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  • Nowhere to Be Home: Narratives from Suvivors of Burma’s Military Regime
  • Teresa Bergen
Nowhere to Be Home: Narratives from Suvivors of Burma’s Military Regime. Compiled and edited by Maggie Lemere and Zoë West. San Francisco, CA: McSweeney’s Books (Voice of Witness), 2011. 495 pp. Hardbound, $24.00; Softbound, $16.00.

Readers looking for more confirmation of man’s inhumanity to man need look no further than this collection of oral histories. Over a space of twelve months in 2009 and 2010, human rights workers Maggie Lemere and Zoë West collected more than 400 hours of interviews with seventy Burmese citizens and refugees. They selected twenty-two interviews to include in this volume. Every story is harrowing.

Lemere and West found the narrators through colleagues, friends, and leaders of human rights and community organizations. They interviewed Burmese people in Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh, the United States and a few inside Burma. Living conditions ranged from a Brooklyn apartment to an illegal jungle camp in Malaysia guarded by armed men and snarling dogs. Because of the security risks to the narrators, names and details have been altered. Unfortunately, the book does not disclose what became of the recordings and transcripts. While making audio recordings available to scholars is probably too much of a security risk for narrators, I found myself especially wondering about the forty-eight whose stories did not make it into the book. It would be nice to think their edited and perhaps anonymized transcripts could be preserved somewhere.

For readers who are not so familiar with Burma’s tortured history, the authors provide forty pages of appendices in very small type. A timeline takes readers from Burma’s kingdoms to the British invasion, post–World War II independence, and the 1962 military coup that still will not go away. The last few decades have featured several bogus elections, Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi being on and off house arrest, a bloodily crushed uprising every ten years or so, all capped by the devastating Cyclone Nargis in 2008.

The editors found a good selection of narrators. They include monks, former soldiers, students, and ordinary villagers who just want to live their lives. The plight of this last category is especially appalling. Khine Su, a thirty-eight-year-old woman living and working in a Thai garbage dump at the time of her interview, grew up in a Burmese rice farming family. She remembers a happy, peaceful life until the age of ten years. Then her village was caught between the Burmese army and the rebel Karen National Liberation Army, which constantly battled in the area. Both demanded support. “We gave the rebels the taxes,” Khine Su recalled, “but when the regime’s soldiers found out, they made trouble for the villagers. The government soldiers also started coming and asking for rations, food, taxes, and money. Then the rebels found out that we were giving rations and taxes to the government and they started making more trouble. This is how the problem started” (186). [End Page 332]

A common theme throughout the narratives is the practice of the Burmese army demanding porters. These forced laborers must carry heavy loads for the army and lead the way across minefields. Men become porters when they cannot afford to pay the “taxes” the government and rebel armies demand. Prisoners, including political dissidents, are also forced into portering. Many die of exhaustion, accidents, landmines, and the whims of soldiers.

Burma’s ethnic minorities suffer immensely. A narrator identified as Fatima grew up in Burma’s Arakan state. She is Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority. West and Lemere interviewed her where she was living in an unofficial makeshift camp in Bangladesh. Her whole life has been extremely difficult. She was denied even basic schooling. Her father died of diarrhea when Fatima was twelve years old. Later, her little sister was stolen by a group from another village who had government protection. The Rohingya are regulated by Burmese officials and charged exorbitant fees to marry and reproduce. When Fatima got engaged, her mother sold all three of her bullocks to pay the village chairman the fee. Fatima did marry, although...

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