‘Breaking the Cycle’ is the first novel to chronicle Myanmar’s Spring Revolution, a dual-timeline epic spanning 1942 World War II Burma and 2024 and the ongoing and evolving crisis. The book is due for publication by Chinthe House on February 1, 2026 – the fifth anniversary of the Myanmar military coup d’etat.
In the following interview with French author Jak Bazino, Mizzima asks about the inspiration for this fascinating human tale of mystery and struggle in a country still trying to find itself after decades of military misrule.
What inspired you to write this novel?
Growing up, my grandparents’ accounts of German occupation and the French Resistance sparked an obsession with history. Not the grand sweep of events, but the human stories within them. I learned early that we understand the past through individuals, not statistics. How else could we truly grasp the Holocaust’s horror, for example, except through survivors like Elie Wiesel?
When I met my wife in Myanmar, she shared her grandmother’s stories of Japanese occupation, echoing my own family’s experiences but on another continent. I became determined to interview both grandmothers about their lives during WWII and write a book about it, but time ran out. Both passed before I could capture their voices. Yet Myanmar, and the war that shaped it, never left my mind.
Then, fifteen years ago, I read about MIA Recovery discovering a WWII aircraft in the Hukawng Valley jungle. That story, a real-life adventure that seemed pulled from fiction, gripped me. So did the legend of Spitfires buried beneath Mingaladon Airfield. I interviewed Clayton Kuhles, who hunts for lost aircraft in the Burmese jungle like a modern Indiana Jones. He spoke of “metal ghosts” waiting to be unearthed, and suddenly I understood: history doesn’t vanish, it just lies hidden. A novel began forming: two eras in Burma, connected by a crashed plane.
Then, traveling in southern Myanmar, I had the privilege of seeing an ancient, ruined laterite wall dating from the Mon kingdom, carved with vivid sculptures emerging from stone. Standing before those half-erased faces, I felt how deeply the past speaks if we listen. At that point it was still an adventure novel in my mind, in 1942 Burma and in modern Myanmar, about a secret artefact, unearthed in the ruins of legendary Suvannabhumi, “the Golden Land”, and the hunt for the sacred relics of the Buddha.
And then came 2021. I was living in Yangon when the military seized power; I saw the repression, the fear, the extraordinary courage of young people who refused to go back to dictatorship. That was the true catalyst. At that point, the story stopped being an abstract historical idea and became an urgent need: to show, through fiction, how the unfinished dreams of the 1940s echo in the Spring Revolution of today, and how a new generation is finally trying to break that cycle.
Why is the subject of the novel so important at this time?
Myanmar is experiencing one of the world’s most intense conflicts, the third most severe globally, yet it barely registers in international consciousness. That silence is infuriating, and dangerous.
Since the February 2021 coup, millions have been displaced, thousands of civilians killed, and an entire generation has faced an impossible choice: exile, armed resistance, or submission. But this isn’t an isolated crisis in a distant country. Myanmar stands on the frontline of democracy itself, alongside Ukraine, in a defining struggle against authoritarianism. The geopolitical stakes couldn’t be higher: Russia and China backing the junta, pro-democracy movements resisting across continents. What unfolds in Yangon and Kyiv shapes the future of democratic freedom worldwide.
That’s why the dual timeline matters: 1942 and 2024. By connecting them, the novel reveals a crucial truth: history not only rimes. It repeats when conditions repeat. And there’s something equally urgent happening closer to home. The patterns we see in Myanmar’s post-coup chaos – the erosion of institutions, the weaponization of fear, the fracturing of civil society, the repression and limitation of freedom – these aren’t alien to Western democracies. Americans especially should pay attention. The Spring Revolution’s lessons about how quickly democracy can unravel, and how fiercely ordinary people fight to reclaim it, feel uncomfortably relevant to what’s unfolding today in the United States. And Europe is not immune to it with the rise of far right and populism. It’s deja vu, and we ignore it at our peril.
Western populations tend to look down on less developed nations with a patronizing gaze, assuming we have nothing to learn and everything to teach. That assumption is dangerously wrong. Today, Myanmar should be a master class for all Western democracies, especially the United States. Not merely as a cautionary tale about authoritarianism’s brutality, but as a living demonstration of how ordinary people organize, find courage, and fight back when freedom is threatened. The Spring Revolution shows what civic resistance looks like when it truly matters.
