“When the music is out of time, the rhythm is destroyed. When the timing isn’t right, the flavor of the curry is destroyed. In politics, when the timing is wrong, the image of the whole country is destroyed. The timing in politics is to do the right thing at the right time.”

 My friend Win Maw, a musician and video journalist, said this to his daughter Khin Suu Kyi. On January 5th she quoted him in an open letter to Thein Sein, the president of Burma, asking for his release from prison.

In 1981 Win Maw entered the music industry as the lead guitar player and band leader of Shwe Thansin (Golden Melody). When Golden Melody was banned from the airwaves he became the leader of the band A-Lin-Kar. On November 18, 1996, during a touristic campaign that the government called “Visit Myanmar Year,” Win Maw was arrested by the military government. He was sentenced to six years in prison for writing songs in support of Burma’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

                                         Illustrated by Than Htay Maung

အရိုးထိေအာင္ေအးေသာညဥ့္ေလထုဒါဏ္ကိုပခံုးႀကံဳ႕ေကြးရင္းလက္သီးတင္းတင္းဆုတ္ရင္းႏွင့္သူတို႔က ျမစ္ဟုေခၚေသာေရစီးေၾကာင္းတခုေဘးတြင္ က်မမိုက္မိုက္ ကမ္းကမ္းႏွင့္မတုန္မလႈပ္ထိုင္ေနမိသည္။ တဆတ္ဆတ္ ရိုက္ေနေသာသြားမ်ားကို လည္းၿငိမ္သက္ေအာင္ အံကိုတင္းတင္း ႀကိတ္ကာကြယ္ရ 
ေသးသည္။

က်မထိုင္ေနေသာ ေက်ာက္သားခံုျဖဴကေလးသည္ခပ္ေနာက္ေနာက္ေရခဲတံုးတတံုးလိုျဖဴေဖြးေအးစက္ 
ေနသည္။ ျမစ္ကိုတိုက္ခတ္လာေသာေလကအကာအကြယ္မဲ့ေသာမ်က္ႏွာႏွင့္လည္ပင္းမ်ားကို တိုးေ၀ွ႔ လာေသာအခါ ၾကက္သည္းေတြျဖန္းျဖန္းထရသည္။

က်မေရွ႕တည့္တည့္ရွိေရစီးျငင္သာေသာအိုင္အို၀ါျမစ္သည္ က်မငယ္ငယ္ကေနထိုင္ ႀကီးျပင္းခဲ့ေသာ ေက်းလက္ေျခတံရွည္အိမ္ကေလး၏ေနာက္ေဖးရွိေခ်ာင္းႏွင့္အရြယ္တူေလာက္ရွိသည္။ က်ီေလာင္ေလာင္ ျမစ္ေရကေတာ့ ေခ်ာင္းကေလးထဲမွာေႏြရာသီစီး ဆင္းေသာအင္းေရႏွင့္တူသည္။ ေခ်ာင္းနံေဘးမွာ လယ္ကြင္းေတြ၊ငရုတ္ခင္းေတြ၊ ေနၾကာ ခင္းေတြရွိသည္။ အဲဒီစိုက္ ခင္းေတြထဲမွာအလုပ္လုပ္ေနၾကသူ 
ေတြက က်မ၏ သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြ။ ေႏြရာသီေက်ာင္းပိတ္ရက္ဆို က်မတို႔ညီအမလည္းငရုတ္သီးခူး ထြက္ရသည္။

Khet Mar (translated from the Burmese by Ko Ko Thett)

Below is the author’s personal account of a student book club in Rangoon, where she taught student union leaders who would later be imprisoned for their political views. Her account also details their January 13 release from prison under a general amnesty and a reunion with of some of the club’s members via telephone.

This past January 12 put me on edge. My restlessness had nothing to do with my birthday, or its falling on Friday the 13th. Instead it had everything to do with the fate of my friends in Burma. That evening the Burmese diaspora had been stirred up by some news: Thein Sein’s government had just declared an amnesty regarding the release of 651 prisoners under the Criminal Procedure Act, effective January 13. It was the new Burmese government’s fourth large-scale clemency in eight months.
As Rangoon is twelve hours ahead of Pittsburgh, I decided to wait for the unbolting of Burma’s prison doors at my desk, starting at 7 p.m. It was a tense wait. How many prisoners of conscience would be released this time? Who would they be? Burmese social networking pages were awash with predictions and rumors. Our status messages reflected the mood of the day. The little green lights on my address book said the whole Burmese community I know in the West was online and sleepless that night—like myself.

၁၉၉၅ ခုႏွစ္တုန္းက ဆရာမင္းသု၀ဏ္ၿခံထဲကထမနဲပြဲမွာ ဆရာဒဂုန္တာရာ၊ ဆရာေမာင္စြမ္းရည္၊ ဘဘဦးမိုးသူ၊ ဦးလိႈင္(သုခမိန္လိႈင္) ဆရာဒဂုန္တာရာ့ေျမးေဒ၀ီကေလးနဲ႔က်မ အမွတ္တရ

