Poetics of Memory about the Democracy Movement in Myanmar: With a Focus on the Narratives in the Commemorations

Abstract

This article examines memories and narratives of the 1988 democracy movement in Myanmar. Though this political uprising led to the collapse of the Ne Win regime that had governed the country for 26 years, it was suppressed with much bloodshed by a military coup on September 18th. Under the military regime from 1988 to 2011, the people of the pro-democracy forces were forbidden to express their memories about the event openly in public, until political liberalization with the transition to civilian rule in 2011 made it possible. This article analyzes how they remembered the event and mobilized the memories as a political instrument by focusing on the narratives in the commemorations that appeared after the political change. As an analytical framework, I propose poetics of memory that approach on the rhetoric people depend on when they express their memories. I argue that rhetoric rooted in the regional context conditioned the way of formation and mobilization of political memory. This framework provides significant insights into the relationship between memory construction and vernacular worldviews.