Penelope Todd highlights the plight of dissident writers
in Myanmar (Burma).
It's a year since the monks marched in Myanmar (Burma),
leading protests against the military government's removal of
fuel subsidies, which doubled the price and put the daily bus
fare beyond the reach of most citizens.
Cyclone Nargis has come and gone, as has the daily news from
that country.
Only now and then does it strike me how fortunate I am in New
Zealand to be able to read, write and do pretty much anything
I please.
I don't need to stifle impulses towards learning, discussing
anything under the sun and being who I am. It's not so in
Myanmar.
One of the privileges of attending writers' residencies
overseas in recent years has been to meet those taking brief
stints away from the tricky ambience of their own countries.
I met Hnin Se last year in Iowa where we were participants on
the three-month International Writers Programme. At home in
Myanmar, Hnin Se's journalistic and allegorical writings had
all been self-censored or encrypted before they passed under
the scrutiny of (and were altered by) government censors.
They were further censored according to her publishers'
justifiable caution.
In Iowa, Hnin Se's warm smile and gentle manner quickly won
her friends - friendships cemented by shared stories and the
tears, suppressed at home, which now fell almost daily.
Tears of relief at being in a peaceful place, of fear for her
friends and family, of insomnia, and sorrow for her country,
as news came in over September/October of the monk-led
demonstrations, then of colleagues, comrades and friends
imprisoned and tortured.
Hnin Se's apparently fragile frame is deceptive.
She was imprisoned, herself, for a year in 1991, after she
distributed poems protesting the Government's refusal to let
opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who had won the Nobel
Peace Prize, travel to Oslo.
Hnin Se was arrested and sent to Insein, spending the first
months on death row.
While in Iowa, she was warned from Myanmar not to come home
when the programme ended in November. She was likely to be
arrested at the airport, before she had a chance to take her
two young children in her arms. She wavered and waited, but
in December went home.
There her work as a journalist soon dried up, as any but
government publications found it too risky to carry on.
She busied herself, unpaid, working for three
monk-administered primary schools, each catering for hundreds
of students whose families can't afford the fees for
government-run schools.
Unfortunately, her four fellow organisers had been imprisoned
so she carried on alone, knowing she was under surveillance
and could be arrested at any time.
Writing this article, I've tried to hunt out the online chats
we've exchanged since Iowa, but Hnin Se has had to delete
them behind us in ongoing efforts to fox government
vigilance.
In early May came Cyclone Nargis.
Hnin Se's first letter from Yangon (Rangoon), where she
lives, talked about the numbers of people dead or lost and of
damage to her house: "Only boiling rice and salt but not
enough. We also didn't have clean water and enough food but
better than victims".
Each day, she and her husband loaded their car with donated
food to drive out into the flood zone and further by boat.
She sent me photographs of bodies still floating days after
they had drowned.
Months after the cyclone, this work is not finished, the
Government having all but abandoned its token efforts to give
aid.
New Zealand Pen Inc, the international arm of the Society of
Authors, is writing letters of protest to the Myanmar
Government on behalf of two writers imprisoned in June this
year in Yangon.
From the NZ Pen Writers in Prison newsletter: "Zargana,
leading comedian, poet and opposition activist, was arrested
on the evening of June 4, 2008, after police raided his home
in Yangon. Some linked his arrest with his private relief
efforts to deliver aid to victims of Cyclone Nargis"
Zaw Thet Htwe, journalist, was arrested on June 13, 2008,
while visiting his sick mother in the town of Minbu, central
Burma, and transferred to an interrogation centre in Yangon
...
"Thet Htwe had been working with comedian Zargana and other
leading Burmese figures to deliver aid and support to the
victims of Cyclone Nargis."
If found guilty they face up to 15 years in prison.
To understand what is happening to Hnin Se these days, I try
to read between the lines of her emails.
I find myself replying in curt leaden code that I hope will
cause no offence.
Her story may be found, among others, in the August 25 New
Yorker online:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/08/25/080825fafactpacker
Penelope Todd is a Dunedin writer.
