Mettā in Dukkha: ko ko thett’s The Burden of Being Burmese
As news of another military coup and mass murder of citizens in Myanmar goes viral in the (selective attention of) the American media, many are expressing outrage, sympathy, empathy, thoughts and prayers, yet fewer, apparently, are speaking of our own culture’s fingerprints in the misery of modern militarized Myanmar, except perhaps as metonymy for globalism. In The Burden of Being Burmese (Zephyr Press, 2015), ko ko thett, a Burmese living in exile among Anglos, is well aware of being a metonymy, that his book (whether he likes it or not) will be taken as representative, as speaking truth to power on behalf of the oppressed, but declawed into commodity exchange: (“Buy me, get my country free,” 61)
Although this book is dazzling poetically and hilariously brilliant, it’s not what one would call a comfortable book. As he provides the English-speaking world with portraits of many (seemingly?) home-grown atrocities “where boys my age get routinely dehumanized” (19), “spent mortar shells are reborn as vases for/ Buddhist shrines and pagodas.” (20) and “everyone suffers adjustment disorder” (20), he’s a master of social and political ironies that, beyond nationalism, show the burdens of the various imperialisms that are sometimes more benignly called “globalism.” (for instance, the irony that many immigrants and refugees globally, moving to imperial countries that are responsible for destroying your own, understand all too well).
Among some of the manifestations of this, we find “a language that never makes you feel good about sex,” being “colonized by bottled water,” (4) “where street vendors who used to sell falafel for rice noodles/have found bootlegging dvds more profitable” (15). Nor is food colonization a new phenomenon, but part of a noble tradition, like chemical warfare, going back at least as far as the 19th century. Monosodium Glutamate, for instance, is: “the buddha’s poop that has colonized our cuisines since 1908….from the shrimp cocktail of Nasa astronauts in space to/ the food aid package in east Africa.” (86). Neither are Big Pharma and the opioid addiction immune. At times, one may detect a nostalgia-by-default for a prelapsarian pre-colonized time, though at other times, he has a great deal of mordantly recursive pleasure satirizing this tendency, whether seen in himself, or in others; for instance “my generation is best,” which also manages to satirize “my country is best” nationalism in the process.
Or check out the movement of this stanza from “chaos clock:”
cockfights used to be popular here
the blood sport is barbaric
people now have other options
scorecasting is not a zero-sum game
investment is pouring in, reeking draws fruit flies
ricky draws angles. (17)
In thett’s exploration of what one reader called, “the possibility of the translatability of lived experience between the personal and political,” he sometimes speaks in the voice of, the “Caucasian engineers,” (20), the imperial self, and the masters of manipulation, whether they take more visible form (tanks), or more invisible forms (banks, or even perhaps even poets).
The speaker and situation of “urban renewal,” may be an urban planner speaking to a city, and nature, in the voice of a psychologist, preacher or ‘big brother’ offering tough-love advice to a friend. Lines that at first might not seem like such a bad thing tend to have a double-edged sword when considered as trickle-down policies. In “the public transit in your brain,” this speaker warns, there should be (and, dammit, shall be!):
“dog parks for dogs,
amusement parks for amusements, child-friendly facilities
for the parents of children who may never grow up,
bingo halls for all ages and sexual preferences.” (28)
Yet, on closer observations, one may ask questions: Why aren’t the amusement parks for people? What about the playgrounds you defunded? Why are dogs being segregated into the dog parks (or what he elsewhere calls “the hammer of animalism” 16). Do all ages and sexual preferences really want to be forced to play bingo? No! this is Blake’s “charter’d city” on steroids, brain candy, happiness pie! The speaker is a rage for order, control freak! Though thett may be talking about Burma in “urban renewal,” he is so adept at making the atrocities of the martial law panopticon visible, his wry observational eye in these persona poems in the voice of worldly power, stripped of specific context, could be easily translated to many of America’s and England’s social crises (which makes sense, since we’ve exported them), in however etiolated a first-world form.
