I’m a fly in the kitchen, buzzing
on the boundary of a blind wall.I’m a chicken under mother’s wing,
confined to the narrows of a wattle.I’m a dove on the street of Yangon,
jailed in the cage of inhumanity.I’m the water flowing in Mayu river,
missing my partner: Air.I’m a human in the universe,
denied the most basic rights.I’m someone I’m afraid of.
The above lines were written by a young Rohingya community development worker, Zaki Ovais. It’s his first-ever poem. The last line might be considered his initiatory moment as a poet and was written after an exercise prompt to consider the lyric “I.” Interestingly, in the poem, Zaki’s “I” finds itself confined/jailed/denied, reflecting the recent history of the Rohingya, one of the most persecuted ethnic minorities on the planet.
Around one million Rohingya refugees are currently based at the camps near Cox’s Bazar, barely surviving, stateless and traumatized. The camps are huge (there are more than twenty of them), the size of a small city.[1] The area is named after Captain Hiram Cox who, working for the East India Company between 1797 and 1799, assigned “waste lands” to thousands of “emigrants and refugees.” For over two hundred years, the Rohingya have been forcibly moved out of their homes in Rakhine State. Their latest exodus from the homeland, since violence erupted in 2017, led by the Burmese military (Tatmadaw) and Burmese Buddhist monks, looks to be prolonged with no real or safe plan for repatriation.
The camps are so crowded many can’t even get in. Two hundred thousand Rohingya are, at the time of writing this, stranded in a deadly no-man’s-land, or genocide zone, between Myanmar and Bangladesh, frequently killed or arrested by the Burmese army.[2] Cox, in first initiating the camps, said he wanted to create a “choky” (prison) for those arriving from Rakhine. If you visit the camps today, despite the large presence of INGOs (international nongovernmental organizations), you encounter a people quarantined, living in a dust-dry, soil-eroding land, their huts dangerously balanced, airless in the boiling sun. As if this isn’t enough: the Rohingya—those who have managed to escape—have fled torched homes, escaped brutal killings, rape, torture. They are the survivors.
At the end of April of this year, Bangladeshi/French poet-editor Shehzar Doja and I arrived in Cox’s to work with twenty refugees, in what I was surprised to find out were the first creative writing workshops facilitated in the camps. Two days of sessions were, we decided, to be themed around imagery and metaphor, with additional materials and writing exercises involving repetition, ekphrasis, simile, the importance of breath and sound. We discussed imagistic poems by Ezra Pound (“Station in a Metro”), H. D. (“Evening”), T. S. Eliot (“Preludes”), Tomas Transtrὃmer (“Tracks”). We discussed Mina Loy (“Poetry is prose bewitched, the sound of an idea”), Emily Dickinson (“Tell it slant”). We even drew upon the use of anaphora by poets writing in Burmese in Myanmar.
Most things worked, but a lot of the first hour, as with any creative writing workshop, was about developing trust and sharing ideas about what the function of poetry could be. There were other, more spontaneous moments. Fifteen minutes into the first day, call to prayer sounded over the camp speakers, and I asked the poets to write something about the texture of the muezzin’s voice or the silences between his recitation of the Koran. I remember reentering the room after a break on the second day to see our twenty participants huddled over Shehzar’s phone with their pens in hand as he blasted out instrumental music over the border camp traffic. While many of the attendees had an interest in poetry, others, like Zaki, were entirely new to it. All of the participants were amazingly attentive, asking questions, reciting and workshopping early drafts, testing their range. In Rakhine State, Myanmar, from which most of the poets in the book have been cast out, education has been interrupted or denied.
The poems we received from the workshops yielded poems about some of the worst human rights abuses committed this century. As I have remarked elsewhere, Rohingya poetics is frequently tough, direct, activist.[3] The way in which the workshop participants were able to speak/write out the unspeakable, while attempting to develop a sensual awareness in their writing, really astonished me. Shehzar and I quickly realized that the attendees weren’t just making history by being part of the poetry sessions, they wanted to mark history. Certainly, in a world gone peculiarly quiet about the fate of the Rohingya, we weren’t about to stand in the way, editorially, and many explicit poems have made it into a selection of poems (the initial Rohingya poetry book in English).[4] Here are a few excerpts from longer poems that still disturb me, combining imagery with direct statement:
I am burnt alive in the bonfire
By those I relied on the most.
