Bertil Lintner's Reading List

"A great book. It’s an interesting mix of tracking this Victorian footballer, Sir George Scott, who wrote a lot about Burma, and an exploration of contemporary Burma. Scott was one of the few colonials who really seemed to understand Burma and be interested in Burmese culture and history. He wrote under a Burmese pseudonym, Shway Yoe. This refers to a comical figure the Burmese portray when they have festivals. Under that pseudonym Scott wrote many books about Burma which people actually thought were written by a Burmese, such was the depth and understanding in them. He also introduced football, and it is still extremely popular in Burma. In Aung San Suu Kyi’s speeches around 1988-89 she used symbolism that was very easy to understand. She was addressing villagers and country people and needed to be able to reach them. She referred to the soldiers as trouser people, because they wear trousers not longis (sarongs) like most Burmese do. The trouser people was also the Burmese name for the British during colonial times. She just pointed out that they had trouser oppressors in the past and now they have another bunch of trouser people oppressing them now: the military. She called her struggle for democracy the second struggle for independence. The British did introduce modern education and a parliamentarian style of government, which didn’t really succeed. Burma was fairly well developed in comparison to other countries in the region and they had a high literacy rate. But actually, due to monastic education for both girls and boys, they had a very high literacy rate even before the British came. Until Aung San Suu Kyi returned in 1988, her father Aung San was the official national hero. He stood for Unity in Diversity: all the nationalities in Burma should live together, there should be no discrimination etc. In 1989, after the military had crushed the uprising and reasserted power, they reinterpreted the whole concept of Burma. They changed the name to Myanmar claiming that Myanmar meant not only the Burmese but all the other ethnic groups as well. That is linguistically and historically incorrect. Aung San had discussed this back in the 1930s and concluded that Myanmar is just the name for the Mandalay kingdom and that Burma was the name for the country. In fact there is no name, nor has there ever been, that covers the country and all the ethnic groups, not until the British came and established the colony. The legacy of Aung San’s Unity in Diversity was replaced by this new Unity concept of Myanmar: one nation, one people, one language. Aung San, as national symbol, was pushed to the background. In the new capital in Nayipyidaw they have erected these huge statues of medieval warrior kings, they represent the new Burma that the military would like to see. There is some irony here, the problem with these kings is that they were excellent warriors and conquerors, but once they had taken territory they didn’t know how to rule it. They never built up any administration, and institutions so the Burmese empires collapsed when the kings died. Burma today is very much the same, they are trying to conquer these ethnic areas by force but they don’t know how to govern properly. The medieval kings are not very good role models for the state."

"I think the main difference between Andrew’s and Emma’s books is that Andrew, who is a very gifted writer, makes places and events come alive; Emma makes people she meets come alive. She is more down-to-earth, probably because she speaks the language. The Burmese are quite aware of Orwell and his Burmese Days is quite famous there. The old joke in Burma is: ‘Have you read Burmese Days?’ ‘Yeah, it’s good but Orwell actually wrote a Burmese trilogy. The first was Burmese Days, about the colonial period, the second was Animal Farm, about the Burmese road to socialism and the third, 1984 , about the present regime.’ Both Andrew Marshall and Emma Larkin seized on an interesting concept – if you want to make Burma interesting to the rest of the world you have to find a westerner who is part of the story. It probably stems from this colonial myth about Burma, that it was this golden country in South East Asia, not as big and frightening as India but still accessible because it was a colony. It has the ring of eastern romanticism, with Kipling, the pagodas, the temple bells, and the beautiful women in their sarongs, etc. I must say that this is the silly part to a certain extent. I do find that many people who have spent time there become captivated with the place for a variety of reasons. I used to get letters from old British and American soldiers who were there during the Second World War. Some of the best memories of their lives were of that time in Burma."

