Living and Travelling in Politically Awkward Places

Tomorrow will be the somethingth anniversary of an event that may or may not have taken place in a way that may or may not have been reported. This event is one of the three forbidden T-words that foreign teachers have been warned not to bring up in class. One involves a large square where stuff might have happened (or, hey, maybe not!), another refers to a region out west, and the other is considered a renegade state.   Because tomorrow is the anniversary of the thing that didn’t really happen, Hotmail is blocked. Last year, Facebook and Twitter disappeared when something else happened (or not, depending on how you look at it).  Wordpress.com and Blogspot have been unavailable for as long as I have been here.

My students have one version of history in their heads and I have another one, wholly different on many levels, running around in confused circles in my brain. I should mention that my undergraduate degree was in modern [this country’s name] revolutionary history- the intersection between art and politics from the 19XX until now.  I am aware of one or two things.

When one moves to this country, particularly to the bigger cities in the East where everything is shiny and new, it’s really easy to forget where you are. The Big Character political posters of the old days are gone; no big socialist realist murals with shiny faced peasants enjoying farming sorghum or building engines at Number One Model Screwdriver Factory, no obvious signs that you are anywhere where there is anything happening that you might want to be careful about.  There is more overt police presence in London or Istanbul than there is here. Your employers remind you to mind your Ts and you get on with business. You drink your espressos at Starbucks, read your Western magazines that can be freely bought at news stands (including Time, Newsweek, the Economist),  read books by Jan Wong or Philip Pan and surf the internet with your favourite VPN.  It’s easy to put any questions out of your mind.  Many foreign workers here have very little clear idea of what happened even ten, fifteen years ago, let alone thirty or forty.  I dare you to stop and think about what your 60 year old neighbour went through in her life, what adults who were in university twenty years ago faced. It makes you stop and think.  Remember, Hotmail is blocked today. Why is it blocked?

The question of living in or visiting politically awkward places came up a few weeks ago when we decided to go to Burma, aka Myanmar, aka nasty scary junta-run country with an international embargo placed on it for its many human rights infringements. Reading up extensively on it, we learned that the internet is heavily monitored and topics for discussion are limited and monitored when possible.  A lot of not good things happen in regions where foreigners need special permits to enter.  It started sounding kinda familiar.

We thought a lot about our motivations for going there and how we could go whilst creating the least amount of damage to the people there and giving the least amount of financial assistance to those in power.  We’ve been planning our routes based on availability of non-government accommodation and transportation. We are trying to tread lightly and carefully.

When we moved here, I had no such qualms though I knew what I was entering, politically.  I didn’t spend two weeks thinking about how I’d justify to my friends why I was going to a place whose politics had some dark patches that couldn’t really be brushed away casually.  What are the boundaries between visiting places that have iffy track records but international support, and those who have been cut off from the world for what they’ve done?  Why South Africa in the 1980s and not USA in the 1950s?  A friend of mine spent a year in Chile while Pinochet was still in power. Others were in Nicaragua and El Salvador during their rougher years.

The question, for me, is still out there, not wholly formed. I’m not sure if I can or need to justify where I’ve been, where I’ve lived, or where I plan to go.  I do need to keep thinking about it though.

I’m consciously not tagging this post with anything concrete. You can probably guess why.