Eine Passage von Burma nach Bern
E-Book, Englisch, Deutsch, 176 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-95732-504-4
Verlag: Verbrecher Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Wendy Law-Yone wurde 1947 in Mandalay, Burma, geboren und wuchs in der damaligen Hauptstadt Rangun auf. Ihr Vater gründete 1948 die erste englischsprachige Zeitung nach der Unabhängigkeit des Landes. Sie wurde in Folge des Militärputschs 1962 aufgelöst, Law-Yone als Herausgeber verhaftet. Auch Wendy Law-Yone wurde inhaftiert, konnte 1967 jedoch ausreisen, zuerst nach Thailand und später in die USA. Dort studierte sie, arbeitete als Journalistin und publizierte ihre ersten Romane, 'The Coffin Tree' (1983) und 'Irrawaddy Tango' (1993). 2002 übersiedelte sie nach Großbritannien, wo 2010 ihr dritter Roman, 'The Road to Wanting', erschien. 2013 folgte 'Golden Parasol: A Daughter's Memoire of Burma'. Wendy Law-Yone lebt heute in London und in der Provence.
Weitere Infos & Material
Dürrenmatt and Me
A Passage from Burma to Berne
Wendy Law-Yone It was my official debut, and I was running late. Oliver Lubrich, programme director and host for the evening, was waiting outside, on the steps of University House, an impressive Neo-Baroque mansion that stopped me in my tracks. But there was no time to dawdle. I crossed the lawn at a half-run, breathless and apologetic, to be greeted by Oliver without a word of rebuke, although he did joke, as he ushered me inside, that he had just begun to wonder who might serve as a substitute speaker … A blur of high-ceilinged opulence as we stepped through the front hall: gilded mouldings and cornices, painted ceilings, allegorical friezes, a marble staircase … The lecture room was on the upper floor, and I suffered a moment’s mortification to see that I had kept waiting some thirty or so guests, all sedately seated. On one wall of the elegant conference room, two images were projected side by side: one of Rangoon, the other of Berne. I had chosen the colour photograph of Rangoon. It showed a typical downtown street, with its cat’s cradle of exposed electrical wires festooning the upper storeys of buildings. The image of Berne was a stock photo of the city centre: arcades of beige-green stone flying colourful flags, converging on a clock tower. Here, too, thin wires were stretched across the street: but symmetrically, almost invisibly—for cable cars. ‘That I’m speaking to you this evening is more than an honour,’ was the way I began, after the formal introductions. It was already an honour, of course, for me, a writer born and raised in Burma, to be delivering an inaugural address at the University of Berne. But to be holding the post of Friedrich Dürrenmatt Guest Professor of World Literature was more, much more, than an honour. For what the selection committee in charge of my appointment didn’t know, I now revealed, was that I had enjoyed a singular, even intimate, relationship with the man after whom my endowment was named. Indeed, so singular was my rapport with Herr Dürrenmatt, so discreet, that the great man went to his grave innocent of its existence. A sprinkling of polite laughter from the audience. A secret sigh of relief from me. Now it remained for me only to recount, in the following hour or so, my episodic journey from Burma, my birthplace, to Berne, the canton of Friedrich Dürrenmatt, my posthumous benefactor, if such an appellation exists. What follows, in Part 1, is an expanded version of my inaugural talk in September 2015. Part 2 is a similar expansion of my farewell address in December 2015. 1. Burma
I was first introduced to Friedrich Dürrenmatt in my teens—at age seventeen, to be exact. I was still living at home then, home being Rangoon, Burma. In those dark days of the mid-1960s, the dawn of military dictatorship, home had become something of a dead end. This was not—or not only—a figure of speech, but the precise location of our house. To reach 116 B University Avenue, you veered off a noisy thoroughfare, onto a leafy residential lane that led to a lake. This was Inya Lake, the city’s centrepiece of manicured tranquillity. Ours was the last house at the end of the road, the one fronting on the water. But this wasn’t the only dead end at which I had arrived around the time I first became acquainted with Herr Dürrenmatt. At three o’clock one morning in March 1963, a convoy consisting of a station wagon, a military jeep, and a truckload of uniformed men armed with automatic weapons crept up the driveway encircling our house. It must have been an exceptionally quiet manoeuvre, because the only person it woke was my mother, the light sleeper in the family. She in turn woke my father, the heavy sleeper. When my father, still groggy, went to fumble with the lock on the expanded metal gate enclosing our front porch, it was to let in a youngish Captain. ‘Let’s go, Uncle,’ was all he said—uncle being a term of respect for men of an older generation. As my father turned to slump into a chair for a moment, rubbing his eyes and trying to wake fully to what was happening, the Captain added with chilly courtesy, ‘and don’t touch the telephone, please.’ A few minutes later, after my father had washed his face and got dressed, more uniformed shadows materialised to escort him down the porch steps and into the idling van. In this Volkswagen van, led by the jeep and followed by the truck with the armed men, my father was … Here we were truly at a loss to know what exactly had happened to him. Had he been arrested? Taken in for questioning? Or kidnapped, simply, by a rogue militia, and held for ransom? We, his family, had no idea. Rather, whatever ideas that came to mind could be neither verified nor discounted with any certainty. All we could vouch for was that Dad’s sudden disappearance had required no arrest warrant, no charges, no writs. Just a casual let’s go! from a young man in khaki, and a less casual show of force in the attendant convoy. A year was to pass before we were officially informed that our father had been taken into ‘protective custody’ by the new military government. Permission was granted for him to write home once every other week; on alternating weeks, he would be allowed receipt of one letter from home. No correspondence was to exceed one foolscap page. Dad’s first message from prison was, for me at least, oddly disappointing. He had folded the 8 × 11" sheet of paper in half, and written on each half, four pages front and back. I’d never seen so large a chunk of his handwriting before. My father’s lengthier pronouncements had only ever taken shape for me in print: in the pages that rolled off the carriage of his two typewriters—the pebbled grey Smith Corona at home, the boxy black Remington at work—or in the editorial columns of his newspaper, The Nation. Now, after admiring his symmetrical half-print, half-cursive—childlike in its neat legibility—and puzzling over his simplistic language, there was something that didn’t quite add up for me. Those were his locutions, his words, on the page; no question. But what colourless, lifeless, meaningless words, giving away nothing about where and how he was living, nothing about what he was really thinking or feeling. I hadn’t yet understood that his letters to us weren’t for our eyes only, that they were written as much with the censors in mind, in the bland language of evasion. But not bland enough, apparently, for officialdom. In time, we would open the envelope duly delivered on mail day to find that the censors had taken a razor blade to one offending word or another. A word like ‘jail’, or ‘country’, would be neatly incised, leaving little rectangular cut-outs in the page. Never mind that a kindergarten-age child could have filled in the blanks just from the sense of the rest of the sentence. I was not a kindergarten-age child. I was sixteen years old, and suddenly the whole business of words—not just the peppy yet strangely pallid words in my father’s letters from prison, but words everywhere in my line of sight—was serious business. A journal lying around our house at the time, a British periodical my father subscribed to called Encounter, ended up in my bedroom, flashing an obscure Morse code from my bookshelf. On the cover of this issue was splashed Mots Mots Mots. The wonky pink-and-blue typography caught my eye even before I learned that the letters spelled Words Words Words in French, referring to the autobiography of a French philosopher called Jean Paul Sartre. Les Mots was the title of his book, a chapter of which was printed inside. Words Words Words. They were coming at me now from every direction, charged with cryptic import. Because it was common knowledge that telephones were tapped, our phone calls became conversations in code. Repression turned us all into code-dependents: not just speakers of code but readers of code, trafficking in language that obscured rather than clarified. The newspapers—if you could even call the two official government dailies newspapers—were filled with outright lies, or sheer nonsense of a crushingly tedious nature. Increasingly, clarity was at a premium—especially, it seemed, when it came to my future. For I had been on the verge of leaving home to study at Mills College in America when my father was arrested. Mills was a women’s college in Oakland, California, renowned for its music department. Pioneers in experimental music either taught, studied, or performed—or did all three—at Mills. America’s introduction to the works of Alban Berg, Darius Milhaud, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, and Aaron Copland began at Mills. Benny Goodman played with the Budapest String Quartet, Dave Brubeck studied under Darius Milhaud, John Cage performed in a percussion music concert—all under the aegis of the Mills Music Department. Everybody who was anybody in the New Music field touched...
