NEW JUCHE — Study for a Portrait

Looking down upon the immeasurable flatness, roofs of prefab cement-fibre collect like crusts of painted barnacle along narrow, tree-fringed strips between withered patchworks of arabilis. The red desert between settlements is peppered with glinting pagodas, that in their starkly even distribution resemble some eccentric and obsolete industrial residue. Delicate veins of irrigation collect and thicken in networks and reservoirs, to become tributaries, and finally unite with their undulant cradle, the once mighty Irrawaddy, the source and the basis of all human organisation in the central and upper plains. And as the rich textures of reds and yellows become greens and browns (that the river-kings were never able to look down upon as I am now), the dead grey saddle of this city adheres to the eastern bank of the river like a goitre. Written onto this bloodless growth are the geometric patterns of the grid system and the perfectly square moat around the old inner city, and these lines thicken and reveal more lines and even more as they come closer, a meshwork of lead filigree streaked and patched with pixels of coloured cement-fibre and billowing green smoke. Closer still, this smoke becomes the leaf-mass of stands and rows and copses of rain trees and some palms, and its thickness collects along the widest road of the city—that which follows the river and runs beside it. This road is a sweeping, oversized and uneven river of tar with no painted lanes or limits, stops or crossings. Long, irregular traffic islands of jungle divide one side from the other. Along both sides of the road run these rows of enormous rain trees, whose canopies resemble smoke from high above, and a green cathedral of crooked wooden columns from within. Surmounting once more the crowns of these giants, to the right of this road are more treetops and roofs jumbled together like bricks in a tumbledown wall. To the left extends the sandy banks of the river, and the river itself, with its loops and meanders and oxbow lakes, a smooth and even surface of greenish and greyish brown which darkens as it deepens along the middle of the artery. But the Irrawaddy is not deep, despite its dolphins and crocodiles and the sharks that swim there—not just bull sharks but the ferocious man-eating Ganges shark—and its levels rise and fall with the weather and the seasons. Upon this even surface of water are boats of all sizes, alone or in mismatched flotillas, moored along the banks, or sunk, beached and gutted. A drip-feed of peasant migrants feeds the industries of this goitre, following paths well-trodden since the inept command economy of the 1960s and the normalisation of land seizures and agricultural extortion. Externally mandated crop-planning on halved or quartered holdings quickly ruined the already tired soil, and with even seasonal work hard to find, the peasants drain from the land and congeal in precarious agglomerations along the township’s railway lines, the outskirts of markets, bus stations and along the banks of the Irrawaddy. And along its eastern bank, a few kilos west of the university campus, two such slum communities hug either side of that wide asphalt river road with its covering of rain tree canopy and its hurtling free-fall of trucks and lorries and their wailing horns and thunderous engines. The first of these communities live on the sandy banks of the river in homemade tents of bamboo and tarpaulin, and their living comes from selling earthenware pots which are brought to them downriver from kilns in the north. Relatives live together in a group, and this is described with an arboreal metaphor—each component of an extended family is like a branch of the same tree. The tents are arranged so that their entrances face the road with their backs to the river. They are four deep at their widest point. There are roughly two-hundred in total. When the water level rises, they move their homes up to the side of the road amongst the rain tree trunks, and when it falls, they move back down to the stretch of sand between road and water. They are officially categorised as an ‘illegal slum’, but their status is complicated by their location within the territorial overlap of two separate government departments: the municipal and the river authorities. It is even further complicated by this seasonal movement of their homes at least twice a year. In the early days of this community, authorities would raid the slum, tearing down the tents and burning or removing the materials. The pot-sellers adapted to this by utilising a kind of bamboo tent-frame that could be quickly dismantled and hidden, or even cast off into the river and replaced later. Officials would remain at the site for a few days, after which the tents could be re-pitched. An understanding developed between the officials and the pot-sellers, to the extent that the former would warn the latter ahead of time when a raid was to take place, giving the pot-sellers time to take down their tents and hide the materials, which was easy to do with the new design. It was accepted that the homes would reappear as before after the officials left, with the condition that no permanent structures were built or heavy duty materials used. Consequently, the