I Am a Rohingya: Poetry from the Camps and Beyond

Ed. James Byrne & Shehzar Doja
ARC Publications

The world has been hoodwinked by Aung San Suu Kyi, State Counsellor of Burma. She has spoken of her own oppression and performed ‘acceptable victimhood’ for the West (and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991), yet has allowed the genocide of the Rohingya to continue and escalate. In this important and urgent publication, we hear from some Rohingya poets and experience what John Kinsella describes in his introduction to the anthology as the ‘Spirit and intactness of their voice’.

‘Writing for Rohingya is activism,’ states Mayyu Ali, one of the poets in the collection. This is evident throughout, with many of the poems created during workshops facilitated by editors Shehzar Doja and James Byrne in the Rohingya camps (the largest refugee camps in the world). It’s poignant that most of the poets have made the choice to write predominantly in English, with only a few pieces offered in translation. Most likely this is an effort to communicate to a wider audience but it is regretful not to see more efforts towards documenting a language and heritage that is being exterminated. Likewise regrettable is a gender imbalance. Byrne admits, ‘Although we had tried to involve female poets, the workshop participants were all male; no women would attend the workshops if they involved men.’ This testifies to the difficulty of the circumstances, but perhaps also points to the need for a more intersectional approach.

These shortcomings are not to detract from the many skilful, understated moments of emotion in the book. In Maroon Moon’s poem ‘Dad’, for example, multiple layers of grief for the Rohingya are drawn: a child morns the loss of a father, lost to his own grief and trauma, whilst they both mourn the loss of their culture, land and community, paying the price of that loss with damaged kinship. Under the pen name Ro Pacifist, another poet writes that the only peace she ever experienced was in the womb, as now she awaits the world’s response:

Have mercy on me.
Give me the chance to restart this life,
to feel this world
like the womb of my mother.

It’s notable how many poets in the collection chose the pen name Ro and Pacifist. Ro is a communal word for the Rohingya, emphasising the importance of identity to a people who have been ethnically cleansed.

Let it be known that the Rohingya people and their struggle is poetry and their voices deserve to be valued and known. This is a timely, valuable collection and the voices here need to be kept alive and amplified. May these poems echo and resound.

—Raman Mundair