Let the fire incinerate me. —Ro Anamul Hasan, “Being Rohingya”
Snipers shoot father and mother,
drag their little son along the streetSave me
—Thida Shania, “Save Me”
What do you feel
when you see your sibling’s corpse
inside a mass grave?—Maung Hla Shwe, “My Arakan”
Many of the poems in I am a Rohingya read so powerfully they do what the American poet Forrest Gander recently mentioned to me: they tear (interestingly, the refrain, answering the unanswerable question posed above by Maung Hla Shwe’s is: “My Arakan torn / to pieces”).
Other poets sought to write more metaphorically without diminishing a collective, activist sensibility—tearing as something physical, the Rohingya severed from their homeland, as here:
The Cut Bud
Grandma planted
a seed. A few days later
It turned into twin plants.They grew together
Like old friends.
Green leaves
Like butterfly wings.*
My drunk uncle came,
Cut one bud(Breath in silence)
*
The other lives—
a bud bearing white flowers
Beside the cut bud.Ahhhhhhhh!
No scope for friendship.
—Ro Mehrooz, “The Cut Bud”
Prior to the workshops and for a year before the book was even in sight, every few weeks I would phone a Rohingya poet and offer editorial suggestions on his poems. Though we have included poems in Burmese and three songs in Rohingya, like many of the poets in the anthology, Mayyu Ali has chosen to write in English.[5] He hopes to disseminate his work to a wider audience and is improving his own range of language poem-to-poem. But Mayyu is more than a poet. He’s a community-builder, someone who initiated the Youth Empowerment Centre in Cox’s Bazaar. He is on the editorial board of the new online poetry magazine the Rohingya Art Garden, a vital source for Rohingya poetics to develop and build.[6] These are both community-driven platforms, self-started and beyond the reach of (I)NGOs despite working from inside the camps. They exist because of collective, activist organization and sheer willpower, what some people term “mobilization.” Imagine mobilizing inside the largest refugee camp in the world. Not only are these organizations unfunded, relying on dedication from the people who started them, they also have to be wary of internal political factions within the camps themselves. As it turned out, Mayyu couldn’t participate in the workshops despite being a catalyst figure in helping us set them up.
Mayyu’s poems frequently prefer statements over images, as he once explained to me during one of our first conversations: “We need activism in our poems so we can tell the world about our suffering.” Mayyu and I have had important discussions about how an activist poetics might both “show and tell” in documenting the atrocities, and this was something Shehzar and I were keen to develop in the camps. For Mayyu, activism comes first and imagery takes a back seat, he has said in a recently published interview.[7] Who am I to tell him otherwise, despite believing (for my own writing at least) in a confluence of both image and statement? In the week before attending the workshops in April, several Rohingya poets shared images of one of their countrymen’s body parts stuffed into a plastic bin, killed at the border by helicopter fire.
How do you encourage imagery to a people who have seen too much? Before the opening day of workshopping in Cox’s, Shehzar and I walked through the camps, hearing from schoolteachers who told us children as young as four and five were drawing pictures of homes burning or helicopters shelling bullets. There’s a large orphan population in the camps. Everybody we spoke to had either lost someone or known others who had been killed.
During the workshops, the word community came up a lot and many poems speak of collective experience, often using the word Rohingya in the poem or the title of the work. A collective, community-rooted, peaceful approach feels key to Rohingya’s looking to emerge from the awfulness of their recent history. In Cox’s Bazar, it can be said that peaceful social forms of protest are remarkable in themselves as the community continues to survive such basic conditions. I fear whether the strength of the Rohingya community can hold while the might and vested self-interests of other countries (including my own in the UK) decide over their fate of a people who are, as Mayyu has written in a poem, “just trying to survive.” How long can you imprison an already traumatized people? My sense is that the Myanmar government are hoping the camps will turn violent so they can refuse to accept the Rohingya back into their homeland of Rakhine. China, too, is making good money out of the crisis. Already at Mae Sot the casinos have moved in. Somehow the Rohingya community are homeless, struggling on and holding firm.
