaphor of a caged tiger; and Shwegu May Hnin did it through autobiographical fiction written after her captivity about her experiences in the women’s prison. While representative members of the middle and younger generations also were jailed as a result of censorship, namely Ma Thida and Nay Phone Latt, and while both these writers have also written about the prison experience through the medium of fiction, it is notable that neither chose to include such writing in this book. Of course, as they are younger, they both have more of their lives left to live, and perhaps as a result of that it seemed to me that they felt less defined by their prison experiences. The third member of the older generation, Pe Myint elected in his personal and literary life to avoid entering into politics or courting controversy of the kind that would have seen him imprisoned under censorship. His chosen short story reflects this, touching on the hardship and inhumanity of life under the regime, but doing so through the intimate and ironic tale of a married couple as they engage with the ethical dilemma around trading human organs. Significantly, the work of all three of the older writers is realist, with limited use of metaphor and little formal experimentation. Despite the clear stance of each writer in opposition to military rule and censorship, their creative writing has been shaped by the literary forms and content that were promulgated by the regime. A partial exception is Shwegu May Hnin, whose chosen work demonstrates a degree of experimentation with form; however, her decision to structure her Insein Chronicles by hour of the day rather than chronology, using multiple perspectives, derives from the original publication of the work in serial form for the prison magazine, rather than a direct intention to employ postmodern narrative techniques. The middle generation, represented by Ye Shan, Ma Thida, and Zeyar Lynn, also remains preoccupied with experiences and memories of life under the regime, but their work addresses this in different ways. Although Ma Thida spent time in prison like Win Tin and Shwegu May Hnin, her chosen story does not explore that at all. “Leaving the Horror” demonstrates that, on the one hand, Ma Thida is keen to move on from the past and to investigate problems of transition—in this instance the prevalence of pop fiction and genre TV,

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which preoccupies the fictional author-narrator—but, on the other hand, she remains haunted by memories of the regime, as is evident from the imagery underpinning her horror story: the shadows of robed monks slaughtered during the Saffron Revolution. Like Ma Thida, Zeyar Lynn also chose texts that hark back to the regime and its atrocities; but unlike her he does not juxtapose this with a focus on transition-specific topics in his poetry, confessing that he felt it difficult to move on from the protest poetry he had engaged with for so long under censorship. Unlike the older generation, both these writers are focused on form as much as content, and are both formally experimental. Ma Thida’s story was so experimental that she admits it did not go down well with readers in Myanmar whom she said were not “ready” for it. Zeyar Lynn has experimented with form for many years, ever since his exposure to contemporary international poetry in Hawaii as a student. It is notable that both of these more formally experimental writers have spent significant periods of time living abroad. Still, they differ from each other in the perspectives they have toward formal experimentation now that transition has begun. Unlike Ma Thida, Zeyar Lynn feels that the experiments he pioneered in the country years ago have less meaning for him now, since they no longer function as a devious way to get past the censors by concealing critique with complexity. Furthermore, many other, younger poets are now experimenting with form in their poetry as well as subject matter, so he is conscious of no longer being the idiosyncratic revolutionary he used to be; whereas Ma Thida still feels that there is still plenty of room to champion the cause of experimentation in prose fiction, and to lead the younger generation by example. In stark contrast to both these writers in both form and content, and perhaps more representatively of the middle generation as a whole, Ye Shan’s short story, “Heartbreak Shunting,” written during the censorship years, could serve as a blueprint of the promulgated socialist realist style, by engaging with the struggle of an ordinary worker in apparently simple, realist prose. However, he managed to sneak his critique of the regime past the censors by making it a sufficiently subtle exploration of abuse of power and the hopelessness of poverty, encased in a moving and evocative story.

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Like the older and middle generations, the younger generation is still engaging with the preoccupations of the military regime and the repressive censorship era. However, the representative three writers featured in this book, Nay Phone Latt, Pandora, and Myay Hmone Lwin, do so to different extents and in different ways. Nay Phone Latt, as a political activist and former prisoner, chose to include a short story that he wrote while he was in prison. This decision was as much practical as it was symbolic, since he admitted he hasn’t had time for literary writing since his release and the start of transition due to his time commitments with his internet NGO and with politics. His story represents the form, widely used by short story writers during the censorship era of all three generations, of an allegory that serves to critique the regime. Conversely, Pandora’s chosen poems were all written during transition, and all engage with transition topics, from a depiction of a Yangon traffic jam representing the country’s political and economic stasis, to the personal dislocation of returning to a place that is supposedly progressing after having lived in a far more developed country like Singapore. In her engagement with transition topics, she differs from the university tutor she wished she’d had, Zeyar Lynn, who felt unable to move on from the past; but like him, her poetry is formally experimental, and she intends to extend this to postmodern fiction when she finally embarks on the novel she intends to write. Myay Hmone Lwin, the youngest of all the writers, is certainly not the most experimental of the three from his generation in terms of form. However, the translated extract of his novel demonstrates the ways in which he has pushed barriers of literary language by using slang and an informal tone that has been met with disapproval from the literary establishment in the country as well as from the censors. It represents what a literary radical he is in terms of his subject matter, by deliberately challenging the most taboo of topics, from social phenomena such as young people’s public displays of affection and disrespect to their elders, to such politically sensitive events as the Saffron Revolution. Whereas Ma Thida also engages with that subject through allusion to “saffron shadows” that represent the monks who led the protests, and with the additional distancing of a fictional writer composing a story within a story; Myay Hmone Lwin engages with it by using direct, realist prose from the perspective of

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a young protester, of which he was one. As he sees it, he is pioneering a “new realism” for the next generation of writers and readers, as opposed to the socialist kind that was promulgated under censorship, and he won’t be cowed.

R As I left Myanmar there was much talk among writers about future trajectories for literary culture and writing. But before I left, Nay Phone Latt told me that he hoped eventually to institute a new interactive, informal type of literary event in future, akin to a literary writers’ discussion event or salon of the kind that are popular in the U.K. and elsewhere, with the aim of enabling new kinds of conversations with writers about writing. Pandora told me her ideas about growing the seed of the Irrawaddy Literary Festival in future in a way that would maximize the benefit to and interaction between Burmese writers and readers as well as providing a showcase for Burmese literature for global audiences. Young artist Ma Ei had just opened a new bookshop in Yangon, handily called The Book Shop, where she was selling noncommercial books, including art books and as wide a range as possible of literary fiction and poetry, experimental writing, and intellectual essays on topics such as literary theory, philosophy, and aesthetics. Passionate about her wares, she was hopeful of encouraging this aspect of Burmese culture to rejuvenate itself. Pe Myint was planning a landmark literary conference to discuss new literary directions for transition. He later told me that the event went off with great success. He read a paper entitled “The State of Myanmar Literature: A General Assessment,” in which he argued that the country’s literature had been in decline over the previous fifty years mainly due to lack of freedom, and that they should revive the literary culture that was alive in the days preceding the military era: the culture of book clubs, literary and learned societies, writers’ and poets’ organizations, libraries and study groups. Other papers read and discussed that day included “An Assessment of the Present State of Myanmar Book Business and Suggestions on Its Promotion,” given jointly by a bookseller and a writer, and “The Increasing Wrongful Uses of Myanmar Language Both in Speech and Writing, and How to Correct Them” by a retired professor

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Mai Ei outside The Book Shop

of the Burmese language at Yangon University—which I have no doubt would have grated with Myay Hmone Lwin. Pe Myint told me that the event triggered discussions about further plans, such as forming literary associations and holding literary events, including a literary festival for children. Artists from other disciplines had also begun innovating and creating in new directions. When I left the country, writer and Yangon

