Burma Snapshots
SWENSON, KAREN
Writers Under Siege Burma Snapshots By Karen Swenson Rangoon Like monks in the monasteries at Ladakh, writers in Rangoon are always a climb away. So not until I reach the fifth floor at the...
...One member of the group, a pharmacist with a steady income, is also its publisher...
...General Ne Win, who seized power in a 1962 military coup, claimed to be leading the country toward socialism...
...He was not allowed to read, write or visit with family members...
...A languid breeze drifts through but does not disturb the Southeast Asian no-see-ums inhabiting the dust under the table we are sitting at...
...Some years later, I was lucky to hear her deliver a speech from the front gate of her home on University Avenue (see "Battle of Wills in Myanmar," NL, June 3-17,1996...
...Courts simply follow the dictates of the military government...
...I leave first down the narrow stairs...
...With a grin he adds, "Although I think that's true about Bush, everyone who read that article knew I was also talking about our own government...
...This shell game with the regime fragments society...
...In an airy room Sein Win sits behind a desk, surrounded by bookshelves, piles of newspapers, and photos of himself and others...
...Prisons used to provide food to prisoners but no longer...
...Paralysis of his right side as a result of the stroke forced him to become, forgive the pun, a leftist...
...When we finish talking, I am asked to leave first, and at subsequent meetings with other writers they do the same...
...A handsome man with a gray mustache, Aung Myint does not talk easily...
...Lyn, a lean, hippieish young man with a goatee and ponytail, is quick and deft in his movements and speech...
...attention...
...Many young people are leaving for universities elsewhere in the world...
...Being a member of the military ensures a prosperous life for you and your rei atives...
...Lyn notes that poetry written in free verse is not recognized by the government, which dictates what is acceptable in music and art as well—discouraging, for example, abstractpainting...
...He would like to publish in the West because he suspects no one there knows Burma exists...
...Among writers in Rangoon, concealing from censors while revealing to readers is a constant preoccupation...
...I no longer expect them...
...There he spent 10 years, largely in solitary confinement...
...The Burmese, Sein Win points out, have learned to read between the lines or "even between the words...
...Sein Win talks softly but easily about these tragedies...
...He got his passport by speaking out against his fellows and their ideas," Sein Win answers...
...No charges were lodged, nor was a trial held...
...Slowly, inexorably, the military has choked off her ability to rally members of the National League for Democracy (NLD) that she formed...
...families must provide food and medicine...
...They study John Ashbery and the Language Poets to find a way to say things between the lines...
...Young men are taught Russian and sent there to learn military tactics and weaponry...
...It is located on a street not far from the famous old Strand hotel, and I climb a flight of stairs so narrow that a whole American foot cannot fit on one step...
...Free verse is considered Western and decadent...
...The assumption is that you are being watched...
...They may write under one name and run a business under another...
...Obedience is the primary virtue, and the generals clone themselves through the military college...
...They just expect you to repeat what they tell you," responds one of the men in disgust...
...Nevertheless, hiding has become a normal part of life...
...The entire country suffers from shortages of water and electricity...
...They are sure the act was meant to give the generals an excuse to crack down on dissidents...
...OnAugust25,1988,Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of an assassinated politician who had returned from England to nurse her dying mother, gave her first speech to the Burmese people...
...After two years and 10 months at Coco he was transferred to the prison at Insein (appropriately pronounced "insane...
...He says today's detainees are often dubbed "terrorists" in hopes of currying favor with the Bush Administration...
...Rice is expensive, and nearly all goods are imported...
...They devour my ankles as we talk...
...Another consequence of the need for concealment is that writers tend not to know one another, because they use an array of pseudonyms...
...If an article is censored on the second round, it is removed and the publisher must recast the affected pages...
...Rather ironically, the group has adopted free verse as its favorite form...
...Because they only travel to Singapore and perhaps Thailand, they have little sense of the outside world...
...It is even possible to be arrested for writing modern poetry...
...So not until I reach the fifth floor at the address I had been given do I find eight young Burmese poets, all men, sitting around a metal table on metal chairs in a large, otherwise empty room...
...He was released a year later and rearrested in 2000 for distributing NLD information to foreign news agencies and embassies...
...They change as a matter of political necessity, just as Rangoon has become Yangon and Burma, since a 1989 diktat by its military rulers, Myanmar...
...Aung Myint believes he was turned in by someone in a foreign news agency...
...The bomb setters, and I'm pretty certain they are not the government, might bring changes, but who knows what changes those would be...
...The generals take our rice, gas, oil, leaving the people impoverished, and buy weapons...
...He thinks he was freed in part because PEN, the international writers' organization against censorship, worked for his release...
