A Reading at Mono, Glasgow, June 2009

Then Khin from My Gun Was As Tall As Me

Filming in the Field

Here’s some dialogue from the film.

‘ Fu di you ? Jes ist! Wh th el? We eed t et ou o ere.”

And this.

‘Oh o. Ple no. I eed oo. Oh od.

This'll go down a treat at the festivals.

We held our embrace in the fire

They set fire to our house. I could hear them laughing when they did it, using words I didn’t understand. But I understood the flames, the smell of smoke. We tried to get to the back of our home where there was a window just above where our daughter Leh Un usually slept. I thought she was still there when I saw a blanket lying on the floor but she had left it in her rush to get away. If she was there the fire would have touched her. It missed me but caught my wife. The fire caught her and I fell back on to the floor. I don’t know how that happened. Maybe it was the wind, the hot, angry breath that came into our village. I’m not sure. I know I banged my head and I know it took a moment just a moment for me to see again and when I looked up my wife was kneeling in flames by the window. She did not say anything but her mouth was open. There were no screams. Her beautiful black hair was writhing in the fire and falling to the floor but there were no screams. The fire had caught her clothes, her beautiful shirt she had made with her own hands. I loved it. I love her. The way she looked and the way she smelt. But not then, the smell then is still in my nose. Now. I can feel the heat on my skin. I can smell how she burned. It’s terrible. Was terrible. Still, she did not say anything. There was nothing to cover the flames with. Leh Un’s blanket was on fire too and there was no water, nothing that could stop the fire covering her body. Her eyes were still open even as the flames started to take away her skin and I could not stop it, I could not stop the fire. Though she made no sound I could still hear her cry, l reached into the fire and held her. Like we did before we slept or when we woke to the forest song. I did not feel the fire and I pressed my face to her, put my arms round her and I hoped that maybe the fire would come to me, that the flames would leave her body and come to mine and I would rush out and throw myself at those soldiers, make them burn like they made my wife burn, let them feel the pain that she held so silently. But our touch did not last. The flames would not leave her and she raised her flaming arms and pushed me with such strength that I fell back against the wall watching as her eyes closed and the face I had known since we were both children disappeared into the fire.”

MGWATAM

Before he had been dropped from a great height, Salva’d been just like Lynch and Leer, a twinkle and a rage in his young eyes, a lip to his mouth that shocked most but not the brothers. To them he was kin in every sense of the word; a brother in soul, a spirit in their midst, their ribs and sinewed heart. In times like these how can you look at the sky in wonder when brutalised bodies can fall at any time?

From a novel in progress [2]

“ He got crazy, Leer, heat and blood.”
“ Heat and blood. So what. Everyone got that. The pigs that used to run around under Verlaine’s house, they got it and Jpaw’s family that you saw and I saw slaughtered in front of our eyes had heat and blood, now gone cold and wet, washed with mud, sunk into holes that soon will be wet season tombs. Heat and blood is nothing by itself. Was it Jaffe’s heat and blood that fired bullets into girls he had kissed, splitting their heads instead of aching their hearts? Was it heat and blood that made him tell us his pitiful story while the Tat, those browned-up soldiers with only killing on their mind, gathered in the forest ready to attack our village?
Jaffe lost his soul. Forgot who he was, to save who he wanted to be.”

From a novel in progress...

I didn’t want a buffer and tried to tell her that. When shown the deep end all I wanted to do was jump. I felt as though I had been well and truly buffed-up enough. Thank you. I had been so polished it seemed to me that I was ready to be displayed. A reliable ornament. An expected sight. I was both heirloom and heir apparent. I was certainly meant to be, Espirit in waiting, and the doubters, from some of the Homes for Peace senior management, expressed concern over my father’s automatic sense that I, as his son, should take over what was now a large and multinational corporation. They were of the new school that didn’t believe in inherited wealth or privilege, that too many blue chips were willy nilly passed on to chips off the old block and soon you would have a successful age old business becoming a growing concern.

But anyway, but everyway, I stopped over in the city because I had to; there was no possibility of a flight direct and so I found myself in the bustling metropolis with one eye on where I was and many thoughts on where I was going. Seating myself in a busy café on the ground floor level of a fifty storey building that pushed aggressively full of gleam and steel into the low cloud and disappeared I ordered from a multilingual menu with an array of fused cuisines, I asked for only coffee and allowed myself the moment Etiane knew I needed. And both by her skill in negotiating with NGOs to get me visas and nearly official access and by her ability to have scoured my soul of the death craving impulses that had led me to lie down in snow, I found myself in a place, a space of incredible noise and fumes absorbed in the impact that was made when I woke up from being dead.

Site under Constriction

The rains have come early.
“ He’s gone. All he was is gone.”