Rachel Wong in The Point:
After a landslide victory in Myanmar’s national elections last year, Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy came to power this February. Among those who took their seats in parliament were eleven poets, many of whom were active during the democracy protests of 1988 and are former political prisoners. Myanmar’s new president is the son of the renowned poet Min Thu Wun. And in a highly publicized trial this year, Maung Saungkha was arrested for defaming the former president in his verses. Circles of poets in traditionalist Mandalay, socialist-realist Pyinmana, cosmopolitan Yangon and elsewhere are debating what it means to write poetry in a time of transition from dictatorship to democracy. Under a state that has abolished censorship, what is the function of a dissident? When the opposition of many years, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, has finally become the ruling power, who forms the new civil society?
Recorded in April at a dinner gathering in the apartment of Point editor Rachel Wong, what follows is a conversation with four writers, publishers and translators from Yangon. Also present were American journalist Maddy Crowell and Point founding editor Jon Baskin.
More here.
