Looks like a good read isanbirder.........:IdHitIt2:
Buy From the Land of Green Ghosts at Amazon.co.uk
From the Land of Green Ghosts,
by Pascal Khoo Thwe
(Flamingo, £7.99)
Now that the US has decided its mission is to remove ghastly dictatorships from the world, maybe it could have a go at the one which has been devastating Burma for the past four decades. Here, from this remarkable memoir, is an eye-witness description of the military tactics the regime uses against its own insurgents.
"People who were obviously civilians began emerging from the jungle into the clearing in which the [Karen] headquarters stood. They came out in pairs, chained together and clearly in a state of abject terror. They were civilian porters, kidnapped like the others we had seen and forced to carry munitions and walk ahead of the troops through minefields ... The first pair stumbled on to a landmine. There was a huge explosion, the dull boom of which echoed through the jungle ... severed body parts - hands, eyes, legs - of the sacrificial victims flew instantly into the air mingled with a cloud of dust. But the chain that bound them was unbroken, so their trunks collapsed on to the ground with a hollow thud, while arms, feet and fingers were scattered among the bushes."
Thirty pages later the man who saw and wrote this is reading English literature at Caius College, Cambridge.
It is quite a journey, particularly when you consider that the author comes from a hill tribe so marginalised and remote that even he considers himself something of a hick, and felt terrified and lost when he first went to Mandalay to study English.
We should not make too much of the extraordinary leap to Cambridge when reading this, but it's always at the back of the mind - not least because Khoo Thwe wrote this in perfectly idiomatic, flawless English. (In the paragraph I have quoted, "abject terror" and "hollow thud" are not clichés. As for the observation about the unbroken chain, that would be first-rate symbolism were it not horrifying reality.) But Khoo Thwe has much to say, lovingly and understandingly, about his childhood among the Padaung, a tribe hitherto only familiar to us for the fashion among the women for wearing those brass rings that elongate the neck. It is an upbringing among the influences of missionary Catholicism and animism (there is an amusing moment later on, when Khoo Thwe is warned that English Catholicism might strike him as somewhat lax in comparison with what he is used to), of ghosts and malign spirits, rites to be observed, dead souls to be propitiated. It is a place where his grandfather asserts that a good reason for believing the world is flat is because the ruling junta declares it is round. After all, they have been proved wrong about so much else. The country exists in a state of disastrous poverty and imposed ignorance; when you read that they only found out that men had landed on the moon in 1977, you might be forgiven for thinking that it is remarkable that they found out at all.
Gradually, but ineluctably, the political situation becomes insupportable; there are simply too many murders, too many personal tragedies, and Khoo Thwe flees for his life towards the Karen State near the Thai border. Timothy Mo wrote as vividly about jungle guerrilla warfare in The Redundancy of Courage; the difference here is that Khoo Thwe lived it. What no novelist could have done is have Khoo Thwe rescued and taken to Cambridge. That all came about because, while working as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant in Mandalay, he met Dr John Casey, who had been told to look out for the waiter who liked Joyce. Casey was only in town because he wanted to see the subject of Kipling's poem. Later on, Casey sent Khoo Thwe a copy of the New Oxford Book of English Verse - the Ricks edition, presumably - with a large-denomination banknote inserted at "Mandalay". This turns out to save several lives.
Casey, I strongly suspect, would blush if attention were drawn to his generosity, resourcefulness and courage, so I shall only touch lightly on it here. I will just say instead that literature is important in ways that can never be foreseen. And now Khoo Thwe has added to its body.
Review: From the Land of Green Ghosts by Pascal Khoo Thwe | Books | The Guardian
Sorry about the smilies WTF1
