George Orwell in Burma

This was supposed to be a post about last week's "Graduation tour" in four refugee camps, but the I got caught up in the world wide web of internet, and now it is time to go to sleep. But here is some of what I have been looking at tonight.

First of all some more about the film, Enjoying Powerty, I mentioned in last post. This is a clip from a interview with the maker of the film, Renzo Martens.

Here is his website. You can read about the film Enjoying Poverty under "Episode III"

http://www.rmma.nl/home

And then I suddenly came across this travel article from Time. Or, not suddenly; I was about to write about Burma when I wanted to check out what I had heard about George Orwell 's books being "about" the military dictatorship in Burma. This is how far I got writing before I begun reading instead:

"Geographically I am in Thailand, but that is about it. I am volunteering in a Karen organization, working with Karen people and eating Karen food. I could just as well have been in Karen State. Except that Karen State is inside Burma, and Burma is run by a military dictatorship burning villages in Karen State. Not a safe place to be. Mae Sot in Thailand is a safe place.

"Karen" is a people living in Burma. I think I have heard the number 2 million about how many they are. They do have kind of their own state, or an area controlled by the Karen rebellion army, which of course is not recognized by the Burmese authorities. They have been in a civil war for more or less 60 years, since Burma got its independence from the British some years after World War II. Among the results is 140 000 (registered) Karen refugees temporarily sheltered along the Thai-Burma border in enclosed refugee camps..."

Back to George Orwell! Orwell was stationed in the British police in Burma for five years when it was a colony. Back again in Europe he wrote a book Burmese Days. It was first published in USA in 1934. This facts I had to check on Wikipedia, and my distraction was a fact. This book was (very) critical to the British colony rule. Later Orwell wrote, as we all know, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). I was a little confused about the chronology, because how could these books be about the dictatorship in Burma when they were written before the military came to power? Ergo, the books are not about-about Burma, but can be read as an analogy to the last half century of Burma's history.

And back to the Time article about George Orwell in Burma. Here it is: http://www.time.com/time/asia/traveler/021017/orwell.html
(Another literature tips is the novel Finding George Orwell in Burma. I have not read it yet, but it is next on my reading list.)

I loved this quote from the article:

"I began to feel a bit like a fish in an aquarium surrounded by glass-tapping kids."

I kind of understand the feeling, even though I have not been exposed to it to the same extent. I think maybe Vegar (195 cm tall and white) in India had more of a glass-tapping experience.

My next thought is what is going on when combining this feeling of being glass-tapped with the issues Renzo Martens brings up in Enjoying poverty. I think it illuminates some of the feeling of walking around in four Karen refugee camp on "Graduation tour" with a SLR camera hanging in a strap around my neck. This post was supposed to be about that and maybe it ended up being that too.