...The students, many of whom were killed during the uprising, had appealed to the outside world for help, naively believing the United States would come to their rescue...
...Released in 1977, he was rearrested the following year and finally set free in 1980—technically under an Amnesty Declaration that was issued, he remarks cynically, because the prisons were overcrowded...
...Though banned from writing for life, he writes under various pseudonyms, and his wife continues to edit the magazine they started...
...Therefore, the slapping and kicking of juniors, or any form of humiliation, is allowed...
...Now, the day after my meeting with Lyn and his friends, I walk to the house of Sein Win, who worked for the Associated Press in 1988...
...Burma has both lead and lumber," he says, "but all pencils are imported...
...They blame the younger generation for wanting independence from Britain, saying, 'Better to live as a slave in comfort than live as a master of your own ship and starve to death.'" Sein Win currently writes for six weekly newspapers and a dozen monthly magazines on women's affairs, youth issues and education—under pseudonyms, of course, because he is blacklisted...
...To meet the eight, I was told to take a particular kind of taxi...
...Karen Swenson, a previous NL contributor, is a poet and freelance journalist specializing in Southeast Asia...
...He has five books to his credit, both translations and his own work...
...Ever since my 1984 trip to Burma, people here have told me to expect big changes soon...
...Let's hope next time we meet in a free Burma," Sein Win says...
...the secret police, they say, are renowned for ineptness...
...Leading the poet's double life, he teaches English full-time...
...He has been on oxygen continuously since he suffered a stroke 25 years ago— which, irony again, got him out of prison: The government did not want to be responsible for his death...
...Each one goes to the censor before publication and after...
...Both men aver that the government set off the bombs...
...He estimates that one of every three pieces he writes is banned by the censors...
...If you do that, it is almost impossible to fail a course, but after you graduate there are no jobs...
...Rushing about to the four required sites—Rangoon, Mandalay, Pagan, and Inle Lake—we felt restricted in time, but we couldn't begin to realize how restricted the Burmese were in every way...
...Neither he nor his friends are active dissidents...
...The Burmese Army, he maintains, is based on the first Asian army to defeat a Western-style army, the Japanese fascist military machine...
...At one end of the long room is a series of arched windows, and at the other an open door to the kitchen, where his wife sits beside her walker...
...If you use traditional Burmese forms and are accused of criticizing the government, you may receive a more lenient sentence than if the criticism is expressed in free verse...
...He belongs to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's NLD and was arrested first in 1997 for organizing neighbors to support it...
...Old people," says Sein Win, "claim this fascist government is worse than the Japanese government was during the World War II occupation...
...Invited to Australia by a writers' organization last year, he was refused a passport...
...I also ask about the bombing of a supermarket largely patronized by the military and their associates in June...
...Their spokesman is Zeyar Lyn, though names do not mean much here...
...He was permitted to see his family twice a month...
...Her voice is silent...
...I visited Burma for the first time in 1984, as a tourist allowed five days to see the country...
...In some cases writers have been forbidden to write for life...
...The Burmese leaders would like to follow in the footsteps of North Korea to get U.S...
...Now that students can leave to get an education, the country will be further debilitated by a brain drain...
...If they are actually brought to trial, their defense attorneys often end up in jail with them...
...Burma is an imploding nation...
...But civil servants earn very little, Sein Win observes, and "people have to pay bribes for everything...
...As an example, he cites a commentary he wrote condemning President George W. Bush for invading Iraq that said, "He is a cowboy who only knows the gun and does not know how to talk like a gentleman...
...I ask about the Burmese writer Thanoe, who recently attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop...
...In 1967, Sein Win and the rest of the staff of the newspaper where he then worked were arrested and sent to prison on Coco Island...
...no one except her doctor and members of the military are allowed to see her...
...The plastic prongs of an oxygen tube are inserted in his nose...
...Instead, he delivered it into the hands of the present military junta during the student rebellion of 1988—and stayed on as the titular head for several years...
...Local people approved by the government operate them...
...The next day I climb Sein Win's stairs to meet Aung Myint, who was released from Insein in January 2005...
...I inquire about conditions at the University of Rangoon, once famous in Southeast Asia...
...Foreigners in Burma, however, claim that is unlikely...
...It is, of course, blasphemy to say this, but Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has perhaps preached patience too long...
...Aung Myint was not tortured in prison, but he was kept in solitary and even forbidden to exercise...
...While he was in prison she supported herself and their two daughters as the headmistress of a high school...
...As we all shake hands, Sein Win and Aung Myint assure me that "something big" is in the off ing...
Vol. 88 • November 2005 • No. 6
