ko ko thett
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Remembering Maung Hmek aka Shwe Yoe aka James C. Scott (1936-2024)
Shanghai Literary Review, July 2024
I crossed the US borders in August 2016, and one of the questions in the US customs clearance form was “have you been near livestock lately.” I wrote to him about that, mentioning that I wanted to be near livestock and would like to visit his farm in New Haven. He immediately welcomed me but my visit never happened. By the time I got to see him again in December 2023, he was at Yale New Haven hospital, recovering from a cardiac problem. He was hollow-cheeked, size-zero, and bed-bound, but still hosting a stream of visitors, debating with some of them, without a break, as the hospital only allowed two visitors per patient at a time.
Sagaing: My return to an illusion of home in Myanmar
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Given my circumstances, Robert Pinsky's suggestion of motion as home appeals to me. I suggest the diaspora as home to climate refugees whose homes no longer exist. I suggest exile as home to exiles. There always will be people who are cut out for violence. Why hang on to home when home gets hostile? "And when / I die, which is a fate no mammal can escape, / it will be far from home in a nest underground." one can appreciate Tishani Doshi.
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Fighting tyranny with poetry
Index on Censorship, July 2022
The last time a political activist was hanged in Myanmar was in 1976, when the ethnic Chin student Salai Tin Maung Oo, 25, was executed for sedition. I was hoping against hope that the junta was bluffing when it announced in early June 2022 that it would go ahead with the execution of four political prisoners on death row, Phyo Zeyar Thaw, Kyaw Min Yu, Hla Myo Aung and Aung Thura Zaw.
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Obituary: Maung Tha Noe (1934-2022)
Maung Tha Noe had been a towering figure in the Burmese literary world since the 1960s. Having hailed from Sagaing, he studied English, Pali, and Burmese at Mandalay University and worked as an editor at Mandalay Ludu and Mannzat journals. He was one of the earliest proponents for the use of speech-style Burmese in writing. He was jailed for student activism for some years in the 1960s, but he hardly talked about that.
Myanmar poets speak out from the frontlines of protest
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"In this spring I have not blown myself up in a suicide bombing. I have not taken up armed resistance. I have not demonstrated my love for the revolution by getting shot in the head, while holding the fighting peacock flag at the front of a protest," writes a Myanmar poet who goes by the name of PlugX in the introduction to "Beloved Revolution," a recent collection of his poems.
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Translating trauma: 'Hlaing Thaya' by Thitsar Ni
National Centre for Writing, June 2022
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On 14 March 2021, at least sixty-five protesters and bystanders were killed when a protest in Hlaingthaya was kettled and suppressed by security forces. When the townspeople began to fight back with whatever weapons they had, the town was named the birthplace of the idea of 'people's defence.' The poem, Hlaingthaya, by Thitsar Ni, is about that struggle.
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Ceasefire capitalism
The people of Myanmar, having endured debilitating Western economic sanctions in the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, know all too well that human rights issues have to be sorted out — at least to a degree seen by the world as acceptable — if their country is to be fully integrated into the global economy.
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Hidden words
Shanghai Literary Review, March 2019
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In bringing out parallel literatures from the ethnic states of Myanmar and “helping to foster talents” editor Lucas Stewart, who has conducted creative writing workshops, and Alfred Birnbaum, who has led the translation workshops, have done an admirable service. The book should serve as a first stop in English for anyone who would like to traverse the complex literary landscapes of Myanmar.
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The end of national literature in Burma-Myanmar
Bengal Lights, November 2017
National literature is necessarily anti-colonial. The poems I happily parroted at primary school in the 1980s were mainly pre-colonial classics, or of anti-colonial Khitsan style, a literary movement that emerged from Rangoon University in the 1930s. Little did I know then that the works of some of the great Khitsan poets, who had enjoyed the stature of “national poets” and the rewards that came with it, had been co-opted into the state propaganda.
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Starfall
In the poem "Starfall", written in January this year, Lynn Moe Swe, a celebrated Burmese poet from Monywa, a town on the banks of the Chindwin 136 kilometres north-west of Mandalay, contemplates a supernova or stardeath: "Sometimes/ I wonder what it is like to fall like a star?" Eight months later, on 18 September, Lynn Moe Swe died from alcohol poisoning.
