"Cooking up [democracy dishes in my very own kitchen]" by Ko Ko Thet
In our recent episode, “The View From France,” we featured a poem reading from Ko Ko Thet. It is worth taking a moment to appreciate both the poet as well as the poem. The reading can be heard prior to the interview with Thiri Nandar.
“What shall I cook for you people?
You can’t afford to be a glutton
if you can’t afford a grain of rice.
I will curry your revolution with coriander.
Simmer the mass movement until it gets
very, very soft — irreproachably tender.
I won’t allow it to thicken, or it will be tasteless.
Turn social media into tomb & lemon salad.
I wouldn’t garnish it with my three little fingers.
I will stir democracy dal with the longest
digit I possess. Let me pour out all my fish-sauce
feelings. Blood stains on the kitchen floor are of
no consequence. It’s unavoidable.
I am the Executive Chef. Am I not a better cook
than your mom? I can ride a spatula for
a horse, yodelling like a hyena, under
a squeaky buffalo cart. The situation is plain
and simple, an elephant crumpling a paddy
in broad daylight — not just all the five abbots,
and the sangha mandapa, were overthrown;
even the reclining Buddha was knocked
down flat in the process. It’s unavoidable.
You happened to be harvesting frogs in a
holey basket. The idiot lizard’s ashen jacket will
collect nothing but ash. Don’t take the burglar
creeping up on you from behind for your husband.
Please help yourself to Brussels sprouts and
Liberty Fries. Now let me serve up more bromides,
as soiled as my oily rags. I will investigate fraudulent
shopping lists, while you work up your appetite.
I have cooked with pots and pans, banged
out of shape, in your hunger-game protests.
After the state of emergency is over, there will be
a new election in the kitchen. I will then transfer
power to my shoe-in, Aloo Party for Our People.”
အစီအစဉ် [မီးဖိုချောင်ထဲ ဒီမိုကရေစီဟင်းလျာများချက်ပြုတ်ရန်]
ဆန်မရှိ သောက်စားကြီး ဒီနေ့ဘာချက်မလဲ
တော်လှန်ရေး နံနံပင်အုပ် ဟင်းတစ်ခွက်
လူထုအုံကြွမှုကို နူးအောင်ပြုပ်
ဆိုရှယ်မီဒီယာကို သံပယိုထည့်သုပ်
လက်သုံးချောင်းနဲ့တို့ကနန်းစိတ်ကနန်းမလုပ်ဘဲ
လက်ခလယ်နဲ့ ပယ်ပယ်နယ်နယ်မွှေ
ပကထိအခြေအနေကို မြင်အောင်မကြည့်
စိတ်ခံစားမှုကိုပဲ ရှေ့တန်းတင်မယ်
မလွှဲသာ မရှောင်သာလို့ မူတိမ်းရ
ယောက်မမြင်းစီးရ၊ ခွေးအကြီးလှည်းနင်းရ
လယ်ပြင်မှာ ဆင်သွားသလို လယ်ကွက်ပါပျက်ရ
ငါးပါး အပါအဝင် သံဃာစင်မှောက်ရုံမက
လျောင်းတော်မူကြီးပါ ပက်လက်လန်ရ
ပလိုင်းပေါက်နဲ့ ဖားကောက်၊ ဖွတ်ကျောပြာစု
ကျောချတာတောင် ဓားပြမှန်းမသိ
မဲပြာပုဆိုးလက်နှီးစုတ်တွေနဲ့ဧည့်ခံမယ်
အားလုံးနားလည် လက်ခံစားမြိန်စေဖို့
ကော်မရှင်ဖွဲ့ပြီး စျေးစာရင်းတွေ ပြန်စစ်ဆေးနေတယ်
အသံကုန်အတီးခံထားရလို့
ပိန်ရှုံ့နေတဲ့ အိုးခွက်တွေနဲ့ပဲ ချက်ထားပါတယ်
အရေးပေါ်ကာလ ပြီးဆုံးပါက
မီးဖိုချောင်ထဲ ရွေးကောက်ပွဲတစ်ရပ် ပြန်ကျင်းပ
အနိုင်ရ အာလူးပါတီကို အာဏာလွှဲသွားမယ်
Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine describe both the meaning of the poem, as well as the background of the poet. Note that they also have issued a call for other Burmese poets to submit entries.
/// The poem is a salve for my uneasy conscience. How the liberal West condemns the 2021 military coup in Myanmar! How familiar their lines are to me since the bloody putsch in 1988 in what was then known as Burma. If they have not done anything to effectively restore human dignity of some of the world’s most repressed ethnic peoples, be they Rohingya or Kachin, would they do anything for the Burmese populace who are complicit in atrocities against the repressed? In my very own kitchen, “today’s special” is yesterday’s leftover. ///
Ko Ko Thett is a Burma-born poet, poetry editor, translator, and anthologist of contemporary Burmese poetry. His poems have appeared in journals worldwide (from Griffith Review to Granta), and translated into several languages. After a whirlwind tour of Asia, Europe and North America for two decades, Ko Ko happily resettled in Sagaing in his native Burma-Myanmar in 2017. As of 2021 he is most likely to be spotted in the Golden Triangle area of Norwich, UK. He writes in both Burmese and English. His new collection of poems, bamboophiobia, is forthcoming from Zephyr Press in September 2021.