Burmese Lessons

by Karen Connelly

  Today San Aung will introduce me to some Burmese artists, so that I can see their work for myself and ask them about living and working under the SLORC regime. In the car, he asks how I slept. I remember the trishaw bell, so late at night, ringing in the dark street. “That was the last thing I heard.”

  “In Burmese, there is no trishaw,” he says. “We call it si-caa. From ‘sidecar.’ Like the sidecar on an English motorcycle. Another word for your vocabulary.” San Aung is pleased with my word obsession; he thinks it’s a reasonable objective to try to learn his language in a few weeks’ time. I scribble “si-car” in my notebook.

  In the beginning, all language is innocent—tree, cup, flower, love—but San Aung wants me to learn serious words. He has taught me death and freedom. Democracy, cruel, trust, don’t trust. I learn quickly, but as I fill my notebook with phonetic spellings I lament the loss of my innocence. Why can’t I just have sweet chats with the tea-shop boys? Or repeat the number of siblings I have? Or ask, “Can I take your photograph?”

  No. I am infected with the desire to grasp meanings, which makes it difficult to keep things simple. And any language makes a home for those who speak it. Even a few shreds, a few building-block phrases, provide shelter. San Aung is at home in English. Unlike his parents’ generation, he didn’t have the opportunity to take language classes in school; General Ne Win had forbidden the teaching of English as too colonialist. Years later, after Ne Win’s daughter was denied entrance to a British university because of her poor language skills, the general put English back in the curriculum. But that was too late for San Aung. He learned the language from his mother and various tutors.

  I watch him from the corner of my eye. In a country of gracious hosts, I find myself attended to by a prickly, impatient man. He is a friend of a friend in London, and has been explaining things that I wouldn’t notice otherwise, taking me to meet people I would not be able to find myself. He has the same alternately madcap and black humor I noticed among Burmese exiles in Thailand, but sometimes there is a caustic, unnerving edge to his jokes. In a Southeast Asian context, this stinging humor is unfamiliar to me. More than once he has said of himself, “I am not very Burmese,” meaning that he does not much subscribe to ana-deh, that essential trait, not directly translatable into English, which is a mixture of decorum, grace, and exquisite tact. He is more direct and more openly critical—of just about everything—than any other Burmese person I have met so far. “I sometimes say out loud what others think in private,” he tells me.

  Hanging on the walls are a dozen works by the senior painter’s students. I use “senior” to denote well known, respected—I cannot tell the man’s age. He might be fifty and not so healthy; he might be seventy-five and excellently preserved. The deep hollows of his cheeks make the upper half of his bald skull seem abnormally large; only after looking again do I realize that he is missing most of his molars. Like the stick limbs of a scarecrow, his pale, hairless wrists and lower legs poke out of his brown sleeves and brown longyi. His rheumy eyes examine me briefly through thick glasses. Then he turns to talk to San Aung. As he speaks, intelligent energy beams out of him like electricity. I take an involuntary step away, as though he were giving off sparks. His head seems to shine harder the more he talks.

  As if reading my mind, he turns back to me, puts his hand to his naked skull, and says, “I went away to a monastery last year, during the rains. Just two months. But I continue to shave my head.”

  When we shake hands, he does not smile. “Please, feel free to look at the pictures. That is why they’re here.” He invites San Aung to sit down with him at a low table. Three young men are already sitting. The senior painter explains, “They are my students. They have made these pictures.” They stare at me; only the one who wears a baseball cap smiles. Not one of them says a word. Perhaps they don’t know any English. Or maybe they’re just deferring to their elders. Even when San Aung begins to exchange rapid-fire Burmese with the old painter, the young men remain silent.

