Description
Prompt:
Please differentiate between bodily and epistemic forms of violence, and then pick one case study of political imprisonment that we have discussed to elaborate upon the forms of epistemic violence suffered by activists and political prisoners in that historical, cultural, and local context.
I have decided to do my case study on Pyone Cho.
I have uploaded all the necessary articles for you to use.
– The response paper should not be a summary or rehashing of the readings but a thoughtful engagement with issues raised in the readings through critical analyses and integration.
850–900 words maximum.
Cite and create a separate bibliography in APA style.
There must be many quotes from the articles, not summarization; they need critical analysis and integration!
Do not use outside sources.
It must be a structured essay.
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THEIN-LEMELSON
LIMINALITY AND DARKNESS
1
Chapter 8—Liminality and Darkness
_____________________________________________________________________________
In July 1989, Pyone Cho was in hiding.1 Once in hiding, many young democracy activists halted
their political activities. Pyone Cho was one of a few who continued to engage in surreptitious
acts of resistance against the Burmese Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) and its military-led
government. On July 7, 1989, he and my cousin, Sithu Tut,2 came out from their respective
hiding places in order to commemorate the student union bombings that had taken place in 1962.
In the middle of the day, and they scrambled to put up a banner on a highway overpass in
downtown Yangon. They had trouble tying the banner because a strong wind was blowing.
Pyone Cho wanted to do it quickly, but Sithu was concerned that the banner would fly away, so
he re-tied it with a tighter knot. They jumped down and ran to their respective hiding places.
The following morning, Pyone Cho received word that another activist who was in hiding
was experiencing “great difficulty.” When evening set in, Pyone Cho came out of his hiding
place, hoping to see the other activist and offer him encouragement. As he approached his
destination, Pyone Cho was suddenly surrounded by soldiers. They placed a hood over his head,
tied his hands together, and bound his legs. The soldiers wrapped Pyone Cho’s entire body
tightly in a blanket. He felt himself being carried and then placed in a car. The car’s engine
started. From inside the suffocating darkness of the blanket, he heard a commotion and someone
yelling, “Follow them!” He was not certain if his friends were trying to follow the car or officers
in another car. His kidnappers drove him in the car around for a long while. He could not see
anything, but he surmised that the driver was intentionally traveling in circles—a method the
military used to try to prevent activists from learning where they were being held. By the time
the car finally stopped, it had taken far too many turns for Pyone Cho to have any sense of where
they might be. Still hooded, he was carried from the vehicle to a new place of deep terror: the
sikyawyei sakhan (interrogation room).3 It was in the sikyawyei sakhan that Pyone Cho would
undergo the psychological and bodily transformations necessary to become naingkyin.4
In this chapter, I describe the experience of torture in the Burmese interrogation centers
as experienced by Pyone Cho and other democracy activists. The centers were neither the
beginning nor the end phase of becoming a naingkyin—but rather a “liminal phase,” one that
Victor Turner has likened to “invisibility,” “darkness,” “wilderness,” and “an eclipse of the sun
or moon.”5 As in Pyone Cho’s case, the journey toward liminality and a subsequent rebirth 6
began for all naingkyin when they were captured by military intelligence, the police, or riot
police. For many activists, this apprehension constituted a form of kidnapping. Inside the
interrogation center and in the prisons the identity of the naingkyin—at once social, political, and
deeply personal—become “fused” with other naingkyin.7 Memories of directly seeing or hearing
others who were dehumanized or violated while they were similarly harmed become unique,
deeply personal memories for naingkyin, who remember clearly those who were hurled through
the liminal space alongside them. Memories of refusal—to give away the movement’s secrets or
to sign a confession—likewise emerge as not only “self-shaping” but also “group-defining.”8
It is in also in the sikyawyei sakhan where naingkyin relationships with symbols of the
movement deepen through the mediation of objects and sensory fragments. Even the most with
abstract perceptual qualities, such as darkness and light, agency and restraint. Some aspects of
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the sensory environment elicit a noticeable “perceptual pull,” soaking into their consciousness
more than others.