And, yes, even the soul is gentrified. Not only shall graffiti “be encouraged/ on the inner walls of your empty chest,” but:
“all administrative quarters of your soul shall be made/
soundproof to prevent the intrusion of street noises
malling, walling, enthralling, and everything else…” (29)
This sense of spiritual or psychic martial law reminds me of Jello Biafra’s “Stay In Your Homes” (“the luxuries you demanded have now become mandatory.”) Though this poem is presented as a future dystopia, perhaps America’s future can be seen in Burma’s present. We could also, however, see the past of Anglo-Americans in this portrayal of the durian-skinned soul. After all, it’s not too different from the dominant Anglo-American philosophies during the time when England first colonized Burma, and the one-way subject-object relationships they were used to justify---as in another poem spoken in the voice of worldly power:
happiness is best served at room temperature
[my room temperature, not yours]
it goes down really well with dukkha
[your dukkha, not mine] (79)
Soundproofing your soul may lead to making you an absolute tyrant. Lacking mettā (a Buddhist word for loving-kindness, compassion, or disinterested love), such a soundproof, bullet-proof soul radiates dukkha (the Buddhist concept of suffering, angst, anguish, frustration, pain, affliction, anxiety---the general burdens of life) and needs to be “cut” (53-54) with “fresh gags below the waistline” (16). He also directly addresses this imperial self beneath the well-intentioned American. Take, for instance, the first stanza of “fuck me untied:”
“are you one of those who will import
our rice so you can bomb our village
you believe in the charity of your moneyed class
now that my body is stuck in your bottleneck, there is
no spillover effect, save for your sperm.” (39)
In personalizing this global relationship between the first world “consumer” (and writer with “sweet monologues”) and the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ dehumanized producers (or human resources) as rape, in a world without mettā, thett expresses the trauma, depression and numbness personally. One effect of this is an absolute feeling of alienation:
“i no longer trust the public ride
faced with the leviathan, i will be playing possum
lying low like a benthic fish, if not committing
another suicide” (39)
Looking for a sliver of hope in this loveless disconnection, a reader may detect a defense of the inward turn of poetic solitude as a survival strategy that, if nothing else, can practice obstacles, and prevent him from turning the violence and threats directed at him from others into an act of self-sabotage, but such faith that this can lead to a kind of rebirth, or resistance to the aggressive hunger of the colonizer (or a ‘lover’ who may act imperialist) on a strictly personal level, is at best temporary. Near the end of another poem, “the rain maker,” thett presents, in a more detached third person tone, an “after picture” to the dark night of the soul in “fuck me, untied:”
look how the dormant underdog,
taken for granted rotten-dead,
has sprung back to life on dukkha media! (71)
By referring to dukkha as a form of media, I feel a skepticism towards the “resurrection” enabled by the path of possum-like dormancy. Perhaps we could read this as self-satire, but in the context of the poem this image is really a “mirage” onto which we, the reader, will inevitably project meanings, feelings, connotations or past experiences (as he sardonically invites us to “turn the projector on” in the first line). thett turns the gaze on his first-world reader by leaving it purposely contextless: This “dormant underdog” is a type, an “it.”
sickened with divided attention disorder
it jumps over the crown, chokes and
strangles the aristocratic order (72)
The divided attention disorder could be his own project of combining the personal with the political, the domestic with the global, the multi-tasking and hybridism, or even those who try to combine poetry with social status in other poems. It could also a transcendental spirit or a revolutionary, which seems to have positive connotations, were it not for the fact that many who present themselves socially as transcendental (my kingdom is not of this world), or revolutionary become future dictators (whether in a country or a poetry community). After all, capitalism, too, “strangles the aristocratic order.” Perhaps it refers to Aung San Suu, who had been elected not long before (and who, in 2021, has been overthrown by military coup). Having seen this movie so many times, starring one who may even genuinely be trying to make things better only to make things worse, the next stanza suggests an alternative:
the kingdom now needs a flea leap forward
the newly elected leader may be comely
just don’t expect her to change the clime (72)
In my projections of thett’s meanings, I take the “flea leap forward” as the possibility of lyric poetry, the inward turn, the need for dormancy against the “move-fast, break things” Zuckerbergian world that’s fueled by and preys on the insatiable addictive hunger of consumerism. Thett’s cynicism towards just about any strictly political solution is rooted in what in 21st century American poetics may be called “slow poetry” and/or “eco-poetry” in a way that appeals to ‘wit-crackers’ like myself who may not be moved as much by an earnest plea to truly humble ourselves before the power of nature as if that could maybe stop global climate change:
isn’t it fascinating?
how each and every cowry trapped in a hallowed-out bamboo
houses an entire symphony orchestra (72)
The defense of flea-like smallness in this poem’s final “mirage” could recall Emily Dickinson’s “The spreading wide my narrow Hands/ To gather Paradise—.” (466), yet even here, such a statement is not unqualified, for it must also be mentioned that the cowry was, in Burma, used for money. Unlike many poets, who believe they can fight a spiritual war against capitalism by banishing economic terms from their poetry, I dare say that thett’s reverence for nature comes through, like mettā, in between the lines of capital and its dukkha.