I genuinely believe the Myanmar Spring Revolution will occupy the same historical significance as the American and French revolutions. It deserves to be studied with that seriousness. Because the lessons it teaches are not abstract historical points. They’re urgent warnings and inspiration for democracies everywhere that are beginning to fray.
This novel insists on something essential: what happens in Myanmar concerns all of us. By offering readers a human entry point into this complexity, rendering both the tragedy and the extraordinary hope through individual lives, it argues that the fight for freedom anywhere is connected to the fight for freedom everywhere. We’re living through a decisive moment, and the outcome will define what kind of world we leave behind. We in the West need to stop assuming we are the teachers. Myanmar is teaching us. The question is whether we’re willing to listen.
The humanitarian toll is staggering: millions internally displaced, villages incinerated, widespread poverty and medical collapse, a population living under bombardment and arbitrary arrest. What outsiders often don’t realize is that this brutality isn’t new. Ethnic minorities have endured systematic violence for decades. The junta is merely escalating a familiar brutality.
It may sound insensitive for someone like me, safe and comfortable outside Myanmar, to speak of hope amid such suffering, especially given the ultimate sacrifices made by courageous young fighters for freedom. But I believe the evidence warrants optimism.
The coup unleashed something the generals never anticipated: unprecedented unity. The Bamar majority and ethnic minorities are working together. Youth and older generations are aligned. The PDF and ethnic armed organizations are coordinating more effectively than in any previous uprising. More than half the country now operates beyond junta control. And critically, the myth of the Tatmadaw’s inevitability has shattered.
What’s missing isn’t courage on the ground, there’s no shortage of that. It’s sustained international attention and material support. Myanmar has been eclipsed by other crises, but five years in, we must remember: this isn’t a frozen conflict. It’s a living, evolving revolution whose outcome reverberates globally.
So yes, I remain cautious. But I’m cautiously hopeful because the conditions for victory exist, and because I cannot imagine Myanmar reverting to what came before 2015. It’s simply impossible now. This is the lesson other nations must grasp, not just Western democracies which support matters, but China and Myanmar’s neighbors. By backing the Tatmadaw, they’re backing the losing side. History is moving against them, and they’re choosing to be on the wrong side of it.
Can you tell us about your experience of living and working in Myanmar?
I first came to Myanmar as a student in 1998. I returned in the 2000s and stayed for over a decade across two distinct periods: under the junta, and then during the democratic opening after 2015. Living through both versions of the country fundamentally shaped how I see it.
Under the military regime, the atmosphere was suffocating. Surveillance and fear were physical forces. I witnessed crippling poverty, forced labour, the Saffron Revolution, and the junta’s brutal response to Cyclone Nargis. Gatherings of more than five people were forbidden. Power cuts meant two days without electricity for every one day with it. I never believed I’d see this change in my lifetime. Then 2011 happened, and everything shifted.
I’d just finished my first novel, Zawgyi, l’Alchimiste de Birmanie, about the Saffron Revolution, a work I thought captured the reality of Myanmar at that moment. When it was published in 2012, it became a historical document about “the past” overnight.
When I returned in 2015, I stepped into a transformed country. The fear had lifted. Internet arrived. Social media exploded. Young people found their political voices. Ethnic and gender issues were finally debated openly. I genuinely believed Myanmar was becoming a democracy. Yes, it would take time to consolidate, but the trajectory seemed irreversible. The Friday before the coup, a French official called asking about rumors of a military takeover. I dismissed it outright, Myanmar was on track. The generals couldn’t be foolish enough to stage a coup during a pandemic, after a decade of freedom. The population, especially the youth, would never accept it.
I learned my lesson on February 1st: never underestimate the military’s capacity for acting stupid.
My wife and I left a few months after the coup, but not before witnessing the daily escalation of repression in our Sanchaung neighborhood. I saw the early protests, the barricades, the pot-banging at 8 pm each night, voices singing Kaba Ma Kyay Buu in darkness, the sudden arrests. Leaving was devastating. Myanmar was my wife’s country but had become mine too – we were planning to retire there. But we were fortunate. We escaped. So many of our friends, family, and colleagues couldn’t say the same.
