Words #1 The Seeds of Truth by Kyi May Kaung

15 July 2007

Last night I attended an exhibition opening at an art gallery in Chiang Mai. The artist, Kyi May Kaung, is a renaissance woman with an academic background in economics and political science, and is now also an artist and poet. She read the following poem, dedicating it to "those who walked away," as she put it, after the uprising and military crackdown of 1988 in Burma. Many of my friends here tell this same story, but none quite so eloquently.

(The International Institute of Social History in the Netherlands has collected Kyi May Kaung's papers, and their short bio of her follows.)

The Seeds of Truth

After the shooting
I moved from house to
house - friends of my
father's youth - along the
invisible borders - sheltered
by tribes I'd always thought
barbarians -
they shared
their measly rice full of
broken
grains and
unhusked shells
with me -
nothing but fish sauce
smelling to high heaven -
chillies
and boiled vines off
the trees -
on that long trek always only
momentarily safe -
the seeds - clung to the
edges - of my black and purple
striped Kachin
longyi -
now I am finally free
these seeds
finally disengaged
themselves
and grew into
sour
roselle
leaves.

You can view Kyi May Kaung's blog at http://kyimaykaung.blogspot.com/.

Biography from http://www.iisg.nl/archives/en/files/k/10929620.php

Born in Rangoon, Burma, 1943; lived in Rangoon for most of her life until she came tot the USA on a Fulbright Fellowship 1982; studied city and regional planning and afterwards political economy at the University of Pennsylvania; dissertation at the same university about centralization and totalitarianism in Burma and the harm it does to human beings 1994; applied and received political asylum in 1989 after the failure of the pro-democracy demonstrations in Burma in 1988; she lives currently as a political exile in the USA; worked as senior research analyst and international radio broadcaster at Radio Free Asia in Washington D.C. 1997-2001; during those years her weekly column 'Reading between the Lines' and het weekly dissident poetry program 'Poems of those who love their country' became well known in Burma; since 2001 she works in Washington D.C. as senior research associate at The Burma Fund, which does strategic research for the National Coalition Governement of the Union of Burma; there she co-authored a book on democratic transition in Burma and is working on the book version of her dissertation; she also has parallel careers as a writer, poet, playwright and visual artist.