The Sikyawyei Sakhan (Interrogation Center)
The sikyawyei sakhan was the place where the collective longing and emotion of democracy
activists were transformed into personally meaningful symbols through deeply intimate
experiences with violence. 9 In the afterlife of the sikyawyei sakhan, in what becomes an iterative
process of “revelatory meaning-making”10 that unfolds throughout their lives, naingkyin cast
these personal symbols, based on their embodied knowledge, 11 again and again, into the public
domain—into collective symbols of self, identity, and nationhood. 12 When understood and
experienced as a rite that is a part of an orderly and meaningful moral universe, shared and
reified by others in one’s social environment, then even torture and dehumanization of the most
extreme forms can result in a creative reconstitution of the self, the collective, and the nationstate.13
The suffering inside the sikyawyei sakhan was not the first nor the final form of suffering
that naingkyin endured, but it constituted a threshold—a point at which their bodies were
irrevocably transformed and incorporated into the movement. Their bodies, once vulnerable,
mortal, and frail, were refashioned, becoming a single joint, drop of blood, or tendril of muscle
that belonged to the larger body of the movement. Only by enduring the many deaths of the
interrogation centers and prisons can naingkyin be subsequently reborn, attaining both a
symbolic and mythic immortality.
Darkness and Pain
Once inside the sikyawyei sakhan, naingkyin enter a liminal space where there is “a destruction
of (their) previous status and … a tempering of their essence in order to prepare them to cope
with their new responsibilities.”14 They move from whole entities embedded in a structure that is
stable with clearly defined physical boundaries toward a space where their bodies are separated
out and cast toward a liminality of nakedness, ambiguity, and undifferentiated suffering. Lying
face down, the body is cut open; beaten repeatedly with a fist, wooden stick, or iron rod;
electrocuted; or strangled. As described by Tun,15 a naingkyin who participated in the 1988
protests:
My body felt youthful. I did not feel worry. I was tortured in there. I was forced to
lie down on the ground filled with sharp rocks. My knees shed so much blood.
While lying on there, they beat me up over a hundred times. I suffered there … I
was forced to lie down on the floor on my chest. And then two people beat me. I
could not see them since I was lying on my chest. When I was at the interrogation
center, they used electric shock on me. They put the cloth on my face, I had to
kneel down on the sharp rocks, and [they] put the handcuffs on my hands behind
my back. A lot of blood came out of my mouth and ears when they put the iron
bucket on my face and hit it. My eardrums were destroyed and started bleeding. 16
The violence and violations endured by naingkyin inside the sikyawyei sakhan bore a ritual
similarity to one another. Masking or covering the face with a hood or cloth so that naingkyin
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were shrouded in darkness was a common feature. Naingkyin quickly learned that darkness
precedes and intermingles with pain. Naingkyin were often stripped of all clothing. Completely
immobile, often naked, their bodies became objects of ritualized sadism. The techniques of
torture used in the interrogation centers were numerous. Naingkyin were forced to crawl across
sharp rocks; suspended in the air; urinated upon; sodomized with snakes or corn cobs; kicked;
choked; and stabbed. Their genitals were electrocuted and they had iron bars rolled up and down
their shins. Hooded, they were held down and then kicked, forced to hold stress positions for
hours, set upon by military attack dogs, and raped. This is not an exhaustive list of the torturers’
techniques. Whatever mode of torture was utilized, it cast naingkyin further into the wilderness
of liminality, where they found themselves in the darkness, alone. Elaine Scarry has likened the
experience of pain in the context of torture to death:
“That pain is so frequently used as a symbolic substitute for death in the initiation
rites of many tribes is surely attributable to an intuitive human recognition that is
the equivalent in felt-experience of what is unfeelable in death. Each only
happens because of the body. In each, the contents of consciousness are
destroyed. The two are the most intense forms of negation, the purest expressions
of the anti-human, of annihilation of total aversiveness, though one is an absence
and the other a felt presence, one occurring in the cessation of sentience, the other
expressing itself in grotesque overload. Regardless, then, of the context in which
it occurs, physical pain always mimes death and the infliction of the physical pain
is always a mock execution.”17
Naingkyin did not often voluntarily articulate the experience of bodily pain inside the
sikyawyei sakhan, and I never asked them to do so.18 When they did speak of their pain with me,
they most often recalled the experience of being in total darkness. For Pyone Cho and other
naingkyin, the feeling of being shrouded in an inescapable darkness began when they were
captured. The hoods placed on their heads immediately after their capture marks the threshold
into the liminal void, the beginning of their terror. Long before they are captured, naingkyin who
were captured and rereleased tell future naingkyin about the hood to prepare them for their entry
into darkness. My uncle, Tin Tut, recounted to me: “I was told [by those who had been
imprisoned previously], ‘They will place a hood over your head and it will have a foul smell.’”