  I walk around the low-ceilinged room, looking at the mostly abstract canvases. Unlike the representational art I’ve seen in Rangoon’s large, expensive galleries, there are no exotic Burmese scenes for tourists, no be-robed monks, no women carrying water pots on their heads. If there is lushness here, or some common Burmese example of culture—as in the painting of the mythical stone lions that guard the overgrown entrance to a temple—it has a menacing quality to it. The lions are dangerous; the vines on the temple walls resemble snakes. For ten minutes I stand before a series of small watercolors. Each picture shows the same brick wall from a different angle, a different position. There are three paintings of the same closed door. The images remind me of Sayagyi Tin Moe describing how many Burmese artists and writers struggle with self-censorship. The outer system of repression calcifies into internal paralysis. The wide-open circle of the mind shrinks, turns into a shackle, a handcuff, the mouth shut tight, unwilling to speak.

  • • •

  When I’ve finished viewing the paintings on display, I thank the artists. No one indulges in any encouraging chitchat. Their teacher looks away from me and bends forward to wave the fan around his bare shins; the mosquitoes are out already. The young men just slap at them, then apologize to the older artist, who gives me a cadaverous smile. “I don’t kill them. Because I have spent a lot of my time in monasteries. As a monk. So I try not to kill anything. Even things that bother me.” He holds my gaze for a moment.

  San Aung clears his throat. “Why don’t you ask some of your questions now?”

  I shoot him a glance of irritation. He makes it sound as if I am the interrogator. Which I am, but I don’t like to present myself that way. It’s not as if the crowd is overly friendly, or interested in talking to me. The atmosphere in the courtyard is heavy, like the weather. The sky is purple-gray and low; the scent of unfallen rain comes to us from the garden.

  I begin, “What do you, as artists, think of Burma’s new free-market economy?”

  The senior artist replies, “It is our own Free Nazism.” No one else says a word.

  A dust-laden ceiling fan turns and turns above us. Two of the men relight their cheroots. San Aung flicks his cigarette butt out the open door. I see amusement in the line of his mouth.

  “Do you have paintings that relate directly to the political situation?”

  Their teacher—their Saya—immediately replies, “No.”

  But most of the paintings here relate to the political situation. Clearly they don’t want to talk to me about that. So I talk to them, trying to explain my interest. Painters transform essence into the visible. They render mind and emotion into actual color and form. I know how much can be expressed with a finely wrought image in words, but visual artists get closer: they create an exact image with materials. The metaphor is the work of art. Only poetry can claim a similar directness. But language is always an interpretation, a translation, while a painting is a visceral, physical experience, both in the making and in the viewing. What a power, to be able to get so close to the mind’s vision, to enhance and deepen the real.

  The artists nod as I talk, but say very little. Does any of this translate? I’m still not sure how much English the younger ones speak. They glance repeatedly at their revered Saya, who unconsciously sucks in his lower cheeks from time to time, making his cheekbones stand out even more.

  I know the ban on speech comes from him. Will he give them a signal, to release us into conversation? San Aung does nothing to help. Among these men I hear only my own voice, and the slow stuttering of the fan. For the past two weeks in Rangoon and Mandalay, I’ve talked and I’ve listened for hours to people’s conversations—sometimes in English, sometimes in French, sometimes in Burmese hurriedly translated by the best English speaker. I thought San Aung’s presence here would be a reassurance that the artists could talk safely with me. I was wrong.

  “Why are artists so dangerous?”

  Silence.

  I look at the man
in the baseball cap. How old is he? Twenty-five? Twenty-seven? He has an impressive series of inky, rough tattoos on his forearms, letters I don’t recognize; I don’t think they’re from the Burmese alphabet. Like San Aung, he smiles occasionally, though not at me. He seems to be amused. I repeat my question. “Why do you think artists are so dangerous?”

  He makes a noncommittal, sideways shrug. Still, Saya has the last word. “Silence is better than talking. There are many meanings behind silence.” This sounds like a line from that kung-fu show I watched as a kid, but he is not an actor.

  We sit in uncontested dumbness. Our rattan chairs creak occasionally; the fan clicks. As the invisible sun begins to set, muted orange light fills the air. Heat lightning flashes above the city.

