Award-Winning Writer + Activist + Photographer =
Karen Connelly and an epic novel of Burma

An interview with Adrienne Phillips for the lit-review READ
September 2005
published by Random House

Q. Your first book, Touch the Dragon, won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction and was a national bestseller. You were the youngest GG winner ever at the time. What that was like for you?

Karen: I was very lucky to win the award, and had a wonderful time enjoying the sense of recognition and appreciation it brought both to me as a writer and to my work. On the other hand, so much sudden attention was rather confusing. I was very young, and used to working anonymously, often in foreign places, for the sake of the page and for my own development as an artist. That isolation and solitude were crucial to my education and to my work. Thus the pressures of becoming a public figure--even in a small way--were ultimately destabilizing for me. So of course I did what I most loved doing, at that time in my life: I left the country again.

Q. Touch the Dragon was published in 1992. Can you tell me a little about your decade-long artistic journey from Touch the Dragon to The Lizard Cage?

Karen: During that time I published several other books--one of travel non-fiction, called One Room in a Castle, and a few more of poetry, including a collection that is mostly about Burma and the Thai-Burmese border (where The Lizard Cage both begins and ends) called The Border Surrounds Us. So, essentially, I kept writing and living, without the attention that I’d had with Touch the Dragon. That was good for me--to spend a lot of time decidedly unlauded. My return to Thailand in 1995 led me to Burma, and within two weeks of my first visit there, I knew I had to write a book about what was happening in that beautiful, ravaged country. I had done some work for PEN CANADA in 1994 and 1995--one of our honourary members was Ma Thida, a young Burmese writer imprisoned for 20 years in solitary for writing short stories critical of the regime. So I was already interested in what was happening there. But that first visit to the country itself was galvanizing, life-changing. On a subsequent visit, after taking photographs of a student demonstration, I was blacklisted from re-entering Burma, so I went to the border on the Thai side and began to get to know many of the dissidents, refugees, and revolutionaries who live there. During that time (I spent almost two years there), I was working on versions of what eventually became The Lizard Cage.

Q. The Lizard Cage is your first novel, though you’ve published many volumes of poetry, and two works of non-fiction. Did you always intend this to be a work of fiction? Is your fiction writing process different from the ways you write poetry or non-fiction?

Karen: I originally thought the book would be a book of essays about how Burmese artists and other creative people survive under dictatorship, how they get around the censors, both the exterior ones and the ones that become internalized after living so long under systematic oppression. The Burmese regime is bizarrely Orwellian, and it fascinated and inspired me immensely to meet so many dynamic, creative people who found various crafty ways to keep working, to defy the censors, to continue thinking and talking and growing--in effect, to keep insisting on life. Their sense of rebellion was very spirited and infectious; they had wonderful senses of humour, too. They were the most interesting, passionate people I had met in years, and yet they lived under so many different kinds of constraints. I saw how the impulse to be creative and the impulse to revolt against oppression--or at least to not be destroyed by it spiritually--are drawn from the same source: to live an authentic life, a life in truth. That is why so many governments (perhaps all governments?) are suspicious of artists and writers and innovative thinkers. In extreme political situations--under dictatorship, for example--that suspicion metamorphoses into fear and violence against.

But then--in the midst of all these heady thoughts--I was blacklisted from Burma, and couldn’t continue my interviews with people there. So I went to the border, and realized I had to keep writing my book, but it would be a novel, and reflective of one of the most uniting, common experiences of creative and political Burmese citizens: the experience of living in prison. Because of my awareness of Ma Thida, and a long interest in prisons besides, I already had a voice in my head, talking about life in solitary confinement.

Q. Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize-winning activist for democracy in Burma, figures prominently in the novel. What was it like to write fiction about an international hero?

Karen: Daunting. Aung San Suu Kyi is a very generous, gracious woman who is also extremely private--in the book there is one chapter where she “speaks”--we hear her thoughts and watch her as a monsoon storm rolls into Rangoon. It was a magical thing for me to write about that and believe what I was writing, but how “true” is it? As true as it needs to be for the book. I can only hope she doesn’t cringe--or growl--when she reads it. In Burma, she is a national icon, as revered as her father Aung San, the architect of Burma’s independence from the British. Internationally, even before winning the Nobel Prize, she was famous for her Ghandian non-violent opposition to the ruling generals of her country. My account of her is fictionalized, based on what I knew of her through friends and what I gleaned from the interviews I conducted with her and some of her closer colleagues.

Q. You’ve done extensive work with PEN Canada, who advocate for the rights of writers in prison around the world. How does your own activism inform your writing?

