Unpacking Burmese Memes
I keep coming back to how insightful our episode was on the role that memes are playing throughout this uprising. On this show, Brad explains the nuances that Burmese language memes are expressing, the cultural relevance and linguistic interplay often being missed by outside observers. This example of the riff made on the common husband-and-wife-snack is a perfect example of how this underlying meaning of memes is explored and examined.
“The Burmese are making brilliant signs with brilliant content”
“I saw that some Western people criticized the protest signs in English language that the Burmese protesters were using. This is something I saw multiple times. They said it must be either photoshopped, or it's been staged in some way.
‘Why would the Burmese people be protesting against the Burmese military in the English language? Clearly, it must be fake!’
I responded in a couple of cases saying it's not fake… you just don't see the Burmese content, which is plentiful, and is far more innovative and interesting than the English language content. So the whole idea for our facebook page ‘Burmese protests memes and signs translated and explained’ came from one of our first posts, which was ‘The husband and wife roads.’
There were a series of protest signs that long haul truckers had painted on the sides of their trucks. And one of them literally translated to ‘I don't want to go back to driving on husband and wife pan roads!’ And, that was absolutely nonsensical.
So my girlfriend had to explain to me that, first of all, ‘husband and wife’ is actually the name of a snack that's made of two halves of dough fused together. And also there's this sort of dimpled type of pan. To Burmese speakers, it was immediately obvious what a ‘husband and wife pan’ is: It's the dimpled iron pan that you make this snack in, and saying ‘husband and wife pan road,’ immediately puts people in mind of roads that are so riddled with potholes that they look like a dimpled iron pan that you would use for street food!
Immediately obvious to the Burmese, even though this is not an existing idiom. This was a new phrase that this trucker had designed to express his concerns, as obviously someone who drives a lot. It is basically saying that when the military is in charge, they don't use any of the money that they make to pay for the needs of the people… like the quality of the roads, and lots of other things as well.
So if you unpack that little statement, it says so much, right?
And I remember talking to a taxi driver and one of the things he said was, ‘Since the NLD has been elected, they've been building roads and they've been paving roads, which was something that was very important and significant to us, a very visible sign of our local government actually investing in infrastructure.’
Despite any other problems that they may have had with the government, it was something that they were really, really, really appreciative of.
The Burmese audience not only understood the imagery and what that snack is, they understand what these problems are, as well as the history that the junta has specifically with road maintenance. It took my girlfriend at least half an hour to explain this one sign to me and I just thought that it phenomenal how someone captured that! The Burmese are making brilliant signs with brilliant content.”