I remember clearly the first conversation I had with Mayyu back in June, 2018. I was in Paris for my wife’s birthday, walking through the Place Vendôme. Halfway through, the signal jammed. I took a moment to dive into a fancy French hotel and use their washroom. In the chandeliered lobby, the tennis player/model Maria Sharopova glided past me, and Mayyu was suddenly back on the line. I could hear children crying in the background and felt vaguely ashamed. Previously I’ve written about how a consideration of the self and the other through poetics (or, better for me, poethics) might contest the Levinisian mantra of how the self and the other are the same. Sitting in my comfortable seat of western privilege, I can be of use to Rohingya poets as a conduit, an editor, an enabler, a listening ear. When Shehzar and I visited the camps, we arrived in a 4×4 car. We taught the workshops in a two-floored hut beautifully designed by one of Bangladesh’s top architects. And when the sessions were over, we sailed out again before sunset, back to our fancy hotels.
During our final hour in the refugee camps, we asked all the poets involved to send us a few poems, envisioning a pamphlet of work to be published, perhaps forty pages. The turnaround was tight; we had a week to edit anything that would come through. Around the time of the deadline, sometimes ten or more poems would be sent through in a single day (I remember one e-mail subject header: “Hello, James, from the world’s largest refugee camp”). Some poems were submitted a little too late, and we simply ran out of time to include them. One of these is a young man called Farooq (not the Farooq of the poem below) whom I’d like to mention here. He repeatedly thanked me for running the workshop as he was saying goodbye, weeping openly. The idea of “rejecting” these poets who have been rejected by their country, and who have lost everything, troubles me. Another poet we couldn’t include said he had seen his family massacred in front of him but said he wasn’t able to write the poem just yet.
In the final shakedown of the book, I can see how the poets have taken in many elements of the workshop, still speaking with a strong sense of community, but also allowing the lyric “I” to reflect individual experience. A few of the poems were distinctly metamorphic, writing through the self:
My life
Here’s my life in brief . . .
I was a frog in a well,
A prisoner in the jail of fresh air.
In the dark, dark cosmos,
No days, just nights, nights.A small cormorant survives
the genocidal waves
by being flung, crashing
into the world’s strangeness.Storm of racism, of hate —
This is my life.Just like an action movie
In which you are the gangster.
Just like an actor who cannot discover his lines.In Arakan, they kill and bury you
under the treasure of human rights.—Farooq Pacifist
The work was edited, sent back for approval with comments directed to the poets themselves, an extension of the workshop process. While many of the poets in the camps don’t have pens or paper, fortunately for us, all seemed to have cell phones. From the amount of poems sent back and realizing their quality, we soon learned I am a Rohingya was bigger than we first thought, book-length and publishing ten of the poets from the workshops, plus Rohingya folk songs sung by local singer Jani Alam. (There are three songs in the anthology, in Rohingya language, and Shehzar is creating an archive of these.)[8]
Before arriving in Bangladesh, Mayyu also put us in touch with Rohingya poets from the wider diaspora, living as far away as the Middle East and Canada. Some are students who have somehow escaped (not all Rohingya were poor before arriving at Cox’s—though many were and certainly are now—some had good houses, cars, connections). A couple of students included in our book are studying in secret. Students with changed names, fearing that one day they will be caught, recognized as Rohingya. When we met a few of them soon after arriving in Dhaka, it had to be in a safe space, discreet, away from the one surveying glance that could ruin their lives. It was extremely brave of them to meet us at all, never mind send poems for the book. Most of the work came out of the workshops themselves, but the Rohingya diaspora alongside them are key voices. They might be seen as the lucky ones, perhaps, disconnected from enduring actual day-to-day hardships in the camps. And yet, still, they are trying to come to terms with living outside. One such poet, Yasmin Ullah (one of the few who wishes to be known by her real name in the book), combines her studies in political science with being a “social justice activist,” serving as the president of the Rohingya Human Rights Network in Canada, a nonprofit group led by activists advocating for and raising public awareness of the Rohingya genocide. Yasmin was one of the major discoveries for the book and represents an often-denied female voice.[9] Rohingya society still has major issues of gender inequality, many of which are, or so I found when I worked in Yangon and Mon State, embedded in Myanmar society, too (women as wives, mothers, all-too-frequently illiterate and often denied any access to education). Shehzar and I have spoken of the need to have workshops run by women in the camps and are working with partners (like Friendship, who enabled these first workshops), plus educators in the field who already work with Rohingya women, arranging scholarships so they can receive an education.[10]
In the camps I heard stories of how women haven’t been able to sign off even the most basic treatment for medicine without a male voice present. This simply has to change, and to some extent it already is changing. While visiting the Friendship health and counseling facilities, I witnessed how they have built up an impressive trust with female patients, offering counseling and treatments without men being present. Many women are, of course, newly widowed. The Myanmar Tatmadaw (who, despite Aung San Su Kyi’s deplorable silence, essentially still run the country), targeted men and boys. Nobody knows the exact death counts, but conservative estimates are that twenty-five thousand Rohingya have been killed by the Burmese government.[11] Of the survivors, females suffered some of the worst abuse. A few months before visiting the camps, I watched two videos of women giving testimonies. One was of a women repeatedly raped by the military after seeing the men in her family brutally killed. She talked without stopping for breath, hurriedly wiping away tears. When the interviewer asked her thoughts about going back to Myanmar, she replied: “Better if you could give me poison. And I die here.”