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gallery owner, U Aung, was about to open a new arts space where writers could convene for book events, discussions, and literary forums in a creative environment, in conjunction with other art forms and artists. The old, government-run Musicians’ Organization had been reformed to include a more diverse range of contemporary musicians and now represents hip-hop, rock, and other new music genres as well as traditional musicians. Together, these musicians have started lobbying for better copyright protection of their work. As the prologue of this book illustrates, performance artists were daring to perform controversial work in public spaces. Visual artists, liberated from official examination of their exhibitions before they are opened to the public, were experimenting with controversial reds, blacks, and yellows. Hitherto banned portraits of Aung San Suu Kyi and her father Aung San are profuse. However, there are still limits; images of nudes, which could be deemed pornographic under existing laws, are rarely produced. Young independent filmmakers were still struggling. Predistribution censorship still exists for both scripts and films. In the relative absence of independent and documentary filmmaking in the country over the past fifty years, apolitical slapstick comedies and action films predominate in the mainstream. However, young indie filmmakers like Myat Noe are in the process of making new films that they hope will find their way through the censorship process. His new film, Nashira Sadachbia, is set in a dystopic future, when global warming has intensified and people are divided into “commoners” and “cronyists” (the latter a not-too-thinly veiled reference to military cronies who retain the handle on power), and the cronyists have control over which commoners are allowed to receive the restorative eye surgery they all need as a result of increased UV rays. And while I was in Yangon, I went to the French Institute’s landmark “Yangon Photo Festival,” where hundreds of people packed into a lush garden to watch the slideshow screenings of its photo documentary competition, featuring issues such as the 2012 elections, the Letpadaung mine incident, and the conflicts in Rakhine State. Comedy, spearheaded by Zarganar, was also heading in new creative trajectories without losing sight of tradition. In March 2013 he took to the stage in the center of Yangon for his first public anyeint

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performance since he was imprisoned, defying the authorities before it even began by refusing to submit the scripts of the show in advance. He directed and starred in the show with his comedy group “Full Moon.” The anyeint retained its traditional characteristics of comedy, poetry, dance, and music, but not as the audience knew it: Zarganar introduced hip-hop style lyrics in place of traditional rhyming poems, influenced by his 17-year-old rapper son, who had recently returned to Myanmar to join his father. Zarganar included reggae and Western-style classical music in place of traditional Burmese instruments, and individual stand-up comedy in place of group sketch performances, adapted so that the individual comedians could enter into comic debates on current political issues on stage. He pulled out old jokes that had got him imprisoned under the censorship regime, tweaked them a little, and re-aired them—and got away with it. For instance, one of his old sketches that had got him arrested was of a “beggars’ assembly.” It was conceived in protest against the government’s announcement that it did not want to see beggars on the streets, so if any were found they would be taken away to an academy to be trained; whereas in reality they would be arrested and taken to labor camps. Zarganar reworked this sketch and inserted new references too—for instance, putting up an advertisement for the performance saying “Please reduce your meals and come to our show,” as a parody of a recent policy announcement to rural people that they should save themselves money by reducing to two rather than three meals a day. He told me he was on a mission to make other artists, and young people, believe that they too can create, publish, or perform in daring ways and can get away with it. The hope is that, before too long, the self-censoring vocabulary of artists and writers around “getting away with it” will disappear, along with the necessity to do so.

R

By 2014, however, a year after I left, there began to appear numerous signs of the government’s reneging on its commitment to transition. New proposals were put forward for laws to “protect Buddhism” amidst the violent religious divisions,9 and a government committee

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finally decided to block an amendment to the constitution that would enable Aung San Suu Kyi to become president in the future.10 Alongside such moves, the authorities once again started to tighten the reins of censorship. In April 2014 a DVB journalist, Zaw Pe, was imprisoned for trespass and for “disturbing a civil servant.” He had interviewed an official at a local government education department about the qualification criteria for a Japanese-funded scholarship program.11 The official had refused to answer some of his questions, and after the visit he and a colleague were arrested and charged.12 Over a hundred reporters took to the streets of two cities on Friday, April 11, to rally support for the journalists, and for greater press freedom. The larger rally was held without an assembly permit, but no one has yet been arrested for participation. Demonstrators were warned by local police but refused to dissipate. DVB and other newspapers printed black-bordered front pages in protest, with a message saying: “Journalism is not a crime.”13 In another incident, four journalists and the CEO of the Rangoonbased Unity journal were arrested and detained without bail after the newspaper reported the existence of an alleged chemical weapons factory in central Myanmar, on the charge of exposing state secrets.14 Disillusioned by the increasing signs that the freedom of expression they had hoped for was never going to materialize under the transition government, by the time of writing half the members of the Press Council had resigned. Literary events have begun to be censored again, initially as a result of hard-line Buddhists and the rising anti-Muslim sentiment. In January 2014 the organizers of a “literary event” featuring Ma Thida were asked to remove her from the list of speakers, on the basis that she used to volunteer in a Muslim hospital, even though she is a known Buddhist.15 The organizers refused to remove her, and instead cancelled the event. Soon after, on Myanmar’s Union Day in February 2014, another such event had to be called off when Buddhist monks threatened the organizers and arrived en masse to protest against it, on the basis that two of the keynote speakers were Muslim: the NLD’s High Court lawyer Ko Ni and the 88 Generation Peace and Open Society’s Mya Aye.16 Worryingly, government authorities proceeded to start barring more literary events around

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the country.17 The 88 Generation Peace and Open Society published an open letter about this on February 19, chiding the prohibition of literary events as “acts against democracy,” and declaring that the right to speak and write freely is “an essential right for every citizen, which for many years the people had strived for, and thus signifies a strong culture in the country.”18 It remains to be seen how far Myanmar’s Buddhist writers will go to support the rights of Muslims, and whether the authorities will start banning a wider range of events. On the other side of the coin, a highly positive move for freedom of expression was made as a result of the efforts and discussions of the writers featured in this book, particularly the driving force of Ma Thida: the launch of PEN Myanmar in September 2013. Nay Phone Latt delivered the keynote speech at the launch event and outlined three main projects for the new organization: monitoring the media on issues concerning freedom of expression, including the impact of laws, policies, enforcement, and cases; organizing interactive discussions between writers and readers in order to establish a new culture of literature in Myanmar; and conducting research on the literature curriculum in the schools of other countries and introducing creative writing courses in schools, in order to promote and cultivate literature in society.19 Myay Hmone Lwin has since become treasurer. Their work currently focuses on grassroots activities such as discussions among writers and readers in remote areas, usually either at public libraries or in monasteries. Writers invite readers to participate by either reading excerpts from any book they like or by joining in with a discussion based on readings by the writers or the other participants. The organization is resisting what Ma Thida calls the “the traditional one-way lecture-style literary talks” (such as the one I witnessed being delivered by Shwegu May Hnin), which she says “cannot promote readership”; instead the organization is striving to make literary events more interactive. “Many people like it,” she told me, “and they never imagined they too could have opportunity to talk in front of the public.” For International Peace Day 2014 they organized a short story and poetry contest on the theme of peace. It will be very interesting to see the extent to which PEN Myanmar is able to transform literary culture in the country to the benefit of free

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expression, and how its work will mesh with the older, more conservative literary establishment in the country.

