Imbibing national miasma in a searching Burma

Saturday, 05 December 2009 12:10

Title: No Time for Dreams: Living in Burma Under Military Rule

Author(s): Carolyn Wakeman and San San Tin

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009

Reviewed by: Joseph Ball


Some dozen years ago I found myself sharing in the daily labors of the residents of a sea-swept monastery in the southern Burmese coastal town of Kyaikkami. One evening, by candlelight, I was shown a prized possession of a group of four monks, a 1962 Time magazine issue – with President John F. Kennedy prominently displayed. How was the President doing inquired an eager audience?

I was reminded of the above episode while reading No Time for Dreams, in which the protagonist recollects tasting chocolate in the mid 1970s for the first time since 1963. With the military coming to political power in 1962, a “bamboo curtain” was drawn around the land of pagodas. No Time for Dreams is one person’s story of surviving, and searching, behind the closed doors.

The subject of the book is a Burmese woman by the name of San San Tin, a poet, patron of the arts and former New Light of Burma writer. Her father, Ba Tin, played a prominent role in the country’s struggle for independence. As such, it is a story of an elite Burmese upbringing – and the rifts that have plagued Burma’s elite class since independence.

The litany of questions raised by the text is endless. What does it mean to be Burmese? What does it mean to be modern? And what should the modern Burmese state resemble? “Every modern person eats seafood,” is one conclusion drawn by a thakin leader in the early years of independence.

Almost immediately following the military’s assumption of power in 1962, anti-Western measures came to the fore of the government’s vision for the State. Increasingly since, as No Time for Dreams chronicles, the country has been wrestling with the means and degree of balancing the Burmese with the “foreign”. Staying in the British Commonwealth following independence was entirely out of the question. The country could not simply adopt socialism as its chosen path. No, there needed to be a Burmese Way to socialism. And only earlier this year, debate arose as to the nature of attire depicted by models on billboards in Burma. Were the images too un-Burmese?

In college, San San Tin is described as “crazy for Western style”. Meandering through Rangoon’s bustling markets she “searched for whatever new foreign goods appeared in the street stalls.” The urban privileged were immersing themselves, to the degree they could, in an open audition to define a modern Burma. And, as demonstrated by San San Tin’s ultimately disillusioned experience in a national literacy campaign – Burma’s select urban centers stood (and stand) in stark contrast to the vast rural hinterland.

While the story does regurgitate popular and simplistic romantic spins on the country’s early history – Aung San having forged an implied all-encompassing alliance among ethnic groups, an efficient national infrastructure bequeathed the country by the British in the wake of World War II – it is as San San Tin matures that her observations become more nuanced and complex.

The protests of 1988 are revealed in their darkness as well as their well-chronicled light. “People seemed to confuse anarchy with freedom…they lacked any experience with democratic practice despite their fervent goals” – a more somber assessment of events than is normally found in a memoir of a Burmese exile.

Though tough, searching questions are not explicitly raised in the text, it is the words between the lines that add depth to a largely personal account. For example, referring to the period between the1988 uprising and the 1990 elections, it becomes obvious that the country’s leadership had already become polarized – as it remains today. Significantly more research by Burma scholars needs to be done into why the intermediate period failed to find competing elites bridging gaps – dooming the 1990 elections.

For San San Tin, the hope for assumption of power by the National League for Democracy and Aung San Suu Kyi comes across as an almost last gasp hope for country and self. All the ills of Burmese society, from 1962 to the present are said to be “a product of the same corrupt and repressive system.” It is a common sentiment, heard echoed throughout Burma today.

But to what extent does a causative relationship exist between the system of government and the state of the State? Or, more specifically, how great is the systemic coefficient in a multi-variable analysis? Political will may provide a more meaningful barometer. As I write today from democratic suburbia, I read through the faults chalked up to the Burmese “system” – lack of proper education, prostitution, displacement, drugs, forced labor and families divided by politics – and see many, if not all, of the same faults in my own community.

Economically, the protagonist seems to arrive at a similar questioning – losing faith in both socialism and the private sector. San San Tin’s brief foray into the world of the private sector leads to the conclusion that it is, in its back door dealings and things better left unsaid, a product of Burma’s moral decline. But does this speak specifically to Burma? Regardless, what is definitely true in the case of Burma is the heightened degree to which corruption, inclusive of the business sector, is an accepted fait accompli.

Likely most informative to a general audience with limited knowledge of Burmese history, unlike the saturated markets for life stories coming out of such places as Afghanistan and Iraq, there is still a niche for similar projects dealing Burma. And as well written and provocative as San San Tin’s story is, No Time for Dreams is a worthy representative of such a genre.

The choice of title for the book is puzzling, instead of having “no time for dreams”, the pages read as one long, searching sojourn – some may say dreaming – from the streets of Rangoon to San Francisco’s Chinatown. And it is a personal quest remarkably shadowing that of the Burmese state itself – questions of direction and identity unanswered or left wanting for decades.