Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (23 page)

‘It’s only now I know how left behind we were. Some would say twenty, thirty years, I don’t know. But even then I was not happy with the way things were. When I was young my dream was to leave the country for good. I decided to leave and not come back. That’s how I felt. I was so sick and tired of this place.’

*

With an easy confidence that comes from not caring too much about what other people think, Darko is comfortable in his skin. But the swagger you might expect from a good-looking lead singer of a rock band isn’t there. It seems to me the powerful sense of being left behind has made him a much nicer person than he might otherwise have been. Darko is also smart, self-aware. He recognises his third-world inferiority complex. ‘To be a musician from a country like this is difficult. You can only be a follower. You have to choose what you want to be and follow it. For example, if you say your band is a punk band you have to stay typical punk. I have suffered from that. But I want to push myself out. I want to go to the edge, and sometimes I want to cross the line.’

Throughout university and through his early twenties, when Side Effect was starting out, Darko dreamed of leaving Burma. The group had hardly any money, there was nowhere to rehearse and it was difficult and expensive to put on gigs. Band mates were leaving to get ‘proper jobs’, and Darko sometimes despaired of a musical future. Worst of all was the scrutiny of the military authorities. For all artists, life under army rule was sometimes suffocatingly restrictive. ‘I hated some of the shit we had to put up with,’ Darko said. Every magazine article, song lyric or album cover had to pass the censor. Knowing that each line they wrote would be examined by a
middle-aged government stooge took the edge off their creativity. Darko would take the song lyrics down to the office of the Lyrics Scrutiny and Registration Committee, part of the Myanmar Music Association, itself a department of the Ministry of Culture. Government apparatchiks, sitting among piles of worm-infested scripts, poems and book manuscripts, would check all the words, the design of the cover sleeve, every last thing. Anything that failed to represent the image of a perfect society was removed. There were many examples, such as a line they wrote about buying a cinema ticket on the black market, or the prostitutes working in karaoke bars. They may have scanned well, but they were forbidden. And it wasn’t just political dissent the authorities were looking for. Anything rude, any bad language was excised with the stroke of a pen. When your whole reason for being depended on challenging convention, this was a maddening, soul-destroying process. Originality was crushed. One of Darko’s friends wrote a song called ‘Universal Prophesy’, about life, death, but not politics. He was so proud of it. But the censor didn’t like it. The word for prophet,
piyadeh
, was considered a religious word and therefore offensive if used in another context. It was cut; the songwriter was distraught. ‘Those things build up,’ Darko told me. ‘Especially when you think you’ve created something special.’

Censorship has made Burmese popular music more innocent and less challenging than it should be, Darko thinks. ‘Burmese bands focus on romantic lyrics because they could pass the censorship. It was so easy and predictable. Some musicians like to think their lyrics are good, but actually, they’re shit.’ Only one type of music really succeeded in breaking out – hip-hop, which burst on to the Burmese music scene just as the Internet became haphazardly accessible around 2005. Burmese kids embraced it straight away and, happily for them, the youthful vernacular of the rap lyrics seemed to outfox the censors. ‘Some of those lyrics, they’re so rude, man, I
think how did that get through? Then I realised – they used a lot of slang, the censors just didn’t get it, they didn’t understand. They are old guys. Some people say the lyrics are too rude, but I am happy to hear the fresh lyrics. They are about real feelings, not fake. It’s really important to express your real feelings.’

*

In Burma, parental disapproval is an inhibitor at least as powerful as any law. Darko is from a conventional family. He may be a punk singer but he doesn’t dress like a punk – as only a small group do in Burma, with glued Mohicans, ripped denim and piercings. ‘For me, being a punk is just a state of mind. But real punks with the punk lifestyle – there are not so many here. To dress up like that is not very easy. Your parents will be upset. That’s why it’s difficult.’ In a culture where family has such a strong influence, Darko’s determination to focus on his music has been a test of will. His father, a marine engineer, put pressure on his two sons, Darko and his younger brother Jozeff (Side Effect’s guitarist), to pursue more conventional careers. ‘Is my father proud of me? Not really. My brother is about to leave the country to become a sailor. We will lose him. He’s been listening to the music I like for a long time. He’s the good-looking one. It’s really hard to find people like him. Now he’s going to sea for, like, the rest of his life. The main reason is because of my parents. He’s just not as strong as me.’