R Looking out, beyond the boundaries of Myanmar, what do the life stories and the work of the writers in this book tell us about writing and censorship in the wider contemporary world? One obvious thing is this unfortunate fact: a government can, if so-minded, maintain intense suppression of the rights and freedoms of individual writers for at least as long as fifty years, and sustain it in the contemporary world, despite the presence of international law and human rights standards and despite the onset of globalization, the internet, and instant, low-cost information-sharing. Notwithstanding long-term economic sanctions from many of the world’s most powerful countries, Myanmar’s military regime was able to support itself (if not adequately its people) economically with a helping hand from China, and did so for decades, until it indicated, unilaterally, that it was minded to begin a change of course toward democracy and, consequently, toward freedom of expression. Recent developments indicate that it could just as easily stride back down the same path. There is no clear explanation for the military’s decision to embark on the road to transition in Myanmar. Was it pioneering writers such as Nay Phone Latt, with his blogging about the Saffron Revolution in 2007 that caught the world’s attention, who put the fear into the government and convinced them that they could not continue to conceal from the rest of the world practices of violent repression that had worked for them in the past? Or was it the humiliation and hindrance of continued international economic sanctions and the realization of Myanmar’s potential for global power in light of the rise of Asia on the world scene? It is likely that there were a number of contributing factors, and that important among these were continued resistance from the population, and in particular from writers; the ability of protesting voices to communicate internationally through the internet and social media; and campaigning by international organizations promoting freedom of expression such as PEN, Index on Censorship,

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Article 19, and Amnesty International. Such organizations do vital work in campaigning for the rights, freedoms, and recognition of censored writers around the world. But unless many more people from the global community engage with this issue, it is easy to imagine similar patterns replicating elsewhere in the world, or indeed once again in Myanmar where legal reform to protect free expression is still at a nascent stage. The stories of the writers in this book demonstrate other, interconnected facets of contemporary censorship. For one thing, they demonstrate how difficult it is, under a censorship regime, for writers and readers to access and discuss the wide range of international literature that is out there, and to keep up with new developments. This inevitably affects the volume, depth, quality, complexity, and outlook of literary work. When the internet emerged in the 1990s, the regime quickly restricted access so that sites like YouTube were blocked and people had limited access to information. Bloggers like Nay Phone Latt outpaced the censors by communicating with the outside world through new channels, until he was found out. Since transition began internet censorship was reduced, but it still remains to a degree. As Nay Phone Latt is promulgating through MIDO, the internet is a vital way to provide freedom of expression and information for suppressed or minority groups in contemporary society. Coupled with the restriction of access to global literature and information in Myanmar was the deliberate limitation placed by the regime on the publication and distribution of any texts considered not to conform with the state’s objectives. This type of limitation ties into state control over publishers, extending from their right to exist through licensing or registration, to close scrutiny of their activities by censors and onerous penalties for crossing the blurred line into unacceptable content. All of these limitations remain possible in a contemporary world, as evidenced not only by the recent history of Myanmar but by the practices of states around the world. Onerous laws with negative impacts on free expression are the focus of strenuous campaigning by organizations such as Article 19. Regrettably, though, they continue to persist far too widely, stifling a wealth of potential literary and artistic output across the world.

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Then there is the wider economic deprivation that is consequent to a censorship regime. Poverty caused by government insularity, trade barriers, and international sanctions means that people cannot afford to buy books, and therefore that in-country publishers cannot afford to print and distribute them, save for the most populist, bestselling genres, and of course state-sponsored or state-sanctioned texts. Translations of international works become unaffordable, importation of such books is restricted in any event, and people are unable to travel in order to connect with the international community. The result is, as evidenced in Myanmar, a scarcity of bookshops and a lack of access to new, diverse, high-quality literary texts. It is no coincidence that every one of the writers I interviewed for this book were fortunate to have access to books as children through their parents—for instance, Pandora’s father’s book rental shop— rather than through state provision. The exception is Shwegu May Hnin, who won a scholarship to take her from a poor, laboring family in Shan State to a university education in Yangon, in the days before the regime took hold. Education is the other key part of society that suffers under censorship, and these writers’ stories point to its crucial importance in creating a thriving literary culture. The quality of education in Myanmar plummeted under the censorship regime, due to a lack of resources put into it by the state, as well as on oppressive restrictions on both the syllabus and upon teachers who encouraged free-thinking. Zeyar Lynn’s expulsion from Rangoon University to a provincial college in a backwater of the country, for encouraging his students to write essays that were not parroting government ideology or propaganda, illustrates the way in which the strangulation of proper education damages free expression and literary development. Pandora’s story demonstrates how Myanmar’s brightest students’ university education was simply cut short when the government decided that student protests were out of control. Literary and artistic education in the country is still extremely limited and conservative. Without the cultivation of or permission for a critical and enquiring intellectual culture, there is no scope for the kinds of research and debate that stimulate, evaluate, and inspire widespread high-quality literature.

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On the other hand, there are some consequences of a censorship regime that could be said to constitute silver linings for literary culture. As Pandora put it, “When I was in Iowa, a writer asked me what was the best thing for my writing—and I answered, half jokingly, that it was censorship.” One consequence of censorship is a public lust for books that are forbidden fruits, which goes hand in hand with intense respect for writers. Under repressive censorship in Myanmar, while it was difficult for most people to access new and diverse books, it was also difficult for them to access other forms of popular entertainment that were dominating elsewhere in the world, such as online gaming and music videos. As a result, in Myanmar under censorship, people looked upon books and literary writers as sources of entertainment, independent thinking, education, and knowledge. Consequently, there was a thriving chain of small book rental businesses, such as Pandora’s father’s bookshop, which survived in small towns and villages by renting books at a very low cost to the community. Those book rental outlets, Pandora says, are now dying out fast. And, as other writers complain, young people are simply less interested in books these days when there are so many other bright, flashy distractions on offer online, which were previously the stuff of fantasy. The tables have not turned yet; while the reverence for books remains in many parts of Myanmar society, publishers have been doing a booming trade in the short period since the censorship board ceased to operate. Another “benefit” of censorship is, ironically, the potential for creativity that is provided by the limitations inherent in censorship itself. Many of Myanmar’s writers who were most seriously affected by censorship, and who became most frustrated and angry about its effects on literature and democracy, are now mourning the loss of its function as a catalyst for creativity in their own work. Not only writers from the older generation, but Zeyar Lynn and even Pandora, from the younger generation, confess to feeling somewhat at a loss to find subject matter that is as passion-inducing and incendiary as that which they were motivated to tackle under censorship. Moreover, the literary devices frequently used to get around the restrictions, such as allegory, metaphor, and allusion, are no longer as potent or necessary as they once were. Often in combination with socialist realism, those devices had formed the backbone of literary style and form. Few Myanmar writers

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yet have access to a particularly wide range of global contemporary literature or associated intellectual thought, criticism, and debate that could help to inspire new kinds of experimentation. Perhaps that is simply a matter of time. However, in the meantime, populist genre fiction is the only kind thriving. This state of affairs is not helped by the fact that the end of prepublication censorship has prompted a desire to move away from the very literary forms of writing that had sustained writers for so many years and instead to write and talk “directly” to the people—a common feature of most of these writers’ accounts across all three generations, from Shwegu May Hnin to Nay Phone Latt. Whereas beforehand literature and literary essay writing was a means of educating and making political and cultural points through the back door, now writers can simply walk in the front door. Since literary authors had inspired such high reverence under the censorship regime because of their perceived independence and unique ability to critique the government, they have subsequently been both inclined, and in demand, to share with the public their democratic ideas and to raise critical questions about government and society, through “literary talks” without literary content, journalistic articles, and nonfiction books. Hungry audiences have so long been starved of such information or debate that writers’ keenness to engage with them is laudable. But it also throws into question the future of literary quality and accordingly the richness of literary culture in post-censorship societies. Does literature inevitably decrease in meaning and significance in a transition phase, when it ceases to operate as it did as a form of resistance? And in today’s technologized world, is a thriving literary culture a remnant of history and cultural tradition which currently lives alongside more popular contemporary cultural forms such as film and gaming, but which is set for a long-term decline due to factors such as the decline of print culture, open access publication, and the rise of the visual in a digitized environment? Might transition societies such as Myanmar, which have been deprived of freedom of expression for so long, be prone to abandon literature altogether in favor of other digital and visual art forms? Of course this is a trend that is happening all over the world. But my own view is that literature and literary culture has a deeply rooted