There is the stench of blood intermingled with tears and perspiration every time the naingkyin
attempts to breathe: a feeling of suffocation.
In the small cell where the naingkyin is kept between periods of interrogation, darkness
descends again. The hood is placed on the naingkyin’s head again before the torture begins. Once
the torturers begin their strange and sadistic acts, the violence inflicted on the naingkyin is all the
more terrifying because they are unable to see the faces of those who terrorize them. As
described by May, a female former political prisoner, who was imprisoned for more than a
decade after the 1988 demonstrations:
May: It was a terrifying experience with interrogation. I first experienced [this
terror] there. They masked my face with a bag. After masking me with a bag,
without knowing who they were [being unable to see them], they beat my face.
They beat my face from the front. They beat my face from the sides. They beat
like that [making a fist and demonstrating the hand motion the interrogators
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used]. That was done before anything was asked. They beat me before asking
anything. When they beat me, I initially became very panicked and scared. Only
later did I manage to bring my mind back to [a place of] calmness and strength.
They continued to beat me more and more. I fainted exactly three times. I was
kicked in the waist too. These lower parts [motioning toward her lower abdomen
and genitals] … with elbows out, they kicked an unmoving person. So … I fell
down with my face downward.
Seinenu: Did you get to see who was beating you?
May: Because my face was masked, I could not see.
Just as pain is remembered through the imagery of darkness, so the night itself can transmute
into other objects. In the Night Trilogy, Elie Wiesel wrote about an encounter he had as a young
boy with a homeless stranger who teaches him “the art of distinguishing between day and
night.”19 The beggar instructs him to “always look at a window, and failing that look at the eyes
of a man. If you see a face, any face, then you can be sure that night has succeeded day. For,
believe me, night has a face.”20 Wiesel describes how from that day forth he “made a point of
standing near a window to witness the arrival of night. And every evening [he] saw a face
outside. It was not always the same face, for no one night was like another. In the beginning [he]
saw the face of the beggar. Then, after [his] father’s death, [he] saw his face, with the eyes grown
large with death and memory. Sometimes total strangers lent the night their tearful face or their
forgotten smile.”21
For many naingkyin, the darkness they experienced inside the sikyawyei sakhan came to
acquire a face. One naingkyin told me how he saw the face of one of his interrogators, who had a
large mole with a single hair growing out of it. He recalled seeing this interrogator in a teashop
many years after he was released from prison, and he remembered him immediately because out
of the darkness of his pain, it was that face with the hideous mole that he saw. Others did not see
their interrogators in the darkness, but saw instead the face of loved ones whom they lost or left
behind, or comrades whose secrets they betrayed during the interrogation. Still, for many other
naingkyin, the face they saw in the darkness was not specific to anyone in particular. Instead, the
darkness came to represent an ever-present face—that of the military and nation-state.