Interestingly, it was Darko’s father who first had the music career. Darko recalls a story he would ask his mother to repeat over and over when he was a child. Before he was born, his dad was a well-known, semi-professional guitar player. The story young Darko liked to hear was that on Rangoon’s warm evenings, his neighbours would come out to the street to sit in groups and sip tea. One man would play the acoustic guitar, and others would listen and sing along. But when his father
walked down the street, his mother used to tell him, the music would stop. His playing was so revered no one wanted to risk strumming an offbeat chord in front of him. Darko loved that story. ‘He had to give up his music to make money and care for his family,’ Darko said. ‘I feel I have the life he would have wanted.’

If he does, his father won’t admit it. His father is still disappointed that his elder son didn’t take his advice and study at the military university, a sure-fire route to a cushy life. ‘I would get a place to stay, free food, and could become an officer in the army. Later, when you have stars on your shoulders, you can steal the country’s money. Even when I was young, I understood the system. I never wanted to do it. The soldiers were the ones who were shooting the kids.’

But a life of principle has not been lucrative. Despite their growing fan base, Darko and the band have made barely any money from their music, and have no illusions that they ever will. They have only occasional opportunities to perform, and those are mostly unpaid or have even left the band in debt, after paying for venues and equipment. So to make a living, Darko and his wife Emily run a men’s clothing store in Yuzana Plaza, a giant shopping mall with stationary, clapped-out escalators and frequent power cuts. The business has made them enough money to rent their new apartment nearby, albeit in an embarrassingly bourgeois way. ‘It’s just a way to pay for our art,’ he explains.

*

I met Emily on my second visit to Darko’s flat, late one afternoon, as a thunderstorm brewed outside. Sounds from the street drifted up to the open window, the whir of generators, car horns beeping, urban cockerels crowing at the wrong time of day. Darko and Emily lounged on the sofa opposite me across the glass-topped coffee table with an overflowing ashtray and a vase of plastic flowers. Together for eleven years
already, they had nothing on which to model their modern relationship, they made it up as they went along. Emily is a performance artist. The couple share a creative drive and understand each other’s struggles.

Emily grew up in a bamboo hut on a scrap of wasteland outside Rangoon. During the sweaty, mosquito-cursed nights, she slept on a woven mat with her parents, three brothers and older sister. There was nothing creative for her. Her parents were poor, and became even poorer when her father died of lung cancer when she was five years old. She missed her father. Not the small income he brought in, just him. She recalled his efforts to bring a little joy to their lives – playing catch with them, growing flowers outside their hut and a monthly trip to the cinema. After his death, Emily’s mother sat outside a school all day, selling fried pancakes cooked on a charcoal burner on the side of the road. ‘My family was so poor and I didn’t have the chance to study art or do it. When I saw my friends doing art classes I told my mother I want to do that too, but the answer was always no.’ Art was superfluous, irrelevant to their lives. Emily was expected to do well at school; even for a very poor family, educational achievement was prized as the key to a better life. Success was measured in memorising texts and equations, reciting answers by rote. Self-expression had no value.

Emily met her first boyfriend when she was in ninth grade, although she says it wasn’t a physical relationship, more of an innocent crush. Even so, when her elder brothers found out they beat her up badly. They told her she could have a boyfriend only after tenth grade, when she was sixteen. In her final year at school she met Darko. ‘I was seventeen and he was nineteen. My family liked him, but they warned me that he would dump me once he had had sex with me. They gave me a hard time,
called me names and scolded me every day. Having sex before marriage is not acceptable here. It’s dangerous.’

