Posts tagged Burma
I have just returned to Bangkok from a fifteen day visit to Myanmar during the closing chapter of my travels in South East Asia. The two weeks I spent travelling in Yangon, Mandalay, Bagan and the Shan State were perhaps the most enlightening and profound of the past five months.
Tomorrow I shall return to Europe and begin work on documenting some of the findings that came about as a consequence of my travels. Indeed, I plan on updating the ‘Photographs’ and ‘Films’ sections of this page in the coming weeks in order to provide a detailed outline with regards to what I witnessed.
In accordance with my latest series of posts, please see below a collection of photos taken during my time in Vientiane, the capital of Laos.
I found it to be a rather odd sensation, swinging back and forth gently in a thick, mesh hammock as the sun rose over the Four Thousand Islands, or Si Phan Don, while reading Orwell’s classic. It was the first time I had read Burmese Days, and the ringing of colonial humdrum split right through my level of concentration, lighting up not too distant memories of the rest of my time Laos and the colonial remnants I had experienced there. From Luang Nom Tha in the brilliant North West, to Don Det in the deepest South, the colonial history of the country was apparent in every corner under shades of UXO and other bloody reminders of the US bombings during the Vietnam War.
Though Orwell’s novel is a gauging testament to the negative consequences of colonialism, it focuses predominantly on the impacts a colonial power, in this case the British Empire, had on the individual level as well as the bureaucratic one. Flory, an Englishman who has spent most of his life living in and around a very small village in Burma, is tormented by loneliness and self-pity despite indulging in native curiosities and trying to befriend a select few of the local people. Flory’s actions consequently ruin the lives of those Burmese people he draws close to him due mostly in part to his cowardice, a negative attribute that grows with the conversations and contact he has with his British associates and representatives of the Colonial power. Orwell also brings life to a whole host of other British characters who seem to detest the ‘natives’ with their every breath - condemning the Burmese to prostitution, corruption and scandal. Needless to say the book is a most gripping read and one that I would sorely recommend, but reading it in Laos provided additional dimensions to the story (it is only a story after all, despite characters being based on people Orwell met when he himself served in Burma).
I am now in Cambodia, a country with a past bloodier than is possible to fathom. The sickening atrocities that occurred in every town and city here were simply appalling. Indeed, the fact that genocide took place here is no secret the Cambodian people seem to be intent on trying to keep; almost every street vendor in Siem Reap sells copies of books about Year Zero (one of which I have just started), the Pol Pot regime, the Killing Fields etc., and there are some excellent films available on the subject. What I find particularly astounding though are the historical webs that link colonial history to the brutality that followed; with the United States, Russia and China of course spinning a great deal of this great misfortune, despite their not being present as official colonial powers. Today I will visit the Killing Caves of Battambang.