cunning battle-design of bamboo and tarpaulin, which originated in the need to evade and deceive officials, was now required and prescribed by those same officials. This became a performative dance that entered the permanent rhythm of the space—the tents rose and sank with the advance and retreat of the water, and disappeared and reappeared with the advance and retreat of officials. In simultaneous but different patterns of movement with the tents are the earthenware pots. These are unloaded from boats at a makeshift dock at one end of the settlement and piled in large neat pyramids along the sandbank until they can be carried up and re-piled in smaller pyramids along the road from where they are sold. Each ‘household’, composed of up to six tents, has their own pyramid, and the prime spots for selling are occupied by the residents who have lived there the longest. There is significant domestic demand for earthenware pots in Burma. They are traditionally used to hold drinking water, and as with many material components of the home they are held to possess auspicious power. Pots are routinely replaced during the new year and Buddhist lent, ensuring constant demand. The headman of the pot-seller settlement is highly respected. He established an egalitarian profit-sharing system in which lower-performing families are supported by the community as a whole, and everyone is permitted credit against future sales with no interest. Having done this at the cost of his own family’s monopoly, the community is unwaveringly loyal to him and they consider themselves secure and very fortunate. The group is consequently tight-knit and highly cohesive in social terms. Only relatives of existing members may join, and strangers are rejected and prevented from setting up housing near the settlement. Flotillas of migrants passing down the river are also chased on. The pot-sellers fear these the most, associating boats with criminality, and they will even appeal to the police and municipal authorities for help if boats linger. On the other side of the wide road, beneath another sheltering row of huge rain trees, the second slum community lives in a double file of more permanent housing built along a trench that runs between the road and the railway. This community of a hundred houses makes its living by harvesting sand from up and down the river banks for the sand-extraction industry. Two entrances serve the trench at either end with staircases of rice sacks packed solid with sandy earth leading down to a similarly cobbled walkway between the two overhanging rows of houses. The houses are mostly built on brick bases with rattan and hardwood frames, but some have zinc or concrete walls. Most are two or even three stories in height. They’re located within the overlapping purviews of the municipal and railway authorities, and their attempts to legitimately register their houses have been unsuccessful. Efforts by the authorities to deal with the sand-diggers have been more fraught and inconsistent than with the pot-sellers, as their more permanent housing represents both a greater offence and a greater capacity and rationale for resistance. Authorities regularly erect barbed wire fences and threatening signs around the trench, and gangs of young men sometimes appear at night and fire live ammunition into it. The sand-diggers have regularly been offered subsidised housing in government apartment blocks, but these are way too far from the river where they work every day, have no utilities or reliable public transport, and are plagued by violent crime. Those who tried moving always returned quickly. The greatest protection the sand-diggers have from the authorities comes from their employer in the sand-extraction industry. This industry has apparently unimpeded access to the river’s sand, which it removes continuously with no concern for the environmental damage this inflicts. It is made up of private companies, who have a strong interest in maintaining an on-site supply of workers living in precarious circumstances, to whom they can pay slave wages, and recruit or dismiss informally on a daily basis. Consequently, most of the community is mired in downward spiralling cycles of debt to money-lenders adapted to exploiting these precise circumstances. The sand-diggers do not consider themselves secure or lucky. They hold themselves to be the de facto property of a business that exploits them with little allowance for their basic needs. In the case of these two river slums, which are considered by many to be two halves of the same slum, materiality is a curiously inverted measure of safety and security. The sand-diggers have a semi-fortified, subterranean street of permanent houses, built from brick, wood, concrete and zinc. Conversely, the pot-sellers have instantly collapsable tents of bamboo and tarpaulin on the exposed river bank, which must move with the water and disappear for the pre-arranged raids. But the pot-sellers have formed a collective under benevolent leadership which allows them a flexible schedule and relative autonomy, a guaranteed source of emergency interest-free borrowing, and the protective social cohesion of the community. They are part of the greater ecology of earthenware pots, along