For naingkyin, the aversion to darkness is both conscious and unconscious, articulated in
rare moments but often kept beneath the surface of a calm exterior. They can experience a subtle
but ever-present unease each time evening falls, a slight shiver as darkness looms. This is
especially true if naingkyin are outside their homes. Some naingkyin have told me that they
prefer not to be alone after dark. Indeed, the 125-page book on torture in Burma’s prisons that
was published by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) in Burma, an
organization founded and run by naingkyin, is entitled The Darkness We See. The sevenparagraph introduction to the book opens with the scene of a political prisoner who is about to be
captured by military intelligence. The first paragraph consists of a single word: “Midnight.” The
second paragraph begins with: “You are hooded.” In two pages, the reader is taken through the
entire journey of political prisoners, from their arrest to their release. It is a concrete description,
oriented toward the senses, leaving much unsaid. Despite the brevity of the treatment, the theme
of darkness appears multiple times. Indeed, in the final paragraph, the nameless political prisoner
finally “flee[s] in the dark of night to an uncertain future.”22 Darkness is the sensorial and
perceptual element of the sikyawyei sakhan that soaks into the naingkyin’s consciousness.
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Darkness suffocates and strangles, never loosening its grip. It is an unarticulated terror that
descends on them every day as evening rolls in, inescapable even as they flee.
Agency and Restraint
The feeling of utter impotence from having their arms restrained was another sensorial element
of the interrogation room that naingkyin cannot easily expel. For Pyone Cho, relenting to a
complete physical powerlessness began when he was captured:
When I went out onto the streets to go meet [my friend], they surrounded me and
… I do not know since when they were waiting [for me]. They surrounded me and
arrested me. After taking me away … they covered my face. After covering it,
they restrained this hand … They handcuffed me. They restrained my legs. After
wrapping me with blankets and pulling them very tight, they put me in a car and
took me to a place. I did not know where I was.
His captors not only bound Pyone Cho’s arms and tied his legs together, they wrapped his entire
body in blankets and threw him into the back of a truck—the same action often taken with
corpses. Inside the sikyawyei sakhan, the arms of naingkyin are tied behind their backs so that
they lose all sense of physical agency. Other times their torturers tie naingkyins’ hands and arms
above their heads as they are hung from a ceiling. A female naingkyin described how her
torturers tied her wrists backward using handcuffs that dug into her flesh: “The idea of the
handcuffs … handcuffs they used were, if you move a little bit, the screw becomes tighter and
tighter. The screw ate the flesh. It ate the flesh.” She noted that she still had the injury sustained
on her wrist.
Naingkyin described how prior to being captured, they experienced taking part in public
protests as having a sense of tekywa-hmu, which is a feeling state where they moved toward a
desired goal with the entirety of their body, self, and emotion.23 For naingkyin, who took such
pleasure in their tekywa-hmu, the feeling of complete impotence could evoke deep terror: one
cannot flee and one cannot fight. If tekywa-hmu is the emotion of unencumbered agency, a flame
that comes to life as a flicker and then dances continually outward, then the restraint of the
naingkyins’ arms as their bodies are violated, defiled, bruised, bloodied, and humiliated is the
feeling of that light extinguished. A naingkyin once conveyed to me that he startles and
experiences a rush of anger when his girlfriend, out of playfulness, hugs him from behind. He
was in a bank once and an elderly woman behind him lost her balance and grabbed his shoulders
to hold herself upright. Startled, he almost pushed her away and was ready to punch her, until he
realized what had happened. These are the sensorial elements of the interrogation center that
remain. A reflex, a memory, neurons that fire. They are pathways back into the room where the
interrogation took place.
Time and Absence
When he was not being tortured and interrogated, Pyone Cho was kept in a small room. He was
unable to discern whether it was night or day. At unpredictable times, men would take him from
this little room, placing the hood over his head again. He did not know when they would come
and retrieve him. Other naingkyin, across the many different cohorts of activists, describe similar
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experiences of being trapped in a small cell or makeshift hut. Violence and terror loomed close,
but they did not know when it would strike. They remained in a suspended state of uncertainty,
alienated from all other life and action. They could no longer keep track of time. As described by
Thet:
I sat in that room by myself. While sitting, I heard my friends’ cries over the next
half hour, about one hour. They shouted because they were beaten brutally. Ah!
