On February 1, 2021, the military forces of Myanmar deposed the democratically elected members of the National League for Democracy, which had won 83% of the country’s parliamentary seats in the previous election. Protests erupted across the country in response to the coup, and what started out as peaceful resistance quickly turned violent as the junta worked to suppress the demonstrations. In this following essay and dispatch, Asymptote correspondent Lucas Stewart provides a delineation of what has happened in the year since, and examines the place of literature during such times of suppression. In conversations with Yu Ya, whose prolific writing career follows that of her father’s and uncle’s (both of whom were writers imprisoned under the former regime), this following piece puts a finger to human pulse of political unrest. Yu Ya’s quotations were co-translated by Stewart and Eaindra Ko Ko.
My balcony in Yangon had overlooked Sule Pagoda, an ancient stupa that once lay beyond the limits of the old city of Dagon, but now lights up the heart of Myanmar’s largest metropolis. From there, on the sixth day of the coup—a Saturday afternoon—we saw some of the first public outpourings of anger. Security forces, which had secured the City Hall opposite us and other strategic buildings in the early days of conflict, tumbled out; grey-uniformed, some with riot shields, those without a step behind them, they fanned from one side of the road to the other. An officer spoke into a radio, pointed one way north and then south and then back north again, before eventually settling on the east side of the pagoda, closest to the City Hall’s main entrance. There was a stand-off but no carnage that day, nor for the first two weeks. In that time, what had been a hundred protestors grew to hundreds of thousands, many coming from elsewhere, but always heading towards Sule Pagoda, the symbolic crux of protest. Some describe it like a carnival—which was true, I guess, at first. Music blasted out from overloaded speakers strapped to trucks. Sellers sold whatever, food, drink, National League for Democracy (NLD) merchandise. Volunteers picked up the debris left behind as the crowd moved on. Cars bashed their horns as they passed City Hall, knowing the soldiers within could hear their disgust. A neighbour, who remembered the midnight of 1988 when perhaps 300 or more protestors were shot at Sule Pagoda, told me this time if felt different. But that was in the early days.
Among the millions of people who woke up alongside me on February 1 to a blacked out and disconnected country was Yu Ya: prominent young short story writer, and friend of several years since we worked together on Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds, an anthology bringing short stories from Myanmar’s censored ethnic nationality languages to light for the first time. She later worked for BBC Media Action as a scriptwriter, contributing to inclusive, working-class voices radio programmes such as The Teacup Diaries.
Like many in Myanmar, she is no stranger to military coups, nor to the violence and oppression that follows the ascent to illegal power. Min Lu, Yu Ya’s father as well as a leading poet and author, was jailed in the aftermath of the 1988 revolution for penning ‘What’s Going On?’—a satirical, sarcastic poem attacking the then-illegal regime’s murders and maladministration. The poem witnessed a revival in the weeks following the 2021 coup. So now, what is going on in Myanmar? READ MORE…
