The programme was another in the series of firsts as the space for expression in Burma opens up.

Of course, this freedom is still a work in progress. The conference had a visit from an official who asked politely how things were going, and Index was told there were a couple of undercover government agents present, who kept an eye on who was saying what.

Some of the most respected artists in the country spoke, including film-maker Min Thin Ko Ko Kyi — who produced the Art of Freedom Film Festival last year with Zarganar and Aung San Suu Kyi — poet Zeyar Lin, who represented Myanmar in Poetry Parnassus as part of the Cultural Olympiad in London, and performance artists Moe Satt, Ma Ei and Aye Ko.

Zarganar, comedian, film-maker and partner of the symposium gave the opening and closing speeches;  U Win Tin, patron of the National League for Democracy, and Min Ko Naing, a leading voice in the Generation 88 group, gave the key note speeches on the first and second days respectively.

One of the key questions the symposium asked was how the reforms had affected artists who had developed a nuanced and subtle vocabulary to circumvent censorship.  For some it is difficult to find their bearings; several poets admitted it would take time, maybe two years, to make work under such different conditions.

One speaker claimed that poets were being criticised for sounding more like journalists than poets, that the subtlety of their voice had been lost. Another said that he did not want to publish his poems that had been banned in the past because they would no longer be of the moment. Another artist, who had created hundreds of artworks in prison, said that he felt his most free when he was behind bars.

Some of the younger artists Index spoke to felt very differently about the influence of new reforms.  They welcomed the openness, the free exchange of ideas, particularly online.

A young performance artist said that her art form was now considered “sexy” and she had plenty of invitations to perform so opening up her work to new audiences.   An established poet said that poets have to be more accountable now for what they write.  Previously, when all work had to be passed by the censors, the decision about what was published was completely out of the writer’s hands.

As the first symposium of its kind in the country it was necessarily experimental and as much as anything about finding a Burmese way to have a conversation about artistic freedom in public.

Index is producing a short documentary which will be translated into English. An English language podcast is also in production.

Julia Farrington is head of arts at Index on Censorship

The post Burma’s art of transition appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

This is the first ever publication in English of verse by Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, written while the author was detained in the Gulag. An extract from a longer autobiographical work composed in 1950-53, it was published in the first issue of Index on Censorship magazine in March 1972.

God Keep Me from Going Mad (translated by Michael Scammell)

There never was, nor will be, a world of brightness!
A frozen footcloth is the scarf that binds my face.
Fights over porridge, the ganger’s constant griping
And day follows day follows day, and no end to this dreary fate.

My feeble pick strikes sparks from the frozen earth.
And the sun stares down unblinking from the sky.
But the world is here! And will be! The daily round
Suffices. But man is not to be prisoned in the day.
To write! To write now, without delay,
Not in heated wrath, but with cool and clear understanding.
The millstones of my thoughts can hardly turn,
Too rare the flicker of light in my aching soul.
Yes, tight is the circle around us tautly drawn,
But my verses will burst their bonds and freely roam
And I can guard, perhaps, beyond their reach,
In rhythmic harmony this hard-won gift of speech.

And then they can grope my body in vain —
‘Here I am. All yours. Look hard. Not a line. . .
Our indestructible memory, by wonder divine,
Is beyond the reach of your butcher’s hands!’

My labour of love! Year after year with me you will grow,
Year after year you will tread the prisoner’s path.
The day will come when you warm not me alone,
Nor me alone embrace with a shiver of wrath.
Let the stanzas throb — but no whisper let slip,
Let them hammer away — not a twitch of the lip,
Let your eyes not gleam in another’s presence
And let no-one see, let no-one see
You put pencil to paper.
From every corner I am stalked by prison —
God keep me from going mad!

I do not write my verses for idle pleasure,
Nor from a sense of energy to burn.
Nor out of mischief, to evade their searches,
Do I carry them past my captors in my brain.
The free flow of my verse is dearly bought,
I have paid a cruel price for my poet’s rights:
The barren sacrifice of all her youth
And ten cold solitary years for my wife —

The unuttered cries of children still unborn,
My mother’s death, toiling in gaunt starvation,
The madness of prison cells, midnight interrogations,
Autumn’s sticky red clay in an opencast mine,
The secret, slow and silent erosive force
Of winters laying bricks, of summers feeding the furnace —
Oh, if this were but the sum of the price paid for my verse!
But those others paid the price with their lives,
Immured in the silence of Solovki, drowned in thunder of waves,
Or shot without trial in Vorkuta’s polar night.

Love and warmth and their executed cries
Have combined in my breast to carve
The receptive metre of this sorrowful tale,
These few poor thousand incapacious lines.
Oh, hopeless labour! Can you really pay the price?
Do you think to redeem the pledge with a single life?
For what an age has my country been so poor
In women’s happy laughter, so very rich
In poets’ lamentations!
Verse verse — for all that we have lost,
A drop of scented resin in the razed forest!
But this is all I live for! On its wings
I transport my feeble body through prison walls
And one day, in distant exile dim,
Biding my time, I will free my tortured memory from its thrall:
On paper, birchbark, in a blackened bottle rolled,
I will consign my tale to the forest leaves,
Or to a drift of shifting snow.

But what if beforehand they give me poisoned bread?
Or if darkness beclouds my mind at last?
Oh, let me die there! Let it not be here!
God keep me from going mad!

