Last weekend, the rowers must have wondered what all the noise was about. Puppet and magic shows were taking place against a backdrop of loud music, bookstalls and cafe tables dotting the grass. Every now and then, a burst of amplified laughter or cheers emerged from the hotel’s meeting rooms.
Inside, some of the world’s leading names in literature and politics were throwing around ideas, discussing their latest books and contemplating Myanmar’s transition toward democracy after nearly half a century of military rule. It was all part of the country’s first international literary festival.
“The very fact that this is happening — I’m still in a trance,” said the Burmese poet Ko Ko Thett, who had flown in from his studies in Vienna to take part.
The Irrawaddy Literary Festival emerged from a conversation the British ambassador’s wife, Jane Heyn, had with a friend in Yangon two years earlier. Within days, Mrs. Heyn had contacted the opposition leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who had recently been released from house arrest and secured her agreement to serve as patron. Funding came from a local businessman, Serge Pun, and his Yoma Strategic Holdings, from Monument Books and others, including the British Council. Moderators were called in from Britain, India, Hong Kong and beyond, ranging from U Thaw Kaung, a venerable man of letters and former librarian at Rangoon University, to Rory Stewart, a writer and member of the British Parliament.
“The point about this is that it’s a nigh-miraculous event, given where we were five years ago, when I first came here. This was simply not conceivable,” said William Dalrymple, a prime mover of the Jaipur Literary Festival in India who recently published a history of the 1839-42 Afghan war, “Return of a King.”
He was joined in Yangon by Vikram Seth (who wrote “A Suitable Boy”), Akash Kapur (“India Becoming”) and Subha Shah (“The King in Exile,” about Burma’s last king, Thibaw). Also on hand were Jung Chang (“Wild Swans”) and Frank Dikötter (“Mao’s Great Famine”), the photojournalist Thierry Falise (“Burmese Shadows”), the travel writers Rory MacLean and Caroline Courtauld, the journalist Fergal Keane and the two of the best-known Burmese writers abroad, Thant Myint U (“The River of Lost Footsteps”) and Pascal Khoo Thwe (“From the Land of Green Ghosts”).
Burmese writers were well represented, fulfilling the organizers’ hopes that the festival would forge strong local links to carry the event into subsequent years.
Drawing the biggest crowds was Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi. She spoke of how books had been her companions in house arrest, and how she looked to them to connect her to the world.
“The books I like best are the books that make me think,” she said after describing her introduction to an avid reading life with the help of libraries at home and abroad. “Please read while you can. You never know when it will be useful.” She made an impassioned plea to support a plan for mobile libraries to bring vital reading matter all around the country.
Timothy Garton Ash, the British historian, writer and witness to the European transformations of 1989, delivered the festival’s Orwell Lecture. George Orwell’s work is well-known in Myanmar, not least for his colonial-era novel “Burmese Days.” Mr. Garton Ash said Orwell’s great lessons must now be applied in this exciting but precarious period of political change in Myanmar. These add up to a call for no violence, no euphemisms to disguise violence and, Mr. Garton Ash said, the courage to stand up not only to tyranny around us, but to new tyrannies in our minds.
Indeed, writing in Myanmar remains a political act, said the author and surgeon Ma Thida. U Pe Myint, editor of the People’s Age Journal, an independent news weekly, agreed. He warned that laws enacted under the former military-led government might still be used against journalists and writers, despite such developments as the recent dissolution of the press scrutiny board. Associates of the military are best positioned to forge new media empires and could put new freedoms at risk. Even the greater access now to the Internet, cheap DVDs and other distractions poses a threat to the reading culture that formed in part from decades of deprivation, he added.
Some of the books discussed at the festival underscored the high price many of the country’s writers have paid for the greater liberties they now enjoy. Ms. Ma Thida’s novel “The Roadmap,” published in 2011, deconstructs the military-led government’s seven-step “roadmap to democracy” in seven tart chapters about what this journey has meant for her and other dissidents and their loved ones. Beside her on the podium was the journalist Myo Myint Nyein, who recounted how his wife, weary of the struggle to earn a living and raise a family alone, sent him away when he finally returned after 12 years in prison. They have since reunited.
More than one writer noted that a striking element of the Irrawaddy festival was not just that it was taking place, but the diversity of views on display. After decades of suppression, the notion that different opinions could co-exist is profoundly radical.
Ms. Ma Thida said she wanted her country to join the world of debate, the open contest of ideas. Its authoritarian past, she said, had left it “stuck at the culture of the monologue,” where too many people push their positions without listening.
“Most people want to dictate to the people, or criticize the government,” she said. “I’m fed up with that kind of culture. I want interaction.”
At the festival, she and others made a start.