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place in society, which is impossible to replace with other art forms, because it enables creative expression through language and the communication human emotion, psychology, and ideas with a depth and subtlety that other art forms are unable to achieve. From my encounters and conversations in Myanmar, it is clear that despite the regime’s attenuated attempts to prune literature into a socialist realist topiary, the importance of literature and literary culture is deeply ingrained. The stuttering progress of literature and the uncertain attitudes toward literary value in transition Myanmar is most likely to take the form of a temporary post-censorship phenomenon: a dip in literature’s place in the cultural hierarchy for a short time before an ascending peak of activity. This would reflect the pattern after the fall of Soviet censorship, where writers such as Christa Wolf in East Germany broke from their literary activities temporarily in favor of political speaking and writing before beginning again. Even though many of Myanmar’s literary writers are still prioritizing what are seen as more pressing political and journalistic activities at present, all of them say they are keen that literary and artistic culture does once again become a vibrant and core part of society. And there are already signs that writers are now taking action to drive a new ascendance of the literary in Myanmar—for instance, Pe Myint’s decision to organize a literary conference and argue publicly for the promotion of a revived intellectual literary culture, and the involvement of Ma Thida, Nay Phone Latt, and Myay Hmone Lwin in the formation and growth of PEN Myanmar. There are of course other examples in Asia of more economically developed countries where literature is a core part of culture despite the existence of other, newer forms of entertainment and culture, notably Japan, and it could well be that Myanmar heads in a similar direction. While all sorts of different ingredients can combine to create a thriving literary scene, there are certain key developments that surely are fundamental to ensure a dynamic future in Myanmar for literature and the arts in the medium to long term. First, law: the removal of legal restrictions that perpetuate censorship and active protection of freedom of expression and information and development of the rule of law. Second, education: the provision of high-quality, diverse education and easy access to books. Third, translation: better translator

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training and free exchange of ideas with the international community. Improved copyright protection would also provide incentives for publishers to invest in more diverse writing. Literature in Myanmar has been severely restricted over the decades of repressive censorship. But the stories in this book are evidence of the creativity that censorship inspired in the most determined writers, and in censorship’s failure to stamp out the desire for a vibrant literary culture. The writers included here are just a small selection of the many brave and talented writers from three generations whose work has not yet been translated but would be fruitfully shared with the rest of the world. I hope that, if nothing else, this book can begin to act as a voice for Myanmar’s contemporary writers, a channel for their work, and a starting point of communication and dialogue between writers and readers in Myanmar and the international community about literature, translation, literary culture, censorship and freedom of expression. There are of course many reasons to be skeptical about the future of free speech and the potential for a flourishing literary and arts culture in Myanmar, and serious concerns about signs that the government is far less committed to the end of repressive censorship than it professed to be at the start of transition. But there are still plenty of grounds for optimism at this pivotal moment. If the optimists win out in Myanmar, then there is still hope even for the worst censorship regimes that persist in other corners of the globe.

Notes

Prologue 1. Wai Moe, “Coco Islands to Open for Tourism,” The Irrawaddy, November 19, 2009. 2. Zarganar was imprisoned several times over the course of many years under the regime due to the sensitive political content of his comedy performances, and at one point sentenced to fifty-nine years for a public order offense under the criminal code. He is now one of the most famous and well-loved figures in transition Myanmar. 3. Index on Censorship is an international organization based in London that promotes and defends the right to freedom of expression.

1. Introduction: Literary Life Under the Censorship Regime 1. It was originally published in Burmese in 1994 but not published in English translation until 2008. 2. I have come across a handful more, including Ma Thanegi’s Selected Myanmar Short Stories (2008) and C. P. Prabhakar’s Selected Burmese Short Stories (1998). 3. I later discovered Mya Than Tint’s On the Road to Mandalay: Tales of Ordinary People (1996), which is a fascinating compilation of interviews with

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4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

ordinary people conducted by a well-known Burmese literary writer, and American journalist Julie Sell’s Whispers at the Pogada: Portraits of Modern Burma (1999), which draws upon her interviews with people while traveling in the country. Steve Tickner, “Exploring Naypyidaw, a Capital Built from Scratch,” The Irrawaddy, January 29, 2013. A traditional Burmese dancelike sport akin to keepie-uppie in the UK, in which players stand in a circle and attempt to keep a rattan (or similar) ball aloft with just their legs and feet, and focusing on the form and style of the kick. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. R. L. Sharman, “Style Matters: Ethnography as Method and Genre,” in Anthropology and Humanism (2007): 118. Banyan, “What’s in a name? Myanmar: Bye-bye, Burma, bye-bye,” Economist Blog (accessed May 21, 2013); see www.economist.com/blogs/ banyan/2013/05/what-s-name-myanmar. Jason Burke, “Burma v Myanmar—What’s in a Name? Obama Plays It Safe During Historic Visit,” The Guardian, November 19, 2012. PEN is an NGO devoted to promoting free expression and to supporting and promoting the voices of international writers. Daniel George Edward Hall, Burma (1960), 8, 10. Hall, Burma, 11. Sadly, many of those temples crumbled and deteriorated over centuries of abandonment. They were “restored” in the 1990s by the junta in an effort to increase tourism, without any record of archaeological or architectural reasoning or justification, and as a result, when you look closely, many of them are near-clones of each other. Hall, Burma, 13. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 87. NB: The area controlled by Alaungpaya still did not represent the current shape of Burma. What is now the Rakhine State to the east of Burma remained an independent kingdom until the end of the century. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 102. For more detail on this, see Christina Fink, Living Silence, 77–99. As defined by the Venice Commission (Council of Europe). “Statute law” refers to laws enacted by the government, as opposed to “common law,” which refers to case law deriving from court judgments.

1. INTRO DUCT IO N 2 5 7

27. Transcripts of judicial decisions. 28. See, for example, Sue Curry Jansen, Censorship: The Knot That Binds Power and Knowledge (1991), 25. 29. Jansen, Censorship, 8. 30. Gary D. Stark, Banned in Berlin: Literary Censorship in Imperial Germany (2009), xix. 31. Stark, Banned in Berlin, xix. 32. J. M. Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, (1996), 42. 33. Coetzee, Giving Offense, 42. 34. Anna J. Allott, Inked Over, Ripped Out: Burmese Storytellers and the Censors (1993). 35. Allott, Inked Over, Ripped Out. 36. P. Gutter and B. K. Sen, Burma’s State Protection Law: An Analysis of the Broadest Law in the World (2001). 37. Coetzee, Giving Offense, 6. 38. Ibid., 38. 39. Hall, Burma, 32–33. 40. Anna J. Allott, “Burmese Literature,” in Leonard S. Klein, ed., Far Eastern Literatures: A Guide (1988), 1. 41. See Anna J. Allott, “Prose Writing and Publishing in Burma: Government Policy and Popular Practice,” in Tham Seong Chee, ed., Literature and Society in Southeast Asia: Political and Sociological Perspectives (1981), 1. 42. Ibid., 1. 43. See Allot, “Prose Writing and Publishing in Burma.” 44. Ibid., 2. 45. Ibid., 1. 46. Ibid., 5. 47. Ibid., 4. 48. Ibid. 4. 49. Fink, Living Silence, 49. 50. “The Burmese Way to Socialism” was the title of an economic treatise written in April 1962 by the Revolutionary Council, shortly after the coup, as a blueprint for economic development, reducing foreign influence in Burma, and increasing the role of the military. See Robert A. Holmes, “Burmese Domestic Policy: The Politics of Burmanization,” Asian Survey 7.3 (University of California Press, 1967): 188–97. 51. Coetzee, Giving Offense, 115. 52. Ibid., 117. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 108. 55. Ibid., 109. Gorky introduced this motif in his resolution on “Soviet Literature” at the first Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934. 56. Ibid., 110.

2 5 8  1. INTRO DUC T I O N

57. Ibid., 111. 58. Ibid., 114. 59. See Anna J. Allott, “The Short Story in Myanmar,” in Terri Shaffer Yamada, ed., Modern Short Fiction of Southeast Asia: A Literary History (2009), 23. 60. Ibid., 7. 61. Osip Mandelstam, The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, ed. Jane G. Harris and Constance Link (1979), 316. 62. Ibid., 11 and 29. 63. Coetzee, Giving Offense, 123. 64. See Allott, Inked Over, Ripped Out. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. See Allott, Inked Over, Ripped Out, n3. 68. Fink, Living Silence, 202.