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'Until the end of the wake' by Lynn Moe Swe
Los Angeles Review of Books, October 2017
The funeral I wrote down happens today. Or, does it? The opening lines of "Until the end of the wake" by Lynn Moe Swe anticipate afterlife. Lynn Moe Swe, who died of Dylan-Thomas Syndrome aka alcohol poisoning in the wee hours of Monday, September 18, in his hometown Monywa, was one of Myanmar's most outstanding poets of his generation. He was 41.
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Not saving the planet
Poetry International, September 2017
Majorie Perloff claims "art is disinterested." Art is disinterested, and selfish. Poetry is the most selfish art. Unless the coital union of two water buffalos or any other deed of nature is a poetry performance to you, poetry is an exclusively human art. Even among humans, poetry speaks only to humans of the same language, verbal or visual.
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No firm ballast for democracy in Myanmar
Myanmar Times, 26 May 2015
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Passengers on the Yangon-Mandalay express train are familiar with the sight of human waste along the railway tracks in Yangon suburbs as well as near the major stops all the way to Mandalay. The narrow-gauge tracks were laid by the British in 1889 after the conquest of Mandalay; the human waste has been added by the people trapped in the 21st-century slums along the railway.
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Why did I become a poet
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I was rudely awakened from my martial arts fantasies by the martial music that blared out of our diode radio on September 18, 1988. The music preluded the announcement of the military coup that afternoon. I realized I had missed something really important. Something really really important had come, and passed.
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Student unions continue to confront the state in Myanmar
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A postgraduate student of tourism at Mandalay University complains that her professor is never there. Lest her thesis be under-evaluated by the absentee professor, she doesn't dare write anything mildly critical of the neoliberal Myanmar Tourism Master Plan, an antithesis to the very subject of her thesis: the spirit of community-based tourism. Hers is not an isolated story.
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'There are more poets than stray dogs in this country,' Thitsar Ni, a leader of a Burmese poetic pack was heard to lament at a Yangon teashop. Burma/Myanmar, with its diverse literary and oral traditions, should not surprise you if it brags the highest density on earth of poets per square mile. After all, the Burmese are going through a collective adjustment disorder, known as transition. Besides, you don't even need pen or paper to be a poet. You just need to utter your poem in the manner of poets of oral traditions and spoken word.
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U Win Tin's final hours
Burma's National League for Democracy has announced the death of U Win Tin, who founded the democracy movement with Aung San Suu Kyi in 1988 and spent twenty years in prison before his release in 2008. A respected journalist, he spent much of his life in the struggle against the military junta. ko ko thett remembers his unwavering integrity and courage in this post.
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Reaffirmism, rejectionism and revisionism: Poetry in transitional Myanmar
Axon Issue 5, 2014
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Contemporary poetry in transitional Burma/Myanmar manifests a literary trend that has been suddenly exposed to, and stirred up by, a barrage of globalization from the outside and a political transition from the inside.This essay argues that even though 'lobby and advocacy verses' responding to the political issue of the day abound in transitional Myanmar, ideological or anti-hegemonic critical rigour is missing in the contemporary poetry of the 'post-ideological' Burmese poets.
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Dagon Taryar (1919-2013), One true star
Myanmar Times, 25 August, 2013
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As far as Taryar was concerned, modern Burmese literature did not begin with the romanticist Khitsan movement in the 1930s. He set it off with the launch of Taryar magazine in December 1946, and the centrefold manifesto of the New Literature Movement. In the name of new literature, Taryar had advanced the Burmese language by bending it, coining new words and phrases or translating English terms into his poetic Burmese. Taryar had been the most global and local poet of his time.
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Why I do what I do and why I love it
Huge linguistic and cultural untranslatabilities between Burmese and English exist, but they should not spook the Burmese-English-Burmese translators. A good poem is always translatable. And, what is ''translatable'' is entirely down to an individual translator inasmuch as what is ''poem'' or what is ''good.'' Always choose a translatable poem.
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Review of Black Rice by Kyi May Kaung
Myanmar Times, 22 July 2013
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Black Rice by Burma-born author and political economist Dr. Kyi May Kaung, first published in the spring 2007 issue of Northern Virginia Review, has been released in print and e-book formats. It is a meticulously crafted bite-sized delight - bite-sized because you wouldn't even know how it dissolves on your literary palate until you come to realize you have savoured it in one sitting, wanting for more.
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A little anticipation from the margins
International Gallerie Issue 31, 2013
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What are your expectations of a land littered with 'moral hazards'? A land, whose 'historical rhythm' is poverty, and her historical rhyme, violence. A land, whose political and economic relations are characterized by 'ethnic networks' where you deal with just your inner circle. A land whose social and environmental conditions are diverse and desperate.
