A Washington DC-based collective (known as Split This Rock),will protest in front of Burmese embassies in the US capital tomorrow to demand the release of jailed poets in Burma.
“It is precisely because poetry refuses to be packaged and manipulated by governments that those same dictatorial governments try to silence poets and poetry,” said its director, Sarah Browning.
One prominent Burmese poet, Saw Wei, was handed a two-year sentence in 2008 for his poem ‘February 14th’, in which the first letter of every line, when put together, said “Megalomaniac General Than Shwe”, referring to the former dictator. Sales of the magazine in which it was published, The Voice, soared after word got out of the coded message inside.
Another poet, U Zeya, who also worked as a video journalist for DVB, is now serving a 13 year prison sentence. “Language of course is a favourite tool of despots everywhere. They distort it and manipulate it and flatten it for their purposes, for propaganda, for pacification. We see this ourselves in the US, where torture is referred to as ‘enhanced interrogation’,” Browning said. “It’s meant to deaden the populace, to numb us. But poetry can wake us up, by reclaiming our language, reviving it, reminding us that we don’t have to believe what we are told over and over again by the powerful.”