Burma’s Struggle is Our Own

by Erika Christie

In Spring of 2007, just months before the “Saffron Revolution”, I spent four weeks traveling through Burma. Like hundreds of other travelers every year, in Mandalay I visited the home of the Moustache Brothers, the trio of comedians- two brothers and a cousin- of whom two were imprisoned with hard labor after a 1996 performance that poked fun at the military junta. They are banned from performing for Burmese audiences and are under constant surveillance from the government, but are allowed by the regime to carry on their politically dissident theatre in front of nightly audiences of a dozen or so western tourists. This is beyond any sensemaking, and it was in that context that I, a student of nonviolence studying in a class that I had never attended (downloading Michael Nagler’s PACS164 course each week as the new lectures were posted) and whose professor did not yet know that I existed, walked into an an otherwise unremarkable house and shook the hands of the two men who famously “went to prison for seven years because of a joke”. It felt as if I was traveling outside of the bounds of the physical world.

Later, in Bagan, I spent an evening at a tea house where I met up with a trishaw driver I’d hired earlier that day. He had very little English and had been drinking. Pulling two five kyat notes out of his wallet, he placed them on the table side-by-side. One was new, the other was an old, faded banknote from the Union of Burma. “You know his daughter?” he said pointing to the image if General Aung San. I said yes and he smiled. Then he picked up the newer five kyat note and made a small tear in it. “See this? New money. Rips so easy. Worth nothing, not real. The old money, it never rip… you go like this,” he pulled and jerked the old Union of Burma note back and forth, smiling: “See, no rip.” Indicating the new money lying on the table he shook his head: “That, that not the real.” He clasped the note bearing General Aung San’s likeness in his hand and held it up. “This?” he said squeezing it in his fist, “This the real.”

You can feel it when you are there. Burma feels unreal. The thousands of ancient pagodas scattered across the landscape provide an apt setting for a country caught in a kind of waking dream. Everyone in Burma knows the regime is a lie, that this is an unreality.  The dissenting monks know it. The comedians know it. Grandmothers know it. My trishaw drivers all knew it. You can believe the generals know it too. They can kill or imprison anyone they want, but it only delays the inevitable. And yet nothing moves. No where in the world is the internal, mental struggle for truth more explicit than in Burma. Like a sleeper who is aware that he is in a dream but can’t wake up, beneath the struggle against the junta itself is the struggle to understand how a lie so obvious an hasn’t yet lost its power.

In Burma, everyone is under house arrest. People live in fear of government informants and spies, who are believed to be literally everywhere, so people will not discuss politics with their neighbors, friends, or even their family members. The junta sees to it that there is rarely electricity after dark. That combined with the crumbling infrastructure- the potholes, the open sewers, the tendency for pieces of sidewalk to unexpectedly give way under your feet and plunge you to your death- make it impractical for people to do much of anything outside their homes after the sun sets at about six pm each evening. Flashlights are indispensable in Burma, but the government sees to it that the only available batteries are expensive and weak. (Flooding the country with hand-powered flashlights – or even better, the materials and knowledge of how to make them – would not be a bad idea.)

The few people who were willing to speak to a foriegner about the situtation expressed the same thought: “We can only hope that someday the generals will decide to change.” At the time, this frustrated me, as it sounded like resignation. I now read it as their profound understanding that the situation in Burma is determined not by guns but by minds, and that change can only come when those who are still clinging to the lie finally let go.