"Yes and while The River of Lost Footsteps comes from an elite perspective, the other book comes from the other end of the spectrum. The Land of the Green Ghosts is one of the best books I have read on Burma in recent years. Pascal comes from the Padaung people, the ‘long-necked Karen’ as they are also known. The background is that he was a working as a waiter in a Mandalay teashop and he met this English academic. They started discussing James Joyce and the Englishman asked him about Ulysses but Pascal had never heard of it. Such was his hunger for literature that he had picked up old books around Mandalay market – he had happened to find Finnegans Wake, and liked it. Pascal took part in the 1988 uprising and then escaped to Thailand and from there made it to the UK. He went to Cambridge where he read English literature; he learned to write very well in English and came out with this fantastic book…. Yes, but also it is about his people, this small, almost forgotten tribe. There is a very moving scene in the book, where someone wants to show him a little statuette he bought of what he thought was an African princess, a person with a long neck adorned with rings. The collector also had some idea that it may have been Burmese. This statuette turned out to be Pascal’s grandmother. She had been taken to the UK in a freak show in the 1930s, where she had been paraded around for a few months. Pascal remembered his grandmother talking about her trip to England. The book is full of interesting anecdotes and humour. For instance, the Padaung are Roman Catholics because some Italian missionaries on their way to China got stuck there. When the Padaung saw them they thought they were some type of pig, and put them in a pigpen. They realised that these were humans, with some knowledge and the Padaung thought: ‘Maybe we can learn something from them.’ The missionaries were released and all the Padaungs became Roman Catholics, with names like Pascal and Antonio."

"Freedom From Fear is a collection of writings and essays that provide an insight into the way Aung San Suu Kyi thinks and acts. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand today’s Burmese politics. It is very intriguing in some ways. When I met her in 1989 she was still using very down-to-earth symbolism, like the ‘trouser people’. I once went to a meeting north of Rangoon. It was April and very hot, on an open plain. There were thousands of people there, villagers, waiting under the scorching sun. When eventually she arrived, the crowd went silent and she spoke for at least three hours using this very simple style. She said things like: ‘Your head is not for nodding with, you have been nodding for 25 years. The head is there for you to think with, this is the time to start thinking about yourself, your community, about the country.’ She made jokes, she was amazing; I have never seen a politician speak like that to a crowd, no superiority or arrogance; she was there for the people, they understood her and they loved her. But then after her first spell of house arrest, 1989-95, she came out again and she had changed. Gradually she changed even more. She has always been a Buddhist but a nominal Buddhist. She meditated occasionally and sent her sons to become novices in Burma but it was more a social, cultural thing than a religious thing. Suddenly she moved into what seemed like a type of Buddhist mysticism. She started using Pali words and concepts in her speeches and talking about Buddhism in a political sense. I found this alien to the Aung San Suu Kyi I knew from 1988-89. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but I wonder what made her change. Was it six years of solitude under house arrest, where she meditated and contemplated life and read Buddhist literature? I think an element is there but also like many Burmese politicians have done throughout history, she realised the political potential of Buddhism. She has become a female Bodhisattva in the eyes of the people and she is living up to that image. Many Burmese keep her picture on the family altar, they light incense and pray to her. She is a saviour who will deliver them from the evils of the military regime."

"These are short stories that have been censored, written by Burmese authors but have never appeared in Burmese magazines. Many of the authors of these stories ended up in jail. There is a very good introduction by Anna Allott, who used to teach at SOAS, she speaks fluent Burmese and is very well known in Burma. When they print a magazine they have to submit it to the censors. If they say: ‘No we don’t like it, rip it out’, then they have to rip the piece out physically from every copy of the magazine printed. Sometimes they apply silver ink to an offending term or a sentence. Yes, and the translations are excellent. Just looking at this book, one of the stories is called ‘The children who play in the back alleyways’. This one was written in 1989 for a literary magazine and it is about children who always have to play in the dark. Another of the stories is called ‘The Python’, about the Chinese takeover of Mandalay, economically, commercially. It is about how Mandalay, the heartland of Burmese culture, has become a Chinatown. The newly arrived Chinese are very different from the Chinese who have been living in Burma for generations. This older community of Chinese Burmese are also worried about this influx too. They have had a hard time being accepted as Burmese and suddenly there are all these carpetbaggers coming in from China and behaving in a way that is upsetting this whole equilibrium. Other stories are obliquely critical of the military of the present order but told as fiction. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Absolutely. There still is. Represented mainly in Mandalay by various literary circles, like that of the late Daw Amah, and also the Moustache Brothers. They are famous comedians in the Shway Yoe tradition. They look funny and jump up and down and tell jokes. The Moustache Brothers are tolerated because they only entertain foreigners and everything is in English. They have been arrested off and on, they are always under surveillance but they have become an institution in Mandalay. One of their best-known jokes is sort of short dialogue: ‘I have just been to India to see the dentist,’ says one man to his friend. ‘Why did you go all the way to India, don’t we have dentists here in Burma?’ his friend asks. ‘Yes, but I had to go to India because here in Burma you are not allowed to open your mouth.’"