I am a Rohingya includes three strong female voices, one of whom provides, at six pages, the longest poem in the book—an incredibly sustained piece of writing called “Birth” by Yasmin Ullah. Here is an excerpt:
I was born of tired backs, exhausted bodies,
looking for provisions
so hard to come by,
walking miles carrying water
to makeshift huts,
without help—
water or mud,
you have to drink to survive.I was born of empty stomachs,
tongues dried and parched lips,
from starvation of food and water
for months on end.I was born of the forced crooked smile
blurred with tears,
the slow fade of resilience.I was born as one of the forgotten,
of those the world doesn’t quite remember.
But at least I was born,
so you can hear me speaking up,
so you, the world, can listen.This could take generations to mend,
our losses are irreplaceable.
We taste fear in every breath.
It’s not enough to hope for
the generosity of helping hands
or consoling voices,
I want the ears of love,
the heart of justice
that believes
that as much we are victims
there is potential in our social contribution.
There is more to being Rohingya than exodus.
The last stanza is purposefully direct, a poetics of saying over showing, different from some of the more imagistic poems emerging from the camp workshops. It shows how both kinds of approaches to writing can be effective for Rohingya poets. Yasmin is a poet ready to take back the power, addressing us directly, wanting “the ears of justice to listen.” There’s no needing or asking, there’s no plea here. The poem is more insistent than this and uses repetition cleverly as insistence.
Somehow, despite the heavy odds, Rohingya poetics has decided to move beyond hoping hopelessly complicit governments will change their lives. They have decided to change it themselves, creatively, peacefully, but with an activist charge that is rare and without artifice. During my time working with Rohingya poets, I have witnessed their “potential contribution” turn into a remarkable one. The Rohingya voice has emerged from under the extreme weight of deep tragedy. They are speaking up with great courage “so you, the world, can listen.”
11 May 2019
Note: All poems in this selection are published in I am a Rohingya, Arc Publications, July 2019, edited by James Byrne and Shehzar Doja, ISBN: 9781911469698.
Notes
[1] The camps are actually situated in the Teknaf and Ukhiya Districts of Bangladesh, close to the town of Cox’s, but most people refer to the area of the camps as Cox’s Bazaar.
[2] Various reports of this have appeared in the media, emphasizing the precariousness of Rohingya trying to flee Myanmar but with nowhere to go: https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/rohingya-trapped-inside-a-genocide-zone-26095
[3] Published in Modern Poetry in Translation, Spring, 2019 (No. 1)
[4] I am a Rohingya. Todmordern, England: Arc Publications, July, 2019
[5] Rohingya is a language written in Arabic or English script, a variation of Chittagonian dialect and Bengali-Assamese, some two hundred years old. Mostly oral, it is rarely written down.
[6] www.facebook.com/HeartbeatsOfRohingya/
[7] Published in World Literature Today (spring), April, 2019.
[8] www.youtube.com/channel/UC3TVF-OPXw7K5WaRsglO2AA
[9] Disappointingly, the workshops were entirely male but for a Rohingya-speaking transcriber of the songs—we tried to receive female participants but were told women wouldn’t attend the workshops if men were also attending them. Some women in the camps have been prevented by men from working with NGOs in the past.
[10] www.friendship.ngo includes details of the “Learning Centre” where we ran the workshops, as well as several other Rohingya initiatives.
[11] www.thedailystar.net/news/frontpage/killing-rohingyas-death-toll-could-be-over-10000-1622392