What strikes me as I write this is the thought that both people mentioned above are fictitious (in that these names are just nom de plumes) and yet they claim to tell the truth about Burma. This leads to a further curiosity: does one need to lie in order to make truth surface? Or, from a more literary perspective, can fiction do what its sibling, non-fiction, does too? I’d spend hours just plucking through the wordplay and sorting out the tedious philosophical debris that these questions leave in their wake but then what?
Cover of Finding George Orwell in Burma
Emma Larkin’s 2004 book, Finding George Orwell in Burma was purchased on a warm summer day at a bookstore that no longer exists today. It was one of the first expensive books I bought and admittedly, I only bought it for two reasons: the cover (which is a photo showing a man’s silhouette as he paddles his boat–at a distance, there are mountains and the rest of the page is a misty blue) and the country: Burma.The pages are now slightly yellowing from their stay in my shelves. I’m guessing I got this in 2005 which would make it a tenant going on a decade in these tired shelves of mine. I’ve attempted to read it thrice but on all three counts I’ve failed owing to the one aspect of the book I never considered upon purchasing it: content.
Tonight, I lay restless after having been kept up until the wee hours on a quest to read Metamaus. I was engrossed until the 100th page after which I could no longer open my eyes. I pried the book open again today to find that the few hours of sleep and dream time had gathered together images of the Holocaust and Maus to a point where I needed to read something else. (This, of course, I’ll explain in greater detail when I manage to sort out my thought’s on Spiegelman’s Metamaus.) The next logical step, as it is January, would be to stay true to resolutions and among them, i did recall promising to finish the unfinished. So, Larkin and I made haste once more, skipping introductions and long afternoons in the tea shops of Mandalay.
What I can conclude is that I love this book more than I can speak of for fear that someone might catch a wind of what I write and never allow me into this beautiful country. It heightens the beauty and the sadness once hinted at by Kon Ichikawa in his compelling masterpiece, The Burmese Harp. The scenes in that film coupled with the stories Larkin has gathered in this book have made me hope for a reason to visit if only to sit in front of a pagoda and ponder the many ways life twists and turns.
I must admit though that after reading Larkin, the effects of literature on people cannot be easily reduced to sentimentality that sparks action. Avid readers and lovers of the written word will find that sometimes books are not enough to liberate but they do keep people company throughout what may be such long, lonely lives lived in isolation and fear of their government. Most of those Larkin speaks with in her book are learned people who have read more than most of us will have read in our own “free” societies and yet, Burma is the way it is. While it goes without saying that I am deeply against a state where people must endure in these conditions, I’m keeping an open mind…the country has long baffled me because in this age its rare to find such a secluded place that’s so shrouded in mystery and portrayed solely as helpless by foreign press. Incidentally, this book is about tracing the path of another foreigner who, Larkin posits, prophetically wrote novels that could aptly describe the country’s history since it was colonized by the British. My tendency is not to trust everything a foreigner says about a place and its people precisely because situations like this one of Burma are wrought with time and put in place by conditions greater than just our intelligent assumptions. Still, its amazing to read about this one woman’s quest to see Orwell’s Burma and understand the parallelisms that exist in the way we perceive the country today.
Also, I can’t help but wonder what it must be like to walk the streets of Rangoon which she describes as quiet and peaceful. It seems uncanny and reminds me of a Filipino way of describing certain individuals: nasa loob ang kulo–this roughly translates to having the chaos within so as to describe those who look placid on the outside but contain their maelstroms within. Is Burma really like this and are people on the edge of breaking? Or are they as calm and content as their scenic landscapes portray? I would like to know one day but I suppose I’m too young and naive, wasting my youth on romanticized images of golden pagodas and the promise of one day meeting a white elephant. The scholar in me knows that it’s all a construct, a fiction we are meant to believe to be true so that things might remain exotic in our eyes–this figment of our imagination that keeps us in search of dream places but separates us entirely from reality. My Burma is still the yearned for land of mysticism that promises great adventure and self-reckoning. This, I suppose, is the tragedy of my youth and the one reason why its taken me so long to read and listen to what Larkin has to say.
Now if only I could grow up just a little bit and rid myself of the romance and the adventure, I might see things clearly and know which path to take…but I’m afraid that time might never come and if it does, I fear for what little optimism and hope I’ll have left for my beautiful, beloved Burma.
