Artists prohibited to exhibit their paintings, the famous writers whose works never pass the Press Scrutiny Board. Hundreds of people gunned down on the street, the school girls who were bayonetted in 1988. “Why don’t you write a book about that?” The children carrying loads of wet concrete at the construction sites of new hotels. Whole villages of women raped by soldiers. Men taken away, enslaved as weapon porters on the front-lines. “Will you write this story down?” The outspoken father, brother, sister, mother who disappears at night, and eventually is sentenced to seven, ten, twenty years in a prison infested with tuberculosis, dysentery, and rats.
Confronted with these stories, and with so much intelligence and indignation, the very least I could do, in my great freedom as a writer, was to reply Yes, I will write it down.
Of course I didn’t really understand what I was getting myself into.
Writing The Lizard Cage was profoundly painful, just as researching the book was physically and spiritually exhausting. After I was denied a visa to reenter Burma, I sought out dissidents and revolutionaries who live on the Thai-Burma border. I could already feel the shape of the novel I was to write, but I needed to get the details right, and live longer with my subjects.
I spent almost all of my time with Burmese people who had left Burma for political reasons. Yet it was a lonely time, too. The writer is alone, in the sense of not belonging to an organization. The writer is (or should be) a free agent, uniquely unprotected from the hard, bright truth of the world. I was in my twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh year: youth and idealism carried me through. But it wasn’t easy. There was no coworker I could talk with after interviewing former political prisoners; there was no supervisor who could tell me what I might expect psychologically after listening to dozens of people describe how they had been tortured, how they had lost their families or been cut off from them for a decade.
The stories people most wanted to tell, it seemed, were the stories of how they became political, and then how they ended up and survived in prison. Metaphorically, the story of modern Burma is one of violence, incarceration, isolation. Living on the border, among Burmese people who had lived that story, who had the marks of it on their skin, I learned the questions I still ask myself: What am I willing to see? What am I willing to feel? How well can I know this world that I live in, this world that I love? I ask myself these questions often, and the answers, often, are very humbling. Sometimes I don’t want to see. I don’t want to feel. I would prefer a comfortable numbness. But numbness is boring.
Whereas seeing, especially seeing with a compassionate eye, always surprises. It is labor paid for with unexpected gifts. Burmese people taught me how to see beauty anew, and then how to see beyond beauty. They taught me how to see beyond what I wanted to see. How to listen to more than what I wanted to hear. How to listen for a while, a while longer, a long time, until the speaker could tell the story underneath the story, which was often tragic.
To face the woundedness and vulnerability of others is to face my own vulnerability. Or to face my fear of it—the dread of being hurt or broken. That can be uncomfortable. It can be terrifying to know your own fragility. Most often we place that fragility outside of ourselves—over the border or in the prison, where the other people live. The poor ones. The sick and maimed ones. The refugees. All those who are more vulnerable than we are. Writing The Lizard Cage taught me that the border most people are really frightened of is death. It is the border we will all cross eventually. Aided by the wisdom of his Buddhist faith, Teza faces it with a simple courage and matter-of-factness that still inspires me.
The real people I met in Burma and on the border enabled me to create characters who often surprised me, and who did things I could never do. So many of the people I met were so brave. So many of them had whimsical, zany senses of humor. On the heels of bad news, jokes rushed in, and laughter was a liberal, free-flowing tonic. I’ve written of the writer’s solitude, but I was often taken care of, in many ways, by good Burmese people. Wherever I was—the military and refugee camps, the cramped and cluttered rooms of dissidents, the shantytowns of Shan migrant workers—I lived in the realm of their kindness.
Once, after visiting a refugee camp, I returned to the first hut I’d visited to discover that the family had killed and cooked one of their precious chickens in my honor. As we sat down to eat, I had a lump in my throat. These were people who had so little food, so little comfort, yet they refused to let me leave without feeding me. This sort of thing happened all the time. People’s generosity simply boggled the mind and astounded the senses.
But after my research was finished, I had to go into Teza’s prison and live there, alone, in my imagination. After I started writing the novel in earnest, I wrote in tears every day for two years, distraught by the process of internalization that would make my characters and their experiences authentic in writing. One must feel what one writes; at least, I have to feel what I write. But it is another thing entirely, a terrible, necessary act to enter the darkest places in the human world and to stay there for long periods of time, to commit to living there spiritually and mentally.
Eventually, I got used to it. I stopped crying every day. Writing the novel became a spiritual discipline, a creative act of faith. It took me almost a decade to mature enough to finish the story I had started. During that decade, I lived in an obsessively informed state of concern about prisons in general, and one prison cell in particular. Prisons—whatever their level of security or brutality—are human places. That is a very hard fact to face. We build them and we fill them and we commit brutal and government-sanctioned crimes in them. I realized that political prisoners in North America are mostly blacks, Hispanics, drug addicts, and Native Americans.
