Personal loss becomes memoir’s gain

By: Reviewed by Douglas J. Johnston Posted: 1:00 AM CDT Sunday, Oct. 4, 2009

Burmese Lessons

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Burmese Lessons

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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/10/2009 (6178 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Burmese Lessons

A Love Story

By Karen Connelly

Random House Canada, 480 pages, $32

In 1993, at age 24, Calgary-born Karen Connelly became the youngest winner of a Governor General’s Literary Award, for her second book, Touch the Dragon, a memoir of her year as a 17-year-old exchange student in Thailand.

In the intervening years she has published several volumes of poetry and a novel, The Lizard Cage, which was largely set in a Burmese prison

Now she has produced a memoir, Burmese Lessons, which trenchantly recounts her return to Southeast Asia, in 1996; this time to Thailand’s neighbour, Burma.

It describes Burma (for a never disclosed reason, Connelly disdains use of the country’s official name, Myanmar) as a civil society under siege by a brutal military dictatorship.

It also portrays those who oppose that regime — sometimes by force of arms, sometimes by civil disobedience, sometimes via artistic expression.

But it’s also the enchanting story of a highly erotic love affair, one made wonky and dangerous by politics.

Burma has been ruled by a military dictatorship since the 1980s.

In 1990 the generals finally agreed to allow a general election. The election was won by pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who won 82 per cent of the popular vote.

But before she could assume the office of prime minister, the military junta nullified the vote and placed her under house arrest.

That was her status when Connelly saw her in 1996. That remains her status in 2009.

Connelly came to know some of the major players of Burma’s many opposition groups.

She puts a human face — or more accurately, faces — to the pro-democracy movement in Burma. There are moving portraits of leading Burmese dissidents, artists and writers.

One of them, Maung, became her lover.

The book goes far beyond memoir.

It successfully enters into the nature of what it means to be a Western woman in Burmese society. It also focuses on how she, as both a woman and a writer, was received as Maung’s partner by the many male-dominated opposition groups.

Lastly, and sadly, it illustrates the clash of cultures and loyalties that doomed even their ultra-passionate relationship.

Burmese politics and recent history are complex. They can intimidate and exhaust an outsider’s attempt to understand what decades of continuous military rule does to a people and country.

But from the messy mix Connelly extrudes both keen analysis of the many faces of opposition to the Burmese generals and an intimate account of love, jealousy and guilt.

The conflicting demands of politics and romance doomed Connelly’s love affair.

But that same clash added a whole other dimension to what otherwise could have been just another Western report on the repression of democracy and human rights in Burma.

Her personal loss has become her book’s gain.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.