But Darko didn’t dump Emily. They dated for years, trying to see each other wherever and whenever they could, while still living with their parents. They suffered the same predicament as many young Burmese couples – they had nowhere to go. On Sunday afternoons, Rangoon’s parks and the grassy banks of its lakes are populated by canoodling couples, entwined under trees or on benches by the water. The only way round this is marriage, but that wasn’t something Darko and Emily were interested in. Their spirits were free, and they still dreamed of leaving Burma. But, in the end, a wedding was the only option. ‘I still don’t believe in marriage and all that shit,’ Darko explained, making Emily laugh. ‘But there’s no way we could have moved in together without getting married. Even though we are very free people, in family matters we have to follow convention.’ In many ways, Emily said, it was marriage that set her free. ‘Getting married has allowed me to become an artist. I couldn’t experiment with art, express myself, while I was still living at home. And I couldn’t have left home without being married.’ She quizzed me on life for young women in the West, intrigued that they were able to leave home alone, move in with friends and boyfriends, support themselves financially. ‘In this country, women don’t have the money to go and live off their own income. They cannot afford to leave home and parents are happy not to let go of their children. You can stay with them for the rest of your life, and if you bring them grandchildren and great-grandchildren they will be happier still.’

They still try to break the mould. Within a year or two of marriage, a couple is expected to produce a baby, but Darko and Emily have decided to postpone starting a family. They enjoy the freedom of their child-free lives. In the coolness of dusk, they
like to take a
passeggiata
, sauntering past teashops with low stools set out on the pavement, and cigarette stands on wheels and packs of ravenous street dogs. They stroll along chatting, their arms casually around each other, a rare sight for a couple in Rangoon.

Emily wanders across the black-and-white chequered lino to shower in the small tiled bathroom with two buckets of water. She returns smelling of citrus and combing her wet hair, having changed into a T-shirt and soft jersey shorts with an elasticated waist, clean and comfortable for an evening in. She is going to show me a DVD called
Distortion
, one of her performance art pieces. Emily is round-faced, unthreatening; there is little about her to suggest the power of her artistic expression. ‘I have a split personality,’ she says. ‘When I am performing I feel like a different person.’

The DVD was filmed in the Lokanat Gallery in central Rangoon, a wide, open space with high ceilings, huge open windows and a blue and terracotta Victorian tiled floor. The gallery is housed in a neo-classical building with a Florentine dome built in the late nineteenth century by a Baghdadi Jewish trader. Once one of the city’s most prestigious business addresses, greyish green mould now seeps across its faded mustard exterior. Much of the building is deserted, except for a family of six who live in the metal-caged lift shaft.

Rangoon’s artistic community and some interested foreigners had gathered for Emily’s performance, standing around the edge of the room. It was 15 August 2010; Aung San Suu Kyi was still in detention and Burma still under General Than Shwe’s control. Prior to the performance, Emily had to give a preview to the inspectors from the Ministry of Culture. A panel of middle-aged men, one of them absent-mindedly picking his teeth with a cocktail stick after lunch, listened to her outline her plans for
the avant-garde piece. ‘It was so totally embarrassing’ she said. ‘How could I begin to explain what I wanted to do?’

We watch the DVD together. Emily is wearing a black shirt and trousers, an apron and a gauzy black blindfold that she seems to be able to see through. She has laid a neat, low table in the centre of the room with a tablecloth, four bowls and china cups. She takes a handful of spoons and gives one to each person in the audience ‘Then they’ll think, “What’s going to happen, will I be asked to join in?” They probably think it will be something nice.’

She squats down at the table with the ease of a Burmese woman well practised at sitting on her haunches. She lights four candles and sets them out carefully around the place settings. She reaches into her bag and pulls out white tissue paper, which she rips up, putting a handful in each bowl. She takes a cigarette lighter and sets light to each pile of tissue paper, so that each bowl contains a small blaze. There is a murmur in the audience. Emily is focused. She lets the bowls burn for a few seconds, then turns around, picks up a baseball bat and rains blows on the table, smashing up the china bowls and cups, her destruction timed perfectly as the tissue paper burns itself out, leaving the table strewn with shattered, smoking rubble. She breathes out, turns to the audience and bows.