Because they were beaten brutally. So, so, they were beaten first. When beaten …
beaten … beaten, I was sitting just like this. Then around 1 a.m., 2 a.m. … that is
just a guess. There was no clock. I did not know the time. [laughs]. I did not know
how to mark time with the hitting of the iron rod. I did not know how to mark
time … Only when I was imprisoned later on did I learn how the iron rod works. I
came to know a bit about the sound of the iron rod. Then, they … I think, after
about one or two hours later … they said to me too: “Ah, you! Don’t think you
are getting away!” Ah, they started to beat me out of the blue. All of them
together. They beat me together with sticks. Because they beat me all at once, I
also … became very shocked because it was my very first time [being beaten].
The sensory fragments that remain after violence are never predictable. That the presence of
things—the cuffs, the ropes, the hood, the cloth on the face—should elicit an “attentional pull”
is, in some ways, not surprising. 24 But absences can also “pull” one’s attention. For Thet, the
absence of time is startling. Time is an abstraction that is never truly in one’s perceptual field. It
is concretized only through other objects or sounds, such as a clock and its ticking. Time is often
attended to only in one’s mind. Yet loss of his sense of time is so startling that it preoccupies
Thet decades later. He tries to remember how long he had to hear the sounds of his friends being
beaten. He then tries to surmise the time that they finally came to his room, lamenting that he did
not know yet how to mark time inside the prison. He continually gropes for the exact time, even
though it is now, forever, unknowable.
Allen Feldman described how political prisoners in Northern Ireland were able to
decipher the temporal spacing and, hence, the cruel melody of violence inside the interrogation
room.25 By surmising the logic and timing of the torturers’ actions, Northern Irish prisoners were
able to orchestrate their own rhythm of silences and answers, thereby reasserting their own sense
of control. Pyone Cho had an uncanny ability to keep track of time inside the interrogation center
and experienced a similar restoration of agency. Throughout the many conversations that I had
with him both about the sikyawyei sakhan and his subsequent life in the prison, Pyone Cho never
once grappled for the time, either in terms of the hours and minutes that passed during an
interrogation or beating, nor in terms of which month or year a given event occurred. He was
confident not only that he had a grasp of how much time had passed, but often how many people
had interrogated or beaten him even when he was blindfolded. Like the Irish prisoners, “the
restoration of time, and the emergence of a new body, forged as an instrument by the captive,
signals the transformation of the interrogation experience into a political rite of passage.”26
Sound and Terror
Hearing the sound of other naingkyin screaming in pain was a common experience, both in the
interrogation centers and the prisons. Begoña Aretxaga wrote that female political prisoners who
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were subjected to the humiliation of violent strip searches in Northern Ireland “affirmed that
hearing the screams of other women … produced a feeling of impotence and anxious waiting
that was almost worse than the assault itself.”27 Naingkyin who were captured alongside many
others had the added burden of knowing that it was their fellow protestors who were being
beaten. In the previous passage, Thet describes hearing other activists being beaten before it was
his turn to be brutalized. Even though he tried to maintain a certain lightness, even smiling at
times during our interview, he was clearly distressed, often pausing and stuttering as he recalled
what transpired that day.
Sometimes it was not the sound of screaming that brought terror, but barking dogs.
Military dogs were often used to torture naingkyin, both in the interrogation center and prisons.