The novel draws directly from these experiences, though always through fictional characters. This isn’t memoir; it’s about capturing the emotional and moral truth of what people endured. I’m convinced that stories, with their emotional weight, generate understanding far more powerfully than statistics ever could. People need to feel injustice in their hearts and flesh, not just comprehend it intellectually. Art provides that vector. After all, my own passion for Burma began watching Beyond Rangoon as a student. I hope my novel can do the same for readers: move them to truly see Myanmar and what’s at stake.
What is your fascination with contemporary Burmese history?
For someone with a background in political science, Myanmar’s modern history is a compressed laboratory of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: empire, war, decolonization, Cold War, socialism, nationalism, ethnic insurgencies, fragile democratization, digital revolution, and now the decisive confrontation between authoritarianism and democracy in a globalized world.
But what truly fascinates me are two “hinge moments” that mirror each other across eight decades. The first is the Burma Campaign of 1942: the Japanese invasion, the collapse of British Empire, and the emergence of Burmese independence. The second is the Spring Revolution of 2021, where a new generation is literally fighting to complete an unfinished independence story, and to reimagine the state on federal, multi-ethnic, democratic lines.
What’s remarkable is watching federalism resurface as a unifying political vision. This idea emerged during the independence movement in the 1930s, lay dormant for decades, but has now become the shared project binding the entire pro-democracy movement together. After decades of state propaganda portraying ethnic minorities as threats to national unity, Bamar citizens are finally understanding what those minorities have endured. The revelation is powerful: the fragmentation of Myanmar was never caused by the periphery. It was caused by the nationalist army at the center, imposing uniformity through force.
Watching federalism gain ground in real time, seeing Bamar and ethnic minorities unite around this vision, is genuinely encouraging. It suggests that Myanmar’s future could genuinely be different.
Contemporary Burmese history also forces us to confront uncomfortable truths about colonial legacies. How did British policies around ethnicity, land, and citizenship plant seeds that still poison politics today? How do unresolved traumas, from World War II to post-independence conflicts, continue to haunt individual and collective psychology? These aren’t uniquely Burmese questions; they echo across many societies, including France’s colonial past and others. But Myanmar brings them into sharp, undeniable relief. That’s what makes it so compelling to write about, and so devastating.
Who would you say is the audience for your novel?
There are several overlapping circles of readers for Breaking the Cycle.
First, anyone interested in Myanmar –, whether they already know the country well, or are coming to it for the first time, will find in the novel a way to enter its recent history through human stories rather than just through geopolitics or NGO reports.
Second, readers of historical and political fiction who appreciated books like The English Patient, The Nightingale, Between Shades of Gray, The Glass Palace or The Last Reunion are, in many ways, the natural audience. The book is an adventure and war novel, with mystery elements around an archaeological artefact, but it is also a love story, and a meditation on trauma, resistance, and moral courage. It will speak to readers who enjoy being immersed in another time and place while also being invited to reflect on their own.
Finally, the novel is written for people who care about democracy, human rights, and the way ordinary individuals navigate authoritarian systems, whether in Myanmar, Ukraine or now in the United States. You do not need prior knowledge of Burmese history to connect with Anthony Preston, Nandar Aye or Khin Yadanar; their dilemmas are universal: how to act when the world around you collapses, what you are willing to sacrifice for freedom, and whether it is possible, at last, to break a destructive historical cycle.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
Perhaps two things.
First, despite its darkness – war, massacres, betrayals, torture, the intimate cost of resistance – Breaking the Cycle is fundamentally not a pessimistic book. It’s dedicated to Myanmar’s youth, “who sacrifice their lives and their today to make way for a better tomorrow.” Even in the bleakest moments, there are acts of solidarity, humor, tenderness, and love. These aren’t sentimental flourishes. They’re the threads that prevent history from collapsing entirely into despair. They’re what make survival possible. I genuinely believe there is light ahead, and that these sacrifices will not be in vain.
Second, fiction isn’t a substitute for action, but it can ignite the empathy without which action rarely begins. If readers finish this book moved to learn more about Myanmar, to support organizations working on the ground, or simply to hold the country in their moral consciousness rather than letting it fade into obscurity, then the novel will have succeeded beyond its pages. There is a better future for Burma within reach, and the world should recognize it as both a worthy cause and a realistically achievable outcome.
To paraphrase Hemingway: Myanmar is “a fine place and worth the fighting for.” The Spring Revolution proves it. The world should stand with those who are.
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