Karen: I often wish I was more of an activist, frankly, and less of a writer. In the early years of working on the novel, my desires to “do” something were often at odds with the solitude and slow laborious process of creation itself. Burmese people taught me that every human being, whether he or she likes it or wants it or understands it or not, is a political being, and that the struggle to express oneself and tell “the truth”--even the subjective, localized truth that we all possess--is very often a political struggle. In the West, most people do not very easily engage with the idea that politics are part of our daily lives; nor are we comfortable with the notion that we are directly responsible for our extraordinary freedoms. For me, part of that freedom--and part of that responsibility--is to look beyond my immediate self and to act out of concern for the greater good. This sounds very old-fashioned humanist because it is. It’s also very Buddhist. And Christian. And a bunch of other religions besides, I’m sure.

I mention these religions because I think there is a spiritual aspect to activism that is rarely discussed; North Americans, and Canadians in particular, are more embarrassed about spirituality than they are about sex. And the locus between spirituality and politics--oh my god, how could that be, how could their be such a connection? That’s the secular, middle-class white Canadian question, which reflects our alienation from both a living politic and a living spirituality. Of course, many Catholic priests and nuns in Latin America have been brilliant political activists. And in Burma, Buddhism is understood at the outset to have an important political dimension. Aung San Suu Kyi writes a great deal about this in her books.

Because so much of my understanding of the world has come from living in other cultures, when I think of civic responsibility, I think of other cultures and countries as well as my own. Even as a child I was shocked that there are so many places on this planet where people are sent to prison and tortured and murdered because of what they write, or make, or think. So for years I’ve supported and done work for organizations like PEN and Amnesty.

Sometimes the most we can do--and this is a lot--is to experience a kinship with the suffering of others, rather than turning away and being untouched. It has been very hard for me to learn that sometimes there is nothing we can do--we can only feel. Writing the novel required me to feel deeply, and to mourn what is happening in Burma. But that experience eventually made me look at my own society more closely; it also made me a lot more tender toward all kinds of suffering. Compassion is a daily form of spiritual and political action; it does not require a political prisoner or a victim of the tsunami as its object. Walking down College Street and greeting the panhandlers with humanity rather than a quarter is a very challenging form of activism.

Q. Teza relies on his strong Buddhist faith, and particularly his meditation practice, to help him survive the worst of his prison experiences. In what ways would you consider The Lizard Cage a Buddhist book?

Karen: Certainly one of its main themes is Buddhism as a philosophy and religion of non-violence and release. But the spiritual aspect of the novel is not strictly Buddhist. The boy’s struggle for “spirit” is much less dogmatic and traditional than Teza’s. The boy believes in the lizard that changes colour as a kind of little god, and he believes in the mysterious power of the nat of the tree. He believes in the Buddha, too, and actively recalls his Muslim father praying early in the morning. His is the work of a more complex integration, though in the book he’s just a little kid desperate to believe in anything that is more reliable than the the adults who consistently fail or hurt him.

Teza’s lot is simpler: he was born and raised a Buddhist. Buddhism is a religion of non-violence, compassion, equanimity--and those are the values that Teza dedicates himself in with great, imperfect faith. Many of the former political prisoners I got to know talked about the value of meditation while they were imprisoned, particularly if they spent time in solitary. Many of them told me that meditation kept them from going insane, or from falling into serious depression. It’s a very powerful practice--to just sit still and breathe and not think continuously, obsessively, despairingly.

The boy is more an animist, in his private way, though when he gets the chance, he immediately and fervently adopts Buddhism. Just as Christianity incorporated much older “pagan” rites and traditions, most notably Christmas and Easter, the Buddhism of Southeast Asia is full of animist traditions, beliefs that are rooted in a reverence for the natural world and its many spirits and powers. For me the animist elements of the book--of the tree and its good spirit, so believed in by the warders and by the boy--are as important as the Buddhist ones.

Q. Hunger, both spiritual and physical, plays a prominent role in the book. Can you tell us more about that?

Karen: In my other books I have written a lot about food, as I do in The Lizard Cage. Food as gift, food as the connective tissue not only between each other, but between ourselves and the physical earth, food as a form of communion. Food as a method of seduction.

In a Burmese prison life, food is the first and central subject of daily life. The prisons do not supply enough food for the inmates to live on, so prison life in Burma involves hunger or the fear of hunger. And longing for certain foods is a crucial part of prison life everywhere, as is a much more generalized hunger. It has always seemed bizarre as well as truly criminal to me that we can put maladjusted, angry, and wounded people in concrete boxes, expose them to awful deprivation--intellectual, sexual, emotional, spiritual--and expect them to become good people. It’s ridiculous. Of course political prisoners are of a different order than criminal prisoners, but their hungers unite them. Hunger unites us all, I suppose. We are a hungry, restless species. A lot of my work is about the hunger for transformation, for crossing over into another world; so it’s natural that this theme would reappear in my first novel.

As well, I was interested in what happens when someone who chooses physical hunger--something I could never, ever do myself. The act of hunger-striking has a very long history in Burma, dating back hundreds of years to Buddhist monks who refused to accept alms from corrupt kings. Hunger, as Teza attests, also can be a political act.

