YANGON – Poet Saw Wai parked himself on the lawn, unfurled a map of Myanmar with a blob of blood-red paint dripping down from a spot up north and invited people to make poetry with him.
“He’s calling for more trouble,” said a passer-by.
What the message lacked in subtlety it made up for in brazenness. Government forces have been pounding ethnic rebels in Myanmar’s northern Kachin state, displacing tens of thousands and testing the country’s fast-growing friendship with the West. It’s the sort of thing you couldn’t really talk about in Myanmar for 50 years.
Nearly two years into reformist President Thein Sein’s term, the rush of hope and idealism that greeted many new freedoms — most strikingly freedom of speech — is turning into a measured assessment of the nation’s progress.
Long accustomed to writing around censorship, Myanmar’s authors are relearning the habits of free thought and testing the boundaries of speech. But change has also brought questions about how licensing requirements and market capitalism will shape public debate and how speech should be regulated in a multiethnic and multireligious society of Buddhists, Muslims and Christians.
Saw Wai, who served 28 months as a political prisoner, grinned as he handed out photocopies of his latest poems. “I’m not afraid,” he said. “I’m just a guinea pig, testing freedom of expression on behalf of the people.”
Myanmar’s censorship board, which was shut down in August, was officially re-branded the Copyrights and Registration Division at the end of January, just in time for Yangon’s first international literary festival, where Saw Wai staged his poetry performance. The festival, which ended Sunday, brought together around 80 Myanmar authors — including exiles and former political prisoners — and international writers such as Jung Chang.
For decades, Myanmar’s books — like its people — were subjected to varying degrees of physical violence. First, there was the censor’s red pen, which slashed across manuscript pages. Writers, bearing gifts of food, clothing and books pleaded with censors not to cut too deep. They also had to submit copies of their printed work before distribution. Pages that didn’t conform to the government’s edit were torn out, undesirable phrases blacked over.
It was an age of allegory. There were forbidden words: Poverty, suicide, kiss.
Fiction began to fill in for news. People turned to literary magazines stuffed with topical short stories because newspapers and television reported only government propaganda. Writers passed banned manuscripts among friends.
Saw Wai said he never let the censors into his head, writing exactly what he wanted to even if it meant his work could not be distributed. That’s changing. A new book of his poems, including some that were previously censored, came out in November.
No publisher has yet been brave enough to publish the poem that landed Saw Wai in prison in 2008. That doesn’t mean you can’t read it. A poster of the poem, which includes an encrypted insult against Myanmar’s former leader, hangs on the wall of his wife’s restaurant in Yangon. It’s also on his Facebook page.
Newly unmuzzled, many writers are eager simply to say what they see.
While Saw Wai calls his work “realism poetry,” author Ma Thida describes her novels as “documentary fiction.” In 2011, her book “The Roadmap” was published abroad, and she knew something had changed when her prison memoir was released in Myanmar a year later.
While the new liberties have been good for her writing, the rush of competition has been terrible for the circulation of the four publications Ma Thide helps oversee. The arrival of nongovernment news journals has also pulled people from her literary magazine, she said.
Today, some of the laws used to incarcerate Ma Thida — who was sentenced to 20 years for passing an opposition political journal to a friend — remain on the books. Under the 1962 Printers and Publishers Registration Law, publications must be licensed by the state. Critics say the awarding and renewing of licenses is not transparent and could be used to silence dissent.
“Cronies can get licenses easily. We cannot,” Ma Thida said, referring to business people with connections to the former military junta. “It is a kind of a censorship.”
Myanmar’s constitution enshrines freedom of expression providing it doesn’t harm “community peace” or “public order and morality.” While that could be used to block the kind of hate speech that fueled ethnic violence in western areas last year, such sweeping measures can also be used for political prosecutions.
“We’re in a phase where maybe the dream era is coming to an end, and it’s a hard struggle,” said Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash, who has studied freedom of expression in former totalitarian states. “Once you have free speech, you have to work out how to use it.”
The years of censorship have given author Tin Tin Win, who writes under the name Ju, an enduring sense of the power of writing. Ideas were, after all, dangerous enough that the government tried to control them. “Literature can change our heart,” she said. “The reader cannot forget what they read in their heart.”
As for whether the new freedoms might dilute that power?
“Maybe I will know about that later,” she replied.
Instead of straining against boundaries that have been forced on her, she must now delimit her own speech, deciding, for example, how far to push religious taboos.
“With censorship gone, it’s difficult to write,” she said. “It’s a big responsibility for me.”