A Poet Goes to War
Deep in the sweltering jungles of Myanmar this spring, a rebel commander stood in front of 241 recruits for Day 1 of basic training. The troops — part of a resistance fighting an unpopular military dictatorship — were organized in rows by height, starting at less than five feet tall. A spotted dog patrolled the ragged lines before settling in the dirt for a snooze.
The commander, Ko Maung Saungkha, has raised an army of 1,000 soldiers. But his background is not military. Instead, he is a poet, one of at least three who are leading rebel forces in Myanmar and inspiring young people to fight on the front lines of the brutal civil war.
“In our revolution, we need everyone to join, even poets,” Mr. Maung Saungkha said.
He amended his statement.
“Especially poets,” he added.
To his new recruits, though, Mr. Maung Saungkha delivered a lecture devoid of literary embellishments. The soldiers, roughly half from Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, may have been lured by his social media presence, curated to appeal to romantic notions of resistance, or by the junta’s ordering conscription for all young men and women in the country. But no rhyming couplet — no matter how deft — would save them in battle. For that, they had to learn how to shoot and fight.
The jungle simmered. Over the next few hours in Myanmar’s eastern Karen State, more than a dozen enlistees would collapse from the heat, exhaustion or simply nerves. Ko Rakkha, Mr. Maung Saungkha’s chief drill sergeant, kept the soldiers moving. Otherwise, he said, they would not be ready for the front lines in three months’ time.
“Whether you’re a doctor or a lawyer or a poet, forget your past, forget your pride,” said Mr. Rakkha, himself a poet. “The point of training is to learn how not to die.”
Myanmar is a country entranced by poetry. Poets are celebrities, accorded the kind of adulation that, in other places, might be showered on actors or athletes. And verse, delivered in punchy rhymes made easy by the Burmese language, has long been political, used to galvanize the masses.
Irreverent and waging a personal war against portliness, Mr. Maung Saungkha, 31, would not pass central casting for a battle-hardened militia leader. Before Myanmar’s military junta seized full control of the country three years ago, he had gained a reputation as a literary wunderkind, standing in front of City Hall in Yangon, reciting his antiwar poetry. But the army coup in 2021, which displaced a civilian leadership and ended all political reforms, changed him.
“Words are powerful weapons,” Mr. Maung Saungkha said. “But against the military, we need real weapons because they don’t fight fairly.”
In the tradition of Myanmar poets, Mr. Maung Saungkha was quick to oppose the junta’s power grab. Earlier, as much of the country’s political leadership ignored or even justified the military’s persecution of Rohingya Muslims, Mr. Maung Saungkha defended the minority group. He also went to prison for writing a poem in which he juxtaposed a national leader and male genitalia.
Since the coup, at least half a dozen poets have been killed, as the military junta crushes dissent. More than 30 poets were imprisoned in the aftermath of the coup, according to the National Poets’ Union.
With the help of longstanding ethnic militias, the rebel movement now claims control of more than half of Myanmar’s territory. After a concerted offensive last autumn, the resistance is now threatening major urban areas. Still, the country’s heartland remains in junta hands. And while the resistance says the Myanmar military’s casualty count is high, many rebel soldiers are dying, too.
Mr. Maung Saungkha’s Bamar People’s Liberation Army, or B.P.L.A., does not fight as a separate army. Instead, its troops, which train in the forests of eastern Myanmar where an ethnic militia has given them refuge, are dispatched to other rebel armies. Since the fighting force formed in April 2021, more than 20 B.P.L.A. soldiers have been killed in action. In 2022, Ko Linn Htike, also a poet, was hit in the leg by mortar fire, just one week after he finished basic training. It took him months to recover. He has not written about his injury.
“I can stand the sound of guns,” Mr. Linn Htike said, explaining how he has come to dread another feature of life in the trenches. “The sound of cicadas on the front lines, that I cannot bear.”
A Poet’s Life
Mr. Maung Saungkha began writing poetry as a child. He entered comic verse competitions, and at bookstores, on the way home from school, checked the poetry journals — mimeographed compendiums of thin paper — to see if his entries had made it. Barely in his teens, he discovered he was a published poet.
His poetry matured into a bawdy, brawling verse. As he was coming of age, before 2010, the military completely controlled the country, with its censors slicing through media. There was almost no internet and few captivating T.V. shows. Cellphones were an unaffordable luxury. But people needed diversion. So comedians traveled the country, performing in village squares. Puppeteers roamed. Entertainers, poets included, knew to trade in allegory and allusion.
In college, from 2010 to 2012, Mr. Maung Saungkha studied chemical engineering, which led to a brief stint working at a sunscreen manufacturer. But he also started the Poetry Lovers’ Association, which was far cooler than it might be in other countries. The group attracted the attention of military minders, who were suspicious of any subversive meaning. When the lovers of poetry tried to attach their club symbol — a dove holding a pen in its beak — to their graduation gowns, the university rector said “no.”
Mr. Maung Saungkha was already part of a long tradition of political poets. Burmese kings employed troubadours to rouse soldiers in battle. An anticolonial movement depended on poets and other writers outsmarting British censors. When a paranoid general staged a coup in 1962, bringing a nation then known as Burma under what would become half a century of military rule, he targeted poets and other freethinkers. One poet died of a hunger strike in a remote island prison.
In later years, poets helped lead democracy movements that were bloodily suppressed. Others were arrested, such as one who wrote a poem in which the first letters of each line put together called a former junta leader “power-obsessed.”
