Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the Mekong Review, a Cambodia-based quarterly journal focusing on the literature and culture of Southeast Asia and beyond. Starting next week, you can pick up the latest issue of the journal in Yangon at Pansodan Gallery and Pansuriya.
In the 80s, when Myanmar was still under military rule, my father managed to get a subscription of Newsweek — one of the perks of his job at the United States consulate in Yangon. On more than one occasion, the magazine arrived in the mail with curious ink blotches. The country’s postal system was notoriously prone to mishaps, but this was no accident. Someone had painstakingly blocked out specific sentences and paragraphs with a broad-tipped black marker. This was a telltale sign of the government’s displeasure at a certain news item.
I do not know how many people were permitted to receive the magazine, but even if the number were confined to those connected to the diplomatic circle, it would still be a sizable pool. I imagine a small team had to work through the night to block out the offending text in all these incoming copies. This was the extraordinary length the paranoid regime would go to suppress stories that challenged its legitimacy or questioned its leadership’s wisdom.
Years later, reading Orwell’s 1984 after immigrating to the United States, I came across Winston Smith, the fictional Records Department clerk whose job involves erasing textural and photographic evidences of “unpersons,” people who had run afoul of the ruling party. It made me think of Smith’s real-life Burmese counterparts whose job was to literally cover up the news items in Newsweek.
In Saffron Shadows and Salvaged Scripts, the British author and human rights lawyer Ellen Wiles chronicles the literary culture of my homeland, tracing it from the Big Brothers’ era to the current reform era. In Wiles’ own words, her book is “an ethnographic investigation of literary culture in Myanmar under censorship, and the new direction it is taking now that the country has entered a phase of transition toward democracy.”
Some parts of Wiles’ book read like fascinating travel diaries. In 2013, Wiles went to Myanmar to work with a new non-government organisation to train local lawyers about the rule of law. Describing her first night in Yangon, Wiles brings us along on her taxi ride, “a journey into a beehive.” Her sentences guide us into the midst of “hungry diners perched on clusters of child-size plastic chairs.” Her prose is as pungent and crispy as the “rainbow vegetable stalls” and the “noodle soups, pancakes, and deep-fried miscellany” she encounters. As she confronts “the weight of the past and the speed of change,” she takes us into a world where a wilderness is transformed into “a strange beast of a city” on the advice of a fortune teller, where “maroon-robed monks and flamingo pink-robed nuns” share the sidewalk with mobile phone-clutching teens and pop music.
But the bulk of Wiles’ book comprises interviews with writers, former political prisoners, and dissidents young and old; and English translations of their writings, some previously banned in the country. Whereas Wiles’ own narrative shows us the transition-era Myanmar that visitors can see for themselves, the personal narratives of the once-outlawed literary figures show us the Orwellian Myanmar the former military regime hoped the world would never see.
One of the interviews is with the late U Win Tin, a cofounder of the National League for Democracy (NLD) party. Also known as Hanthawaddy U Win Tin (after the Hanthawaddy newspaper he launched), the veteran newsman continued to wear his blue prison shirt after his release, as a sign of solidarity for his colleagues who still remained behind bars. In his own words, Win Tin described the desperate measure he took just to be able to write while incarcerated:
“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 memorise them.
“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.”
Wiles also introduces us to Shwegu May Hnin, a prison survivor who still crackles with “the energy and dynamism of a woman a third of her seventy-four years.” As the author recalls, May Hnin’s laughter is “frequent, raucous, and occasionally a little wicked.”
Novelist and broadcaster Shwegu May Hnin once led the women’s division of NLD. If the former military regime had recognised NLD’s sweeping electoral victory in 1990 and allowed it to form a new government, May Hnin would have been a member of the parliament. Instead, the regime put NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest and sent MP-elects like May Hnin to prison. May Hnin recounts how prisoners find humour in the most unlikely places:
“We had no right to leave the room to go 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.”
