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ABSTRACT
Drawing from Aung San Suu Kyi’s Freedom from Fear (1991) and Pascal Khoo Thwe’s From the Land of Green Ghosts (2002), this article examines how the discourses of nation-building in Burma are inextricably linked to sovereign ambitions of state-building through militaristic and insurgent means. In particular, it focuses on the contested nature of both nation- and state-building ideologies in Burma, which are characterised by a rift within their respective modes of narration: national autobiography and subaltern autobiography. The genre of national autobiography, which is commonly associated with the life histories of national leaders, has gained considerable attention in recent literary criticism. This article suggests that while Suu Kyi’s autobiography remains complicit with elite nationalism, Pascal Khoo Thwe’s life narrative charts Burmese national history through individual and communal trajectories. Within this, the article introduces the notion of subalter-nation as a narrative mode of subaltern autobiography that forges the means of another national consciousness through insurgent and secessionist sovereign ambitions.
Acknowledgements
This publication has received support from a grant by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation: MA 7119/1-1). The author wishes to thank the external reader of this article for his/her helpful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Note on contributor
Pavan Kumar Malreddy teaches English Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. He has written extensively on the intersections of literature and postcolonial violence. His recent publications include several essays on Burmese and Middle Eastern literature, and a co-edited volume Violence in South Asia (2019, Routledge) and Narratives of the War on Terror (2020, Routledge). He is currently working on a manuscript, tentatively titled Insurgent Cultures: Narratives of Violence from the Global South. He is the co-editor of Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium.
Notes
1 William McGowan, ‘Suu Kyi’s Buddhist Problem’, Foreign Policy, 2012. Available at: http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/09/17/aung-san-suu-kyis-buddhism-problem/ (accessed 12 February 2018); ‘Suu Kyi declares Love for Myanmar Army’, The National, 2013. Available at: https://www.thenational.ae/world/asia/suu-kyi-declares-love-for-myanmar-army-1.571289 (accessed 12 February 2018).
2 Robert Booth, ‘Aung San Suu Kyi Picks Beatles and Tom Jones on Desert Island Discs’, The Guardian, 2013. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/27/aung-san-suu-kyi-desert-island-discs (accessed 12 February 2018).
3 Brad Evans and Gayatri Spivak, ‘When Law is Not Justice’, The New York Times, 2016. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/opinion/when-law-is-not-justice.html (accessed 12 February 2018).
4 Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, London: Penguin, 1995, pp 205, 270.
5 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, London: Zed Books, 1986, pp 51, 162.
6 Elleke Boehmer, Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005, pp 28–29, 69.
7 For a related discussion, see Pavan Kumar Malreddy, Orientalism, Terrorism, Indigenism: South Asian Readings in Postcolonialism, New Delhi: Sage, 2015, pp 123–141.
8 Philip Holden, Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, p 17.
9 Holden, Autobiography and Decolonization, p 40.
10 Boehmer, Stories of Women, p 69.
11 Boehmer, Stories of Women, p 77; emphasis original.
12 Holden, Autobiography and Decolonization, p 5.
13 Martin A Danahay, A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain, New York: SUNY Press, 1997, p 67.
14 Holden, Autobiography and Decolonization, p 6.
15 Holden, Autobiography and Decolonization, pp 5–6.
16 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983, p 6; emphasis mine
17 Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, pp 160–162.
18 Robyn Eckersley, ‘Greening the Nation-State: From Exclusive to Inclusive Sovereignty’, in John Barry and Robyn Eckersley (eds), The State and the Global Ecological Crisis, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005, pp 159–180.
19 Although Freedom From Fear is not marketed as an autobiography, as this article will show, it adheres to a number of its generic features as outlined by Holden and Boehmer: (1) autobiographical pact enabled by collapsing the author, narrator and protagonist into a singular identity; (2) mirroring of this identity with the national destiny (Holden, Autobiography and Decolonization, pp 17, 47–51) through ‘pre-eminent, and form-giving and even dynastic position in the national family drama’ (Boehmer, Stories of Women, p 84); and (3) propagation of documents the leader ‘has authored [which] have played some part in the nationalist cause’ (Boehmer, Stories of Women, pp 84–85). Moreover, both Freedom from Fear and Letters from Burma are listed autobiographies in various encyclopaedias. See Margaretta Jolly (ed), Encyclopaedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms, London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001.
20 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, p xxix.
21 Richard Collin and Pamela Martin, An Introduction to World Politics: Conflict and Consensus on a Small Planet, London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012, p 284.
22 Emma Larkin, ‘The Force of a Woman’, The New Republic, 2013. Available at: https://newrepublic.com/article/103083/lady-peacock-aung-san-suu-kyi (accessed 12 February 2018); Elisabeth Rubin, ‘Aung San Suu Kyi, Beauty and the Beast’, 2011, Vogue Magazine. Available at https://www.vogue.com/article/aung-san-suu-kyi-beauty-and-the-beast (accessed 12 February 2018).
23 Holden, Autobiography and Decolonization, p 142.
24 Boehmer, Stories of Women, p 81.
25 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, p 217.
