‘Eradication’: a Rohingya poet standing in the midst of genocide

MNTV News Desk — Genocide does not begin with fire. It begins with language — with slurs, with silence, with the quiet stripping away of belonging. For Rohingya poet Mayyu Ali, survival meant refusing that silence.

 In Eradication: A Poet at the Heart of the Rohingya Genocide, he writes not only to document atrocity, but to defy the attempt to erase a people’s history, culture and courage, reports Counter Currents.

When they fled the ongoing genocide in Myanmar, losing everything they owned, and arrived in Bangladesh and then India, this hatred did not leave them behind. For these same Rohingya Muslims, BJP leader T. Raja Singh said that all Rohingya should be shot dead. 

In India, ‘Rohingya’ began to be used as a slur. They were declared terrorists, illegal immigrants, and jihadis. Propaganda was spread against these helpless, destitute Rohingya Muslims, claiming that they could enter your homes at night and kill you.

Among these Rohingya is 35-year-old Mayyu Ali.

But Mayyu Ali refused to simply live as a helpless refugee amidst this cruel genocide. He took refuge in poetry and began to create an alternate world in his poems, where he started to preserve all those things that this brutal genocide in Myanmar sought to erase. Such as the Rohingya language, culture, songs, idioms, and above all, their will to live. 

Poetry is, after all, the final sanctuary of hope and the will to live. In Mayyu Ali’s own words, “They buried our culture in the lands they snatched from us. Now it can only be preserved and saved in poetry.” 

The recently published book by Mayyu Ali, ‘Eradication: A Poet at the Heart of the Rohingya Genocide’, is both a living document of the brutal genocide of the Rohingya Muslims and a vibrant resistance against it. Written primarily in the style of a memoir, interspersed with poetry, you can get a glimpse of this book through this excerpt from one of Mayyu Ali’s poems—

Perpetrators lie in various ways,

While the world still debates on genocide,

You can see the fire but not how we are burnt,

You can read of killings but,

Not how throats were cut.

For Mayyu Ali, writing poetry became a symbol of resistance. In an interview with The Polis Project, he said, ” Poetry is my weapon against oblivion, declaring our existence.”

One day, while living a hellish life in a refugee camp in Bangladesh Mayyu Ali met Emilie Lopes, a renowned journalist from France. Emilie Lopes was documenting the stories of women who had become pregnant due to rape by Myanmar soldiers for the newspaper ‘Le Figaro’. When Lopes learned about Mayyu Ali’s poetry and his will to live, she was deeply moved. 

Through considerable effort, she helped him obtain a refugee visa for Canada, and he came to Canada with his wife and his young daughter, Inayah. However, this decision was by no means easy. For a long time, he suffered from depression and guilt over leaving his people behind in such dire circumstances.

It was here that he wrote this important book with Lopes’ collaboration, and told the world that it is not enough to know that we were killed, because we are not merely statistics. What is far more important to know is ‘how’ we were killed. If you know that Jews were killed, but you do not know that they were killed in gas chambers, you cannot understand the genocide, the Holocaust, at all.

Mayyu Ali was born in 1991 in the Arakan province of Myanmar. Around this same time, the process of othering the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar began to accelerate rapidly. By 2017, this had transformed into large-scale genocide, and the Rohingya became one of the largest refugee groups on earth. 

The most powerful aspect of this book is that Mayyu Ali has documented this process of othering with almost forensic detailing. He highlights that the process of genocide creeps silently into our lives, and often we think that the matter probably won’t go any further, or that these are just trivial things.

Here, Indians can also clearly see their own reflection. Since the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the process of othering Muslims has accelerated so much that it is rapidly pushing us towards the very same situation that Mayyu Ali and the Rohingya Muslims are facing today.

Recalling his childhood, Mayyu Ali says that they used to play freely with Buddhist children. No difference was visible. But as they grew a little older, they noticed that their identity cards would be checked in public places, while Buddhist people were not questioned. 

After some time, the use of the derogatory term ‘Kalar’ for them increased, they began to be denied birth certificates, and they faced discrimination in public institutions.

Finally, on one cold night, the army surrounded Mayyu Ali’s village. His house was subjected to an intense and terrifying search. When he went to school the next day, Mayyu Ali found that all the Muslim homes in the village had been searched, but not a single Buddhist child’s house had been searched. On that day, something broke inside Mayyu Ali, and it was after this that he took refuge in poetry.

The most astonishing thing is when Mayyu Ali describes how messages of hatred against Muslims were spread in Buddhist monasteries, and ordinary Buddhist people were incited to commit violence against Muslims. 

This metamorphosis of a religion that has always been synonymous with peace and compassion is bewildering. In India, we can hear its terrifying echoes in the ‘Dharm Sansads’ (religious assemblies) that occur regularly.

The final chapter of the book is very beautiful. This chapter is essentially a letter from Mayyu Ali to his daughter, Inayah. In it, while telling his daughter the story of her birth, he writes that when he came to Bangladesh as a refugee with his family, he also brought with him, in a jar, some soil from their homeland. 

It is a tradition among Rohingya Muslims that after a child is born, their umbilical cord is buried in the soil of their own land behind the house. It is believed that this maintains a person’s connection to their land. But when Inayah was born in a government hospital in Bangladesh, the doctors did not give them the umbilical cord. This made Mayyu Ali very sad. But there was nothing he could do.

So then, how will Inayah stay connected to her soil?

In this sense, Mayyu Ali’s book is meant to connect Inayah to her ‘soil’. When Inayah grows up, she will read this book and understand what ‘soil’ she is a part of, what the fragrance of this ‘soil’ is like, and most importantly, what the history of this ‘soil’ is.

In Mayyu Ali’s own words: “I am dedicating this book to you so that you never forget your history, the history that some Burmese people want to erase.”

Mayyu Ali begins the book with a Rohingya proverb, and with that same proverb, I want to conclude: “Nourish yourself, with rice gruel if need be, but don’t ever lose your courage.”  

Mayyu Ali’s book is the story of this very courage.