ko ko thett : A survival guide for exiles

 

 

 

 

 

• For the sake of your health, get out of bed first thing in the morning before tuning into news and gossip from your homeland. 
• Don’t collect anything you cannot carry with you — be prepared for a life on the move.
• Don’t expect your hosts to have ever heard of your country’s name. Don’t expect them to be responsible for your wellbeing. Expect them to give you a surname.
• Just as a second for gods is a life for humans, your one year in exile may translate into a lifetime in your homeland.
• Don’t burden yourself with the weight of the world. For some people exile means business. War and pandemic mean business. 
• Do not associate with exiles who will add more woes to yours, be them compatriots or foreigners. 
• Your nation-state you have clung to may go up in smoke overnight. The nation within you no one can destroy.
• Don’t be a trauma clown;  analysed and anonymised by anthropologists, turned into a feature by film makers or your suffering co-written and edited by privileged White writers whose lives have nothing in common with yours — tell your story in your own chosen form.*
• Revolution will not be less perfect without you. 
• Don’t look too far. Even the earth has her own fever, her own dukkah.
• Don’t look back — when you left it was spring. Today it might as well be a cold dark bitter winter. 

 

 

* For trauma clown by Vivek Shraya and how to beat it, see https://nowtoronto.com/culture/art-and-design/vivek-shraya-trauma-clown

 

 

 

ko ko thett is a poet, poetry editor for Mekong Review and poetry translator who works in Burmese and English. Bamboophobia, his most recent collection of poems, is out from Zephyr Press, MS, in 2022.