{"id":10819,"date":"2015-05-27T16:28:37","date_gmt":"2015-05-27T20:28:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=10819"},"modified":"2015-11-05T00:01:23","modified_gmt":"2015-11-05T05:01:23","slug":"burmese-lessons-explores-politics-love-and-the-artist-as-a-young-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/burmese-lessons-explores-politics-love-and-the-artist-as-a-young-woman\/","title":{"rendered":"Burmese Lessons explores politics, love, and the \u201cartist as a young woman\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

One Book One Aurora Living in Vancouver, Karen Connelly could hear the drumming of indigenous women in the distance as police and investigators began excavating the farm of serial killer Robert Pickton, looking for bodies of scores of women missing from the city\u2019s Downtown Eastside.<\/p>\n

Ms. Connelly was, at the time, working on her novel, \u201cThe Lizard Cage\u201d, a book she describes as \u201clooking at man\u2019s inhumanity to man, what evil is, where evil comes from, and people who are physically cruel to one another.\u201d Although the novel is, in part, informed by her own experiences travelling in Southeast Asia, the sounds of the drums drifting up from down the hill was a watershed moment for the author.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought what I was writing about was far away, but with the excavation, I realised I was writing about my own country as well and that affected me deeply,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Since then, Ms. Connelly has devoted a considerable amount of time to advocacy work, particularly in the realm of missing and murdered aboriginal women and, this fall, Aurorans will have the opportunity to get up close and personal with the author as her memoir, \u201cBurmese Lessons\u201d, forms the centrepiece of the second annual One Book One Aurora Campaign, hosted by the Aurora Public Library.<\/p>\n

Next week, small, portable libraries will begin popping up in a number of locations around Aurora laden with copies of Ms. Connelly\u2019s book for you to pick up, pass along, and keep the conversation going throughout the year.<\/p>\n

The book centres around her experiences in Myanmar (Burma) at a time of social and political revolution, and her relationships with the people in general and, specifically, a very personal relationship with one of the dissident men.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis book is very much about Burma and the dissident movement against the military dictatorship that used to rule Burma, but it is also a portrait of the artist as a young woman,\u201d says Ms. Connelly, now 46, and married with a son. \u201cI fall in love with one of the people who are involved in the dissident movement. I think it is great to read about the artist as a young woman. We don\u2019t have too many narratives that take that seriously. It is an intimate [story], but it is also a political experience too, not just vis-\u00e0-vis Burma, but the politics of being female, in a way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Connelly says she was \u201cenormously honoured\u201d the Library chose her book to engage the entire community in a conversation. \u201cIt\u2019s a writer\u2019s dream, quite frankly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Very much a love story, both to a culture, and between one man and woman in particular, Ms. Connelly says giving a few years\u2019 space between the actual events and setting pen to paper allows for a \u201cprocess of maturation and an ability to understand those events we can\u2019t have in the moment.\u201d It deepens the writing, but it doesn\u2019t lessen the emotional impact of reliving the experiences.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t realise [why] I was making some of the choices I was making, but I understood that later,\u201d she says. \u201cI understood that being with this person would make my life much more complicated as a writer, but, again, with the passage of time, and the more you live your own life, the more you understand who you are. A book like Burmese Lessons records that learning, but it is also lessons for a life. Sometimes I regret I didn\u2019t choose that life. At the same time, I still understand, the way things were playing out, it would have been extremely difficult for me to have the life that was being offered to me with that particular person.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since its publication in 2009, \u201cBurmese Lessons\u201d has garnered considerable national and international acclaim, and several awards, but its reception has been polarizing in the land which inspired it. Burmese women really like the book, says Ms. Connelly. Burmese men, on the other hand, are less enthusiastic. An important part of Burmese culture is to be \u201cvery private about the intimate relations between men and women,\u201d she says, a taboo which she contravened.<\/p>\n

Writing the book with this in mind made her \u201cuncomfortable\u201d, she says, but that was one of the things she wanted to explore. Some Burmese men, on the other hand, have said they enjoyed the frank candour and discussion about sexuality, \u201csomething that is missing from Burmese literature and conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope readers will be more aware of a country with a complex, interesting past and an equally complex, interesting future,\u201d she says of participating in the One Book One Aurora Campaign. \u201cIt is really an amazing, beautiful place. Learn through that young woman who is so open to the world and so willing to enter other realities. She, my former self, is an example to me. I live a very different life now. I am much more settled, have a child, I\u2019m married, and my life is quite middle class.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I read that work, I am quite inspired by how open and dedicated I was to figuring something out, even though I made mistakes and mis-stepped. We\u2019re lucky to be in a place like Canada, which welcomes other cultures as well. There is still a sense of celebration around other cultures and that is part of what this One Book Celebration is all about.\u201d<\/p>\n

For more information about One Book One Aurora, visit www.onebookoneaurora.ca.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One Book One Aurora Living in Vancouver, Karen Connelly could hear the drumming of indigenous women in the distance as police and investigators began excavating the farm of serial killer Robert Pickton, looking for bodies of scores of women missing from the city\u2019s Downtown Eastside.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":10796,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archive"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/2015-05-28-08.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-2Ov","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-03 03:55:13","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10819\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}