IT has become harder to get lost. Global positioning systems are dogged stalkers. Yet being lost is a necessary condition.
To be immersed in place, you have to let go of bearings, of time itself. Only then will mysteries begin to reveal themselves.
To every voyage there is a farthest point. It involves a feeling, an inflection, more than a location. V.S. Naipaul wrote of the “enigma of arrival”. That’s close.
One early morning, here in the capital of Myanmar’s troubled Rakhine State, I went for a walk along the seafront. Stray dogs accompanied me. The muddy waters of the Bay of Bengal lapped onto a beach where ranks of plastic chairs were set beneath lurching parasols.
A young man in longyi and camouflage jacket scattered crumbs to grimy gulls. A vast naval barracks had an air of abandonment. Faces seemed ravaged.
Long plunder, I thought, yielded this desolation. The British plundered Rakhine when it was part of imperial India. In his novel, Burmese Days, George Orwell writes: “The Indian Empire is a despotism — benevolent, no doubt, but still a despotism with theft as its final object.” Dark-skinned people were a disposable means to this end.
Before the British, the Burmese monarchy plundered the kingdom of Arakan, modern-day Rakhine. Had I not seen in Mandalay the Mahamuni Buddha, taken from Rakhine as a spoil of war and now an object of Pagoda-gilding veneration?
Yes, in Mandalay, a crowd murmured in prayer, edging closer to the Buddha image. A child lay asleep on a mat oblivious to the flies. Market stalls nearby offered dahs, Burmese knives like small sickles. The palm readers, weary of prophecy, had passed out after lunch.
After the British, the Burmese military pursued plunder of their own: crony business deals; the plundering of history to produce enemies that might justify its predations; the plundering of truth in an attempt to cover up the villages destroyed, the thousands slaughtered in a succession of wars against Myanmar’s ethnic minorities and dissidents.
Rakhine was always a suspect place. Like other minorities — the Kachin or the Shan — Rakhine had a history that had to be bent, through force if necessary, to Burmese nationhood. The smiling images of Myanmar’s 135 official ethnic minorities (they do not include the Rohingya) in the National Museum in Yangon constitute folkloric deception.
In her book Finding George Orwell in Burma, Emma Larkin speaks to a historian, Tin Tin Lay, who says of the military: “They are interested only in nationalism and patriotism. There is no history in Burma any more. You can look in the school books and the libraries. You will not find it. We are a country without a history — without a truthful history.”
The destruction of the distinction between truth and falsehood is the foundation of dictatorship.
The military rampage against the Muslim Rohingya population of Rakhine State that sent more than 600,000 across the Bangladeshi border was not an anomaly. It was of a piece with the plunder and lies of a half-century of military rule.
Burmese nationalism has increasingly been wrapped in defiant Buddhism. Pope Francis met this week with Sitagu Sayadaw, one of Myanmar’s most revered senior monks. Sayadaw recently gave a sermon at an army combat training school. He alluded to a historical battle between Buddhists and Tamils. After the battle, the story goes, the Buddhist king was troubled because many thousands of Tamils were dead.
The monks reassured him by saying that all the Tamils killed amounted to just one-half human beings, because only those keeping Buddhist precepts were human. Sitagu Sayadaw said the king, like the army today, was fighting for the security of Buddhism.
The Rohingya, for Myanmar’s Buddhist majority, are an invented identity, less than human, agents of a subterfuge to Islamise and seize territory.
No democracy can be built on denial of a people’s existence.
I drove out of Mandalay, through Sagaing with its countless golden bell-shaped pagodas, to a village on the Irrawaddy River to hear Sayadaw speak. People pressed donations into the hands of organisers. Their names and contributions were announced over booming loudspeakers. The multicolored Buddhist flag fluttered.
Sayadaw entered in magenta robe under two white umbrellas. He said he was weary. His sermon was restrained.
I got talking to Kyaing, 65, a woman with a lovely smile. I asked her why there were more women than men attending.
“Because only the women want to go to heaven. The men are busy drinking.”
“Where will the men go?
“To hell.”
“What do you want to be in your next life?”
“I don’t want to come back in any form.”
“One life is enough?”
“More than enough.”
“You wouldn’t want to come back as a man?”
“No. I don’t want to drink. My husband was violent. We had 11 children. Now he can’t drink, so he doesn’t beat me any more. I live with him, and grow rice, on a bend in the peaceful river.” NYT