Author. Literature. Myanmar
For centuries, the Chin people, who now live in the hills that border Bangladesh and India, were animist, tracing their own oral histories that began when they left their original ‘chinram’, or homeland, a dark cave. When the Christian missionaries came, following the British imperial invasion of the Chin Hills in the last decade of the 19th Century, their first mission took root in Hakha, now the capital town of the Chin Hills.
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Hakha is the capital of Chin State, Myanmar’s least developed region and a restricted area for foreigners without permits until 2012. With very few roads, and many of the villages clinging to remote hillsides, it is detached from the literary centres of the country …
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The Chin, who live in the hills that border Bangladesh and India, like to say that Burmese literature was born from peace, while Chin literature was born from war. The first known Burmese text is the 12th Century Myazedi stone in Bagan, which lists the deeds and donations of a prince in memory of the love he held for his father and mother …
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Travel in Chin State and you are most likely heading towards the major towns, Falam and Hakha in the north, Mindat in the south (and if you are fortunate, Matupi in the centre). But these are mostly imperial constructions, enlarged by Christian missions and colonial trade with the valleys in Burma Proper below. The original clusters of the first chin communities are often found beyond the road.
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If ever there was a book which showed the world how to publish a translated work in minority, national and international languages, this is it. Written originally in Lai Hakha by the ethnic Chin poetess and creative polymath Anna Biak …
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Possibly the first novel written by a writer from an ethnic community, certainly to first to have been translated into English, The Lonely Land was originally written in the Lai Hakka language …
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The Chin live in a wedge of hills along the western border of Myanmar with India and Bangladesh. Descending south, possibly from Tibet, around the 7th century, they settled in the Kalay valley in Sagaing region and were known to the first Burmese Kingdom in Bagan in the 11th Century.
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An unnamed, newly promoted headmaster attempts to build a ‘perfect school’ in a village in the northern Chin Hills. As with a lot of ‘realist’ fiction from Myanmar, this novel reads like a memoir …
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‘The road from Kalaymyo to Hakha is lined with grave markers. With little flat ground in the northern Chin Hills, cemeteries are exchanged for solitary memorials overlooking the knuckled mountain ranges. Some—usually those of the young—have photographs embedded into them; the elders are left faceless. All are etched with a name, an age, and a date of death. Yet in Chin State, as in the other six states of Myanmar, the lives of those who lived and passed away here are not recorded and remembered in the Myanmar language, but in an ethnic-minority language and literature.’
My Irrawaddy Journal article on the Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds project in Chin State
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Holding a literature workshop in Chin state, the least developed state in the second least developed country in Asia was always going to pose challenges. All of the Hidden Words workshops, regardless of the location, follow a logistical template revolving around our 2 partners, the Millennium Centres who provide the workshop venue and live literature night and the local cultural group who source the participants …
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