Different, Similar, Same

"What makes you miss your native country the most ?  Adisa Basic, my fellow writer, a poet and a journalist from Sarajevo asked me.

‘Almost everything’, I abruptly responded.

It was true. In America, daily routines are arranged systematically, allowing people to have carefree lives. The exhausting tasks that in our country (Burma) take hours to finish can here be completed by just a push to button. Whenever I think about these material developments that make life easier, I cannot help but remember my people who have to struggle in their everyday lives.  With respect to the spiritual growth of the people here, who learn that all people are worthy of respect, I was bothered when thinking about how our people are not allowed to feel empathy very much, because of the very demanding and troublesome daily struggles in poverty.  When crossing the thick layer of snow here, my mind would travel back to my native land, then in scorching heat. My homesickness or nostalgia was mostly based in the differences between the two respective countries.

New Orleans, however, changed my way of missing it.  Shady, with large green trees that  caused me to wipe sweat drops from my neck as I was walking,  here was the same air as the air of Burma. Most of the native flowers and herbs are also familiar in Burma. The jasmine shrubs blossoming in their whitest form were everywhere.   The blazing ground and the cool aromatic breeze provided the closest synonyms for Burma’s atmosphere that I have felt in a long time. Forget-me-nots, oleanders, mabolo trees, crotons and even the geographical surroundings made me feel as if this was Burma.

Another coincidence yet is the fact that New Orleans was tragically hit by the Hurricane     Katrina,  which arrived in August of 2005, at the rate of 175 mph.  It left 2000 people dead and 700,000 homeless.  I was told that the overall loss is as much as $81 billions.

On April 8, our ‘Writers in Motion’ group was scheduled to meet with John Biguenet, a professor at Loyola University as well as a writer. John explained to us in detail what they experienced during Katrina Hurricane.  Mentioning the inadequate aid and the delays in the rescue processes, he said people felt the former president Bush’s administration was to be blamed.  Victims were deprived of proper medicines and treatments. The mercury-contaminated tap-water led to thirst. Schools were interrupted for 6-7 weeks. 2,500 school children had to wait on the streets to attend class.  In a dramatic story he retold the nightmarish scenes of the crisis

That same afternoon we visited the hurricane-hit area on a Disaster Bus Tour. The woman who was our tour-guide noted that some shattered buildings were yet to be reconstructed.  But the formerly catastrophic area gave me a certain strange feeling.  The buildings, which were somewhat luxurious for our country’s standard, were standing neatly along the street. I witnessed families, gathering and sitting on benches beneath the shady trees in front of their houses, avoiding the scorching heat. Children were riding their bikes. People sitting under the trees waved their hands at every tour bus. The tour guide was briefing us in a style that went something like, ‘Do you see the man wearing white T-shirt and waving to us?  His father and daughter were killed by Katrina in that very house.’  After passing every thirty or forty houses, it was likely that we would witness a damaged roof-top or a collapsed wall, guided by the orderly voice: ‘Please look at that house. It couldn’t be rebuilt till now’.  Everybody in the bus sighed.

As for me, I was sitting stiff in my bus seat while my mind was in turmoil. It travelled back to my native land, hit by lethal cyclone Nargis, and to its victims.  We had landed in the Day Da Ye Township, a week after Nagis and witnessed many floating corpses in the river, for the death toll had been over 130,000. The air stank of rotten flesh. To reach the village we were headed for, we volunteer rescuers had to row the boat in a narrow creek that had been blocked by dead bodies.  Some of my companions had to clear the way by pushing them with bamboo sticks, thearing holes in the corpses’ decaying skin. The villagers cried and greeted us as they saw the approaching aid, bringing food and medications. We were the very first rescuers to reach them, 8 days after the storm. The whole village had been swept over by the sea water. The drinking well was contaminated by salt and by corpses, while extreme winds and waves followed, leaving nothing behind, not even to drink.  I could not bear thinking about how they survived such a catastrophe of hunger, let alone thirst.

John’s words appeared to my mind. ‘Katrina hit on Tuesday. There was no aid available, or rescuing underway, until Tuesday.’ A picture of the thousands of books damaged as waters entered into his house was displayed in a slide-show on his computer screen. John was explaining us emotionally about the circumstances during and after the disaster. That was the most agonizing period in his life, he told us.  Instead of his gleaming eyes, a pair of faint-yet-hopeful eyes appeared in my memory.

That was on the remarkable May 15, a dozen days after cyclone Nagis hit, on one of our typical every-three-days visits to the stricken area, as we traveled to another village in Day Da Yal township.  While we volunteers were carrying rice, potatoes, medicines and clothes from a chartered car to a motor-boat, a woman with faint eyes and messy hairs approached me timidly.

‘Where did you plan to go, dear?’ she asked.  I told her of our destination.

‘Were these items intended for the cyclone victims?’ she asked again.

‘Of course’ I assured her.

‘Which ministry you are from?’