စက္တင္ဘာလထဲမွာ မာမားဆီကအီးေမးလ္တစ္ေစာင္ရပါတယ္။ ‘သားငယ္နဲ႔ဖုန္းေျပာရတယ္။ ဦးရဲ႕ အဆူမခံရတာၾကာၿပီ။ အဆူခံခ်င္ေသးတယ္လို႔ သားငယ္ကို ခက္မာကေျပာတယ္လို႔ျပန္ေျပာျပတယ္။ ဦးကလည္းေျပာတယ္။ 'သူ႔ကို ငါကစိတ္ပူလို႔ဆူေနရတာတဲ့’။ အဲဒီေမးလ္ေလးကိုဖတ္ၿပီးက်မမ်က္ရည္ လည္ခဲ့ရပါ တယ္။ အီးေမးလ္စာမ်က္ႏွာကိုဖြင့္ၿပီးစာျပန္ဖို႔လုပ္ရင္း ဘယ္လိုျပန္ရင္ေကာင္းမလဲ စဥ္းစားရာကေန အေတြးေတြကအတိတ္ကိုေရာက္သြားေတာ့ ညလည္ေခါင္ႀကီးမွာ တေယာက္ထဲ ရယ္လိုက္၊ မ်က္ရည္က်လိုက္နဲ႔တမ္းတရင္းရွင္သန္ရတဲ့ လူလတ္ပိုင္း ကာလရဲ႕ အရသာကို အျပည့္အ၀ ခံစားလိုက္တာစာေတာင္မျပန္ျဖစ္ေတာ့ပါဘူး။ ဒါနဲ႔ေနာက္ေန႔မွေအးေအးေဆးေဆးေဆြးေဆြးေျမ့ေျမ့နဲ႔ စာရွည္ရွည္ျပန္ေရးေတာ့မယ္ ဆိုၿပီးေတးထားလိုက္ပါတယ္။

( 'ပုန္းလ်ိဴးေနေသာ၀ိညာဥ္မ်ား' အက္ေဆးေလးရဲ႕ အဂၤလိပ္ဗားရွင္းပါ။   HIMAL SOUTHASIAN magazine မွာပံုႏွိပ္ေဖာ္ျပေတာ့ ေခါင္းစဥ္ကိုေျပာင္းလိုက္တာပါ။ )

The spring had with it warmth and happiness. Basking in its radiant sunlight, the earth could finally forget the melancholy of winter landscapes, with their dull-white snow and dried branches. The blacks and whites of winter had finally brightened into full-blown colour: the sky a tranquil blue, the earth covered with green grass.
Flower buds of so many hues peeped out from amidst the limbs and twigs. These delicate buds, bursting forth from dried bark, had been forced to endure dreadful chills. But nonetheless they had always continued to prepare for the passing of the awful winter chill.
Now, the snows could no longer remain stubborn in the face of the warmth that had arrived. So the ice thawed and the water soaked into the earth, to be swallowed up by roots and refresh the plants.
The spring knows no favourites. It even visited my garden, nudging the plants there to blossom. But in nature everything is constantly changing, and the flowers in my garden are no exception. Eventually the petals withered again; the remaining buds, pecked by birds.
One day autumn came, and with it the sense that the time of the flowers was over. The chill winds once again stripped the leaves of the plants and the trees with their invisible hands. And before long, the snowflakes and frosts set out again to kill the flowers.
The blossoms were helpless as always, and fell easily to the ground. But they never failed to store their remaining energies inside the bony branches that would continue to struggle numbly against the brutal cold. And on the day those branches met with the radiant sunrays once again, the strength stored there would trigger off another round of blossoming. Though the brutal winter could kill the flowers, it could do nothing against this inner strength – the souls that lay hidden deep inside the bones of the branches.
Each of us needs to struggle against the winter chill and prepare for the coming spring. We must raise new plants to replace the damaged ones. And if we do not rise to the occasion, if we feel helpless, we will be the ones who feel the loss of the flowers when they fail to bloom.
Because we are afraid of the winter, we feel helpless when the cold winds blow. But if we succumb to that feeling, we do not give ourselves the chance to welcome the spring. Of course, spring cannot be brought on by prayers alone. But as long as we are able to store our strength, our souls, in our bodies during the difficult seasons, our spring will no doubt bring with it a bounty of flowers to our garden.

Translated from the Burmese by Tazar
~ Khet Mar is a journalist, poet and author born in Burma.
 HIMAL SOUTHASIAN magazine
December 2011

ႏိုင္ငံတကာကပူးေပါင္းပါ၀င္ခဲ့ၾကတဲ့ စာေရးဆရာ၊ကဗ်ာဆရာ ရွစ္ေယာက္

                                                တခ်ိန္က Gettysburg စစ္ေျမျပင္မွာ 

(ထံုးစံအတိုင္း အိပ္မရတဲ့တည ေဖ့စ္ဘြတ္ထဲလည္ရင္း ခင္ေအာင္ေအးရဲ႕ႏုတ္စ္ 
ေတြဖတ္မိပါတယ္။ ဘာေၾကာင့္မွန္းမသိသူေရးတာေတြဖတ္ၿပီးစာေရးခ်င္လာတာနဲ႔ 
ေခါင္းထဲျဖတ္ကနဲေပၚလာတာကိုခ်ေရးလိုက္တာပါ။ ဘယ္လိုစမယ္၊ ဘယ္လို ဆံုးမယ္ဆိုတာထည့္မစဥ္းစားပဲ ေရးခ်င္တာကိုေရးခ်င္သလိုေရးၿပီး ရပ္ခ်င္တဲ့အခ်ိန္ မွာရပ္လိုက္ပါတယ္။)