Myanmar Coup and Sadaik
On this day three months ago, the military fucked the country it proclaims it protects.
When I started Sadaik back in 2012, before the censorship had been lifted, I posted anonymously at first. I didnt really know what the site was going to be or what it could do but it has evolved over the last ten years, in some ways mirroring Myanmars paths over the same time. At its heart though has always been to give literature from Myanmar a wider voice.
I have spent the last three months looking at Sadaik and thinking, what now?
The first month we saw the tens of thousands that marched in the streets. The second month we heard the military trucks and backhoe loaders rumble under our balcony and the flashbangs and gunshots downtown. The third month we had to leave after the massacres.
My normal posts on Sadaik seemed irrelevant then and still do now in a way. Im not sure on the best way to connect literature to the trauma that Myanmar is experiencing. I dont have the platform to promote larger pieces of literature on the coup (though others do) but staying silent or shutting Sadaik down would be to surrender the privilege I now have to write without terror, a freedom that once again has been viciously denied to those Ive known for so long and now abandoned.
So whatever happens to Myanmar over the next three months, the next ten years, Sadaik will remain a home for literature from Myanmar, a censored Myanmar but still, hopefully, one that the world will want to know of.
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