By Isabelle Ha Eav & Mayco Naing
Published by Héliotropismes, 2022 – Gift from the Artist –
Location: Studio Sakse – Chiang Mai, Thailand
Poems and Photographs witnesses of the coup
Burma Spring presents 14 Burmese and Rohingya poets and 6 photographers, all exiled, imprisoned, or murdered by the military since February 2021. Their works are testimonies shot through with astonishment, anger and determination.
“Authoritarian rulers the world over have demonstrated time and again their holy terror of the subversive. The lengths to which they will go in order to silence or exterminate writers, artists and intellectuals is proof positive. We have seen time and again – in Stalinist Russia, in Eastern Europe throughout the Soviet Era, in the Cultural Revolution in China, in the killing field in Cambodia – how feared and hated are people who dare to question and challenge, to speak out and act out in defiance of oppression.
We are seeing it today in Burma. Since the February 2021 coup and the consequent Spring Revolution, the military government has cracked down with excessive force, hunting down, imprisoning, beating to death, burning alive, or simply disappearing its victims with impunity. Unsurprisingly, the earliest victims of military violence were poets, artists, and entertainers – the usual suspects in totalitarian states. What’s telling, however, was that these ‘threats to public security’ in the Burma Spring weren’t targeted for their ideas or aesthetics. They were targeted because they served as foot soldiers at the frontlines of protest. They were among the unarmed protesters who took to the streets day after day, who braved the bullets and manned the barricades, in the almost certain knowledge that for them the battle could only end in death, or worse.
This is why poets were martyred in the early Burma Spring; they were literally living out Diego Rivera’s dictum that “the role of the artist is that of the soldier of the revolution”.
The poems and images selected to bear witness to a profound revolution – of spirit, mind, and heart – now known as the Burma Spring. The collective cri de cœur arising from these pages is nothing if not a resounding “I can!” of the spirit that insists on remembering and testifying, even with its heart ripped out.”
— Wendy Law-Yone