In Burma, they are people like Teza, like the student protestors of 1988, like the monks and nuns and new activists of 2007. Anyone who participates in a peaceful protest against Burma’s military government risks his life. In the twisted logic of dictatorships, such an individual is openly declared by the ruling authorities to be dangerous. Ruling authorities everywhere are afraid of voices—not the ghostly voices of schizophrenia, but the voices of human beings who demand truth, explanation, change, power. And prisons are places where human beings can be de-voiced en masse, much like batteries of laying hens are debeaked. It was a heartbreaking thing to put my sweet-natured, devoutly Buddhist, song-writing protagonist Teza in such a place.
All people who live in prisons become at least partially, if not fully, invisible. Whether political or criminal prisoners, we do not see them; we do not look for them. To abuse their detainees, governments depend on our blindness. Working on a novel about a man who lives in prison, I had no choice but to look inside, to imagine the world of the prison as well as I could, and to spend a lot of time talking and listening to people who had lived there.
One of them, who became a good friend and writing colleague over the years, had participated in the 1988 demonstrations. During his long imprisonment, he was brutally tortured by the military regime. (The novel is dedicated in part to him, Aung Zaw, and to his brother, whom he left behind, also in prison. They were eventually reunited years later.) He left Burma only to end up as a migrant worker in Thailand, where he did backbreaking manual labor until illness ravaged his body. He thought he would die. But he didn’t. When he began to remake himself, literally from scratch, he planted a garden. He became a very political journalist who was—and still is—passionately dedicated to gardening, to plants. Plants, he once said to me, conquer by living.
The way my friend healed himself is part of a larger history that is mostly unwritten, passed over in favor of the history of wars, territories, empires. I think of it as the history of kindness: how humans retain and deepen their humanity. Paradoxically, this often involves the participation of the Other Majority—the plants and animals that are our fellow citizens in this world, the ones who know nothing about our borders, but who have often taught us how to live, what to eat, how to surviv
e so many different climates, even giving us the means, the materials, to do so.
While writing The Lizard Cage, I came to understand that the most useful thing I could do as a writer was contribute to the history of kindness. It may seem strange to look for kindness in a prison, but a prison is just a microcosm of the world we live in every day. The details are different, but the human struggles and needs are the same. To eat properly. To be clean and safe. To live with dignity. To live in choice, in truth. To love and to be loved. To die with grace.
Every prison is an extreme environment, where fulfilling those needs is challenging, and often not possible. Very profound for me, and very moving, was that so many former political prisoners spoke to me in great detail about the small animals in and near their solitary cells. These creatures, they told me, helped them to remain human. The ants and cockroaches that kept them company, the birds they would feed, the lizards and spiders and rats: they did not anthropomorphize these animals; they had relationships with them.
In the course of my research, I read about prisons all over the world, including a prison in the United States where a small group of extremely violent offenders was trying to learn about empathy. They became responsible for a guinea pig. For most of these men, it was the first time in their lives that they had experienced taking care of another living being. They had themselves never been taken care of—all of them had childhood histories of violent sexual and physical abuse. But they learned to feed, water, and handle this little guinea pig. They grew to love it and to express concern for its well-being. Over a year later, the guinea pig got sick. It died. The men gathered together and were able to touch its body, to say good-bye. Every one of them wept. For most of them, it was the first time in their lives that they were able to express sadness and to mourn loss.
I don’t know why some abused people become violent and cruel, while others manage to survive their experiences, even becoming kinder and more compassionate. Why are some people more resilient than others?
In Burma and on the border, people who had been brutalized and hounded and violated repeatedly—sometimes for most of their lives—were still kind, and open, and hopeful. And if they were not quite hopeful, they were determined. Sometimes they were also very angry, but their anger did not obliterate their humanity. Every day I would meet such people and the mystery of their goodness seemed as great to me as the mystery of the very real evil of the interrogators and the imprisoners.
That is our mystery, the human mystery. That is also us, the possibility of us, if the wonderful accident of our birth had taken place elsewhere: you could be the refugee, I could be the torturer. To face that truth is also our burden. After all, each of us has been the bystander, the reasonable person who just happens not to hear, not to speak, not to see those people, the invisible ones, those who live on the other side of the border.
A NOTE ON BURMESE PRONUNCIATION AND TERMS
In traditional Burmese, surnames do not exist. People are identified by their birth names only, which are chosen carefully by parents and advisers, usually according to the day of birth and astrological influences.
ky is pronounced ch
kyi, as in Aung San Suu Kyi, is pronounced chee
gy is pronounced j
gyi, as in longyi, is pronounced gee
In daily conversation, honorifics are very important. The speaker chooses an honorific according to his own and the other person’s age, status, and sex. The most common honorifics in the novel are
Ko—for older brothers, for young men equal in status, or for men slightly older than oneself
U—for uncles and older, respected men
Nyi—for younger brothers (as spoken to by other men)
Daw—for aunts and older women
Ma—for older sisters, for young women of equal status, or for women slightly older than oneself
Saya—for a respected man who is a teacher or who acts in a teacherly fashion
In this book I have used various terms that are “Burmese English,” the elegant, colonial, British-influenced English spoken by Burmese friends in Burma.
