They came for Zargana after midnight. He cannot have been too surprised — he knew the crackdown had begun, and he had made no secret of his support for the marching monks.
In easier times, he had an ability to pull crowds second only to Aung San Suu Kyi’s. A celebrated comedian and poet — whose real name is Maung Thura; his stage name means ‘tweezers” and refers to his initial training in dentistry — Zargana devised close-to-the-knuckle jokes that were spread — are still spread — by word-of-mouth throughout the country. ‘He is very inventive,” says Htein Lin, an artist who himself served six-and-a-half years in prison (on false charges).
‘Zargana’s jokes always reflect current conditions in the country and are new and up to date. Other comedians just repeat old jokes,” he adds. That explains why Zargana is detained now and has been detained before — in the protests of 1988, the last time the people of Burma rose to call for democracy in such numbers, and then in 1990, after he impersonated General Saw Maung, head of the state law and order restoration council, the then newly formed military junta, at a rally of thousands. That time he got five years, several months of which were spent in solitary confinement. Reading and writing were banned, so he scratched poems on the floor of his cell with a piece of broken pottery, and committed them to memory
Poems — words — have power in Burma and the military authorities realise it.
International PEN, the global writer’s association, has a writers in prison committee, led by Sara Whyatt, which is currently campaigning for the release of nine writers serving sentences ranging from seven to 21 years. Among them is U Win Tin, a journalist, who was for years editor-in-chief of a Mandalay-based newspaper called Hanthawaddy, until it was shut down by General Ne Win for running too many articles critical of his regime. In 1988 he established, briefly, the Burmese Writers’ Association; from the beginning he was a leading figure in the National League for Democracy, and an important adviser to Suu Kyi. For these crimes, and ostensibly for harbouring a girl who had had an illegal abortion, he was sentenced to 20 years; he has now been imprisoned for 18, since 1989.
He too has gone to great lengths to keep writing, making ink out of brick powder from the walls of his cell, writing with a pen made from a bamboo mat; now 77 years old, he has, according to PEN, had two heart attacks, lost most of his teeth, and is suffering from diabetes, spondylitis, and a hernia.
Burma once had the freest and liveliest press in Asia. But two years after Ne Win’s coup d’etat in 1962, newspapers were nationalised. Ever since, official news has had only a glancing relationship to reality, while censorship has had a great impact on the nature and ambition of Burmese letters.
Yet the regime has not been able to dent the liveliness of Burma’s literary culture. Because of a system of education run through the monasteries, literacy levels — unlike in many similarly totalitarian states in the developing world — are high. The educational system is also gender-blind; there are many women writers, and much is written by doctors, who have greater access than lay people to extremes of experience across the country.
There are fewer novels than there might otherwise be — it is too dispiriting and expensive for everyone involved if a novel is banned — but there is a thriving culture of monthly literary magazines, full of short stories, poems, cartoons, passed hand to hand in tea shops, or borrowed from lending libraries.
The temptation for everything to have a defiant message is great. Often the only way to do this is to develop subtle allegories that can fox the censors, but be understood by the readers. But in the paranoid world of censorship, anything can happen. According to a 1994 piece in the Independent, the word ‘sunset” was often banned in books because it could be construed as an attack on Ne Win, whose name means ‘brilliant as the sun”.
Another method to circumvent censorship is to rely on puns and secondary meanings. Burmese words often have similar shapes, so all it takes is a subtle change of consonant, or vowel, or tone, or even one small mark, for a phrase to change its meaning completely. So, the recent bank advertisement ‘Ma su naing hma, hsin-yeh-meh [Only if you cannot save, will you be poor]”, can become, with the removal of one dash above the yeh (in the Burmese alphabet): ‘Only when Ma Su [an affectionate name for Suu Kyi] wins, will [the army] step down.”
Zargana slotted himself into a Burmese tradition of a’nyeint, a form of cabaret that includes the figure of the court jester — the only person, when Burma had a monarchy, allowed to criticise the king. In so doing, Zargana was able to push lese-majeste even further because of his skill with puns.
It is thought that Zargana is being held, with many others, at a former racetrack while the authorities decide what to do with them. A few have been released, but Zargana has so far been too high-profile a scalp to let go. —