In 2015, the military allowed general elections for the first time in a generation. Among the candidates who ran for the National League for Democracy, led by the opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, were nearly a dozen poets. All won. In Naypyidaw, the junta-built capital, a former defense minister lost his parliamentary seat to a poet who spent his years in prison carving his verse on scraps of plastic because pens were banned.
Mr. Maung Saungkha’s poetry did not dwell in a gauzy past. He referenced Haruki Murakami, Cat Power and a girlfriend’s breasts. He wrote of the intimidating muscle of social media.
All I have to do is stroke my smartphone
to stoke war
In 2015, just as the National League for Democracy won the elections, Mr. Maung Saungkha posted a poem about a president (unnamed), a tattoo (of the leader) and a penis (his own).
On my manhood rests
a tattoo portrait of Mr. President.
My beloved found that out,
after we wed.
She was utterly devastated,
inconsolable.
Mr. Maung Saungkha was thrown in prison for defamation and violating a telecommunications act. By the time his trial wrapped up, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy headed the civilian side of Myanmar’s government. Nevertheless, Mr. Maung Saungkha was convicted and sentenced to six months in prison. He was 23 years old.
Poet 23 loves freedom.
He never wears undies.
He despises dictators.
On Feb. 1, 2021, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing ordered the arrests of Myanmar’s elected leaders, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi included. His coup yanked a young populace, which had embraced the country’s integration into the global economy, back into a closed, paranoid world.
Mr. Maung Saungkha joined hundreds of thousands of other peaceful protesters in Yangon. When the junta cracked down, he learned how to use a slingshot and craft Molotov cocktails. After soldiers combed each neighborhood, trying to obliterate dissent, he escaped to an area under the command of the Karen National Liberation Army, an ethnic armed group that has been fighting the Myanmar state for generations.
There and in other borderlands, a shadow pro-democracy government formed. Its defense minister is the poet who in the 2015 elections defeated the military’s former defense minister.
A Poet’s Militia
Mr. Maung Saungkha did not know how to raise an army. Nor did most of the actors, lawyers, writers and even a runway model who tried to form guerrilla forces of their own. In unfamiliar jungles, given sanctuary by ethnic rebels wary of the new arrivals from the cities, they tried. Most failed.
Mr. Maung Saungkha’s militia is the largest of those that survived. First, he designed a logo: a dancing peacock. He came up with the name after the country’s Bamar ethnic majority, which has long occupied a privileged place in Myanmar society. Only those who identify as Bamar can rise to the top echelons of the military, whose history includes targeting ethnic minorities, using rape as a tool of war and ringing villages with land mines, human rights groups say.
For decades, Myanmar’s democratic opposition was personified by a single woman: Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate whose party has dominated Myanmar’s elections. But Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, now 79, did not cultivate political heirs. Her cult of personality endured even as she failed to stand up for Myanmar’s ethnic minorities.
Although Mr. Maung Saungkha is Bamar, he decried the military’s ethnic chauvinism. He called the army’s persecution of Rohingya Muslims a genocide, a designation that the United States later came to use. Should the military fall, Mr. Maung Saungkha said Myanmar will only succeed as an equal federation of ethnic groups. In such a formulation, the Bamar, represented by his army, will be just one more ethnic militia.
But Mr. Maung Saungkha is wary of any future role in government.
“Revolution is the job of poets and artists,” Mr. Maung Saungkha said. “Politics is the job for someone else.”
Among his fighters now is Ma Wai, who before the coup was working as a saucier in Dubai, stirring hollandaise and reducing stocks. She was, she said, not political, but she happened to be home when the junta grabbed power three years ago. The resumption of full military dictatorship horrified her. She joined Mr. Maung Saungkha’s fledgling army. She is not a poet, she says, but she can speak like one.
“One drop of water, like me, is nothing,” she said. “But a wave is powerful.”
Three years after forming his militia, Mr. Maung Saungkha’s body is soft, his jawline less defined than when he sweated through his own basic training. About the only decorative items in the jungle shack where he sleeps are empty bottles of Johnny Walker. Squatting in a forest clearing where a bamboo pipe dripped rainwater for bathing, he groomed himself with an electric shaver.
He is, he said, deploying a newfound English word, “a metrosexual.”
Some of his underlings grumble about Mr. Maung Saungkha’s tendency to sleep past reveille or to spend his evenings attending Zoom meetings with armchair warriors discussing theoretical concepts like restorative justice.
Mr. Maung Saungkha dials in from the middle of a mosquito-swarmed forest, the only light coming from a candle jammed into an empty beer can. He visits trenches on the front lines, giving pep talks to the recruits who joined up because of him. Traveling near enemy territory, he sleeps in Buddhist monasteries, which have been hit by Myanmar military airstrikes. He may look slightly sheepish when he strokes the pistol at his side. But he is not playing at war.
At the basic training in May, his new recruits before him, Mr. Maung Saungkha raised a finger at one soldier. Her battle cry, he said, was hardly befitting that of a soldier. The young recruit, not quite five feet tall, blinked. Her jaw tensed. A rivulet of sweat surged down her cheek.
“If you feel tired, think of the people who have been killed and jailed,” Mr. Maung Saungkha said. “We fight for them.”
Mr. Maung Saungkha’s voice softened. She would be OK, he told her. She blinked again, wordless.
Later in the day, the soldier crumpled in the heat. Fellow recruits dragged her off the field.
“For peace in Myanmar, we need war first,” Mr. Maung Saungkha said that night. “When I have time, I will write a poem about that, about our revolution.”
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