Rohingya in Modern Fiction
The Rohingya crisis has produced a number of recent non-fiction worksmost notably, Francis Wades much reviewed ‘Myanmar’s Enemy Within‘ and Azeem Ibrahim’s earlier work ‘The Rohingya’s: Inside Myanmar’s Genocide‘ while long time Myanmar based journalist Poppy McPherson will have own take on the crisis out this year from I.B Tauris in the UK …
The conflict is now finding its way into fiction.
Rosalie Metro’s sardonically titled ‘Have Fun in Burma’, out now through Northern Illinois University Press, uses the Rakhine State crises as one of several strands following American high school graduate Adele Frost as she spends a summer teaching English at a Burmese monastery, falls in love with a former political prisoner (who else!) and is drawn into the religious fault lines that crack open as the country transitions.
The second, a novella, pushes the Rohingya to the core of the narrative. A Tale of Rohingya, by Nuruddin Jahangir (Protiksha), published in Bangladesh, follows the Rohingya ‘Everyman’ Solomon, collaborating with international aid agencies as they cope with the influx of refugees fleeing Myanmar all the while hiding his true to identity to those he works with.
Image Credit at Frontier Magazine