Nowhere to Be Home: Narratives from Survivors of Burma's Military Regime (Voice of Witness) [Hardcover]

Maggie Lemere and Zoe West did an excellent job on compiling the stories of 22 survivors of the Burmese military regime. The interview conducted in refugees camps and some secretly within the country. The victims are young some are child soldiers kidnapped by the Tatmadaw or the Burmese army to swell the ranks of the brutal Burmese army. Many are ethnic people of Kachins,Shans,Chins, Karens who were systematically forced by the army to be porters or forced laborers. There are no rights in this country for many in the courts. I feel sad for the very young children that ends up as sex worker. Rape is a policy against minority women in the rural areas as witnessed by Fakima who is a muslim women of the Rakhine region. After I read this book I feel a need to help my fellow country men from the grip of fear and poverty that hang over my native country.

In Nowhere To Be Home: Narratives From Survivors of Burma's Military Regime, from the Voice of Witness Series, editors Maggie Lemere and Zoe West often manage to make you feel that each of the twenty two storytellers from Burma in the volume are sitting next to you telling you their story. Often in heartbreaking fashion, each story, like a mini-biography, retells the personal details of suffering, persecution and abuse under a brutal Burmese military regime.

While every story in the volume divulges a sense of individual personality and reflects the diversity of Burma's people, everyone, regardless of whether they are now living in Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh, the USA or Burma, is united through their shared experiences of loss, disappointment and displacement as subjects rather than citizens of a country that deprives them of their most basic human rights and the freedom necessary to live a decent life. This is the main logical thread that runs throughout.

In one account from near Rangoon in Burma, we hear from an ordinary sounding fifty year old, Auntie Hla, who lost her son and home during Cyclone Nargis. The government obstructed supplies of aid and did nothing to help rebuild her home. We hear how she has been forced to move on but has found a new home living with others while she has also managed to look upon her experience as fortunate compared to others during the national disaster.

Contrast Aunti Hla's story with that of thirty-three year old Knoo Know, an ethnic Kachin and son of a famous rebel soldier from northern Burma, who now lives and works in Mae Sot on the border of Thailand-Burma. His experience as a gay man in Burma made it difficult to pursue his dreams of a happy life inside the country so he has become a human rights and GLBT rights activist. He seeks to heal the narrow-mindedness of divisions that wrack the country through education and the many social networks in which he now participates.
Other penetrating narratives in the book discuss the difficulties of survival in a Bangladesh refugee camp for the oft-maligned and displaced Rohingya of the Arakan State in Burma, the disregard for judicial process by police in Malaysia when dealing with their now significant population of Chin refugees, the experiences of refugee monks in exile and the insightful perspectives offered by former soldiers. The story of Yun, a sixteen year-old in Rangoon, acquaints us with the personal trials and hopes of a sex worker.

The style of the book does not try to draw you in through overtly dramatic literary machinery. The "I" in each of these voices also gives a good sense of what is normal in their lives and what keeps them motivated. If the goal of the editors is to assist in opening a "dialogue" as they say in the introduction, it is difficult to measure this success. However, the introductory heading that reads, "There Is Enormous Power In Listening," is spot on.

The words of each storyteller reveal something very personal about the effect on their lives of being from Burma. It is very true that the over simplified maps could offer more detail about the places described and perhaps the stories could be a little less heart-wrenching, but that might take the book away from the strength of the volume; the emotional power evoked by the stories themselves.