I told her that we aren’t connected to any branch of government; that we are just a  volunteer group, searching for local and outside donations and visiting the victims’ sites in person, providing basic aid face to face. She was simply unable to conceal her surprise in her eyes. After a while, I heard her timid voice.

‘Would you come to our village too?’ She pleaded.

‘Did your village receive any aid?’ I asked.

‘Only once’, she muttered. 

‘What did you get?’ I asked with hope.



They were hungry

 I found myself covering my mouth with my hand to keeping from crying out, for the young woman’s answer made me almost mad.

‘Two days ago, drinking bottles were dropped from a helicopter. We had to rush to pick up one, in a stampede, exhausted. When I got the bottle, I emptied it in one gulp.  After the helicopter disappeared, we counted the bottles. Our village’s quota of drinking water was 23 bottles altogether’, she said.

.I have not told my experiences to John or to my companion writers. As a matter of fact, many people from all over like to learn from America, one of the best developed countries of the world.  My native country is a poverty-stricken nation where people are nearly dying of starvation in spite of its rich natural resources. It is the poorest developing country in the world as far as education, healthcare and many other social aspects are concerned .  

So, in matters of life and death, and with similar situations on hand, why was the response from the leaders of two such different countries somehow almost the same?  If we can see behind the "almost the same", we might find an answer in the similarity of power, which regulated the speed of response in both places.

Catastrophes and natural disasters are never good to witness. The suffering in New Orleans was lighter, ours was deeper, and such comparison makes Burma look worse. I know that. But I just couldn’t help to make the comparison anyhow.

Khet Mar.



Birmingham, 11 April, 2011
translated from the Burmese by Tazar



Damage in Burma 1



Damage in New Orleans







Damage in Burma 2



 

Reconstruction in New Orleans





Reconstruction in Burma 1



Reconstruction in Burma 2



For more writing on and by Khet Mar go to Sampsonia Way, the magazine of the City of Asylum in Pittsburgh, and to The Irrawaddy. For extensive coverage of Nargis, including some of the events and people described above, go to The New Yorker. The Burmese version of this piece can be found at MoeMaka Multimedia .





Extracts from Adisa Basic’s coverage of the ‘Writers in Motion’ tour

for the weekly magazine “Slobodna Bosna”  (Sarajevo, Bosna-Herzegovina),

dated  04/07/2011

WAR TOURISM: A BLOODY PAST CONVERTED INTO BUSINESS

[…]  

The first stop is the surreal town of Gettysburg, the place where the biggest battle of the Civil War took place a century and a half ago, and which today lives comfortably off its past. A million visitors annually visit its National War Monument, the former battlefields teeming with tourists having themselves be photographed in historical uniforms, as well as communicating with the spirits of the dead warriors.

[…]

In the stream of visitors coming through Gettysburg there are virtually no black faces. The reason is, apparently, that the majority of the visitors here come to gaze with nostalgia at the suffering of the heroic Southern troops, ignoring the fact that it was the Southerners who put in place the slavery upon which their economy was based. Peter Carmichael, professor of history at the local university tells me: “This place has always provoked lively controversies; people interpret history according to their own ideas, they romanticize the past, and they tell stories the way it suits them. Mostly people imagine gentlemanly battles of volunteers giving lives for their ideals.  The fratricidal slaughter, in which men gauged out each other’s eyes fighting face to face, or how they starved —that does not get talked about. Precious sources of facts from that period are the letters the soldiers wrote, and which show not the heroic but the tragic side of war. “

According to the Civil War specialist Carmichael, many people appear to still accept the Southern ideology: “I really have heard much here about how this is really a celebration of the Southern troops... take the monument to General Lee, the commander of the enemy Southern army—it's ten times more visited, not to mention grander, than the monuments for the fallen Northern soldiers. I often hear people commenting Lee's greatest defeat by saying:  “If only he would have done this or that, gotten here earlier, played the situation differently or estimated things differently.... “  And I ask myself whether they are conscious of what it is they are saying, whether they truly realize this means wishing that the South would have won and that we would today be living in two different American countries.  I'm not sure they understand the consequences of what they are saying....” says Prof. Carmichael with slow resignation.

He and his colleagues are indeed involved in ongoing debates about the war even today, hundred and fifty years later. For them this dialogue is an indispensible part of the American identity, even if the participants’ opinions about these fundamental questions can never reach a point of agreement.  At the same time there is the problem of the diverging interpretations of recent history—a problem that daily provokes bitter arguments in Bosna-Herzegovina.  Comments professor Kent Gramm, the author of a recent book the about major traumata of US history: “We live in a post-modern era but a whole generation of students is now raised within this postmodern perspective, in which history is simply a narrative shaped by whoever is (re)telling it.  The final consequence of such an approach is a complete relativization of everything from the past-- yet there were actual people who made a heroic effort so that our life today is what it is.  People fought here, as president Lincoln says in the Gettysburg address, for a government of the people, by the people, for the people.  When it’s necessary to confirm an undeniable historical fact, all we are left with are facts and historical data, nothing more.”

