Bearing Witness through Poetry and Prose
One of the difficult tasks in reporting on the conflict in Myanmar is finding a way to break through foreign media coverage and accurately share the devastation that has been going on since the military coup. This is a task that Brian Haman and ko ko thett managed to carry out through their incredible poetry anthology, “Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring: Witness poems and essays from Burma/Myanmar (1988-2021).” In the following excerpt about this work from our recent interview, Brian describes their process in creating the anthology.
“You have this transition [to violence], that was reacting to the escalation of violence. So it’s very much about allowing the people on the ground to bear witness to these kinds of traumas themselves.””
Host: In some of the more impactful interviews, or even parts of interviews I've had, it's been when the guest is describing the human sense of loss and of hopelessness and of struggle, and of trying to overcome that as well, all these things together. When it comes in these human terms of people trying to overcome things, that really moves you. I think that was the quality found in these pages of your anthology, and that's why I really want to encourage all listeners, even those who think they've been following this conflict very closely, there's still something in your book that rises above the large events and the stories and the basic news and just goes to the level of humanity of what it actually feels like to be in those very moments. And it's just expressed so powerfully and really with the devastation of how it actually feels. For whatever reason, that's something that is just not coming out to the extent that it should be in the news coverage. So I wonder what your thoughts are on that, bringing that humanity out, and how you're able to find these works that managed to break through that plane to some extent, and really just deliver this message in real human terms?
Brian Haman: That's really one of the reasons why Ko Ko and I agreed to describe it in terms of witnessed poems, in essence, rather than poetry as resistance or protest. And, and obviously, when I say poetry, I also mean essays as well, because the book has both.
The point was to offer a platform to a certain extent unmediated, so not filtered through the media and so on. Obviously, there is a kind of filtering mechanism at work because Ko Ko and I were both editors. And so we were selecting which works to choose. But we had a tremendous number of works to choose. And I would say the vast majority of them made it into the anthology.
The focus was on allowing the people and their voices to emerge and to speak for themselves. And to really be the sort of the eyes and the ears, and the mouths for what's going on in Myanmar, not to have it filtered through the New York Times or The Guardian or whatever other media was reporting on it. But rather to allow the people there to bear witness to all of these horrific things that they were experiencing and seeing on a daily basis.
Early on, the mood was very much an optimistic one, and so the pieces themselves weren't weren't really sort of ripe for that kind of violence. There was a sense of optimism in those pieces, describing people coming together nonviolently, gathering in the streets, peaceful protests, and so on. I think we have one piece that describes how people would bring food to each other, and others would bring water and others would then clean up and so on. And so there was this, there was a spirit of collaboration and, and sort of mutual solidarity and so on.
But that was quickly shattered. As so many people began to suffer from the similar fate. I mean, you had large numbers of people curiously being shot in the head, I think one of the earliest people to become a victim of this kind of violence was a teenage girl who was a peaceful protest, and she was wearing a moped or motorcycle helmet. And the bullet pierced that and she was shot in the head. She died. And so you have this transition [to violence], that was very much reacting to or cataloging or describing the escalation of violence by the winter. So it's very much about allowing the people on the ground, to bear witness to these kinds of traumas themselves.”