Romancing Human Rights: Gender, Intimacy, and Power between Burma and the West (Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Transcultural Studies) by Tamara Ho

Author:Tamara Ho [Ho, Tamara]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Published: 2015-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

I see myself sometimes quite differently from how other people see me…. when people say, “How marvelous it is that you stuck out those six years of detention,” my reaction is, “Well, what’s so difficult about it? What’s all the fuss about?” Anybody can stick out six years of house arrest. It’s those people who have had to stick out years and years in prison, in terrible conditions, that makes you wonder how they did it. So, I don’t see myself as all that extraordinary. I do see myself as a trier. I don’t give up…. [B]ut basically I don’t give up trying to be a better person.117

Aung San Suu Kyi’s distinctive modesty and determination shine through, in contrast to her overdetermined image as the symbol of Burma. She denounces heroic status and cults of personality and makes plain the privileges she has over other Burmese political prisoners, in terms of the relatively tolerable conditions of her house arrest. Quoting “one of the drafters of the Constitution of India,” she asserted that “hero worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship” and told people in her own words that “there is no room for hero-worship in a true political struggle made up of human beings grappling with human problems.”118 Although Aung San Suu Kyi has followed her father’s model, “sharpening herself into an incorruptible leader for the cause of democracy—capable of sacrificing her own life,” she ultimately returns to the importance of a diverse set of peoples working together as a whole and the shared humanity and potential agency of everyone who wishes to see a better Burma, be they Burmese or not.119 By categorizing herself as simply a person who tries, she becomes a role model accessible to the people of Burma and around the world.

Despite fifteen years of detention, Aung San Suu Kyi remained stubbornly committed to her vision of political change and reconciliation. She remained cautiously optimistic and politic about finding terms of agreement with her former captors and the military ruling party. During her years of house arrest and famous 1998 protest (in which she stopped her car on the bridge and refused to move), Aung San Suu Kyi proved to be a woman with an indomitable sense of moral justice who has, as one friend noted, not only the courage of her convictions, but also the courage to utilize her connections.120 By tactically deploying transcultural knowledge in a multivalent fashion, Aung San Suu Kyi displaces binary divisions of gender, culture, and liberation and advocates a flexible mode of nonviolent change and synthesis. She explains, “I never say I’m going to do this or that. That’s something I’ve never done, because in politics, one has to be flexible.”121 Akin to Gloria Anzaldúa’s la mestiza (see Borderlands: The New Mestiza/La Frontera), Aung San Suu Kyi negotiates languages, straddles multiple cultures, and articulates spiritual and political identities to articulate a border-crossing paradigm of resistance and change. Situating knowledge and bringing it to a specific level of application can have a profound effect on people’s lives.

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