2. Writers: The Older Generation 1. Kyaw Phyo Tha, “Tens of Thousands Pay Tribute to Win Tin at Rangoon Funeral,” The Irrawaddy, April 23, 2014. 2. Ibid. 3. General Ne Win was prime minister from 1958 to 1960 and head of state from 1962 to 1981. 4. The definition of political prisoners in Burma is contested. See, for example, Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma), “Criteria for AAPP’s Definition of a Political Prisoner,” Press release, AAPP, September 30, 2011; and the U.S. Congressional Research Service’s article on “Burma’s Political Prisoners and U.S. Sanctions” by Michael F. Martin (Washington, D.C., Library of Congress), December 2, 2013. 5. Bo Bo Aung is a mythical Buddhist man with supernatural powers who is called on by some Burmese people to assist in times of trouble. Weizza is one of the three paths of Burmese Buddhism which involves occult practices. 6. Thanaka is a yellowish-white paste made from ground bark which is regularly applied to the face in Burma for cosmetic reasons and as a natural sun block. 7. The full name is the Southeast Asian Writers Award.

3. Writers: The Middle Generation 1. Sir Nicholas Bacon, quoted in Coetzee, Giving Offense, 42. 2. The cabinet of the pre-independence interim government.

5 . CO NC LUS IO N 2 59

3. This story was published in 2012 by Padauk Pwint Thit (“The Padauk Young Writers” magazine; Padauk is an indigenous yellow flower that blossoms once a year in Myanmar). 4. Tension between the people of Kachin State and the Burmese government has been ongoing for many years, with the Kachin people seeking increased independence, and violence regularly erupting during clashes with government forces. 5. The original Burmese version of “My Heart Beating on a Plate” was published privately in 2012 for friends as part of a chapbook, which is a small collection of poetry, generally no more than forty pages, that usually focuses on a specific theme. 6. “Whale” is from a collection entitled 2007 (Yangon: The Eras Press, 2008). 7. “The Returnee” and “I Am Silence” were both published in Zeyar Lynn’s first collection of poetry, Identity: Distinguishing Features (Yangon: The Eras Press, 2006).

4. Writers: The Younger Generation 1. This short story was published by an illegal magazine during censorship. Details are withheld for the publisher’s protection. 2. Since this interview, two more poetry magazines have launched in Myanmar. 3. The original poem in Burmese was published in New Style magazine in Burma, and an English translation, edited by Maung Tha Noe, was published on the Oxford Burma Alliance website in 2013. 4. This poem was published on Pandora’s blog. It has not yet been published in print until now. 5. This poem was published on Pandora’s blog. This is its first print publication. 6. Engraved was published by Myay Hmone Lwin’s publishing house, Ngar Doe Sar Pay, in Yangon in 2012.

5. Conclusion: Literary Life in Transition 1. The Irrawaddy was formerly an exiled online daily news provider with a printed monthly magazine. 2. DVB began life as a radio station with a limited print content. 3. Coetzee, Giving Offense, 43 4. Ibid., 3 5. Britte Lange, Literature and the Demise of the GDR (Berlin: GoetheInstitut); see www.goethe.de/kue/lit/prj/lwe/hin/enindex.htm (February 2009), 1

260 5 . CO NC LUS ION

6. The 88 generation student leader, Min Ko Naing, was one of the first to defy this expectation, having published his book without the slogans when he came out of jail, and not having experienced any retribution; he has since been encouraging other writers and publishers to do the same. 7. Kate Hodal, “Buddhist Monk Uses Racism and Rumours to Spread Hatred in Burma,” The Guardian, April 18, 2013. 8. Ibid. 9. Thomas Fuller, “In Myanmar, the Euphoria of Reform Loses Its Glow,” New York Times, July 4, 2014. 10. Andrew Buncombe, “Aung San Suu Kyi’s Presidential Ambitions Dim as Constitution Change Blocked in Burma,” The Independent, June 13, 2014. 11. Noreen Naw, “Journalists Rally to Free Jailed Colleague,” Democratic Voice of Burma, April 26, 2014; see www.dvb.no/news/journalists-rallyto-free-jailed-colleague-burma-myanmar/39986. 12. Karen News (anon.), “Journalist Arrests—Burma Sliding Back to ‘Dark Days,’ ” Karen News (online publication), May 16, 2014; see http://karennews.org/2014/05/journalist-arrests-burma-sliding-back-to-dark-days. html/. 13. Roy Greenslade, “Burmese Newspapers Publish Black Front Pages After Journalist Is Jailed,” The Guardian, April 11, 2014; see www.theguardian .com/media/greenslade/2014/apr/11/burma-journalist-safety. 14. Zarni Mann, “Journalists Detained for Reporting Alleged Burmese Chemical Weapons Factory,” The Irrawaddy, February 2, 2014; see www.irrawaddy .org/burma/journalists-detained-reporting-alleged-burmese-chemicalweapons-factory.html. 15. Democratic Voice of Burma (anon.), “Literary Repression Violates Basic Rights: PEN,” February 19, 2014; see www.dvb.no/news/literary-repression-violatesbasic-rights-pen-burma-myanmar/37452. 16. Noreen Naw, “NLD Cancels Literary Event After Pressure Over Muslim Speakers,” Democratic Voice of Burma, February 14, 2014; see www.dvb. no/news/nld-cancels-literary-event-after-pressure-over-muslim-speakersburma-myanmar/37265. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Nay Phone Latt, PEN International website, September 23, 2013; see www.peninternational.org/09/2013/introducing-pen-myanmar-nay-phone-latt/.

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Index

1988 (revolutionary year): 19, 45, 50, 55, 77 104, 137, 159, 162, 191, 193; 88 generation, 44, 176, 178, 209, 246 adaptation, 30, 98, 144 aesthetics, 136, 140, 142, 144, 180, 242 allegory, 30, 38, 84–85, 102, 103, 115, 137, 141, 183–85, 186, 205, 210, 241, 252 Allott, Anna J., 3, 24, 39 America, 62, 150, 152, 157, 160, 162, 225; American Center, 209; American figures, 59, 173; American writing, 83, 106, 154, 155 Amnesty International, 16, 49, 249 anonymity (online), 171, 198 Arakan League for Democracy, 51 arrest, 55, 56, 64, 65, 75, 77, 79, 138, 139, 174, 175, 176, 209, 221, 245, 246 art forms, 41–45, 243–45, 252, 253 “The Art of Transition” (symposium), 235 Asia, 6, 16, 226, 248, 253. See also Southeast Asia associations: pro-democracy, 42; writers’ groups, associations, and societies, 32, 33, 35, 36, 50, 52, 54, 55, 70, 102, 108, 123, 145, 161, 243 astrology, 3, 15 audience, 41, 42, 73, 74, 75, 85, 135, 143, 150, 156, 164, 174, 182, 183–86, 192, 197, 199, 232, 238, 242, 252 Aung San Suu Kyi, 7, 13, 15, 16, 19, 25, 36, 44, 49, 52, 55, 61, 62, 64, 65, 72, 74, 75,

85, 120, 134, 139, 175, 199, 204, 214, 236, 244, 246 autobiography, 141, 161; autobiographical fiction, 86–93, 239 awards: National Literature Award, 35, 100, 115, 119, 120, 121, 123 124, 135; PEN/ Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award, 171, 180; Southeast Asian Writers Award, 100, 115 banning, 37, 38, 41, 42; of books, 138, 140, 207, 208, 212, 214, 215, 216, 217; of literary events, 247; of paintings, 44; of poems, 104; of words or pages, 212, 214; writing materials, xiv, 37, 50, 57, 59, 75, 77, 139, 174, 179 BBC’s World Service, 13 black market, 115, 211, 239 blacklist, 42, 75, 95, 138, 144 blogging, 26, 171, 172, 174, 176, 178, 179, 180, 181, 186, 187, 195, 197, 248. See also Myanmar Bloggers’ Society books: access to, 117, 121, 138, 143, 154, 175, 177, 179, 189, 192, 201, 208, 209, 211, 242, 250; book club, 32, 35, 102, 242; book cover, 214 bookshops or bookstalls, 9, 39, 143, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 200, 201, 242, 250, 251 bribery, 8, 20, 21, 37, 58, 61, 81, 174, 199, 207, 213, 215, 229

