Arakan News Agency
A new collection of refugee children’s art gives a victim’s-eye view of the decades of terror inflicted on ethnic families by Myanmar’s military
Art is the original common tongue – it allows meaning to be transmitted between cultures which lack a shared language. But it also crosses the gulf between another two islands: the sayable and the unsayable.
When Human Rights Watch gave crayons and paper to kids in Darfur, Sudan, in 2005, they drew what was first on their minds: scenes of the devastation they’d experienced when the Janjaweed militia attacked their villages. The images were so powerful they were submitted to the International Criminal Court in 2007, as witness statements testifying to the attacks.
Creating art after injustice, however, is not just about documentation. It also helps victims reclaim a sense of control over memories of times when they had no control. When trauma shuts down the linguistic centres of the mind, as psychologists and MRI studies show, the areas governing visual creativity are not blocked in the same way. Finding an outlet through art to discuss experiences without fear of judgement or criticism gives victims opportunities for emotional healing.
Forced To Flee: Visual Stories by Refugee Youth from Burma is a newly published collection of 196 “visual stories” telling the history of those evicted from this country by ongoing exploitation, aggression and outright acts of war against minorities. Partly funded via Kickstarter, the book is the result of over 40 “visual storytelling sessions” facilitated by author Erika Berg, her husband and their then-10-year-old daughter with over 1200 youth – a fraction of the hundreds of thousands displaced from home, mostly living in border areas in Bangladesh, India and Thailand, but also in third countries.
While the participants included former political prisoners, the vast majority were children, some younger than 10, most in their teens. Having undergone tremendous upheaval at a young age – “conscripted into armies, trafficked, preyed on for sex, orphaned, persecuted, discriminated against, marginalised and, without exception, force to flee” – and often lacking the language skills, social permissions or self-confidence to speak about what happened, particularly to older strangers from another culture whom they have no reason to trust, they were hesitant at first, Berg writes. But each session began with her telling them, “I need your help,” and soon they came to believe her.
In “refugee camps, orphanages, shelters for child survivors of human trafficking, textile factories, places of worship, schools, boarding houses, open fields and a city dump”, participants were asked to paint responses to some of following questions:
.Why were you forced to flee Burma?
.What do you remember most about your journey to safety?
.What is/was it like to live in exile (a refugee camp)?
.What do you miss most about Burma?
.What is your dream for the future?
Provided with watercolour paper, a pencil and a box of watercolour crayons, they then set out to answer the questions, each of which is given a separate chapter in the book. Each gorgeously designed page contains one piece of art, paired with a column of text commenting on the picture, the individual who drew it and sometimes relevant background information on larger issues or events, or a photo of the artist.
“As I made my way around the room, a few youth would sit bolt upright, grinning expectantly, eager to share their works-in-progress,” writes Berg. “Others were too consumed by memories of their past or the creative process to notice me. Still others were engrossed in animated conversation with their peers about human rights issues that had been revealed, at times unexpectedly, by their stories.”
The result, nearly 200 pages, is a stunning documentation of the wounds incurred by the military’s infamous “Four Cuts campaign” launched in the 1960s against non-Bamar insurgents, families and villages to cut off food, funds, intelligence and recruits. The book also carries right on through to the present day, examining the displacement of families by environmentally damaging development, for instance, and the ultranationalist Buddhist sentiment that has created an atmosphere of fear for Muslims.
Some of the art is allegorical – an eye weeping in the sky above a burning village – but some, particularly in the first section, “Why were you forced to flee?”, is brutally specific. In one picture, the sun shines, birds fly by, animals graze in the background, but instead of a happy family portrait in the foreground, there are men in green uniforms shooting bullets into bodies. Red circles represent where the bullets entered and blood spilled out.
The victims here are not types but individuals: friends, neighbours, family members. And while the memories are individual – a lifelong Christian young woman forced to kneel before a soldier at gunpoint and recite Buddhist scripture; a village burned by soldiers; families carrying their possessions on a road leading they know not where – in combination they tell the story of a coordinated assault, carried out in many areas over many years, against the helpless.
