Books in Review
runs through the city, he must turn to illegal
refugees for manpower, through his best
friend, Keong, the “middleman.” Unlike
the “dark-skinned and foreign” migrants
from Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Nepal,
the Rohingya refugees fled persecution by
the Burmese state and are smuggled into
Malaysia. They are exploited and brutalized
simply because they didn’t have “refugee
papers.” During negotiations with a “labor
contractor,” Ah Hock commits a crime of
passion, fueled by his frustration with pov-
erty, racism, and corruption, that leads to
his imprisonment. “Customs officers see
a big lorry loaded with sacks of rice or
cages of live chickens, of course they know
what’s underneath all that, . . . but pay them
enough and they won’t bother.” As Su-min
observes, corruption was a two-way thing,
and the victims didn’t even know they
were victims. In fact, “you could say that
the victim becomes not only the enabler
of corruption but the perpetrator.” It is in
this sense that Tash Aw’s new book can be
read as both a thrilling personal story and a
political allegory.
Yang Jing
Nanjing Normal University
James Byrne & Shehzar Doja, eds.
I Am a Rohingya: Poetry from
the Camps and Beyond
Todmorden, United Kingdom. Arc. 2019.
83 pages.
This important book is the first English-
language anthology of poetry written by
Rohingya poets, and these vital poems com-
mand our attention, memorializing people
and places while speaking back to politi-
cally orchestrated genocidal dispossessions
(see WLT, Spring 2019, 26–31). Refugee
poets contributing to this exemplary book
include students, school teachers, journal-
ists, folk singers, editors, and translators;
tellingly, many use a pseudonym, and “only
basic information is given to protect poets’
safety.” Written predominantly from within
110 WLT AUTUMN 2019
the world’s largest refugee camp, the so-
called Cox’s Bazaar, these catalyzing works
arguably constitute some of the most con-
sequential poetry being written today. A
moral onus lies with readers: These poems
emphatically ask that we each read empa-
thetically while listening closely.
Demonstrating a collective and coura-
geous refusal to acquiesce or be silenced,
I Am a Rohingya instead chooses to “shout
for justice” while challenging readers: “Am
I not a human being?” Ro Anamul Hasan
wonders. Co-editor James Byrne reminds
us that “[t]he Rohingya are, without doubt,
one of the most persecuted people who live
on our shared earth. And they are speak-
ing to you now,” stateless, from within
dehumanized zones of forced exclusion.
These poems speak harrowingly of pro-
foundest loss, suffering, precarity but also
of nostalgia; despite the ongoing pogroms,
many texts in this book speak of their poets’
yearning to be included as sovereign citi-
zens within the Burmese state.
In the interview that concludes I Am
a Rohingya, poet and activist Mayyu Ali
asserts, “We love our motherland like oth-
ers do. Historically, geographically, ances-
trally, we belong there.” At the “apex of
inhumanity,” beyond the Burmese govern-
ment’s monstrous ideological violence, this
poet quietly wishes for experiences that
many of us may take for granted: “Just to
feel once the full meaning of freedom, / My
heart wishes / Just to walk once around my
own world.”
Amid the brutalities, this poet’s wistful
reflection echoes throughout other works
in the anthology, and indeed in the absence
of a coordinated global condemnation of
the Burmese military’s recent exterminato-
ry displacements of Rohingya people, these
poems are feats of resolute fearlessness. As
Ali asserts, heartrendingly, “If we don’t have
the support from inside Myanmar or from
the international community, we will have
to find hope within ourselves.”
Other contributors to the book
may agree, for “[w]hen love is this pure it
holds onto hope.” But beyond these avow-
als, those surviving the murderous persecu-
tions are “transformed into the living dead.”
Of course, many poems in this book cen-
tralize trauma, and bearing witness remains
the anthology’s energizing logic; as Yar
Tin understands in “Too Much Bitterness,”
surviving barbarism takes a toll that poetry
simply cannot assuage: “To make rhymes
out of gunshots, / To make poetry out of
death and destruction, / This heart of mine
is not skilled enough.”
For readers, a challenge remains: In
which pragmatic and empowering ways
are our hearts skilled enough to meaning-
fully intervene? So many of the shocking
accounts located in this book refuse bit-
terness or hostility, requiring only that we
too gaze unflinchingly in reflection on the
episodic ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. But
this carefully courageous book asks that we
not only read and listen. Amid the atroci-
ties, I Am a Rohingya speaks indomitably, in
eyewitness accounts; among those who read
it, may this book inaugurate a cascading
ripple of our loudest support, cried publicly
in protest and indignation.
Dan Disney
Sogang University (Seoul)