13 - Intimate Conflicts: Rebels, Heroes and Disfigured Terrorists in Burmese Anglophone Literature

Summary

Disfiguring the Terrorist: Tropes, Figures and the Intimacy of Violence

In a post-war story about the intimacy of two amputated legs, an investigative team of inspectors descends upon a battle zone to collect evidence. ‘28 legs in all’, cries out an inspector, ‘19 military personnel and 9 militants’. ‘No, our boss won't accept that’, responds the officer, ‘we can't have odd numbers, we need two legs per person’. Even if we assume that one of the military personnel was an amputee from a previous battle, we still have one militant leg to account for. So, the investigative team either needs to wait until one of the insurgents steps on a mine, or chase some of the local villagers from the militant-controlled areas in the direction of a mine field and hope that they will get an odd number of blasts to even the number of legs. But there will be a problem if one of the military personnel steps on a mine accidentally. That is exactly what happens in Mitali Perkins’ novel Bamboo People (2010), in which a fifteen-year-old foot soldier of the Burmese junta, forcefully recruited, loses his leg in a landmine explosion. Left to die, with a missing leg, he is eventually rescued by another teenager from the enemy's camp, a Karenni insurgent, who takes pity on him and gifts him a prosthetic leg which was meant for the teenage amputees of his own camp.

The boy goes home to Rangoon, proudly displaying his ‘Karenni leg’ (Perkins 2010, 60) to his Burmese friends, in an overt gesture of political bonhomie that allegorically reinforces the notion that Burma the nation needs two legs to trundle along, one organic and one inorganic, one aesthetic and one prosthetic, the Burman and the Karenni, which stand side by side, as it were, but never even on ground or in life. The Burmese teenager can walk only at the expense of a Karenni amputee. The conflict that holds the two legs of the same body together and apart is therefore binding and intimate at the same time, as Moira Fradinger observes in the context of the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo: the violence between ‘the most powerless and most powerful [is] part of a structure of enmity whose two polar opposites alternatively embody figures inimical to the fantasized unity of the nation’ (2010, 188).