The Irrawaddy Literary Festival 2014 was held in Mandalay this weekend. I wasn’t there and can’t report from the frontline, but I would like to salute an event now in its second year and hopefully looking to a successful future. A striking consequence of Burma’s long retreat from the world is how rarely its dark past has been written into novels published in English. Thankfully the country knew nothing on the scale of the Soviet gulag, the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the Khmer killing fields. The years after 1962 were nevertheless deeply destructive, as an entire economy was brought to its knees in a matter of months. Still today, Myanmar lives in the shadow of that madness. Leading the way in making creative use of such rich material is Wendy Law-Yone, a panelist at ILF 2014. This passage is from her bleak, mystical debut novel, The Coffin Tree, published in 1983:

“After these brushes with the black market, my aunts would join the lines at one of the People’s Stores, with its air of a raffle or a lucky dip.

But when my aunts’ turn came, the clerk at the counter would have little to offer.

If they said, ‘Salt, please?’ he would invariably say, ‘Yes, Auntie. We have no salt.’

‘Oil?’

‘Yes, we have none.’

‘Sugar. Give us some sugar, in that case.’

‘Sugar? Yes. No sugar.’

‘Aspirin, then.’

‘Yes. We don’t have.’

‘Hè! Then what do you have?’

‘Ointment, Auntie; ringworm ointment.’

‘What for? We are a bathing family, not a scabby one.’

‘Take it, dear Aunt. You never know.'”