In one, a farmer bends over while labouring in a field while a giant arm, clad in military green, reaches down from the sky to pluck money out of the basket on his back. From the caption we learn that the farmer – the artist’s father – had been forced to sell rice to the military at below-market rates, leaving the family in such poverty that they could not afford medical care for their one-year-old daughter. She later died.
Quotes from the artists, particularly in the later chapters about building bridges between different faiths and ethnic groups, are forward-looking, showing undimmed hope for a better world. But in the “why you left” chapter, almost all quotations are short, declarative sentences, most expressed using the negative, outlining the grim horrors these children have lived through: “We never looked back.” “No one was safe.” “I will never forget the smell and crackling sound.” “I had never seen helicopters shoot bullets before.”
Forced to Flee spotlights not just one minority group but many, showing how those living along outer areas of the country are being squeezed out by those in the heartland. Chin flee to India; Shan, Kachin, Kayin flee to Thailand; Rohingya flee to Bangladesh, or by boat to whatever place they can find to take them. The book serves as a primer for those outside the country who may know of Myanmar’s dictatorship/democracy struggle, but not of the “world’s longest-running civil war” that has been displacing civilians for over 60 years. It also puts the lie to the notion that anti-Rohingya sentiment is new: “Operation King Dragon” left nearly 250,000 Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh in 1978; “Operation Clean and Beautiful Nation”, in 1991, pushed 200,000 more across the border.
Leaving, of course, is only the beginning. “Rarely does refuge mean a home away from home. Usually it is an overcrowded refugee camp or an impoverished, crime-infested urban slum, and not always a safer environment than the one left behind,” Berg writes.
One refugee in Nu Po camp, Thailand, said that rather than having fled to freedom, he felt he had been pushed out and confined there in exile by the Myanmar government. “It felt like prison … Only we didn’t do anything wrong and didn’t know the length of our sentence.”
The book includes anecdotes of attacks, rape, muggings, robberies, teasing, racist slurs – and that’s all in a place that’s still better than the situation they left behind. Even small things, like getting water in Delhi when the supplies run out, reveal the “outsider” nature of refugees. “Even if we get there first, we always end up last in line.”
Berg notes that only 1 percent of refugees are registered by the UNHCR and selected to resettle in a third country, where they receive assistance to integrate into society. “However, many of those who have been resettled in a free and democratic society struggle with post-traumatic stress, flashbacks, nightmares, insomnia and self-blame. The stigma associated with mental health issues among many refugees has discouraged refugees from seeking counseling or psychiatric treatment. Instead, they continue to suffer secretly, sometimes for the rest of their lives, behind a smile.”
As Berg writes in the epilogue, however, refugees can be a powerful catalyst for change – if only they are listened to. “No one is better qualified to speak out against human rights abuses than those who have survived them.” Once the children realised their stories would be seen, they “rose up, eager to share their dreams, eager to be heard and – by the end of the workshop – eager to make a difference in the world”.
Some wanted to return to a bucolic home they had never seen, or be reunited with loved ones they missed. Other wanted to grow up to be doctors or teachers to help those in need. Many expressed wishes to work on peace-building initiatives, or to become lawyers or start schools. One wished to start a multi-ethnic football league so people of all backgrounds could bond through sport.
One participant, Berg writes, sat quietly in the back, speaking to no one, but he drew himself resplendent, in long hair and a dress, holding flowers. His dream was to live freely the way he saw himself inside. That’s the dream stolen from all these children, and from countless thousands more like them. One only hopes the experience of making this art will help nourish these dreams and keep them alive.
Forced to Flee serves as a kind of visual history of modern Myanmar – the kind those in charge don’t want to be told. Just as the drawings of the children in Darfur were submitted to the ICC, so has Berg, with this book, submitted these drawings to the world for judgement. They serve as yet more evidence – as if more were needed – that Myanmar’s government has for decades planned and carried out targeted attacks on non-Bamar ethnic minorities, in ruthless purges without regard for the value of human life.
Perhaps more importantly, the book provides an exemplary teaching opportunity, particularly for those in, say, the more affluent areas of Yangon, where such landscapes and experiences may seem awfully distant. Every classroom needs a copy: If the adults in charge won’t listen to the children, perhaps their children will.
Forced to Flee: Visual Stories by Refugee Youth from Burma
Erika Berg