POST-CAPITALIST TOURIST TOURS    

The town of Gettysburg together with its National War Memorial complex may seem as a precarious place of militaristic pilgrimages, where assorted militant  inclinations come to the fore.  Yet it is interesting to see how, in being overtaken by consumerist kitsch, its martial air has gradually lightened.  There is barely a house which is not in one way or another tied to the Civil war. T-shirts with pictures of generals, uniforms of both warring sides, dress-up photo-stands, wax museums, the model of the most decisive battle of American history enacted by 120.000 miniature figurines….   In answer to my question whether it doesn’t seem tasteless to be merchandising trauma in this way and whether such war tourism (sometimes known as black tourism)  oughtn’t be avoided so as to retain a sense of piety,  the American writer Hugh Ferrer says:  “I  understand that this may seem strange to an outsider, but the economic aspect of war's heritage is in fact fundamentally American. The fate of the entire town rests on it, it lets people make a decent living-- and such entrepreneurial spirit is fundamentally in keeping  with the American culture and way of life.“

Indeed, Americans trade on trauma in this way even when it comes to much more recent events.  9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, too, are occasions for souvenirs, themes for movies and TV series;  both New York and NO offer special programs on the spots where catastrophes occurred:  “Soon after Katrina a bus tour operator started offering  visits through the hardest hit places.  There certainly were people who were upset and raised objections, but in the last analysis, and taking into account the economic aspect, perhaps a tour of such places can be both informative and sobering,  one of those life-altering experiences that mark us forever,“ says an American commentator.

From the Bosnian perspective such questions and perspectives may seem unusual, to say the least.  Though there now are groups of tourists who visit out country in search of Sniper Alley, “Sarajevo Rose,” the debris of The Tunnel or similar  places, the idea still strikes us as dark, morbid and somewhat offensive.  Yet it's interesting to see not only the different manner in which other cultures tackle their painful experiences but also how disagreement around large-scale historical questions is a more universal phenomenon than we may have thought.

[….]
Translated from the Croatian (nd)

Life goes on, or rather...

We tend to believe that things are replaceable. Our clothes last hardly a season or two, we throw away eternal lasting plastic dishes as soon as we quench our hunger. By tomorrow, everything we have will appear in a better, smaller, more perfect version. The only problem is that we slowly start to believe that people can be replaced much the same way. No doubt, our job could be certainly done equally well by many others. There are also those waiting in a line to jump into our lives, to love our lovers, take our kids to kindergartens, put their clothes into our closets.

Because whatever happens, life goes on… There are very few things so encouraging and yet so frightening as knowing that there is so much truth in a well-worn phrase that life goes on. Sometimes slowly and painfully, with hesitance, other times easily and energetically, without fear, but one stands up after falling down. And then what. We shake it off, count our loses and move on. We round off casualties to the nearest number (History rounds off skeletons to zero, a thousand and one is still only a thousand …). On anniversaries, we pay our respect, fix what’s broken and quickly put on the mask of normality. We hail the recovery as a sign of strength. Should a tear appear after some time, we’ll quickly wipe it away, secretly, with a feeling of uneasiness…

One can have a pleasant time in New Orleans oblivious of what happened here six years ago. The city has been given a makeover for tourists, it has put on a smile, opened its shops and restaurants, offering souvenirs, massage, sightseeing tours. New Orleans again gives what everyone has come for – a place of great and unlimited fun where one can smoke in bars, listen to the street music and be free. The Music Festival is on and the French Quarter is swarming with people. Old people dance passionately in front of the stage looking as if the faith in flower power has never died. A group of people are laughing under a small tree, talking shelter from the warm spring sun: they’re wearing cheerful red lobster hats on their heads. Beautiful students dressed up in a carefully careless way, moving their hips in the rhythm of the music. Life triumphs. There is no yesterday. We don’t look backwards.

This abundance of colors, aromas and sounds, a sunny day that always makes the world look more beautiful, all that fights against the gloomy thoughts and calls for oblivion. Amnesia is healing, it makes life easier. How else could we live. On a day like this, how would it feel to think about which one of those nice and hospitable people, a few years ago, was the first to make step towards bestiality, the first to pull the gun. And who was standing hopelessly on the roof, with no one to expect.

Blissful in our forgetfulness we taste gumbo, throw coins to street musicians, drink cocktails and expose our pale bodies to the warm sun for the first time this year. And everything is happening for the first time. It is the power of life that makes sprouts break through the earth in April which indeed is the cruelest month. The explosion of that magnificent cruelty is happening before our own eyes. All the way in the corner of the picture, a young mother with ample bust is feeding her baby on a lawn, they’re both unperturbed by the noisy clamor around them. Relentless and unstoppable, life goes on… The shivers going down the spine of a bystander may just be those of excitement over the power of nature and not of bewilderment and horror.