A French journalist visits a rebel leader who has swapped words for guns in his fight against the military regime
In Burma, notes journalist Guillaume Pajot in an article for Revue XXI, “poetry is political”. It has been this way since the independence struggle against British colonialism at the end of the nineteenth century.
But until a few years ago, Burmese poet Maung Saungkha’s weapon of choice was his pen. In July 2024, when Pajot crossed rivers, hills and double backed across the Thai border to reach Saungkha’s new base in a hard-to-reach corner of the country’s rebellious east – in a province “as large as Belgium”, Pajot notes – the poet has a Glock pistol tucked into his belt.
A black and white photograph taken by local photographer Ta Mwe (not their real name) in a makeshift outdoor studio consisting of a white sheet hung in front of a thick forest of bamboo cane, shows an earnest man with short hair in military fatigues. Another snap shows him on his iPhone. He does not look like the author of poems Pajot describes as a “mash up of politics, art, Van Gogh, Cat Power, prank jokes and sex”. (Pajot provides a translated excerpt from one of Saungkha’s poems; there is no full translation of his works into French).
In February 2021, a Burmese general overthrew the civilian government of Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. Activists like Saungkha decided to throw in their lot with ethnic minority resistance groups, taking refuge with them in the Burmese borderlands. Inspired by Mao Zedong and Che Guevara, Saungkha set up the Burmese People’s Liberation Army (BPLA) fighting alongside the much-older Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA). The poet isn’t writing these days. “I’m too busy”, Saungkha sighs, gently kneading a lime like a stress ball between his fingers: “I don’t even have time to watch a movie on Netflix”.
On his desk, Pajot notes the commander’s Dell computer and a print-out list of the military regime’s local spies – complete with emails – taken in a recent rebel action. Behind him, Pajot notes what reads to Translator’s eyes like an affirmation statement, scrawled on a white board: “If you do what you believe in, you can’t blame anyone else”. Saungkha wears Ray-Ban sunglasses. Pajot’s article oscillates between such pithy observations and another, richly atmospheric, almost poetic register.
An ethnic Bamar, like most his followers – and like most of the country – Saungkha knows he is, to use his words “a stranger in the hills”. He comes from a different, flatter part of the country. His father ran a tea shop, we learn. Saungkha starts writing poetry in local papers as a teenager. Later, in the capital, he’s enrolled as a chemistry student, is an avid supporter of Aung San Suu Kyi and finds a readership for his poetic works on Facebook instead. In October 2015, he publishes a poem entitled Image, about an image of the President tattooed on his penis. A scandal. Saungkha is locked up.
By 2021, his political love affair with Aung San Suu Kyi is over and Saungkha is earning a living from a campsite. He narrowly escapes getting rounded up in the February 2021 coup. Others are less fortunate. A friend and fellow poet, K Za Win, is shot in the head. Saungkha’s writing simmers with rage at the military.
They love their country
Like they love taking
The pulp from a coconut
To save the juice for themselves
That’s how they are.
A former school director Saungkha knows has acid poured in his mouth. Saungkha shares the idea of setting up a guerilla organisation fighting alongside the KNLA on Facebook. His father thinks he’ll never go through with it. And yet. He sheds 15 kilograms. He cuts his hair. The BPLA is born.
There is a hint of revolutionary chic in the military encampment Pajot describes. A bookshelf juxtaposes a copy of Saungkha’s poems with Homer’s Odyssey and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. But the BPLA has flourished, getting by with financial support largely from the diaspora, and some slick marketing (BPLA T-shirts, for example). The fear of getting caught up in compulsory military service into the Burmese army has been a helpful recruiting sergeant for the BPLA, swelling its numbers. Pajot describes the most recent recruits as “large children with oily skin and shaved heads”.
But this isn’t a cosplay army. The military training is real. So is the war: the Chinese-made warplanes buzzing overhead, the bombs, the wounds, the death. Pajot leaves the camp at four in the morning and is taken through a town recently taken from the military regime by the rebels: “Houses torn into concrete confetti. An ambulance with its windows smashed in. A child’s bicycle askew on the road”.
“The poet speaks of victory”, Pajot writes, “but the only presence in this damned town now is fear”.
The full original article by Guillaume Pajot was published in French on 11 November 2024.
It is available here: ‘Le poète qui avait levé une armée’, RevueXXI.
RevueXXI is a French-language quarterly based in Paris.
Translator’s translation of Saungkha’s poetry from the French article.
