The relief of exile
In January, I spoke of being moved by the “enhancement of alienation and numbness” brought on by the exhibition of ancient manuscripts in the British Library. The Burmese-American novelist Wendy Law-Yone experienced a different, though similarly strange emotion when she was there. “A vision of hell that induce[d] homesickness” is how she describes it in her essay on exile for Time magazine. The gallery, you see, also includes 200-year-old watercolours of Burma.
“Probably commissioned in the mid-1800s, at the beginning of a century of British rule over Burma, the paintings are meant to illustrate aspects of Buddhist cosmology: hell, heaven, the world, a pantheon of spirits and deities, a fortune-telling manual. Whimsy and insouciance are at the heart of these illustrations. The world is egg shaped. Heaven is a diagram, abstract and dull, of seven concentric circles. And hell? Hell is a field of open fires, encircled by a ring of flames, on which stick figures are busily kicking and punching, beating and beheading one another with long sticks and long swords while others are being impaled, hung upside down over spits, boiled in cauldrons, dismembered and devoured by wild beasts.
As I lean forward for a closer look, it occurs to me, as it must to anyone familiar with Burma’s recent history of oppression and violence, that here in fact is an eerily prophetic hell.
Along with this message in the paintings, I see a metaphor in the very glass enclosing them. Exiles are beings with their noses forever pressed to the windows of the past, fogging up the panes with sighs of inchoate nostalgia and guilt. Yet the sigh I breathe as I step back from the glass is mostly one of relief.”
She goes onto describe her escape from the country and the journey back after a 33-year absence.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- How do you get To Hell?
- Raphael’s Picture
- Aung San Suu Kyi - the French biography
- From Hell Alan Moore’s Victorian murder epic Fr…
- Gateways to Hell
