Yangon Awakening

 

THIS IS WHAT a city looks like when it emerges from half a century of military rule. In the wake of a general election in 2010 and a by-election in 2012, which saw Daw Aung San Suu Kyi elected to parliament, Myanmar’s political trajectory has shifted toward a more democratic system of governance. And the city of Yangon awakens.

As censorship eases and surveillance abates, it is a time for the tentative telling of tales. An old poet, long hushed by government censors, composes for publication. A musician tests out lyrics previously heard only by an audience of his most trusted friends.

Here, unlikely characters have been cultivated within the hothouse atmosphere of so many decades cut off from the frenetic connectivity of the rest of the world. Enter a tattooed Burmese punk with an immaculately crafted mohican, circa London’s Kings Road, 1970s. Here, also, is a verdant cosmopolitanism that dates back to British colonial times and has miraculously survived the exclusionist policies of the country’s Socialist era. An elderly Muslim woman passes on methods for memorising verses from the Koran while a Hindu priest, smeared in saffron, officiates at a shrine to foreign gods.

 

 

The skeletal remains of the former colonial capital – a place far grander and moreceremonious than today’s Yangon – provide the architectural backdrop for this unfolding drama. An economy made stagnant by years of mismanagement has reduced once opulent buildings to dilapidated ruins. Countless layers of paint, posters, and graffiti have been shed with each lost generation. As a gold rush is unleashed upon this last economic frontier of Asia and pioneering international investors scope out lucrative prospects, the city’s inhabitants face potentially massive social, economic, and urban upheavals. Still and silent for so long beneath the aspic of military rule, they stand now on the brink of an unknown future.

Words by Emma Larkin, 2012