with kilns, river transport, brokers, and end-customers. Conversely, the sand-diggers are a looser community with no effective leadership, subject to the harsh exploitation of a private company whose leadership is remote from them. Their work is long, labour-intensive and so poorly paid they must enter into high-interest debt to survive. They are alienated and miserable, slaves in a murky industry of unregulated extraction that is gradually killing the river in which they work. So materials lie, appearances confound and deceive. Why, and how? Because the language of appearances operates in the minds of human beings, where it originates. Beauty—hardness; permanence—tells a lie that shelters insecurity and danger. My trade has honed my ear to these lies, but I have not chosen to use my ear scientifically. Instead, I have both celebrated and mourned the world of forms and appearances as though at a funerary rite without end, and listened to the voice of ‘underlying structures’ when it sang to me from behind: “Be as I am! The Great Mother of Toads, Eternally Creative and Ecstatically Defiant, Forcing this Long Beauty into Existence Forever!” (See where I have swum to now, Mother of Toads, in the country of this vast cistern, where my courage and my fine instincts, my hunger for festivals, and my preparation for painful destruction have elevated me to an office many fathoms deeper than the dreams of engineers.) And when I walked in that trench between the rows of overhanging houses with scientists and interpreters, I was alive to the thick oily smell of sweaty cooking and carbon monoxide, the concrete-hardness of the sacks of earth upon which we walked, and the noisy clusters of sand-digger women and children who sat in doorways. Some of them looked at me, and some of them were smiling. The atmosphere of that trench was otherworldly, the air was filtered green through the canopy high above, and red from the dust of the earth through which it was cut. The headman and his wife were waiting for us on a covered wooden platform with open sides that formed the front of their house, and they sat like medieval royalty, both in head wraps, both chewing betel, wrapped in their sarongs with their knees bent and their feet tucked behind them. They were austere, especially the woman, the queen, who did not once lay her eyes upon any one of us who were strangers and aliens to her. As scientifically composed questions were asked and answered through the crossing prisms of interpretation, of course I thought about their love-making and how it took place. The foul, humid atmosphere of the dark rooms in the houses belonged to sexual desperation and evolutionary necessity. The crowd of observers around us grew, increasing the inhibition and the respective fear of losing something. We left before this happened. On the other side of the road, the stands of pot-sellers’ tents appeared to have been drawn up directly from the impacted synthetic waste upon which they were pitched. The language of this housing would have been a ghastly single tone had it not been for the earthenware pots, each of them red, bulbous, upended, modestly decorated around the rim. Their smoothness and the order of their pyramidal arrangement was soothing, and I became at once seduced by their inherent and symbolic value. The pot-sellers were not sitting but standing, and there were many men in their numbers. They smiled and they looked at us openly, and we set to smiling, and then all of this rambunctious mutual smiling dispelled much of the inhibition which weighed upon myself and the other scientists. I looked at the smooth skin of very young children, and at the fetching modesty of the women and the thanaka paste scraped over their cheeks. I looked at smiling men in their sarongs, and observed a strange and wonderful thing—most of them wore a bamboo or wooden tube with a long lid that hung from a cord around their wastes. These tubes held a single cheroot, which the men would remove and light, take a few pulls of smoke, then extinguish and replace in their holders. I loved these tubes and this culture of tobacco-smoking, I felt a great enthusiasm for the tubes, and I loved these smiling men. There were pigs and goats tethered amongst the tents, some of them in bamboo pens. Once through the stands of tents, on the open riverbank with nothing between me and the water of the river beyond, I could see little or no sand, only the revolting crusts of many layers of impacted plastic waste, which seemed to have completely replaced the earth and the sand, and offered a symbolically holistic and grotesquely material dissimilitude from the brilliant green leaf canopy above. Fires, and the remains of fires, that had burned plastic and polystyrene were everywhere, tainting the air which was already thick with diesel exhaust fumes and wood smoke. Colourful lines of laundry ran from trees and bamboo poles around the space. I walked down through the toxic miasma, alone, and made my way to the water’s edge. In front of me I could see a dull grey sandbar with a fringe of wild grasses thirty feet out. To the south I could see pot-pyramids alongside a wooden platform, further along to the north was a huge derelict hulk lying at a jaunty angle, half submerged