26 6

British colonial rule, 12, 16, 26 30, 50, 51, 52, 53, 64, 79, 162 British Council, 194 Buddhism, 15, 18, 21, 29, 30, 44, 83, 86, 90, 139, 165, 175, 201, 209, 216, 229, 236, 237, 245, 246, 247. See also jataka stories Burma: Burma Journalists Association, 54; Burma Lawyers Council, 25; Burma Press Council, 54; Burma Research Society, 108; Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP), 19; Burma vs. Myanmar, 12; Burmese Communist Party, 79; Burmese language, 2, 9, 11, 17, 30, 37, 62, 72, 73, 98; Burmese people, 83; Burmese Translation Society, 32, 35, 52, 102, 123; Burmese Way to Socialism, 19, 33; Upper Burma, 45 Byrne, James, 3, 196 cartoons, 23, 42, 44, 62, 85, 176 censors, 24, 27, 32, 37, 38, 44, 82, 104, 105, 120, 125, 132, 180, 207, 213, 214, 216, 241, 24 censorship: advantages of, 202, 235, 250; boundaries of, 104, 199, 207; censorship board, 24, 25, 25, 37, 39, 43, 82, 125, 141, 156, 164, 174, 175, 207, 212, 216; concept of, 22, 238; era of, 69, 119, 241; law of, 1, 9, 20–27, 36, 196, 213, 244; lifting of restrictions, 83, 164, 182, 199, 208, 228, 234, 239; prepublication censorship, 22, 23, 37, 144, 216, 231, 244, 245, 252; process of, 25, 103, 104, 213, 214, 215, 244; regime of, 1, 22, 40, 41, 51, 47, 229, 248, 250; rules of, 24–25, 27, 37, 81–82, 231; self-censorship, 1, 22, 27, 106, 141, 163, 165, 234, 236; techniques for avoidance, 174, 251; tools of, 42, 44 character, 31, 34, 35, 93, 101, 115, 122, 136, 137, 140, 141, 142, 175, 192, 212 Chin state, 160 China, 17, 53, 85, 155, 191, 225, 248 Chit Oo Nyo, 30, 42, 191, 233 cinema, 43. See also film class (social), 11, 15, 30, 34, 115, 121, 136, 188, 212, 224 Coetzee, J. M., 2, 22, 27, 38, 231–32 colonization, 5, 11, 12, 28, 30, 31, 79, 119, 163; colonial architecture, 109, 173, 226 comedy, 23, 100, 142, 150, 244. See also humor; satire commercialism, 86, 188, 210, 228, 237, 238, 242, 254 Commonwealth, 18, 162 communism, 33, 52, 79, 210, 215

INDE X

Communist Party of Myanmar, 102, 214 computer games, 6, 125, 201, 251. See also internet constitution, 15, 19, 21, 26, 27, 85, 204, 236, 245; constitutional reform, 21, 67 copyright, 40, 197, 244, 253. See also International Copyright Convention corruption, 27, 42, 170, 199, 229; of prison officers, 62, 179 creative writing (academic), 193, 203 cronyism, 230, 236, 244 culture: cultural norms, 95, 192, 199; educational, 194; intellectual, 95, 194; national, 26, 30, 103; popular, 42, 191, 200, 201; reading, 107, 108, 189, 190, 197, 199, 200, 201, 210; traditional, 45, 192, 252; Western, 106; youth, 217–24 Cyclone Nargis, 15 dance, 53, 183–85 democracy, 1, 14, 36, 41, 42, 48, 50, 51, 62, 66, 74, 85, 95, 122, 134, 135, 155, 156, 165, 180, 199, 201, 232, 233, 235, 236, 238, 246, 248, 251; Democratic Voice of Burma, 237, 246; D-Wave (Democracy Wave), 62. See also Arakan League for Democracy dictatorship, 19, 20, 170–71, 186 direct sociopolitical writing, 31, 55, 73, 83, 105, 115, 134, 155, 180, 233 discrimination, 21, 43, 165, 229, 245 economy, 19, 24, 25, 26, 143, 201, 204, 211, 228, 241, 248, 250; economic development, 14, 19 editors, 47, 52, 54, 67, 93, 103, 107, 122, 135, 233; editing process, 142 education, 38, 61, 75, 79, 98, 108, 121, 122, 145, 150, 153–55, 158, 159, 162, 163, 165, 174, 175, 176, 186, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194, 201, 203, 250, 253; literary, 159, 161; policy, 194; system of, 99, 144; through fiction 145 elections, 14, 98, 133 Electronic Transactions Law, 25, 182 emigration, 193, 194, 206, 241 English language, 9, 11, 12, 74, 75, 95, 98, 150–53, 157, 158, 175, 194 English literature, 9, 121, 193. See also literature (international) ethics, 54, 115 ethnicity, 15, 162, 163, 237; ethnic areas, 53; ethnic conflict, 98, 107, 231, 236; ethnic minorities, 14, 236

INDE X

ethnography, 1, 10, 11, 225 exhibitions, 26, 44, 242, 244 exile, 59, 60, 159, 161, 171, 177, 181, 193 feminism, 44, 192 festivals: film festival, 43, 44; literary, 203; poetry festival, 161; water festival (Thingyan), 41, 50, 228. See also Irrawaddy Literary Festival; Yangon Photo Festival, 244 fiction: documentary, 134, 201; historical, 191; horror, 145–50, 237, 240; leftist, 102; literary, 242; pop, 126, 144, 150, 237, 240 film, 43, 44, 73, 82, 143, 144, 145, 203, 244, 251; film festival, 43; film star, 101, 105; filmmakers, 12, 23, 42, 82, 197 Fink, Christina, 3 form: experimentation with, 39, 101, 103, 134, 137, 140, 141, 142, 202, 206, 234, 238, 239, 240, 241; form vs. content, 101, 155; poetic, 40; politics of, 164; traditional, 44 freedom: of assembly, 21, 83, 235; of association, 21, 83; of expression, 1, 2, 9, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 32, 51, 66, 67, 68, 83, 107, 144, 172, 174, 180, 229, 231, 233, 234, 236, 237, 246, 247, 248, 249, 252, 254; of information, 145, 231, 249; of the market, 196; of movement, 68; of the press, 23, 41, 50, 67, 246 Furnivall, J. S., 31 generations of writers, 1, 233, 238, 241, 253; middle generation, 117–70, 239; older generation, 47–115, 165, 174, 212, 235, 239; younger generation, 6, 134, 135, 142, 149, 165, 171–224 genre, 29, 141, 154, 240, 244; genre fiction, 38, 40, 144, 145, 150, 201, 210, 237 globalization, 2, 242, 248, 249 government: civilian, 125, 155; critics of, 37; government policy, 35, 101, 162, 196; officers of, 36, 54, 88, 97, 162, 187, 246; pro-government writers, 120, 135; socialist government, 134 hate speech, 182, 236 Hinduism, 29, 30, 228 hip-hop, 245 Hla Hla Yee, 7, 9 human rights, 2, 3, 7, 9, 21, 22, 61, 62, 63, 85, 115, 231, 248, 249 humor, 98, 100, 101, 115, 139, 145. See also comedy; satire