Q. Teza and Little Brother, an orphan and child labourer who’s been raised in the prison, have an extraordinary relationship. Where did the inspiration for that come from?

Karen: I met incredible children all over Burma. Plucky, brave, startlingly intelligent, possessed of remarkable senses of humour and of self. And I am talking about the poor children of shanty towns and tea-shops, kids who have been working since they could walk, whose lives have been a series of awful hardships. Many of them were orphans, or had been abandoned, or had been farmed out to work by overtaxed, exhausted parents who simply couldn’t take care of them.

Two unfortunate Burmese children came together to “give” me the boy. Some children in Burma end up living in prison with their parents--if convicted criminals have no other place to put their kids, they can take them into the prison system. One of my dissident friends told me about a child he had met in prison; he lived in a cell with his father, and did various odd jobs for the warders. My friend remembered this particular child among the others because he had no idea what a woman was; he’d been in the prison since he was a baby and didn’t know his mother. He had never experienced a mother--at least not in female form. This fascinated and saddened me. What happens to a child, or for that matter, to a closed society--like a prison--where the feminine is non-existent?

Then, much later, I went for a long meandering walk in Rangoon one night, got lost, and somehow ended up far from my hotel near an overpass bridge for a train yard. Down the hill and under the bridge was a makeshift tea-shop where a few people were sitting, smoking, and drinking tea. With that stupid false sense of security well-known to travellers everywhere--while I would never have done the same thing in a poorly lit, unknown part of Toronto, the attraction of it in Rangoon proved irresistible--I clambered and slid down the hill towards the fire and vat of brewing tea and the dark figures hunkered over their little tables. I quickly realized that I was the only woman. But having made such an effort to reach them, I was too embarrassed to leave, so I sat down and ordered my tea, and watched, and was watched. Among those men was a boy, a small, wiry, large-eyed boy. Alone at one of the tables, he was smoking a cheroot and drinking tea, like the men. But, even taking malnutrition into account, which makes many Burmese children look younger than they are, this boy couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven. I chatted with him a little. He looked at me so directly, so unblinkingly, it made me more nervous than I already was. My Burmese was not very good; I can’t remember what we said; certainly not much. But I remember his huge eyes, his bony jaw, and his filthy fingers holding the cheroot. And I remember his grimness. He was not going to smile and be charming for the white lady; he had more important things on his mind. I felt a great deal of respect for him. There was a fierceness of self about him I will never, ever forget. That child became Nyi Lay, Little Brother.

Q. Your own photos, taken in Burma, are interspersed throughout the text of The Lizard Cage. Can you tell us a little more about your experience as a photographer in Burma, and the relationship between writing and taking photos?

Most Burmese people are very generous when it comes to having their picture taken. I would always ask, and was most often given permission to shoot photos. My favourite thing is shooting portraits; the intimacy of it is palpable and very moving for me. There is nothing more beautiful to me than a human face, with its complex and wholly unique story. Many of the faces in the novel have lived with me for years, and I am still grateful to the people who let me photograph them. They helped me write the book.

I love giving myself over to images, to imagery. For me taking photographs is similar to writing poetry, but more fun, because I am less familiar with the medium. I do not have the pressure of having to be perfect when I take pictures; they can overexposed or blurred and I still find them interesting. It’s the love of an amateur. My Burmese photographs became a visual series of notes about the country. Because writing The Lizard Cage took me so long--and I did most of the writing away from Asia--I came to rely on my photos as an important visual connection to Burma. I managed to visit the country a couple times after 1997, when I was first blacklisted, and each time taking photographs was an important part of the journey. When you shoot photos in a concentrated manner, you become all eye, and I love that--roving around without really thinking, only looking, seeing, trying to see better, more deeply. Out in the field, shooting street scenes or landscapes, one needs to be completely open and present, ready to catch that perfect moment when it falls. It’s how I would like to live all the time, to be that present, that aware, that open.

Q. What are you working on now? What’s next for you?

Karen: I have a bunch more poems finished, but haven’t had any time to organize them into a manuscript. And I am working on a book of essays about Thailand and Burma, as well as another novel-though its subject is still shifting and changing. I know that in part it will be about a missing woman. I think that the novel takes its theme from a line in The Lizard Cage: “Who remembers the voice of a dead woman?” I think that’s a difficult, useful question. I was living in Vancouver, writing Lizard, when Robert Pickton was charged with the murder of so many women from the downtown East Side; the police had known who he was for years, yet never put him away. That is another very shameful chapter in Canadian history. I won’t write about that, but I do want to explore the lives of women next. The Lizard Cage is a very male book; women are felt as an absence. In my next novel, I want them to be a living presence. It will be a living woman who asks the above question, and she I hope she finds an answer to it.