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Myanmar tourism after the boycott
There is an urgent need for a critical debate on mass tourism in Myanmar, particularly the viability and frailty of the Myanmar Responsible Tourism Policy that will soon be framed by the Myanmar Tourism Master Plan. The irony and paradox of mass tourism are most concisely captured in the recent official brochure for responsible tourists visiting the country; "Practice safe sex. Prostitution is illegal in Myanmar."
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Funeral of the rugged gold
Memory is not a dependable thing. Milan Kundera might as well tell you that the memory of an exile about home can be even more unfaithful. It is usually muddied with conflictual fragments, what used to be there against what ought to be there. Don Quixote complex to sociologists, the tension between experience and expectation. For him the return to Myanmar in early August 2012 for the first time in almost sixteen years was rather like sleepwalking into the documentary They Call it Myanmar. He expected to see appalling poverty but he never meant to be that appalled.
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They are free but what about us?
Sampsonia Way, 2012
Even within the predictable pattern of reforms, the Burmese government keeps us pleasantly surprised. Friday the 13th was the day of choice for the recent release of 651 political prisoners and some of the former members of Burmese Military Intelligence who were arrested along with their chief Khin Nyunt in 2004. It was not the full moon day, the Buddhist sabbath, nor President Thein Sein's birthday.
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Sampsonia Way, 2012
www.sampsoniaway.org/blog/2011/12/29/film-review-neither-burma-nor-myanmar/
Lieberman constructs a series of interviews to highlight the dire situation of economy, education, health care, infrastructure, and culture in one of the poorest nations, ruled by some of its wealthiest people. The film presents an uncompromised look at the paradox of a land still struggling with its new image, trying to grapple with developments and distribution of wealth, and attempting to be integrated into global politics, while ostentatiously hanging on to its old institutions, history, and economic dynamics.
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From panegyrics to the end of poetry
Poetry International, December 2012
The idea of the end of poetry may be as baffling as any endism. Since the time of yadu, however, what has caught on and lived on in Burmese poetry has been the language of the day, spoken by the populace. The speech rhythms, the particular sound of a Burmese dialect, be it urban or ethnic Arakan or Tavoy Burmese or the Burmese of other ethnic areas, remains the defining feature of current Burmese poetry.
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​Htein lin: A moving monument
The Irrawaddy, July 2008
Burmese people are said to be natural performers, because they are accustomed to playing different roles in their fluid social circumstances in an authoritarian society. Performance art, however, is new to most Burmese.
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The Irrawaddy, March 2008
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A Burmese academic once observed, 'No wonder our political culture is very antagonistic. Look at the games we have in Burma, like kite fighting. Almost all games are designed to crush your opponent.' His hypothesis overlooks Burma's national game chinlone, which is the subject of the award-winning documentary 'Mystic Ball.' Its Canadian director Greg Hamilton says, 'The most amazing thing about chinlone is that it is not competitive. There is no opposing team, no scoring, no winners or losers.'
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My memoirs: From Hsai Su to Meng Hai by Brig-Gen Kyaw Zaw (Retired)
The Irrawaddy, February 2008
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Living history is a good way to describe retired Brig-Gen Kyaw Zaw, who has published his memoirs at age 88. The book, as a firsthand account of a lifelong Burmese revolutionary, will be invaluable to scholars. The story begins in a small farming village near Tharrawaddy in lower Burma in 1919 and ends with Kyaw Zaw's dramatic break with the late dictator Ne Win's Burmese Way to Socialism in 1976 and his journey to what he calls home, one of the strongholds of the Communist Party of Burma in northern Shan State.
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​The river of lost footsteps by Thant Myint-U
The Irrawaddy, July 2007
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When Rudyard Kipling first saw the Irrawaddy River in 1889, he wrote: I reflected that I was looking upon the river of lost footsteps, the road that so many men of my acquaintance had travelled, never to return, within the past three years. That colourful phrase, river of lost footsteps, provides the title of a semi-autobiographical version of Burma's history, by Thant Myint-U, author of the scholarly and elegantly-written The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
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State Dominance in Myanmar by Tin Maung Maung Than
The Irrawaddy, April 2007
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The Political Economy of Industrialization,the subtitle of Dr. Tin Maung Maung Than's recently released State Dominance in Myanmar, may be perplexing to those who perceive industrialization as modernization, impersonal bureaucratization and the welfare state formation of the West over the past two centuries.
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