267

independence, 98, 121, 156, 162, 252 Index on Censorship, 235, 249 Insein (prison), 73, 81 intellectuals, 45, 48, 108, 152, 161, 163, 242. See also culture International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), 81, 139 International Copyright Convention, 40 International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), 21, 26 internet, 6, 25, 26, 106, 158, 161, 165, 171, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 181, 195, 236, 237, 248, 249; internet training, 173, 176, 177, 180, 181, 193. See also Myanmar Internet Development Organisation interrogations, 8, 55, 61, 150, 174, 176, 177, 223 Iowa International Writing Program, 106, 181, 188, 196, 202, 251 irony, 32, 39, 100, 115, 141, 239, 251 Irrawaddy Literary Festival, 6, 7, 70, 143, 155, 182, 242. See also festivals Japan, 16, 31, 51, 246, 253; Japanese rule, 18, 31, 50, 51, 52, 102 jataka stories, 39, 30, 97 journalism: academic study of, 105; citizen journalists, 181; ethics of, 182; journalistic style, 155 Ju, 40, 192 judges, 112, 191 junta, 1, 3, 15, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 45, 54, 65, 125, 133 Kachin state, 53, 75, 145, 155, 211, 229 Karen state, 53 Khoo Twe, Pascal, 3 KoKo Thett, 3 Larkin, Emma, 3 law: copyright, 197, 253; election law, 77; international, 248; law reform, 94, 95, 97, 144, 145, 182, 217, 229, 230, 231, 253; lawyers, 7, 9, 63, 178, 246; legal system, 7, 9, 20; media law, 66, 67, 94, 144, 145, 182, 230; rule of law, 2, 8, 19, 20, 21, 24, 178, 229. See also Electronic Transactions Law; Printers and Publishers Registration Law; Printing and Publishing Enterprise Law letters: from censorship board, 215; from prison, 174, 179, 181, 183 libraries: private, 21, 97, 138, 175; public, 32, 35, 39, 97, 138, 189, 247; university, 158

26 8

licensing of publishers, 144, 145, 211, 217, 230 linguistics, 45, 142, 151, 159 literary: circle, 54, 102; clubs and associations, 32, 32, 35, 52, 54, 102, 108, 123, 145, 161; criticism, 34, 124, 136, 150, 195, 197, 250; establishment, 224, 241, 247; experimentation, 39, 101, 103, 134, 137, 140, 141, 142, 202, 206, 234, 238, 239, 240, 241; journals, 97, 103, 104, 136, 189; magazines, 31, 32, 35, 39, 75, 97, 103, 122, 123, 124, 132, 134, 135, 136, 142, 143, 150, 154, 163, 165, 175, 188, 189, 191, 193, 237, 238, 239 (see also magazines); style, 31, 32, 36, 99, 100, 102, 103, 115, 119, 124, 137, 141, 142, 165, 192, 199, 211, 224; talks and events, 31, 32, 36, 70, 73–75, 85, 93, 95, 107, 132, 135, 143, 174, 182, 203, 216, 232, 233, 242, 243, 244, 246, 247, 251, 252, 253 (see also festivals); value and quality, 106, 137, 144, 156, 198, 199, 233, 242, 249, 250 literature: aesthetic, 136, 144; Burmese, 29, 32; contemporary, 154; decline of, 106; English, 121, 193; experimental, 142; international, 30, 35, 97, 98, 99, 103, 105, 121, 138, 144, 152, 154, 155, 157, 163, 200, 202, 209, 210, 242, 249; modern, 30, 103; poisonous, 196; traditional, 97, 212. See also awards longyi (sarong), 5, 35, 61, 79, 172, 207, 226 love stories. See romance lyricism, 154, 155, 157 lyrics, 44, 156 Ma Ei, 44, 242 Ma Thida, 58, 73, 132–50, 216, 238, 239, 240, 253 magazines, 24, 37, 39, 41, 44, 52, 54, 62, 81, 83, 84, 86, 97, 110, 111, 122, 125, 172, 180, 194, 200, 201, 237; American, 106, 172; government, 81, 82, 86; online, 188. See also literary Mandalay, 41, 54, 79, 99, 121 manuscripts, 24, 29, 136 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 39, 103. See also realism (magic) Marxism, 18, 35. See also communism; socialism media, 26, 65, 66, 67, 68, 94, 143, 172, 186, 230, 231, 236, 247; foreign, 13; news, 136, 231. See also law; social (media) medicine: issues, 101, 110, 135, 138, 165; problems in prison, 49, 61, 64, 66, 78, 92, 132, 139, 177, 178, 179; training, 95,

INDE X

98, 99, 136, 138; as theme in literature, 98, 100, 115 memoir, 83, 139, 140, 142, 196, 208, 215, 216, 235 middle class, 11, 115, 121, 136, 188, 212, 224 military: authorities, 132, 214, 231; coup, 18, 61, 77; generals, 139, 176; government, 26; intelligence, 59, 61, 62; officers, 55, 61, 72, 177; oppression, 236; rank, 126; regime, 6, 15, 102, 108, 164, 228, 236, 238, 241, 248; rule, 20, 32, 39, 42, 95, 150, 161, 239; soldiers, 142, 162, 221–23; training, 121. See also junta Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi, 43 mining, 154, 155, 203, 229, 244 Ministry of Culture, 32 Ministry of Education, 159, 160, 191, 246 Ministry of Information, 24, 32, 35, 66, 145, 182, 217, 229 minority groups, 14, 18, 20, 236, 229 modernism, 101, 103, 106, 143, 152–54 modernization, 42, 119, 226, 228 monks, 15, 23, 29, 142, 147, 155, 201, 209, 216, 221, 236, 240, 241, 246, 247. See also religion; Saffron Revolution music, 6, 23, 44, 45, 76, 79, 85, 196, 207, 211, 217,218, 244, 245; Musicians’ Organization, 44, 244. See also song Muslims, 98, 229, 236, 246. See also religion Mya Than Tint, 40, 121, 138, 144, 193 Myanmar Bloggers’ Society (MBS), 174, 176, 180, 181, 188, 198 Myanmar Internet Development Organisation (MIDO), 173, 174, 241 Myanmar Writers and Journalists’ Association (MWJA), 36, 70, 108 Myanmar vs. Burma, 12 Myat Noe, 74, 244 Myay Hmone Lwin, 142, 182, 199, 207–224, 234, 235, 241, 242, 247, 253 narrative, 10, 11, 115, 134, 141, 143, 239 National League for Democracy (NLD) 1, 5, 19, 21, 47, 49, 50, 51, 55, 58, 61, 65, 70, 72, 73, 75, 77, 85, 104, 133, 134, 139, 156, 172, 174, 175, 181, 214, 238, 246 National Literary Conference, 32 national sovereignty, 25, 37 National Unity Party (NUP), 19 nationalism, 18, 31 nationalization, 23, 32, 54 Nay Phone Latt, 73, 171, 172–86, 236, 239, 241, 242, 247, 248, 252, 253 Naypyidaw, 3, 225

INDE X

Ne Win, 18, 19, 32, 42, 61, 98, 122, 124, 162 news: government or crony newspapers, 45, 144, 145, 156, 231; journal, 13, 24, 37, 52, 67, 93, 94, 95, 106, 107, 132, 135, 136, 144, 156, 181, 189, 216, 231, 233; media, 49, 62, 63, 76, 231, 237; newspaper, 13, 23, 32, 45, 54, 55, 58, 62, 64, 156, 203, 204. See also Press Council NGO (nongovernmental organization), 172, 173, 175, 180, 228 nonfiction, 3, 52, 83, 99, 107, 108, 124, 134, 135, 144 novels, 2, 3, 30–34, 39, 40, 73, 82, 83, 86–93, 98, 103, 121, 124, 138, 140, 154, 163, 171, 175, 191, 192, 201, 212 Nu Nu Yi (Inwa), 2, 35 Obama, Barack, 71, 225 online, 172, 174, 181, 188, 197, 198, 203. See also internet; publishing; social (media) Open Society, 246 Orwell, George, 33, 47, 74; Orwell Prize, 70 pagoda: 3, 6, 25, 30, 90, 132, 180, 209, 221. See also Shwedagon Pagoda painting, 44 Pandora, 12, 171, 187–206, 234, 235, 238, 241, 250, 251 parliament, 16, 18, 32, 47, 75, 77, 98 Pe Myint, 47, 93–115, 192, 232, 238, 239, 242, 253 PEN, 13, 247, 249, 253. See also awards pen names, 47, 53, 54, 75, 81, 105, 117, 140, 150, 151, 171, 175, 179, 188, 193, 198, 207, 215 performance: anyeint, 42, 244–45; dance, 183–85; live readings, 54, 107, 143, 157, 161, 197 (see also literary: talks and events); musical, 45; performance art, 23, 42, 244; poetry, 107, 188, 197 photo documentary, 244 plays, 30, 42, 76, 124, 193 poetry: acrostic, 163; conceptual, 157, 161; constructivist, 157; documentary, 155, 156, 163; modern, 154, 156, 158, 161, 192, 193; traditional, 41, 97, 154, 163, 192, 233; youth poetry, 165, 238. See also UNESCO World Poetry Day poets, 41, 58, 154, 156, 160. See also Union of Myanmar Poets police, 155, 177. See also military; students (student protest) politics: party politics 54, 55, 77, 95, 98, 99, 104, 106, 144, 162, 165, 191, 204, 209, 216; political activism, 163, 174, 238,

