Reading as a Form of Protest

“This spring, a few chapters into Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig, I had to go look up Myanmar on a map. The historically accurate novel spans two generations and shows the impossible untangling of warring bodies after the British occupation. But reading Myanmar’s Wikipedia page after having read the novel, the dates and facts about the colonial rule, the Burmese involvement in World War II, and the ensuing civil war, elicited far less emotion in me than the story of the native woman who marries a British solider.

Khin and Benny begin their lives together without even speaking the other’s language, and the novel is as much about the endless struggle of communication and human connection as it is about the civil war which harms them and their country. Amid the shockingly brutal moments of Khin being raped and mutilated or Benny being tortured for weeks, there are moving passages of humanity—Khin unable to show Benny her ruined body, their daughters not recognizing their father when he’s finally freed. As a reader who had never experienced similar hardships and knew nothing about the historical moment, these scenes gave me an entry point into the text and brought me close to its foreign characters.

In novels, history becomes more than a series of dates and names, dots on a timeline. It mutates into its true shape, an endless web, connecting unexpected lives. Facts are necessary to give us context and ground us in a common reality—the reason why I turned from Miss Burma to Wikipedia—yet logical arguments rarely change our opinions. As much as we may try to fight it, so many of our decisions and judgments are made on an emotional level. Reading is a way of combining these two facets, of giving us information while also shifting our beliefs on a deeper, emotional level…”

Monthly column for Epiphany Magazine about fiction, empathy, and subverting societal conventions.

Read full text here.

This piece was also featured in Notes in the Margin’s, Last Week’s Links.