In digging deep into the conscience of “woke’ readers who may feel they have no moral blind-spots, and poets whose conscience has “been ideologically castrated” (56), at one point he writes, “there’s no municipal services to collect your moral trash” (16), and “your karma is you.” (77) A question of morality arises: what is morality in a social media world of virtue signaling, where the private is more fishbowled, where “sale items, dressed in poverty and virgin virtue/ vie for the highest bidder (15)? Do we need the feeling or concept of immortality to live a kinder, more moral life on earth? Thett is certainly skeptical of how the promise of an afterlife is employed by people in power who want you dead (at one point he calls them the “afterlife insurance salespeople” 79):
people are welcome, problems are not
living is expensive, but dying doesn’t cost a dime
where else in the world can you enjoy a free funeral”. (17)
Or, perhaps:
“to age is to get less serious/about life, to die is to be incinerated to be reincarnated,/ a multi-purpose stadium for metal concerts and the /vispassana for the masses” (29, though I can see a reader saying, ‘that’s no worse than coming back as the grass in Walt Whitman’s “Resurgemus” before it got depoliticized in the more famous, “Song of Myself 6”). Hell, I like metal, and love vispassana.’).
When I first read “Anxiety Attack” (73), with lines like, “every detail of your life will be laid bare,” it seemed like a poem about judgement day, or as the Sufi mystic put it:
Everything cruel and unconscious
done in the illusion of the present world,
all that does not fade away at the death waking”
But as the poem continues, it becomes clearer that the “immortality” this poem is talking about is your reputation on earth (“future generations will be overwhelmed….researchers will no doubt nose into your diaries” and, closer to home, a literary person with “a penchant for post-modern flip-flops,” an emblem for moral relativism and what thett, as “flip flop thief” (79), calls ideological castration. I read this poem as a conscience scouring cautionary tale, to at least question what the desire for any kind of fame, however modest, is, and whether or not you’re implicated in it more than you think, and whether it has maybe robbed your soul. This facing of the darkness of dukkha (whether in others or himself—if not ‘his own’) is not an attempt to outsmart death as much as it’s a reminder that we don’t have to wait for death.
In “the rain maker,” he offers (faux) advice to his readers, “you don’t want to be another down comforter.” Perhaps The Burden of Being Burmese, working in the trenches of arrogant contemporary corruption, suggests it’s better to be an up afflicter. But though thett’s book doesn’t offer any specific solutions for these systemic atrocities and human meanness, it engages in a cathartic, detoxifying karmic payback to anyone with ears; its meta-poetic aspects may even clear the way for more mettā.
If I err, in the selective emphasis of this prose, by making this book seem more aggressively heavy handed than it really is, the only solution is to read the book first—and perhaps focus on the wit in such poems that explore the madness of discourse of a dissembling culture that may enable “divided attention disorder.” For instance, “after ‘the lie of art’”(41), with its playful, but at times maddening, binaries that remind of Lydia Tomkiw and Algebra Suicide’s “Proverbial Explanation for Why No Action is Taken,” or “faith supper” which may recall The Buzzcock’s “A Different Type of Tension.”
A more thorough essay would also consider how he’s able to transcend the page vs. spoken word divide as well as the three-dimensional wit of a single line. In “no football color” (57), he asks:
“shouldn’t the referee always trust her lineman?” Saying referees rather than the more conventional quarterback implies what many suspect: the game is rigged, fixed, government spies, Astroturf people’s movements, and what of the gender change to her? “Lineman” could also refer to poets.
Much more can be said, also, about the sad laments that appeal more to pathos than logos such as “the 5000th.” Many times, in reference to the contagion of the oppressor’s psychological aggressions, it’s been said, “oppression makes a wise man mad.” In ko ko thett’s poetry, “brahmin the economist” says “the mean reversion may or may not be inevitable,” (46), yet The Burden of Being Burmese suggests that that economic jargon, perhaps, can yet be translated poetically into an ethics of post-capitalist mettā.
[1] See, for instance, “In Burma, They Have Come For The Poets.” https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2021/03/21/in-burma-they-have-come-for-the-poets/
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