Another interview features Zeyar Lynn, a contemporary poet and an English teacher. I happen to know Zeyar Lynn personally. He was a lecturer in Yangon University’s English Department when I was studying there as an English major student. Zeyar Lynn, whose father was once posted to Malaysia as a diplomat, describes himself as a “diplobrat” — a fitting pun from a poet who’s leading the charge in Myanmar’s budding L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement. The poet recounts the repression he endured in the academic circle:
“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 started to wear 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.”
Under the military regime, the inclination to stamp out signs of dissent, however trivial, is so pervasive that it reaches into the heart of the education system — the classroom. Zeyar Lynn remembers:
“The old hands considered literature to be theirs. My colleagues in literature were hardline conformists. They didn’t try to push the boundaries. They were so hardline they wouldn’t even allow any interpretation of any poem that went against their own, never mind criticism of the government!”
Technically, Myanmar is now no longer under military rule, and the country’s once-powerful censor board, known as Sar Pay See Sit Yay, is no longer hovering over every manuscript destined for publication. Yet, the effects of six decades of censorship lingers.
The late U Win Tin pointed out, “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.” Similarly, Zeyar Lynn reveals, “I can’t stop self-censoring. Other older poets find it very difficult to do … We were brainwashed by censorship. We can’t just change overnight.”
Seeking ways to outwit the censorship board during military rule, Burmese poets and writers relied heavily on metaphors and symbols. Well-known poets like Maung Sein Win Padeegon would write about woods and forests teeming with peacocks, a somewhat obvious reference to the peacock that’s in the NLD flag. Others like the late Maung Chaw Nwe used the cyclical bloom of flowers to pay homage to the dissidents:
“To Wilt is to Bloom”
Come! Knock us down,
Wild gust; tumble us,
Cut us down, storming blades,
Blow your hardest, do your worst.
Litter the ground with our buds,
Trample on us, see if we care.
To wilt is to bloom,
That’s the flowers’ doctrine.
You may crush us, we may fall,
But when we die we rise again.
– Maung Chaw Nwe
(Translated by Kenneth Wong)
Now, the same writers and poets wrestle with their newfound freedom. It may take them years, or an entirely new generation, to feel comfortable with expressing themselves in a more explicit language. While censorship rules are less restrictive under the current quasi-civilian government, it’s certainly not unconditional. In a way, the unpredictable nature of censorship during the transition makes the writers’ job riskier. Wiles observes:
“In April 2014, a DVB journalist, Zaw Pe, was imprisoned for trespass and for ‘disturbing a civil servant.’ … In another incident, four journalists and the CEO of the Rangoon-based Unity journal were arrested and detailed without bail after the newspaper reported the existence of an alleged chemical weapons factory in central Myanmar.”
The rise of the religious hardliners, too, represents another type of censorship. Wiles notes, “In January 2014 the organisers of a ‘literary event’ featuring [Burmese novelist] 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 … another such event had to be called off when Buddhist monks threatened the organisers and arrived en masse to protest against it, on the basis that two of the keynote speakers were Muslims: the NLD’s High Court lawyer Ko Ni and the 88 Generation Peace and Open Society’s Mya Aye.”
I should also add that Htin Lin Oo, a former NLD member and a columnist, is currently in jail over his criticism of the ultra-conservative religious group Ma Ba Tha’s obsession with racial purity.
Saffron Shadows and Salvaged Scripts tells the story of a literary culture that somehow manages to survive, and even flourish, against great odds. Wiles book gives us good reasons to believe the talents that once outmanoeuvred one of the most repressive regimes still have enough tricks and craftiness to sail through the murky waters of transition.
Some of the poems and essays collected in Wiles’ book were once forbidden. They had to be smuggled out of prison and disseminated by the detainees’ fans and loved ones, usually at great risks to themselves. Like the brief note below that Winston Smith penned in his secret diary in a moment of spontaneous defiance and hope, the Burmese authors’ salvaged scripts endure with a vengeance.
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone.
From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!
Kenneth Wong is a translator and writer based in the United States