26 Boehmer, Stories of Women, p 71; emphasis original.
27 Holden, Autobiography and Decolonization, p 6.
28 Lisa Trivedi, ‘Visually Mapping the “Nation”: Swadeshi Politics in Nationalist India, 1920–1930’, The Journal of Asian Studies 62(1), 2003, p 11.
29 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, n.p.
30 Boehmer, Stories of Women, p 77.
31 Danahay, A Community of One, p 67.
32 Devika Sharma and Frederik Tygstrup (eds), Structures of Feeling: Affectivity and the Study of Sulture, Vol. 5, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015, p 127.
33 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, p 226.
34 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, p 220.
35 Homi K Bhabha (ed), Nation and Narration, London: Routledge, 2013, p 292.
36 Giddens in Homi K Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 2004, pp 298; Bhabha Nation and Narration, pp 298–299.
37 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, p 67.
38 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, p 63.
39 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, p 83.
40 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, p 100.
41 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, pp 133–134.
42 Although a majority of Chinese themselves are Buddhists (of Confucius or Taoist schools), Suu Kyi’s attribution of migrant status to other such non-Burmese Buddhists goes hand-in-hand with the Orientalist constructions of Theravada Buddhism as the ‘proper’, ‘rational’, if not the ‘purest’ form of Buddhism in the East.
43 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, p 103.
44 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, pp 103–104.
45 ‘Introduction’ in John Barry and Robyn Eckersley (eds), Greening the Nation State, 2005, p 6.
46 Suu Kyi, Letters from Burma, London: Penguin, 2010, p 63; emphasis mine.
47 Aung San Suu Kyi, Letter from Burma, p 199.
48 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, pp 194–195; emphasis mine.
49 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, p 232.
50 Yu Bromley (ed), Soviet Ethnology and Anthropology Today, Vol. 1, Berlin; Walter de Gruyter, 1973, p 134.
51 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, p 194.
52 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, p 205.
53 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, p 195.
54 Donald M Seekings, Burma and Japan Since 1940: From ‘Co-prosperity to ‘Quiet Dialogue’, Copenhagen, NIAS Press, 2007, p 26.
55 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, pp 261–267.
56 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, p 268–269.
57 Suu Kyi, Letters from Burma, p 161.
58 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, pp 203–205.
59 Barbara Kosta, Recasting Autobiography: Women’s Counterfictions in Contemporary German Literature and Film, Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1994, p 17.
60 Pascal Khoo Thwe, Form the Land of Green Ghosts, London: HarperCollins, 2002, p 37.
61 Thwe, Form the Land of Green Ghosts, p 37.
62 Thwe, Form the Land of Green Ghosts, p 30.
63 Thwe, Form the Land of Green Ghosts, pp 179–188.
64 Edward W Said. ‘Foreword’ to Elias Khoury, Little Mountain, trans. Maia Tabet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p xvi.
65 Thwe, Form the Land of Green Ghosts, p 109.
66 Thwe, Form the Land of Green Ghosts, p 45.
67 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p 201.
68 Bhabha, Nation and Narration, p 2; emphasis original.
69 Said, ‘Foreword’, p xxi.
70 Thwe, Form the Land of Green Ghosts, pp 14–15; parenthesis original.
71 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, p 54.
72 Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, p 81; emphasis mine.
73 Thwe, Form the Land of Green Ghosts, p 107.
74 Thwe, Form the Land of Green Ghosts, p 103.
75 Thwe, Form the Land of Green Ghosts, p 29.
76 Thwe, Form the Land of Green Ghosts, p 29.
77 Thwe, Form the Land of Green Ghosts, p 82.
78 Thwe, Form the Land of Green Ghosts, p 184.
79 Thwe, Form the Land of Green Ghosts, pp 185–187.
80 Thwe, Form the Land of Green Ghosts, p 200.
81 Christian Hunold and John Dryzek, ‘Green Political Strategy and the State: Combining Political Theory and Comparative History’, in John Barry and Robyn Eckersley (eds), The State and the Global Ecological Crisis, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005, pp 75–95.
82 Robyn Eckersley ‘Greening the Nation-State’, p 177.
83 Thwe, Form the Land of Green Ghosts, pp 185–186.
84 Thwe, Form the Land of Green Ghosts, p 200.
85 Thwe, Form the Land of Green Ghosts, p 200.
86 Pavan Kumar Malreddy, ‘Gender, Nation, and Violence in Hindi Cinema’, Kairos: The Journal of Critical Symposium, 1(1),. 2016, p 5.
87 I owe this insight as well as the information to the external reader of this article.
88 Bertil Lintner, ‘The Ties that Bind Suu Kyi’s Hand’, Asia Times, 21 October 2017. Available at: https://www.asiatimes.com/2017/10/article/ties-bind-suu-kyis-hands/ (accessed 2 February 2018). See also Sunanda Dutta Ray ‘Why “Pragmatic” Suu Kyi is Silent on Rohingyas’, Asian Age, 9 October 2018. Available at: https://www.asianage.com/opinion/oped/091018/why-pragmatic-suu-kyi-is-silent-on-rohingyas.html (accessed on June 18 2019). Ray writes ‘Frail and delicate Aung San Suu Kyi might look, but she is her father’s daughter. She will do nothing to damage her inheritance or alienate the masses’.
89 Thwe, Form the Land of Green Ghosts, p 172.