269

239, 241; political songs, 79; political writing, 69, 104, 106, 107, 164, 199, 232, 236; politicians, 47, 72, 75, 79, 93, 104, 175, 178, 191 pop fiction, 126, 134, 144, 200, 202, 210, 237, 240, 250 pornography, 24, 244 postmodernism, 41, 44, 101–103, 106, 134, 149, 151, 154, 156, 163, 180, 192, 202, 203, 239, 240, 214 poverty, 14, 35, 39, 75, 101, 115, 120, 132, 202, 240, 250; represented in fiction: 100, 101, 102, 113, 115, 119, 122, 123, 124, 132, 136, 143, 240 Press Council, 9, 23, 54, 66, 95, 107, 217, 229, 230, 246 Press Scrutiny Board (PSB). See censorship board press, 48, 66, 95, 231 Printers and Publishers Registration Law, 23–24, 230 Printing and Publishing Enterprise Law, 66 prison: political prisoners, 48, 55–65, 69, 72, 77–80, 91, 144, 163, 172, 174, 179, 228, 241; solitary confinement, 37, 48, 57, 60, 139, 178; women prisoners, 86–93 propaganda, 37 public speaking, 232, 236, 247 publishing: international publishing, 189; online publishing, 106, 165, 171, 174, 181, 186, 188, 197, 199, 202, 234, 238; publishers, 24, 25, 27, 35, 79, 83, 142, 163, 196; publishing houses, 36, 95, 106, 115, 171, 207, 208, 211, 214; republishing, 49, 66 radio, 39, 47, 62, 73, 76, 77, 83, 93, 209, 250 Rakhine state, 95, 98, 107, 157, 229, 244 Ramayana, 30 reading: history of, 107, 189; readership, 197. See also culture; performance realism: literary, 35, 69, 83, 101, 102, 115, 123, 124, 126, 141, 143, 180, 192, 198, 202, 203, 210, 212, 224, 239, 241; magic, 39, 102; socialist, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39, 101, 102, 103, 119, 120, 122, 124, 132, 134, 136, 138, 142, 143, 191, 202, 210, 212, 224, 240, 241 religion, 15, 28, 38, 57, 60, 79, 88, 90, 91, 144, 165, 247; religious division, 98, 236. See also Buddhism; Muslims reviews, 137, 152; salons, 107; literary scene, 48, 102, 195, 196, 199, 233, 253; value of, 137, 144, 156, 198, 199, 233, 249, 250 Revolutionary Council, 32 rhetoric, 19, 73

270

Rogers, Benedict, 3 Rohingya, 229 romance, 40, 85, 126, 189, 191 royalty (kings of Burma), 17, 18, 30, 60, 161, 162 rural life, 155 Saffron Revolution, 15, 19, 23, 41, 142, 150, 171, 175, 180, 199, 211, 214, 216, 235, 240, 241, 248; in fiction, 145–49, 208, 209, 221–24 Sarpay Beikman (Palace of Literature), 35, 124 satire, 38, 42, 100, 123, 142, 149, 163 self-help, 79, 107, 201 serial, 195, 239 Shan State, 120, 124, 250 Shwedagon Pagoda, 5, 44, 87, 95, 221 Shwegu May Hnin, 7, 12, 47, 70–93, 232, 238, 239, 250, 252 Shwei U-daung, 30 slang, 211–12, 221–24, 241 social: media, 172, 181, 182, 183, 185–86, 197, 198, 236, 237, 248, 251; utility, 34 socialism, 19, 24, 26, 32, 34, 36, 102, 103, 134, 137, 162, 197; Burmese way to, 19, 33. See also communism; Marxism; realism (socialist) Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 34, 234. See also Soviet Union song, 44, 76, 79, 85, 156, 169, 184, 185, 233 Southeast Asia, 17, 19, 53, 195. See also awards Soviet Union, 6, 23, 38, 103, 154, 234; Soviet censorship regime, 33, 34, 38, 54, 171, 234, 253; Soviet Writers’ Congress, 34; Soviet literature, 34, 154, 234 State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), 19 State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), 19 state: the State, 20, 21, 22, 24, 37, 38; State Protection Law, 24 storytelling techniques, 107, 145–49 struggles of the poor and working class, 34, 35, 46, 51, 79, 101, 102, 137, 235, 240, 254 students, 19, 41, 45, 46, 71, 79, 83, 144, 151, 153, 154, 160, 171, 175, 193, 209; student protests, 19, 135, 151, 159, 160, 175, 193; Student Union, 18, 32, 45 symbolic writing, 34, 103, 104, 121, 122, 125, 140, 199, 214, 241 symposium. See “The Art of Transition” taboos, 165, 171, 192, 199, 207, 208, 217–24, 231, 234, 235, 241, 244

INDE X

Tatmadaw (army), 18 teashop, 3, 151, 193, 209, 211, 212 television, 39, 65, 77, 159, 189, 201, 240 Than Shwe, 3, 19, 163, 176 theater, 23, 42, 185 Thein Sein, 13, 224 Tin Moe, 41, 58, 193 torture, 36, 37, 47, 55, 63, 170, 177 tradition, 5, 6, 45, 85, 105, 209, 214; traditional arts, 45. See also culture; literature; poetry translation, 2, 9, 10, 12, 30, 32, 35, 39, 40, 47, 62, 66, 83, 95, 97, 99, 105, 108, 121, 123, 124, 138, 141, 144, 152, 154, 156, 158, 160, 163, 183, 191, 193, 200, 203, 225, 238, 241. See also Burma (Burmese Translation Society) U Nu, 18, 102, 123, 215 UN human rights rapporteur, 61–63 UNESCO World Poetry Day, 161 Union of Myanmar Poets (UMP), 161, 197, 233 United States of America. See America video, 75, 161, 251 violence: between ethnic or religious groups, 229, 231, 236, 236, 245; by police or military, 23, 142, 145, 152, 159, 162, 175, 229, 236, 238, 248; depicted in literature, 142, 145–49, 165–66, 167–68, 203, 221–24, 235 visual art, 23, 42–45, 242, 244, 252 wealth, 19, 66, 100, 107, 111–13, 115, 124, 125, 212, 251 White Rainbow movement, 41 Win Tin, 12, 15, 37, 47, 48–70, 73, 77, 104, 238, 239; Win Tin Foundation, 65, 66 women writers, 31, 40, 58, 77, 84, 86, 102, 165, 188, 189, 192, 193, 235 wordplay, 38, 59, 62, 192, 206 writer’s block, 80 Writers’ Month, 31 Yangon Photo Festival, 244. See also festivals Ye Shan, 34, 117–32, 239 Zarganar, 39, 42, 59, 60, 178, 214, 225, 235, 244, 245 Zeyar Lynn, 12, 41, 45, 61, 150–69, 193, 194, 196, 206, 233, 234, 237, 238, 239, 240, 251