READERS’ GUIDE
1) During a meditation, Teza reflects on the following Buddhist principles:
Metta.
Karuna.
Mudita.
Upekkha.
These are the Four Divine Abidings. Love. Compassion. Joy in the good fortune of others. Equanimity.
How are these principles depicted in the novel, and in what way do they help Teza cope with his imprisonment? Does he always succeed in living by these principles? How does he impart them to Little Brother?
2) How do Teza’s experiences inside the Lizard Cage represent the larger political turmoil in Burma (now Myanmar)? Despite the inhuman conditions, does hope still reside inside the prison?
3) “Words are like the ants. They work their way through the thickest walls, eating through bricks and feeding off the very silence intended to stifle them.” How is the irrepressibility of truth evident in The Lizard Cage? What parallels can you draw from other civil rights conflicts in the world?
4) Brothers Teza and Aung Min chose different paths of resistance, the former peaceful protest and the latter armed revolution. In your opinion, whose choice was more effective? How does Teza keep their relationship alive through memory? In what ways is Teza’s friendship with Little Brother similar to his relationship with Aung Min?
5) Why are pen and paper contraband in the Lizard Cage? Even Little Brother, who cannot read and write, understands their power. How is language a powerful weapon against oppression?
6) “From solitary, the whole cage is a foreign country to him. He lives on the very edge of it, straining to hear the other voices.” While confined, Teza reflects on life, from his family and first love to his education and political actions. Can memories be both freedom from captivity and a torturous reminder of a life not lived? When have you experienced this paradox?
7) Little Brother is referred to by various names, most commonly the boy, rat killer, Free El Salvador, Nyi Lay, and his real name, Zaw Gyi. Why is Teza comforted to know the boy has such a strong name? What does one’s name signify in terms of social hierarchy and character?
8) Animals, particularly lizards, play an important role in The Lizard Cage. What is the significance of the characters’ relationships with animals? How are those relationships spiritual, and what do they teach us about human relationships?
9) How are jailers Handsome and Chit Naing products of the environment in which they live? Why do they have such different attitudes toward Teza even though they have the same occupation? Are they motivated by survival, loyalty, or ambition?
10) In what way does Teza achieve freedom through Little Brother? What does the novel say about the resilience of the human spirit?
For Ko Aung Zaw (a.k.a. Zaw Gyi) and Ko Kyaw Zwa Moe, brothers who found each other on the other side of the border
For Ko Moe Thi Zon and Dr. Naing Aung, brothers who lost each other there
For the child in prison
For Lucas, beloved
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Despite the solitary nature of writing, this novel has been a community project. It could not have been written without the help of many Burmese people of various ethnicities, who spoke to me about life under the dictatorship that rules their country. These conversations spanned several years and continents, but in the beginning people entered into them with little regard for their own safety or privacy, recounting painful and sometimes harrowing experiences for the sake of a stranger who said she was writing a book.
I am thankful to many people, from former political prisoners to unemployed prison guards, from young tea-shop workers to old betel-nut sellers. Those who still live in Burma must remain anonymous, with the exception of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Her books were important during the writing of this one, as were the interviews I conducted with her and her colleagues in the National League for Democracy in the mid-1990s. Many Burmese write
rs, journalists, and artists helped me understand the suffocating power of the censorship under which they live and work. Someday the government of Burma will change, and I will publicly thank each of you by name.
The prison in this novel is a composite of several different prisons and work camps in Burma. Insein Prison, near Rangoon, is its architectural model, but the real Insein now stands in the midst of a bustling township. Needless to say, though based partly on historical events, this is a work of fiction.
For associations and friendships that began in 1996, my gratitude goes to many men and women on the Thai-Burma border who are or were members of the following political parties, armies, and dissident groups: the All Burma Students Democratic Front (ABSDF, both sections), the Democratic Party for a New Society (DPNS), the National League for Democracy Liberated Area (NLDLA), the Karen National Liberated Army (KNLA), the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), and the Burmese Women’s Union. Some of these groups have morphed into other organizations, but the names of generous individuals remain the same. My sincere thanks to:
Win Naing Oo, with whom I did my first extensive interviews about prison life, and whose writings, especially in the ABSDF publication Cries from Insein, helped me to build a fictional prison. Many of ABSDF’s publications were indispensable to my understanding of prison life in Burma. The punishments in the novel, created around seemingly innocuous contraband—pen and paper and words—came directly out of the shocking book called Pleading Not Guilty in Insein, a translation of an official court document that was smuggled out of Insein Prison. It records the trials of twenty-two political prisoners whose cells were raided and whose sentences were increased substantially on the basis of the contraband found therein: pens, paper, political poems, old copies of English magazines, congratulatory letters, and notes to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.
The Lizard Cage Page 46