  I look from one face to another. “Would any of you like to say anything?”

  Saya replies, dryly, “They haven’t got enough inspiration to talk.” This comment makes the others smile.

  Amazing. Every one of them understands English and no one will talk to me.

  “Well,” I say, too loudly, then reach into the bag at my feet. It’s like knocking a glass to the concrete floor. They look in my direction. I rummage around in my bag of notes and papers and books. Their faces are immediately expectant, curious. What is she going to take out of there? A rabbit? A pair of American blue jeans? I bring out a book, one of my own, because the political books I brought with me about Burma and South Africa have been given away. That is my one regret: I didn’t bring enough books. People have been so grateful to have them—small publications put together by Burmese dissident groups and NGOs, two of Bertil Lintner’s books about Burma, Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, a couple of recent newspapers—that I should have brought a suitcase full of books and magazines. I hand my slender volume to Saya; it’s a collection of poetry.

  The book is an opening. We begin to talk about poets. I tell them about meeting Sayagyi Tin Moe at the dinner party, then again at the new art gallery. The gallery owner kindly seated us on the only two chairs in the room and we had a long conversation. For close to an hour, the old poet made me laugh with his stories. He talked about his youth, his education in a monastery school, his love for teaching and for his students. His self-deprecating humor was irresistible. “I know I am very ugly, I am an ogre, but that is part of my charm,” he says. “Ugly men are the best poets. Look at Shakespeare! Or Pablo Neruda. And I am sure there are many more international examples. I am the Burmese example!”

  Then, for another hour, he had me close to tears, talking about his time in prison. His prison stories were not about himself. Instead, he described the struggles of his fellow inmates, their health problems: rheumatism, from sleeping on cold concrete; scabies, the itching-skin parasite; amoebic dysentery, a feared and common killer; TB and hepatitis, from the lack of sanitation. Everyone suffered from the constant lack of food and clean water for drinking and bathing. He talked about how much his family suffered during his absence. “The authorities make it difficult for the family, not allowing visits, sending the prisoner far away and so on. That is why prison is so harmful. It is not just one man or one woman who goes to jail. It is a whole family.”

  He was kept for some time in a dog kennel, without a latrine pail, exposed to the elements. I told him that what those idiots did to him made me sad but also furious. He patted my hand consolingly. “Yes, some anger is good. But that emotion is not so useful. It is better to be …” He couldn’t remember the English word; we had to find the gallery owner, who gave us a translation. “Ah, yes, crafty. It is better to be crafty!”

  Sayagyi Tin Moe was warm, fearless, and fat with happiness, despite those lean years of incarceration. Because he spoke so candidly of his political involvement, I thought (naïvely) that other artists would be like him. By talking about the great poet, I try to tell the painters that they can trust me; Sayagyi Tin Moe did.

  The conversation does put us on a different footing. Saya is pleased when I give him the definition of the word crafty, and its synonym, sneaky. “I am an expert at the sneaky,” he says. We talk about the craftiness of creating an image and imbuing it with meanings beyond the obvious. Burmese artists in every discipline have become consummate practitioners of the art of metaphor, setting images alight while simultaneously finding ways to hide them from the Censorship Board. Saya jumps up and flips through a bunch of canvases leaning against the wall. He knows what he’s looking for, and when he finds it he pulls it up and raises it in front of his body, then slowly turns around. Gray-blue and green-blue ghosts swirl and howl out of the depths of cobalt mixed with black. It’s called The Sea, and evokes stormy waters clearly enough, but it’s also a chilling portrayal of suffering. Though more abstract, it recalls Munch’s The Scream.

  Saya smiles down at the nightmarish image with obvious pride. “This made it past the censors, into an exhibition abroad.”

  The baseball-cap painter asks me, “How do you make a living?”

  “Some money comes from my books, some from teaching. And grants.”

  Saya leans his painting, face out, against the pile and sits down again. “We have heard of grants from a Dutch painter. The government gives artists money to do their art—is this really true?”

