Sampsonia Way Writer Khet Mar’s Interview with The Huffington Post
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Khet’s Grandmother Encouraged Her to Write
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“I was 14. My grandmother read everything I wrote and said “If you don’t send in those stories, I will.”
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University of Yangon
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“After the 1988 uprising ... many universities were closed for three years, and I had a lot of time to read and write.”
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Demonstrations in Rangoon, 1988
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“Soldiers blocked the road and shot at us. After that, I became deeply involved in the pro-democracy movement, and I became a leader in my village.”
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Her First Censored Work
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“I wrote about a girl who preferred to stay in her room and the paranoid censorship officers thought I was writing about Aung San Suu Kyi.”
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Khet Mar was Censored 15 Times
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“Editors have to show all articles to the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division of the Ministry of Information. It’s important to say that the head of this department is a military captain and a man who has never read literature."
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Being in Insein Prison
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“A nurse came every day to inject us with medicine, but she used the same needle for all the prisoners. I was in the same cell with prostitutes, drug addicts and homeless who already were HIV-positive.”
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Friends in Jail
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“I made many friends while I was in jail who were political prisoners, too. Some had the idea of starting a book club ... But we didn’t know if we had infiltrators in the group, so we never were explicit.”
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Putting Things in Perspective
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“At that time [of Cyclone Nargis], I was running [Moe Journal] and had the money to publish the next issue. I thought, ‘What is more important, a magazine or people?’ I answered myself, ‘People.’”
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A Call to Action
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“A friend came to my house to tell me that he lost eight nieces and nephews in Nargis ... When I saw all the suffering and how the government wasn’t helping, I was really moved to act.”
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A Classroom After Nargis
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“One of my responsibilities as a writer is to let readers inside Burma know about the era in which we are living."
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Asylum on Sampsonia Way, Pittsburgh
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“Here I have more time to write and I don’t live with the fear of persecution.”
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Quotes from this slide show originally appeared in a Sampsonia Way interview of Khet Mar on June 10th, 2011.
On February 21 The Huffington Post published an interview with City of Asylum/Pittsburgh’s former writer-in-residence Khet Mar. Khet Mar is a Burmese writer and activist who has suffered imprisonment and great persecution for her writing until finding asylum in 2009. She is also a contributing writer for Sampsonia Way. This interview arrives in anticipation of a lecture and book signing event for her work The Souls of Fallen Flowers at Chateau Chavaniac at Easton, Pennsylvania on February 24 (This event is not open to the public).
In this interview Khet Mar describes her childhood in a fishing village, the inspiration to become a writer, the political uprising and her life in prison, how she was released, her subsequent disaster relief work, and the risks she took in reporting. She also discusses her new life in Pittsburgh, and the publication of her latest book, a memoir of her life story.
Read the full interview here.
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