Pyone Cho had one such experience:
Around this same time … they took me to the area where they keep the military
dogs. They took me from my cell and placed a hood on my head. My arms were
tied behind my back. I could not breathe properly because of the hood on my
head, which was too tight. They took me somewhere I could not see, but I could
hear the sound of animals—dogs, military dogs. They had me sit down on the
ground and they surrounded me with these dogs. I could not see, but I could hear
them and sense them; the dogs were barking, growling. They would come up
close to my flesh, where I could feel their breath, their saliva even, and some of
them would smell my flesh. Now, you have to understand that anyone in this
situation—anyone who is blindfolded with his hands tied behind his back and is
surrounded by barking, growling dogs that he cannot see—he would get up and
run, try to get away. But I knew that if I did this, then it would be far worse than
what I was experiencing in that moment. So I sat down and stayed very still, with
my hands tied behind my back. That is all I could do. I thought to myself, let them
bite me if they will. But I stayed very still and tried to stay calm. This lasted for
about fifteen minutes, and they eventually took the dogs away and brought me
back to my cell.
Pyone Cho’s experience brings to light how the sensorial elements involved in an act of torture
come together to produce terror. Even the particular sequence of the events elicits dread. First
Pyone Cho’s captors placed the hood on his head so that his breathing was restricted. Then his
hands were tied behind his back so that he further lost his sense of control. As they walked him
toward the area where he was to be tortured, he could both smell and hear the sound of animals.
When they finally had him sit on the ground, surrounding him with barking, growling dogs that
he could not see, other senses overtook him, including the dogs’ breath and saliva on his flesh.
The Burmese word for prey is thagaung, which can be translated literally to “flesh creature.”
Unsurprisingly, the English word “victim” is often translated by naingkyin as thagaung. In that
moment, by his torturers’ design, Pyone Cho was made to feel as if he were not a man but a
creature, a lump of flesh to be sniffed, drooled upon, and consumed. It was only by remaining
calm and not panicking that Pyone Cho was momentarily able to restore his sense of control and
reassert his humanity. His experience is similar to that of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, where
Bakhtin’s notion of “grotesque” has been evoked by anthropologists to describe the ways in
which torturers “degrade, bring down to earth, turn their subject into flesh.”28 Pyone Cho’s
reassertion of his humanity lends credibility to the observation that even “grotesque” spectacle
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can be an “ambiguous form” subject to momentary transformation. Just as “it degrades and
brings people down, it also, in the end, renews and regenerates.”29
It was not only the sound of screams that produced a deep terror inside the naingkyin, but
silence as well. Pyone Cho endured solitary confinement in the interrogation center and said that
at different points during his twenty years of imprisonment:
The one thing that I feared most during this time was falling asleep in the
afternoon and then waking up in the middle of the night. And the dawn, I feared
that the most. That was the worst point—when night would begin to transition
into day. The light would be on in my cell, but all was dark and still outside.
Everything was still. My blood would feel like it stopped pumping, stopped being
warm. Even if I got up or tried to stand up, I did not feel fresh, alive. At that
moment, I would start thinking about playing soccer with my friends when I was
young. I would try to relive the moment when I was a young boy and I would be
playing soccer, chasing the ball and trying to overtake someone who was kicking
it. Or other times when I was completely free—where I would be kidding around
with my friends or playing in the neighborhood. And that would bring back the
blood. My hands and my fingertips would begin to have circulation. And I would
breathe right again.
Unlike Wiesel, who uses the metaphor of “dawn” in his writings to symbolize hope, for Pyone
Cho the “transition [from night] into day” is the apex of a seemingly boundless liminality. When
one is trapped in a Burmese interrogation center, daylight offers no reprieve but only the
reminder of one’s vulnerability. Pyone Cho was drawn closer to death during the still of the
night. Once again, he was only able to overcome his sense of utter isolation through his
remarkable ability to remind himself that he is a being whose heart still pumps blood. By
imagining himself again as a young boy playing soccer with his friends, he was able to bring
back circulation to his fingertips. 30
The Confession
Of course, all of it—the hood, the bound hands, the blood, the bruises, the screams—are all
conjured, contrived in the name of eliciting information from the naingkyin. The violence and
violations are accompanied by the interrogation. Pyone Cho described to me how they asked him
the same questions over and over. May told me a similar story:
They asked everything, what I … could answer … They had records and evidence
of what I really did. For example, they said: “You were involved in the ceremony
for Phone Maw Day back on March 13th at Phayar Gyi, right?” So, there, they
had photos. I admitted that I was involved. “You contacted some important
people, didn’t you?” “No, I don’t know.” When I answered questions like that, I
had a difficult time. During this interrogation period, for the entire fifteen days,
they interrogated me … They interrogated day and night. Then, after those …
days, they interrogated me by beating. They interrogated me by beating.