in the bank. Two skeletal figures stood on its prow. The headman received us sat on a plastic chair at the roadside, with three other seated men who were his assistants. His friendliness belied his appearance: he was fat, and had the face of a pig with suspicious eyes and a protruding brow, he chain-smoked and chewed and spat betel constantly. Everyone called him ‘Big Uncle’. He listened attentively to our questions and gave serious, comprehensive answers, and sometimes he conferred with one of the other men, and sometimes the other men cut in of their own volition, and clearly there was an equality between them and a long-standing intimacy. No crowd collected whilst we spoke, and there was no sense of urgency, nor any suspicion or apprehensive poise, despite Big Uncle’s eyes. He had bottled water brought to us, and when it was finished he had more brought. When we had exhausted our lines of enquiry, during which Big Uncle had also told us stories and anecdotes designed to amuse as well as edify, he led us himself down to the makeshift dock I had seen earlier, where the pots are unloaded. There was no boat there, but there was sand and there were huge pyramids of pots, and I asked how these had been assembled as they towered over us at a height of perhaps four metres. We were told the small children build the pyramids, being light and agile enough to climb up and down them with ease. I felt myself the very god of plastic energies, in a scientific dream of potent materialities, and I allowed myself to take photographs of the pyramids, and in these photographs the earthy red bulbousness of the pots is enhanced, contrasting beautifully with the yellowy texture of the sand. And within the frame of the photographs, the yellow sand is like the freedom of nomadic peregrine cultures, and the brilliant grainy red colour and shape of the pots are like the full breasts of Indic deities as depicted in bas reliefs. I also took photographs of women carrying the pots on their heads. I wanted a pot for myself, but I satisfied this strong impulse to own, to obtain, by instead purchasing from Big Uncle a small, crudely-formed green figurine of a plumply voluptuous woman holding a pot. I was distracted from counting out the money to pay for this figurine by a wild-looking middle-aged woman with a crooked and frightening grin that exposed her red teeth kneading soil and cow shit together with her bare hands on the road beside me. She had the bearing of a wild dog. Like everyone here she was coated with layers of particulate matter. Over a cup of illicit coconut toddy, dear little Professor Yin Yin Oo told me that her interest in the pot-sellers and the sand-diggers began when her bus-driver made some idle remarks as they hurtled past the rows of tents under the stands of trees on the riverbank. He had a name for the children of the pot-sellers that meant ‘evil spirit’. He said that these ‘slum-dwelling’ pot-sellers deliberately allowed their children to play on the road, in the hope that one of them might be hit and killed by a driver such as himself, who would not only have to pay the parents compensation, but also propitiate the ‘evil spirit’ with offerings for the rest of his life to insure against its revenge. Yin Yin Oo told me that both the pot-sellers and the sand-diggers were entirely dependant on the monastery that neighboured the latter’s trench for water and toilet facilities, and that the monks there gave leftover alms food to them also. That river once smelt like heaven. It comes from up in that place where Tibet begins, outside the tropics entirely, a shadowy rocky place of oak and rhododendron. And then on down through the Burmese mountain ranges and into the plains, and all the way through the centre of the country where it divides out into the Andaman sea. Dolphins swam in its fertile alluvium and showed to fishermen where hid their prey. Mangrove-forested marshes fanned out from it to the coastal regions, where tigers and leopards were set upon by crocodiles, and crab-eating macaques and wild boar would come to drink. Canoes and barges took rare forest produce up and down the length of human organisation, and rice, that token of despotic control, rose as a symbol with the river itself like regalia, the totem, under which, with help from Glasgow and London and Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool and Dundee, York and Plymouth and Aberdeen, this universe of life and water and light would be undone into a chaos of poisons. You have to ‘girdle’ teak two years before you cut it, or it won’t float. Teak-cutters depend on the river to get their logs to Rangoon and the global markets beyond this universe of Burma, so the teak must float. You make a deep incision through the bark and the sapwood, all the way around the trunk so as to sever all communication between the roots and the upper tree. The information and the nutrients in sap cannot pass through this girdle, and the tree dies, dries out, and two years later will float when cut and put down in the river. But I have also seen giant logs on the fume-spewing lorries that stampede along that parallel river of tar. The misery of the river plays a role in my heart that I find difficult to articulate, and I’m unable to trust