Portrait of the Poet

MYANMAR’S LITERARY world has more than its fair share of illustrious home-grown authors published internationally. But Myanmar poetry is not all that popular overseas as it’s always remained strictly vernacular – until now, thanks to the publication of Myanmar’s first poetry collection in English by Ko Ko Thett.
The Myanmar-born, Vienna-based poet recently completed “The Burden of Being Burmese” (published by Northern Illinois University Press), about growing up in pre-2011 Myanmar. It’s due out next February.
Meanwhile, his second, “Bamboophobia”, a stinging satire on Myanmar totalitarianism, is also coming along though no publication date has yet been announced.
His poetry is laden with political overtones, but to say that Thett lives and breathes politics as a poet is a grave misinterpretation.
“I don’t feel duty-bound to write about politics all the time. Poetry is the only place that I find myself free from duty and responsibility. My duty is to write, write, write and write. That’s why I am a poet,” he says.
There’s a mood of pessimism too.
Back in the more liberal Myanmar for the first time in years to attend the Irrawaddy Literary Festival in Mandalay last month, Thett remained just as downbeat given the current state of affairs in his own land.
Myanmar, he says, won’t be better off with the 2015 election. What it needs is “a revolution, no less,” he says.
He conveyed that pessimism at the festival through a poetry reading session joined by Irish poet Joe Woods and Canadian novelist-cum-rhymer Karen Connelly. He also spoke on totalitarianism in present-day Myanmar in another session.
Poetry serves as much as an emotional refuge from the harsh realities of life as a vehicle for his musings on the ever-changing Myanmar.
 Thett started scribbling “silly verses of a kind” in his teens. That passion grew more intense as an engineering student at the Yangon Institute of Technology (YIT) during the 1990s.
 “Like those at Thammasat University in Thailand, students of YIT like were very politically active. Life in university was an eye-opening experience for me as I became both politically and poetically active. It was there I discovered new forms of poetry,” he says.
In the Burmese tradition, written poetry grew out of an oral tradition, with Buddhist stories told by the monks and handed down. The Burmese had no script of their own, so they borrowed one from India and developed egg kha yer, or Myanmar alphabet.
Generally there are two schools in Burmese poetry: the traditional poets from Upper Burma, who are closer to nature but also more ideological, and the “language poets” from Lower Burma, who are “more open to the world” and choose more universal themes.
The modernist phase of Burmese poetry, known as khitsan (meaning “testing the times”), emerged in the 1930s from Rangoon University and was associated with opposition to British colonial rule.
 Under the military dictatorship, many readers in the country took refuge in the metaphorical fervour of poetry. Thett is a passionate advocate of rhetorical devices.
“I can speak in multiple voices in poetry, and can be anyone I want to be. In the same poem, I can be someone one minute, and his foil character the next. In poetry, you can be anyone you refuse to be,” he says.
And Thett was definitely more than a poet in the turbulent 1990s.
In early December 1996, between 1,000 and 1,500 students from Rangoon University and the Rangoon Institute of Technology staged protests denouncing the police brutality of the October demonstrations. The December protest was described as "the most defiant student protest since the pro-democracy uprising 1988 when the ruling junta known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council (Slorc) came to power.
Thett was among the 609 demonstrators detained by police following the march through Rangoon. Most were later released.
 Thett was detained for 137 days at a military camp outside Yangon.
“I was detained because I took part in the protests. I don’t want to overstate this because others suffered more than I did,” says Thett, adding: “I was lucky that I was quite well taken care of. I was alone there as other students were kept in different places. I had a TV and state run newspapers to read. Though I was there, I was thinking of my comrades. But I didn’t write any poems at all during this period.”
Following his release in April 1997,
 Thett left for Singapore, then Bangkok where he spent three years working for Jesuit Refugee Service. In 2000, he went to Finland and, eventually, settled in Austria where he took a degree in development studies from the University of Vienna. It was during his years in exile overseas that Thett began writing poems in English.
 Aside from being a tutor in development economic in Vienna, Thett today devotes much of his time to poetry writing and translation. He’s the editor of the Burmese poetry section at PoetryInternationalWeb.net.
His brief return to Myanmar afforded him the chance to catch up with the development frenzy. “You know, I am a pessimist. So I don’t get disappointed easily. I’m also a sceptic,” he says.
Thett toured the Mandalay Palace and came away with somewhat mixed feelings.
“The main palace is well maintained with signage for tourists. Just outside the palace, there are the tombs of King Mindon and others, which looked abandoned like other edifices outside. That’s because the focus is on the palace. What’s happening in Myanmar is like that.
 “Development is focused in urban areas. Outside the big cities, there’s rurality and poverty. Well-paved asphalt roads are being constructed. But they are like a facade. Beyond that, people are pretty much the same as they were in, say, the 1970s in terms of living conditions and poverty,” he says.
In Kyaukse (near Mandalay), Thett saw a lollipop seller on his bicycle. (“This scene could have been the same 30 years ago.”) Then a little boy, six or seven, came over to him, begging for money, his hand clutching a piece of paper containing his father’s medical records.
“It was sad. These things have never happened before. His is not the only case,” he says.
Thett attributes the widening rich-poor gap to Myanmar’s unscrupulous pursuit of “liberal let thit” (“new liberalism”).
 “Anyone can come to my country and grab something. It’s a shame the government and the opposition party are not sceptical about this ‘new liberalism’. Some people are incredibly rich by taking advantage of development projects. But the rest are lagging behind,” he says.
The solution is a people’s revolution.
“The election next year will not solve problems. We need a complete overhaul of the corrupt system. Everybody is after something. In Myanmar they no longer build a ‘kissable road’,” he says.