The first literary work to emerge from Myanmar since the military seized control of the country a year ago reveals the altruism and courage of a new generation of writers, its editor has said.
Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring is an anthology of poems and essays, many of which were written during the military crackdown after last February’s coup. Others date from 1988 to 2020.
Since the coup, “scores of poets have been persecuted, executed or killed in resistance”, said Ko Ko Thett, poet and co-editor of the anthology. The deaths of Myint Myint Zin and K Za Win in March 2021 sent shock waves through Myanmar, he said.
In the book’s introduction, Ko Ko Thett and co-editor Brian Haman wrote: “Many poets … have been jailed for taking part in the protests. We are honoured to include poems by a number of these poets, including some best-loved poems by Khet Thi who died at the hands of the junta’s inquisitors on 8 May.”
After the military seized control, hundreds of people, including children, were killed in street protests. Security forces used water cannon, rubber bullets and live ammunition to disperse protesters. The military imposed restrictions, including curfews and limits to gatherings.
“In the wake of the military’s overthrow of Myanmar’s democratically elected government in February 2021, we found the online literary outpouring of outrage, grief and dissent particularly generous, altruistic and courageous,” said the book’s editors.
The relatively recent introduction of the internet and social media in Myanmar became a powerful vehicle for the circulation of what Ko Ko Thett terms “witness writing”.
“The removal of so much of the censorship following the 2010 election in the so-called ‘transitional Myanmar’ coincided with the introduction of the internet and social media,” he told the Guardian.
“Many poets and writers became active online overnight. In the instantaneity and virality of social media, protest poets who posted their poems online got easily known, easily identified and easily tracked down.”
In the decade after, the internet became a “major vehicle for poetry and voices of protests,” he said.
Witness writing was distinct from protest writing, said Ko Ko Thett, who was a student activist in Yangon in the 1990s and now lives in the UK. “All protest writings may be witness writings, but not all witness writings are protest writings. Witness writing is more subjective and does not usually have an explicit political agenda – however politicised it might be or become.”
The book’s editors said there was an “urgently felt need to preserve these online writings in a more durable and enduring format. Not only does this corpus of writing demonstrate the power and possibilities of the written word when faced with the barrel of a gun, but it also reveals Burmese writing to be aesthetically accomplished and significant.”
Among the pieces in the anthology is Portrait of the Need for Oxygen by Zeyar Lynn, which compares the suffocating grip of the military on the country with that of Covid on an individual.
Residual Lives by Mi Chan Wai is a first-hand account of the terror the poet felt in her neighbourhood on the outskirts of Yangon.
In Whose Footfall is Loudest, Thawda Aye Lei described how “flip-flops had always been important witnesses to our revolutions”. In 2021, “every time a group of people were chased by guns and batons, dozens of ownerless flip-flops would be left abandoned on the street … When the security forces were gone, people picked them up and organised them in pairs for their owners to come and collect them.”
Last year was extraordinarily tragic for Myanmar, and there was “no sign of abating conflict in the year to come, if not years”, said Ko Ko Thett. “The stage is set for protracted conflicts, poverty beneath human dignity, human suffering and environmental degradation.”
Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring was published on 29 January