Zarganar

Burmese comic, dissident and poet Zarganar was imprisoned for speaking out against the military junta in its handling of the Cyclone Nargis crisis in May 2008. Last year he, along with dozens of other political prisoners, was released Myitkyina jail in northern Burma by the Burmese government.

The following poem appeared as part of a profile of Zarganar in Beyond Bars, a 2010 issue of Index on Censorship magazine.

Untitled (translated by Vicky Bowman)

It’s lucky my forehead is flat
Since my arm must often rest there.
Beneath it shines a light I must invite
From a moon I cannot see
In Myitkyina.

To mark our 40th birthday, on 19 November we are partnering with Poet in the City for a special celebration of Index’s remarkable literary heritage. More here

The post National Poetry day | Poems by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Zarganar appeared first on Index on Censorship.

“It’s very important that I give this poem to [Zarganar],” said Ma Nyein. “But right now, I don’t know if I can even do that.”
In a week where human rights campaigners appealed to the Indian government to apply pressure to the junta during a visit to India by one of its senior generals, free expression groups Index on Censorship and English PEN are hosting a special fundraiser at 6.30pm on 30 July at the Free Word in order to raise funds for the inaugural Burmese Arts Festival, to be held in October.

The event will feature special preview excerpts from new film This Prison Where I Live, presented by director Rex Bloomstein. In the film, German comic Michael Mittermeier travels to Burma to understand Zarganar’s motivation, which led him to become the ‘loudspeaker of the people’.

It will also include the UK premiere of Burmese Theatre Workshop’s new show Beyond Nargis, which takes the audience back to Burma in May 2008 as the population struggles to cope with the effects of one of the worst natural disasters in living memory, Cyclone Nargis.

Tickets cost £20 and all proceeds will go to the bringing artists to the festival and production costs. They can be reserved by calling 0207 3242 570 or emailing bookings@freewordonline.com.

If you can’t make it, please send a donation to Burmese Arts Festival — cheques made payable to Writers and Scholars Educational Trust, 60 Free Word Centre, Londonn EC1R 3GA

The Burmese Arts Festival (14-17 October 2010) will bring together a unique group of Burmese contemporary artists and artists inspired by Burma to London’s Free Word Centre, many for the first time. Curated by internationally acclaimed visual artist and performer Htein Lin, the festival will include new presentations and productions and a celebration of Burmese culture to share with UK audiences. For more information, please see www.burmeseartsfestival.com or email info@burmeseartsfestival.com

The post Burmese Arts Festival fundraiser appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Supported by Index on Censorship, campaigners from across the UK and abroad are to converge on London’s Trafalgar Square on 3 May in support of Zarganar, Burma’s most famous comedian turned prisoner of conscience.

The Free Zarganar Campaign coalition will be holding a colourful afternoon in London’s Trafalgar Square to call for his immediate release. The comedian, writer and performer is currently serving a 35-year prison sentence for his criticism of the Burmese junta’s bungled response to the 2 May 2008 Cyclone Nargis disaster.

The cyclone devastated the country — more than 140,000 people died and millions were made homeless.

The event starts at 2.00pm om May 3 and is open to all. Organisers ask supporters to wear something red to help show your support and bring along an umbrella — the more colourful the better — to take part in our umbrella stunt.

Speakers on 3 May, which is also World Press Freedom Day 2010 include journalist, artist and friend of Zarganar Bo Bo Lansin, and freelance journalist and former political prisoner Nita May, who will talk about freedom of the press for women in Burma, the rights of artists and performers in Burma and the latest news of Zarganar’s situation.

Other speakers are Carole Seymour-Jones, Deputy President of English PEN and Chair of the Writers in Prison Committee, former political prisoner and close friend of Zarganar Aung Thwin and activist and former colleague of Zarganar Dr Win Naing. There will aslo be performances by the The Burmese Theatre Workshop and Camila Fiori.

Zarganar, an outspoken critic of Myanmar’s military government, was arrested on 4 June 2008 for his public criticism of the government’s response to the humanitarian crisis that emerged in the wake of Cyclone Nargis.

After it emerged that the Myanmar government was obstructing international aid that was to be distributed to the devastated Irrawaddy Delta and the surrounding areas, Zarganar began to lead efforts to raise and distribute aid from private donors.

Despite assurances from the authorities that private donors would be given free access to cyclone affected areas, Zarganar and at least 21 others were later arrested for their participation in the voluntary aid effort.

Zarganar regularly gave interviews to journalists abroad, exposing the devastation which had not been reported by the tightly-controlled Myanmar media. They collected video footage and photographic evidence from the affected areas. Two days after his arrest, state-controlled media published warnings against the production of video footage of relief work for foreign news agencies.

Zarganar has insisted that humour in Burma will prevail. “Burmese people love to laugh. If I can’t speak, jokes will still spread. People will make them up themselves.”

The Free Zarganar Campaign was launched by a consortium of human rights and freedom of expression advocates including Index on Censorship. Its goal is to mobilise public opinion and win his immediate release. See www.freezarganar.org/ and http://zarganar.blog.free.fr/ or follow on Facebook

Read more about Zarganar at Liberty Central

The post Burma: Free Zarganar! appeared first on Index on Censorship.