Cycles of the Sun, Burma

Cycles of the Sun, Burma                            copyright 2008 Focus Agency

Burma seems a land out of time, possessed of a strange, slow, and beguiling innocence. Before I can look deeper, the images I would be dreaming about somehow float forth, children playing inside orange boxes, bells jingling round the neck of my horse cart, the sweet bitter smell of spices and dust and wood fires, rust-red robed monks barefoot on the golden paya path, glimpses of water and houses on stilts, giant green banana bunches and curious beaming girls. Everywhere I go I am soon encircled by a shy and smiling people, yesterday's Christmas day celebrated by a bicycle ride through a town I don't know but which seems to know me. The snap and rhythmic thump of the beating of dry sesame stalks, the six or eight clear glass bottles, filled with amber liquid, sitting haphazardly on a wooden rack by the side of the road, a gas station in the Burmese midday dust, my negatives have become timelines, markers to hold on to as impressions swirl by.

Beneath all that is political is our essential human truth, and nowhere I have been is it clearer to me that this spirit is alive than in Burma. One hot day in Thanlyin, as I was watching some children playing on the side of the road, an older man approached, and asked me, gently, and in perfect English, why I wanted to photograph poor people. And I told him, as best I could, that to me, there was nothing on earth as beautiful as the smile on that little girl's face, that in my search for a poetry of life, any moment might show itself in that brilliant, unpredictable way to be just what you remember forever. Sure, there were to be instances of dread, of doubt, and apprehension, the cold expectancy of trouble, the restaurant I sat down in that turned out to be full of soldiers, rifles propped casually against the wall, but for any time like that there were a hundred times as many experiences that cried out to be described, and for which there would be few words.

These are people who know how to do things, and for whom it seems the technology we take for granted means less and less the more they are denied access to it. Most of the toys I saw were handmade, tops made of wood, rope and a single well-placed nail, kites fashioned from bamboo strips and found plastic flown high, on cotton string wound round simple wooden reels. It is a heavy burden, for instance, that electricity here is neither reliable nor inexpensive. Those who can afford it have generators. The fuel, of course, comes at its own price. But how sweet becomes the sound, in a village tuned down to the cycles of the sun, of an acoustic guitar, strummed lightly, of actual conversation, of people singing, and I heard this everywhere, unaccompanied by music, singing loud and unabashed, their favorite songs. Perhaps I betray my romanticism by suggesting there is something good to this, but in all I saw in the Burmese there is resilience, and strength, and humor.

Kalaw, Burma, February 2001

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ALL PHOTOGRAPHS AND TEXT COPYRIGHT JAY DUNN 2008

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