Censorship fades with junta
YANGON, Myanmar — On a Saturday morning early this month, a layer of mist blanketing this city’s weathered colonial buildings and golden Buddhist stupas began to dissipate. “I hope that in our country the fog of the past will also lift,” said Pascal Khoo Thwe, the celebrated Burmese author of “From the Land of Green Ghosts,” an evocative memoir that exposed foreign readers to the brutality of life under military dictatorship.
After two decades in exile, Khoo Thwe was back home to take part in the Irrawaddy Literary Festival, which gathered more than 100 Burmese and international authors and crowds in the thousands. The event’s patron was Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate and newly elected parliamentarian.
The festival, the first of its kind in post-junta Myanmar, marked the lifting of a cloud of a different sort: censorship, which had shrouded the country in silence during four decades of military rule. After the inauguration of a civilian government in March 2011 and the freeing of hundreds of political prisoners, official censorship ended last August.
The country’s writers are reveling in the new space, which would have been unthinkable just two years ago. The poet Pandora, whose work is featured in two new anthologies of Burmese verse, said all artistic expression — not just political writing — suffered under the previous system. “The censors were not writers, they were bureaucrats. When a line or word was cut, oh, my God, we lost the essence of what we were trying to convey,” she said. “Now, administratively at least, we are free.”
Myanmar has always been a nation of readers — the literacy rate is nearly 90% — and the changes have led to a publishing boom. The country now boasts more than 200 newspapers and magazines, most of them privately owned and operated, and publishers have released a flood of books in these heady days, including political treatises, prison memoirs and poetry anthologies. “There’s a real hunger to read following the changes,” Pandora said.
Previously banned works are now available on the country’s bookshelves, and the image of Aung San Suu Kyi — once the ultimate taboo — is ubiquitous on book jackets and magazine covers. Low Internet penetration and the high cost of cellphones have kept the printed word dominant, and the sidewalks of Yangon are crammed with bookstalls and newsstands doing brisk business. Reporters Without Borders elevated the country 18 places to 151st in its latest Press Freedom Index, just behind Iraq and Singapore.
Still, restrictions exist. Some old laws remain on the books, giving the government the power to crack down on writing it doesn’t like — commentary on the country’s ethnic conflicts is considered extremely sensitive — exposing writers and publishers to punishment for crossing red lines that have merely shifted rather than disappeared altogether.
The 1962 Printers and Publishers Registration Law requires publications to apply for licenses that narrowly dictate what subjects they’re allowed to cover, such as entertainment or news. In January, the government shut down the fashion magazine Hnyo for running photos of scantily clad models, which the authorities said overstepped the bounds of its license. This month, Google said that the email accounts of journalists covering Myanmar had been hacked by “state-sponsored attackers.”
“We’re in a transition period. The new freedoms can still be withdrawn,” said Kunt Myu, head of Mya Nanda Book, an independent publishing house.
Whatever the future holds, the psychological effects of four decades of censorship and repression will not vanish overnight. Free of their external shackles, writers fret that they have internalized the restrictions of the past, leading to unnecessary caution and self-censorship. “Burmese writers have a censor sitting at a desk in our brains,” said U Pe Myint, a prize-winning novelist and translator.
Self-censorship was just one topic at the festival, held at a hotel overlooking bucolic Inya Lake. The atmosphere was both celebratory and cautiously optimistic. Young poets shouted verse composed on smartphones to rapt crowds in small anterooms, while in the main ballroom intellectual heavyweights like the British historian Timothy Garton Ash and the Burmese writer and former political prisoner Ma Thida discussed the limits of free speech.
The biggest draw was Aung San Suu Kyi, also a noted author, who gave a talk about the impact of literature on her life. There were some light moments, such as when she admitted to reading all of the Harry Potter books. (“When people talk about my courage, I think to myself, ‘They don’t know anything about Harry Potter.’”) But she also noted the influence of her favorite authors, George Eliot and Victor Hugo, whose Jean Valjean character from “Les Misérables” she called a “true revolutionary.”
The festival’s venue was across the placid lake from the villa in which she spent 15 years under house arrest. During the dark days of her detention there, she read prison memoirs to bolster her spirits. Now, she spoke as an elected leader in a country whose proud literary tradition is reviving.
The only regret for Myanmar’s best-known writer and lover of books? Her duties as a lawmaker interfere with her reading time. “I’ve had to wade through not terribly exciting documents,” she said. “All of you who have the time and leisure to read, please take advantage of it.”