my own reason, in the same manner that a sand-digger may not trust her employer. That misery, whatever it is and truly looks like, represents a deep well of primeval emotion and an inner blizzard of refraction that intoxicates and addicts me like a drug. (I must have it, in all of its moist shimmering chimerical diffusion, and when I examine my life, in the moments when I see clearly, I know that I have travelled from one deep well to the next like a band of nomads around a desert). Sweaty pestered nights in terrible lodgings, constant diarrhoea and food poisoning, inflamed sinuses and raw dry eyeballs, as a scientist I am supposed to ‘girdle’ myself, in order to preserve my ‘objectivity’, in order to stave off personal attachments and sympathies that bring with them partisan emotions. So girdled, I may then practice my art: seeing through another’s eyes, reading another’s drives and desires, walking alongside them, walking inside them. Only then, am I permitted to fulfil my purpose and ‘describe’ them. I encouraged Yin Yin Oo to make ‘materials’ a thematic focus in her study. I would paint pictures for her, that my interpreter would struggle with, of the arbitrary patterns that ‘materials’ would form or coalesce into via human behaviour. And then, like a magician completing a trick, I would indicate through induction and extrapolation the overarching and underlying social and economic structure that was revealed by these patterns, tying the nominal subject of study into a broader, richer context. Housing was my first suggestion of course: tarpaulin and bamboo. I told Yin Yin that having a thematic focus like this can also aid conversation with one’s informants, as there is always a subject to return to and ask questions about. Bamboo: the material of tent-frames, animal pens, fishing equipment and cheroot-holders, an organic material, a cheap or free resource whose supply was almost limitless, a sensuous and beautiful material, flexible, practically weightless and as strong as iron: bamboo, as it turned out, was freedom. I was squatting over a toilet-hole in the monastery for the fourth time one afternoon, whilst Yin Yin and others were systematically collecting the ‘life-stories’ of one pot-seller per ‘household’. I didn’t know it yet, but I had a giardia infection, the effects of which were to remain with me for almost a year. A thin haze of wood and plastic smoke hung in the air as I left the monastic compound and stood waiting for a break in the shrieking free-fall of traffic. But actually I felt well, or just calmed by fatigue from the infection, and the parallel strips of sickly water and tar and diesel fumes juxtaposed with the pot-sellers and the sand-diggers and their respective stands of slum-housing, formed together a luscious cross-section of elements, materials and human data in the midst of which I felt a proud and numinous privilege of access that rendered unto me that quality which I desire above all else, that which becomes me when I understand and am naturalised to a marvellous ‘place’. As I moved slowly through the rows of tarpaulin hovels, and emerged from the shade of the canopy into the dirty light of the waterscape, the universe of upper Burma seemed endless and heaven-sent. The water seemed as still as the sandbars and the stands of grass, and so the ripples that began to move in from the left were immediately visible to me. A wading bird took off from the water in a diagonal line across the brown sky. Moving out from behind the cover of the dock and the earthenware pyramids, a group of pot-sellers waded along the river’s edge toward the camp with a long, large object floating in the water between them. A corpse, I thought at first, but it was too big. A canoe was moving down the centre of the river parallel to the group, oars upright, its occupants clearly watching the procession as I was. Some intuitive notion of propriety stopped me from walking down to them as they relinquished their grip on the thing and stretched themselves, and I then saw what it was. It was belly-up, mouth open with both rows of sharp triangular teeth visible. Its tail fin lolled stiffly several feet below the exposed lower part of its belly, which in colour was the most beautiful and leprous marble of bone-white and sepia brown. The belly reminded me of every tiled room I’d ever paid to become myself inside, every victorian urinal I’d smelt, every stone trough, every cracked and water-damaged apartment wall in a condemned building I’d ever been invited to enter the presence of in the hours before sunrise. The massive, dark pectoral fins lay like outstretched arms either side of the belly. The men who’d pulled the shark looked weary and nonchalant, like the executioners of St. Sebastian, or the figures in any deposition of Christ. In that moment, that apotheosis of smoke and water and light, of the sky’s sickly brown and yellow tones and the belly’s cracked and marbled textures, the dead shark’s beauty was an annunciation, yes, I have learned to say it, a bell tolling for that which was about to be born. New Juche is a writer and artist originally from Scotland. His published books include Bosun, The Worm, and Mountainhead. He also publishes a journal called Heat Death with Gallows Fruit.