  “Yes, it’s true.” Blessings and a long life to the Canada Council!

  “You can do anything you want?” As Saya opens his bony hands wide, his mouth opens, too, and this time it is his long, thin face that reminds me of The Scream. The young painters talk excitedly among themselves. It is a bizarre reversal for them, to hear of governments that actively support artists and make their lives easier.

  “We’re not allowed to do anything,” I explain. “You need to fill in a lot of forms, and have a project. And you describe the project you want to do.”

  “And then the government lets you do it,” one of the young painters says.

  “And gives you money,” adds another.

  In this instant, all my past complaints about the odious task of applying for grants become pathetic. “You have to explain what the project is, and then a jury, a group of other artists, chooses which projects to support. Sometimes you don’t get the grant because there’s not enough money for all the artists.”

  Saya nods and leans back in the rattan chair. “There is not enough money. This is the normal problem for the artist. Do you also write for magazines?”

  The question leads to talk of censorship. When the censors don’t like something in one of the popular journals, they paint over each copy of the offending line or article with silver or black ink. Saya picks up a magazine and shows me what he means. Above an article about a drug runner in South America, the popular Burmese proverb “No one escapes from his own crimes” has been silvered out. He holds the page up to the light and points out the words.

  One of the young men explains, “On the bus, you know who is trying to read the censored articles because they hold the pages up to the windows. But if the ink is black this trick doesn’t work.”

  San Aung explains the context of the article. “It’s about a South American criminal, but it will remind readers of a famous Burmese one, Khun Sa, the Shan drug lord. He made a deal with the SLORC and is now a free man. He lives in a big house here in Rangoon. The U.S. wants to arrest him for heroin trafficking, but the generals take care of him. He has a swimming pool.”*

  The baseball-cap painter says, “Stupid to paint over the proverb. We all know it very well. They’re not hiding anything from us.”

  One of the other young men adds, “The generals know it, too. They can’t escape their crimes, either. They feel guilty.”

  Saya relights his cheroot. Before inhaling, he says, “They are very crude. But more afraid of us than we are of them.”

  “That is what gives us hope.” This comment comes from the third young man, who has not made a sound until now.

  Saya explains how difficult it is to receive permission for public shows. The Censorship Board has to review the paintings, and th
e censors can take as long as they want before making a decision. Sometimes paintings go missing. “Two years ago, I was lucky,” he says. “A gallery in Bangkok asked me to join a group show of artists. And it took many months of visiting people at the Censorship Board, but finally I could send the paintings. And I was permitted to go to Bangkok.”

  “Did you go?”

  “I went.”

  I wait. I incline my head, lean forward a little. “And?”

  “And I showed the paintings there.” He looks at San Aung and asks something in Burmese.

  “Ya-deh,” replies San Aung. This important little word, which the foreigner learns quickly, means “All right” or “Go ahead.”

  “And a journalist interviewed me about my work. I asked him to be careful. I told him some things that I did not want to go in the newspaper. I told him to be careful. For me. Because my government would be watching.” He falls silent.

  San Aung finishes. “The journalist published several articles, in Bangkok and Hong Kong, and he used Saya’s name. He interviewed other Burmese people, too, and used their real names. People were afraid of what would happen to them, because they had been critical of the government. No one wants to go to prison. Sometimes it’s hard for foreigners to understand how dangerous it is for the people here.”

  Now their reticence makes sense. “But I would not use anyone’s real names. I’m not even sure that I’ll write about meeting you.” I look around the circle of unimpressed faces. “I could pretend you were all potters.”

  Saya shakes his head. “Potters?”

  “They work with clay.” I knead the air. “And make pots.”

  “Political potters,” one of the young men says, nodding.

  In an attempt at non-threatening conversation, I motion toward the garden and remark, “Look how strange the light is.” Before anyone can respond, the electricity in the studio shorts out. We laugh. San Aung quips, “Yes, in Burma the light is strange.” Electricity shortages are a routine part of life here.