Quotes of the Day
A vision of hell that induces homesickness is something of a curiosity, especially when that vision is encountered in the John Ritblat Gallery of London's British Library. Some of the library's greatest treasures are on display there: the Magna Carta, ancient Bibles and Korans, medieval mappa mundi. Among these priceless objects, taking up an entire wall of the gallery, is a series of watercolors by an unknown Burmese artist. Probably commissioned in the mid-1800s, at the beginning of a century of British rule over Burma, the paintings are meant to illustrate aspects of Buddhist cosmology: hell, heaven, the world, a pantheon of spirits and deities, a fortune-telling manual. Whimsy and insouciance are at the heart of these illustrations. The world is egg shaped. Heaven is a diagram, abstract and dull, of seven concentric circles. And hell? Hell is a field of open fires, encircled by a ring of flames, on which stick figures are busily kicking and punching, beating and beheading one another with long sticks and long swords while others are being impaled, hung upside down over spits, boiled in cauldrons, dismembered and devoured by wild beasts.
As I lean forward for a closer look, it occurs to me, as it must to anyone familiar with Burma's recent history of oppression and violence, that here in fact is an eerily prophetic hell.
Never was this paradox brought home to me more forcefully than on my return to Burma some three years ago, after half a lifetime of so-called exile in the U.S. Everywhere, my status as a Burmese-born visitor free to come and go about the world was greeted with a kind of wistful awe. Relatives I hadn't seen or heard from in three decades, old friends whose names or faces I had almost forgotten, office workers, taxi drivers, boatmen, Buddhist monks in remote monasteries—almost all of them made me feel that exile was more a badge of honor than a state of banishment.
My freedom from Burma had come in 1967, in the xenophobic days when few foreigners were let into the country and fewer nationals let out. An earlier attempt to escape to Thailand through backdoor routes had landed me in jail, where military-intelligence officials subjected me to a 10-day marathon of interrogation before releasing me as arbitrarily, it seemed, as they had arrested me.
The military junta had recently declared martial law in Rangoon, a citywide curfew was in effect, and I drove to Mingaladon Airport in the spooky atmosphere of a wartime blackout. Spookier still was the discovery that I was the sole passenger on Thai Airways International Flight 304 to Bangkok. I held my breath, from a combination of elation, fear and disbelief, throughout the one-hour flight. Now, 33 years later, I was returning on another Thai flight, this one filled nearly to capacity. As the plane sank lower and lower toward Rangoon, I looked through scudding clouds at the cultivated fields below and once again found myself struggling to breathe.
Inside the airport terminal, the atmosphere—still sinister to me after so many years away—proved similarly breathtaking, reminding me that nothing can be taken for granted in a police state, not even the simple act of breathing. "Things are different now," a family friend from the old days kept insisting as we drove around the city in a quest to track down every house I had ever lived in. She pointed to the high-rise buildings in a downtown sector that lent an air of dubious prosperity to that otherwise bankrupt capital. "So many changes, do you see?" But I didn't see. Just around the corner, on 40th Street, were the old offices of The Nation, the English-language daily my late father had founded in the 1940s and published until his arrest in the 1960s. Nothing seemed to have changed in the least: not the shop houses with their ragged laundry lines, not the flooding ditches, not the stray dogs snuffling in the gutters, not the rubbish heaps on the streets. Everything seemed shockingly true to my childhood memories—including the doorway to No. 290, behind which, for all I knew, still lay our old printing presses, shut down by government order three decades ago.
And when we drove past the entrance to Insein Prison, where my father had spent five years, locked up, along with thousands of others, without charges or trial—all the trappings of that infamous facility seemed grimly familiar as well. The entrance was manned by half a dozen guards who lounged in the shade of an old banyan tree, smug in their power over a cowed populace. The banyan tree housed its obligatory shrine, decorated with scraps of colored paper and withered blossoms left by the prisoners' families. The small watchtower looming above was almost hidden from view by greenery. All along the street were market stalls and crowds and lottery-ticket vendors. Repression had reached the level of domestic routine, as in all seasoned dictatorships.
"A different time now, isn't it?" my friend kept asking, perhaps sensing my observations to the contrary. "Time to forgive and forget, isn't it?" Here, it struck me, was a fundamental difference between those who stayed behind, like my friend, for whom the decision to forget is both a survival mechanism and a political act, and exiles like myself, for whom the same could be said about the decision not to forget.
Nostalgia distorts memory, it is true, but a past that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth tends to curb nostalgia and to cut one's recall down to size. Thus it surprised me to see that the houses I knew, the churches, schools, markets and streets I once frequented, instead of being smaller than I remembered (as often happens with childhood memories) were in fact considerably bigger than my grudging imagination had allowed them to be. Yet even with the past restored to size, when I left a month later to return to the U.S., I knew what I had known upon leaving more than 30 years ago: home—if I could still call this home—was the last place I wanted to live.
Buddhism is the official religion of Burma, and Buddhism, with its teachings on impermanence and the universality of human suffering, is thought to explain in large part the extraordinary tolerance of the Burmese. They have tolerated, above all, four decades of a government renowned for lying, cheating, stealing, torturing and murdering. Do the tenets of Buddhism explain too, I wonder, this particular version of hell before me in the British Library? Because a closer look at these old paintings brings yet another revelation: the fires of hell seem to me now like a picnic of bonfires. And although the stick figures are indeed busy kicking, punching and stabbing one another, their kicks look like dance, their punches like calisthenics, their stabs like harmless swordplay. The whole business of damnation appears to be make-believe.
Displayed against another wall of the same gallery is that rarest of manuscripts: the scroll of the Diamond Sutra, the oldest book in print. Published in 868, this Chinese translation of early Indian Buddhist texts derives from the Mahayana tradition and not from the Theravada Buddhism of the Burmese. Still, in describing the world as unreal—in telling us that there are no objects, no people, no other living beings—it seems to me a guiding spirit behind my Burmese artist's hell. For if all is unreal, suffering too is unreal. Thus, any representation of suffering can only be a parody of suffering.
Parody or not, the images draw me to the glass for one last look. This time I strain to read the blocks of handwritten script accompanying the images—letters in ancient Mon, modern Burmese and scriptural Pali. But the glass is too thick and the lighting too dim for me to decipher more than a dozen disjointed words. The exile's privilege of standing outside the glass looking in has its advantages, but the price of admission is a certain loss of vision. Exiles can press their noses to windows all they want, but they are never fully able to read the fine print.
- Wendy Law-Yone
- When Wendy Law-Yone returned to Burma after 33 years, she discovered that exile was a deliverance from her homeland's living hell