The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note by ko ko thett is part of her curriculum for her class at the University of San Francisco in their MFA in Writing Program.
I have solid proof that Bamboophobia,
published in 2022, was already set for publication in 2014, a year before my debut
in English, The Burden of Being Burmese, came out. Or was it that just
about half of the poems in what would become Bamboophobia existed in
2014? I am not sure.
What I recall is that, from 2011 to 2014,
I was a semi-starved student moving about from one district to another in
Vienna, Austria. I remember I had a copy of Lighthead (2010) by Terrence
Hayes with me at that time.
I had a fortune to get to know in the
flesh some other important poets in Vienna. Serbian poet Dragan Radovancevic
hosted me upon my arrival in Austria in 2011. Charles Bernstein, who came to
Vienna for a reading in 2012, fired me up to write ‘after the lie of art.’
Russian poet Dmitry Golynko (1969-2023), who then was in a residency in the
city, fascinated me— he read his secular poems the way a Russian Orthodox
priest would perform a liturgy. Golynko allegedly drank himself to death
following the Russian war in Ukraine.
Behind Bamboophobia, therefore, was
a series of influences, reckonings and happenings. I feared being associated
with bamboo or Burmese. Being pigeonholed or orientalised is one of the burdens
of being Burmese. Though the book ended up semi-bilingual Burmese-English, the
poem I wrote in Burmese and translated for the book were as remote from Burmese
as anything possible. I sounded disoriented, fragmented and unpredictable, as
it was my cyclothymic mental state of the time. Here I will discuss the making
of a few poems:
Pollen fever
Lived experience. By the time I arrived in
Austria I had been in Europe for more than a decade, and I never had pollen
fever. In the spring of 2013, I suddenly coughed incessantly. Teary-eyed and
runny- nosed, I could hardly sleep at night. I learned that my body became
extremely intolerant to birch pollen overnight. ‘Watchful tree’ is a folk name
for birch. ‘Pollen fever’ alludes to the plight of poor souls in the torture
chambers of the watchful CIA, SAC, ABSDF and the like. The reference to ‘indecent
infixes, triple consonants and doted vowels’ indicates that I was totally
frustrated with my inaptitude in German language. I couldn’t even explain
myself in Viennese German, though most people I met in Vienna could explain
themselves to me in Viennese English. What if one couldn’t understand one’s
tormentor’s tongue?
What really happened to me at Laizastrasse
Lived experience. Leyserstrasse, also
spelled Leiserstrasse, is in the 14th District of Vienna. It was my
sixth or seventh district in that city in two years. Laiza is the headquarters
of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), an ethnic insurgent group fighting for
autonomy in northern Myanmar.
‘I lost V, the glove for my left. V was thirteen-winter old. On the way
to look for her, I lost her identical twin, O, the glove for my right. O was
only a couple of weeks old.’
I kept losing gloves in the cold dark
winter of Vienna, usually one at a time. V is for vasemmisto, left or leftwing
in Finnish. O is for oikeisto, right or right wing in Finnish. And yes, I know
a little Finnish.
Let us suppose you love me
Lived experience. ’my phobia’ in the poem
refers to bamboophobia. By the time I wrote that I already moved out of
Leyserstrasse. I was in a student flat with a number of musically-inclined
German students, who were much younger and more joyous than me. Another German friend living in Yangon at
that time wrote to me about the relentless Yangon rain. There are several
references to torture in that piece, mainly inspired by the memoirs of Burmese
artist Htein Lin, who was thrown into a torture chamber, a bamboo coop, of a rebel group fighting
against the military tyranny in Myanmar in the early 90s. I learned that, in
the hands of a torturer, it’s expedient to exaggerate one’s suffering— the
tormented pain alleviates the torturer’s anguish. Exaggerating pain is what
poets and artists do professionally. No wonder Htein Lin managed to live to
tell one of the most savage torture stories of our times.
Funeral for an elephant
I wrote the piece in one sitting at a
Viennese cafe. After the passing of Nelson Mandela in December 2013, there was
so much heated discussion in South Africa as to how Mandela’s funeral should be
organised. Should Mandela’s body be embalmed? Should there be a mausoleum? The
irony is that Nelson Mandela, the greatest champion of Africa became a white
elephant, a possession that owners did not know how to dispose of, after his
death. But Mandela was never a white elephant, was he?
Swine
Lived experience. The poem was written in
Burmese as a later addition to Bamboophobia. It came about in 2017. By that
time, I was living in a garden in Sagaing, Myanmar, writing in Burmese. One day
I walked out of the garden and noticed the fully pregnant moon rubbing her
spine against a mango branch, like a pageant sow. What made that sow pregnant?
In Myanmar, neutering of young swines by castration is a common sight at pig
farms. Swine castration specialists, who went around town with their surgical
tools, looking for swines who wanted to be sterilised, are called ‘ဆရာ [saya]’
in Burmese. Saya derived from the sanskrit ācārya
or teacher. Any skilled person is a saya in Burmese as any skilled person is a
shifu/sifu in Chinese. A poet muse be a saya or sayama, a lady poet, of course.
Bloody tongue at language’s edge
Lived experience. That piece I wrote for
Language’s Edge, a panel discussion on literary translation at the
International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2016. Naturally
there is “Fish” [ငါး], my translation of one of the best-known
poems by the legendary Burmese poet Maung Chaw Nwe (1949-2002). Following is
the latest version of “Fish”.
Fish
All my
life
I
haven’t caught a single perch.
Look
now,
the
entire universe hangs
twitching
at the end of my line!
I reel
the damn whale in.
My
rod
bends
into a rainbow—
I turn
into a fish.
And lastly in a warm whirlpool bath, I
asked my lover, “What have I done to deserve this?”,
“Poetry” was her laconic answer.
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