Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
State of Exception
On the plaster walls, dirty with blood, there are last words left for you to ponder. This was done to me, the walls say. The passive voice. The unidentified subject. Always circling around, always retreating from the self. To me it was done. This. A finger pointing into an abyss.
What remains are the material things. The shoes they took off your feet, the wrist watches, the engagement rings. Dispossession and repossession. In the piles of things, dead people’s things, you search for photographs. There are scraps of metal in the yard and you are putting them back together. You are building an airplane to take you away.
But where will you all go?
Memories implicate objects. The pliers, for pulling out teeth, or toenails; the rope, to bind hands and feet, pulled taut around the neck; the baton, the lead pipe, the wood planks, the chair, the broomstick, the belt with its heavy buckle, for beatings to the head.
You salvage scrap metal from the yard to construct your own salvation. You are trying to recover the referential meanings of things: the pipe for the sink, the chair to sit in, the belt to wear around the waist. You sit facing plaster walls, facing the void of memory, the resistance of memory. The faces in the photographs are not black and white, but softened in sepia. Diaphanous eyes gaze into yours.
For years that was all the loudspeakers played: military marches day after day after day. Unpaired slippers in the gutter and barricades left standing in the streets. Curfew fell on the city at twilight. Uniform men with machine guns kept watch at the corners.
Come out and see the blood in the streets.
From a distant quarter there was the sound of dogs barking. Across the street a fluorescent bar blinking in a tea shop where moths had gathered. The shop was empty. Beds were empty. You waited for the missing to come home. You did not leave when you still had a chance.
And now, the impulse to leave a trace. A scintilla of suffering. To immortalize yourself through art, through artful words. Poetry written in the red dust of the bricks that had built walls around you.
There was a loose brick in the wall. You kept your secrets there.
You were the lucky ones, the ones in brick cells. There were others who slept on bare concrete.
There were others who were kept in chains.
Pigs were slaughtered for weeks nearby to drown out your cries. That’s what you sounded like: a pig. Who knew you were kept here? The neighbors? Who among them knew what was happening, why the pigs were made to scream. The butcher must have known, and his wife. Their children must have heard the whispers from doors left ajar. In the school yard, the boys and girls must have played a game of guard and prisoner, squealing like pigs. That was how the truth was reenacted, how memory acquired its texture. In a playground with children brandishing butchers’ knives.
On concrete floors, a poem was scrawled in red paste made from brick shavings and salvia. It was a poem about love.
We love you, the loudspeakers had pleaded. We are only doing this because we have to protect. We are only doing this because there are insurgents everywhere, they are everywhere hiding among you.
In a state of exception, love must be willing to murder. In a state of exception, murder is love.
You were stripped naked and pushed face down in the hot sand. You were dragged by your hair in the prison yard until the sand rubbed your skin raw and filled your mouths so you couldn’t breathe. You tried to close your eyes, but the sand got under your lashes, got inside the sockets of your eyes, so your eyeballs felt gritty and you couldn’t stop crying.
You didn’t cry when the tanks ran over the university gates, when they opened fire on your barricades. You didn’t cry in the interrogation room where they kept you chained to the chair. They beat you until you confessed yourself, but still, you didn’t cry. You didn’t cry when they made you line up at dawn to witness the executions: the young men and women, your old friends, kneeling against a wall, shot through the head.
You didn’t cry then. But this sand got in your eyes, and you couldn’t stop crying.
Afterward, they put you alone in a single cell, blindfolded, and you went mad. You howled, sang to yourself, you prayed. You wrote poetry. You tried to lie down to sleep but the floor was too cold and wet, so you slept crouching in a corner. You emptied your bowels in a different corner. You drank water from the toilet bowl. You were surprised by your own nonchalance. The plasticity of the mind. These extremes. This excess. You got used to it.
And you knew nothing until you knew if you had the right to kill.
You didn’t know where you would be taken, or where the others were taken before you. You didn’t know when it would happen, when your home would be broken in and searched for the hiding places: the loose floorboards, a trapdoor behind the dresser, a tunnel you had dug to the sewers. You didn’t know how many were shot, how many were arrested, how many escaped to the border. You didn’t know if the missing were dead, or if they were still alive, where they were being kept, and for how long, and when you would see them again.
There were always trucks waiting outside the prisons at dawn. They returned at nightfall, empty.
Revolution is a return, a restoration of something you lost. To revolt is to find yourself again. I rebel, therefore I exist. You yearned to exist. You yearned to come out from hiding, from the dark basement with a single light bulb dangling from the ceiling. You yearned to escape the long shadows, the damp walls closing tight around you. You yearned for the night markets in the streets, the smell of meat roasting in an open fire, vegetables hanging in clusters, flowers gathered in children’s hair.
You planted bombs in the military quarter because you were caught between love and murder. Because everyone or no one deserved to live. You felt guilty for killing. You felt guilty for dying.
If nothing is true, everything is permitted.
If nothing is true, nothing is permitted, and you will live as a great ascetic, wearing un-dyed cotton and eating fruits fallen from trees. You will sweep cemeteries and shave your head as a sign of mourning. You will barricade yourself in the university and from the highest bell tower, build a radio signal. We are unarmed, we are unarmed, the radios will play. We are unarmed.
You will live unarmed, and you will die unarmed. There will be no reconciliation. There will always be soldiers. There will always be guards. The trucks will leave at dawn always to return empty.
Was there ever a successful revolution? Many times you reached a dead end. Many times you armed yourselves with hand grenades and stolen automatics, you constructed bombs, planted them in buildings, in buses, strapped them onto your chests. Many times you took your revenge, you held mass executions, held your children up on your shoulders and made them watch men and women be murdered. Many times you lost your trust, you condemned your own brothers and sisters, you condemned yourself. Many times you sacrificed what you were for the sake of what you shall be.
Every revolution returns to terror. Every revolution betrays itself.
Still, there were moments of resistance. There were glowing moments, when a love poem was written on the concrete floor of a prison cell, when a radio from a university bell tower called out: soldiers, our brothers, soldiers, our brothers, when photographs of the dead were salvaged from a pile of things, and cherished again.
But how does it end? The radios play a victory tune. You promenade through the streets, wreathed in garlands of flowers, holding hand-sewn flags and streamers. You gather in the yard at night to watch the fireworks. You wash the blood off the walls. You build an airplane with scrap metal from the yard, even though you do not know how to fly, though you do not have a place to fly to.
Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint is the author of the lyric novel, The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, A Haven (Noemi Press, 2018) and the forthcoming family history project, Zat Lun, which won the 2018 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize.