Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Ma Thida sees a more profound, generalized resentment finding expression in the anti-Muslim atrocities. “The generals did not discriminate in their cruelty,” she said. “It was a democratic cruelty.” She believes that people who never believed that the law was intended to protect them are taking their revenge on authority itself. “So this Muslim situation is not simply communal violence nor religious violence nor racial violence,” she said. “It’s a manifestation of something deeper: of undemocratic violence.”

It is a five-hour boat ride from Sittwe, where I had seen the burned-out neighborhoods and the camps, to Mrauk-U, Arakan’s imperial capital from 1430 to 1785. In this northern part of Rakhine, the shadow of religious hatred seemed almost implausible. My first morning in Mrauk-U, I got up at four forty-five and drove through the eerily darkened byways of the impoverished town to the foot of a small mountain with steps carved into it. Mornings in Myanmar often find bewitching mists hovering over the valleys and around the hills, delineating what is small and close, and what is large and far. Temples and other monuments that look about the same size on first glance can be differentiated in scale by the blurring of their edges, which indicates greater distance. Visitors are enjoined to see all the great sites at sunrise, given the aesthetic appeal of the mists.

After a Rakhine breakfast of fish soup with rice noodles and a lot of spices and condiments, I went to visit some villages in the nearby state of Chin. The Burmese king used to take beautiful women for his harem; to protect themselves, according to legend, Chin women began tattooing their faces with lines like spiderwebs to make themselves ugly to the Burmese, a custom that continued long after the threat had abated. Perhaps as a result, the most easily accessible Chin villages are inundated with tourists, and tattooed women pose for thousands of photographs. Here, a few miles from the border with Bangladesh, people from various ethnic groups seemed hardly aware of the crisis faced by the Rohingya. In a country with such poor communications infrastructure, radicalization spreads in fits and starts, bypassing whole districts. We didn’t see a single 969 sticker there.

There are more than a hundred ethnic groups in what is now Myanmar, and they have a long history of violence in the myriad shifting empires of the region. The students of 1988 proved to be nearly as ruthless as the junta that defeated them, staying rigid in their demands, building their own prison camps, and engaging in torture. The nation’s myriad partisans have an often unnerving relentlessness. But Theravada Buddhism points toward an implacable serenity, and that, too, was manifest in most of the activists and artists I met. At their suggestion, I headed across the country and visited the Golden Rock, among the country’s holiest shrines. High up a steep mountain, the sprawling site was mobbed with pilgrims, monks, and nuns. Street foods and ingredients for traditional medicines were being hawked everywhere: porcupine quills; a goat’s leg soaked in sesame oil; bunches of dried herbs. Many people were sleeping on bamboo mats or in makeshift tents. Thousands upon thousands of candles flickered, the hum of chanting was ubiquitous, and the air was heavy with incense and the redolence of food offerings. Young couples come here not only out of piety, but also for the chance to interact in the anonymity of the crowds. Flashing LED displays festooned the buildings, even the animist shrines. If I were to say that it made Grand Central Station at rush hour look like a meditation retreat, I’d be underselling the chaos. Yet for all of that, it felt peaceable.

The Golden Rock itself is an extraordinary sight: a boulder, nearly round, twenty feet in diameter, balanced on the edge of the mountain as if on the verge of plummeting. Legend holds that it remains on its precarious perch thanks to three hairs of the Buddha. The entire rock is covered in gold leaf, to which pilgrims keep adding, so that in some places the gold is an inch thick and stands out in lumps. Atop the rock, far out of reach, is the Kyaiktiyo Pagoda. The gold orb glows at sunrise, in afternoon light, at sunset, in the floodlit nighttime. When the light changes, the effect shifts subtly, but it is never less than awe-inspiring. I climbed under it, stood beside it. From every vantage, one feels the fragility of its odd balance, the drama of its massive heft, and the tranquillity that holy places can achieve. It was both miraculously exciting and strangely reassuring. Like any great landscape, it holds the viewer’s attention even if he or she is not praying.