Everyone's duty

I am a revolutionary. In my hand is a piece of paper. I feel tense and disturbed looking at this paper which bears my father’s address and occupation. I don’t even know how my family is and whether they are all well.

I ask myself why my father worked for the military government, against his own ideals, in denial of all of our beliefs. I had so admired my father my whole life because I knew very well that he was a very fine man with many good qualities.

He had his own plantation and sold produce from that for his livelihood. He sold at very affordable prices. He worked hard and honestly as a government employee . He was humble but strict. He was well known for his forthrightness and his intolerance of lies. (Although my mother’s relatives thought he was overly confident in himself.)

In his free time he would read books and sometimes practice alchemy. He shared with us what he learned from the books he read. He had many books that were no longer sold in the bookshops. He farmed, but his books on agriculture were fewer than the books on politics and other topics.

I had witnessed him in action as an able speaker and entertainer at work functions. After his “problems” (with the government) he was not allowed to participate at these functions and always seemed to miss out on promotions. However, whether it was purely from luck or not, he held his job until 1997 even though both of his children were involved in politics. I had been unhappy about his work in the government, though some people would have called me crazy to think like this.

He himself told us repeatedly about the feelings of workers and their lack of rights. He was barely surviving while he worked for the government anyway. Nonetheless, he did not try to escape from that situation. I do not know why he did not try at all.

Fifteen years ago, he noticed me reading Gandhi’s writings. It sparked off a long conversation: He told me to go for what I really wanted and while doing that, to have wisdom and courage to stand for what was right. In speaking to me like this, he acknowledged me as an intelligent human being, as if he saw in me a potential intellectual. His encouragement gave me a lot of strength.

Many people mistakenly equate intelligence with formal education but the contradictions are obvious. The example of three men in my community always provoked my thoughts on this: The drunkard who had received so many distinctions while at school, Ko Than Oo who could never fill his family’s stomach with his government servant job, and U Tha Noe, who had had no formal education but got rich in the pawn-broker business. I came to accept that formal education was not the only way to improve people’s intelligence, at least, not for every one of us.

My father had previously experienced government violence when he participated in a workers’ demonstration. He often spoke angrily about people who were treated unfairly and violently. But he talked about “compassionate peace” as the means to oppose it.

This view caused our relationship to turn sour and tense when I enthusiastically became involved in the 1988 pro-democracy uprising. I was even kicked out of the house for that. My father whom I loved dearly wouldn’t directly criticise the political situation in Burma. But I remember very well that he did talk about the political situation and conditions of other countries. When my father allowed his friends in the military-backed political party to use his house in the 1990 elections, my friends lost some faith in me. I was so embarrassed. I hated my father and his friends for this.

He admonished me every time he saw me - my activism made me notorious in government circles yet he was concerned for my survival. I vividly remember my tears every time he tried to reprove me. But I understood he did that for many reasons.

Right now, I wonder how many people like my father are in Burma. In our country, we’ve had so many losses on so many fronts. We can’t even gather in groups of more than five people, can’t go anywhere as we like, can’t read what we want to read. We have no rights to say anything, not a word when one’s land is taken or confiscated, and can’t grieve or mourn openly when a loved one dies. So many things happen without any respect for the law. We can’t bury or cremate our dead without interference. We have no rights to defend ourselves if treated unfairly .

While I believe and hope that all of us have the same feelings and resentments, I am one of those birds that actually tried to fly and spread my wings. Despite persecution and imprisonment, I worked for what I believed in, I went for what I really wanted. My father has not been jailed, yet he remains a prisoner within his own country.

Mabaydar, 1997

( ဒီစာမူေလးက ပထမဆံုး အႀကိမ္ အေဖနဲ႕ သမီးၾကား အဆက္သြယ္ ရခဲ့တဲ့ အခ်ိန္က ခံစားရတာေတြကို ရင္ဖြင့္ခဲ့တာပါ..။ alt- asean က တေယာက္ေယာက္ ဘာျပန္ထားတာ ျဖစ္မယ္ထင္ပါတယ္..။ ျမန္မာလိုစာမူ ` တာဝန္ကိုယ္စီ ရွိၾကသည္`ကို ယူမရေသးလို႕ ဘေလာ့ဂါ မိတ္ေဆြသူငယ္ခ်င္း စာဖတ္ပရိသတ္မ်ား ဗိုလ္လို ခံစားေစရန္ ဦးစြာ တင္ေပးလိုက္ပါတယ္.. စာမူျပန္ရွာေပးသူမ်ား ကိုလည္း အထူးေက်းဇူး တင္ပါတယ္..။ .. )
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