Tongues Have No Bones by Kyi May Kaung
An excerpt from a 30-minute film by Lisa DeLillo with poetry by expatriate Burmese writer Kyi May Kaung. There’s also a second excerpt on YouTube, which includes a prose intro on Burmese politics and censorship, but I preferred this selection for its striking scenes of puppets and dancers miming puppets.
The full-length film was made in 2001, and DeLillo’s website quotes a review by Art Jones from Shout magazine:
To get at what’s real, “Tongues” focuses on that which can’t be subjugated. Social indictments sprout from the small, personal anecdotes of student leaders. The savaging of national character unfolds in the words of noted poet Kyi May Kaung, now a producer with Radio Free Asia. The horrors of “freedom lost” find voice in Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Prize winner and repeated recipient of Burmese house arrest. Yet most irrepressible are “Tongues” images of Burmese rivers. The water providing life is the same water choked with the blood of civilian casualties, water that DiLillo uses as a constant mirror of all the regime would like hidden.
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Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.