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And they said our … our National Politics Front was a group formed by
communists. To make matters worse, because I had taken duty from … and held
important positions there, even though I was actually under a youth organization
… I did not know anything about communists. The communists did not exert
authority over me. So even though I did not know anything, they thought I was
lying. The more I was thought to be lying, the more they beat me.
I said “I don’t know” because I did not know. While this was occurring, later on,
though, on the fifteenth day, what they told me was … They took me into a dark
room. After taking me over [to the room], they took out a book and said to me:
“We interrogated you in this manner because we have been asked by the
authorities to interrogate you by every means necessary as you are a cell of the
Communist Party. Actually, though, you do not know anything. So what should
we do?” Until they obtained the answer [they wanted], they would not transfer me
to prison. They would have to keep me at the interrogation center.
During an interrogation, the voice is absent, even as it cries out an answer, because the
information given by the prisoner is irrelevant to the torturer. Inferring the motive of the
torturers—that they inflict pain in order to obtain information—is often a lie. In the previous
passage, May exposes this myth, that which Scarry refers to as the “false motive syndrome”31
and what Feldman references as the “ceremony of verification.”32 May, Pyone Cho, and other
naingkyin conveyed to me the extreme forms of courage and concentration they had to exert in
order not to surrender the secrets of the movement. It was crucial that they not betray those who
had not been captured yet. It is during this period in the interrogation that binaries often took
hold of them: dichotomies of cowardice and courage; loyalty versus betrayal; what is true and
what is not true; who you are versus who they accuse you of being; what you have acted on in
reality versus what you are being asked to confess.
Asking naingkyin to sign a confession is ritualized. The signature with the written
confession never precedes the torture and the interrogation. It is always presented at the end of
the naingkyin’s passage through the sikyawyei sakhan. As May told it:
What they asked me, what they asked for the entire fifteen days, they had already
run out of questions. They had nothing more to ask. So then they said to me: “You
actually do not know anything.” They said: “In that case, we want you to do
this….”
[They told me to say I was] a cell of the Communist Party. I was not a
communist, however. I was not a member either. They asked me to sign [a
statement] that people from the Communist Party were trying to win me over.
See? Like that. So, I could not sign [a paper testifying] to that. The reason was, I
did not know anything about it at all. I did not know anything at all about those
issues.
As the pain of the tortured body expands, the voice withers. Whether or not the self will shrink is
a question for which the naingkyin will not have an answer until the moment words rise to their
lips. May was transferred to prison and eventually brought to trial after refusing to sign. This
9
THEIN-LEMELSON
LIMINALITY AND DARKNESS
10
refusal to sign magnifies not only the self but also the self’s knowledge of the truth. The
difference between the truth and a lie looms large, not because it will elicit different responses
from the torturers, but because it is the difference between the self that is free and the one that
remains inside the sikyawyei sakhan, hands constrained, underneath a suffocating hood.
Pyone Cho was asked to sign a similar paper with a confession after seven days inside the
sikyawyei sakhan. He refused. The next day, he was transferred to Insein Prison, where he was
kept in detention for a year before being sentenced to seven years in prison. Pyone Cho
expressed great pride in saying he never signed the confession. It is not a pride articulated
through language but rather through a defiant gleam in his eyes as he recalls his refusal to sign.
In that moment, he could not be dominated. Whatever els
