THE VOICE OF HOPE

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Conscience of a Nation
By Wendy Law-Yone

Sunday, January 3, 1999; Page X01 

THE VOICE OF HOPE

Aung San Suu Kyi: Conversations with Alan Clements

Seven Stories. 301 pp. $ 24.95


THE LADY

By Barbara Victor

Faber and Faber. 296 pp. $26.95


Reviewed by Wendy Law-Yone, a novelist who was born and raised in Burma.


Comparing these two books, I am reminded of Trollope's line on the
impossibility of revealing one's inner life in print: "No man ever did so
truly, and no man ever will." As if that ever squelched the demand for
autobiography. True or not, in the body of evidence defining a life, the
horse's mouth is still a vital organ.

I mention autobiography although neither of these two books -- about Aung
San Suu Kyi, the Burmese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate -- falls
into that category. Near to autobiography, however, is The Voice of Hope, a
series of conversations between Aung San Suu Kyi and Alan Clements, an
American activist and scholar who spent five years in Burma as a Buddhist
monk. As a transcript, a first-person account of a public life, it is far
more illuminating than The Lady, an impersonal profile by American
journalist Barbara Victor.

Conducted in Rangoon over a nine-month period, the interviews in Voice of
Hope demonstrate clearly that the truth of a person's life is sometimes best
articulated by that person. Speaking to the point is one of Suu Kyi's
signature talents and helps explain her strong pull on audiences both
private and public. Since her release in 1995 from six years of house arrest
in Rangoon, she has drawn crowds by the thousands to her lakeside home,
where they gather once a week in often punishing heat, risking arrest and
imprisonment to hear her informal speeches calling for reform, civil
freedoms, and an end to tyranny. Pithy, hard-hitting and above all simple,
Suu Kyi's rhetoric recalls the language of the great civil disobedience
proponents -- Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi --
most of whom she has read and studied in depth.

Clements's interviews with Suu Kyi disclose the inspired obstinacy and
vision of a woman often compared to Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel and Mahatma
Gandhi as she speaks out against lethargy and injustice, fear and hate,
corruption and violence. Here is a plain speaker par excellence who defines
fear as a "habit," house arrest as a "job," saints as "sinners who keep on
trying." Her answers to the well-considered (at times a little too

considerate) questions posed by the interviewer recall as well the Italian
communist Antonio Gramsci, who spoke of his ordeal in Mussolini's fascist
prisons as that of "an ordinary man who refuses to barter his deep
convictions for anything in the world."

A similar style of self-assessment informs Suu Kyi's unsentimental remarks
on her calling. "I suppose people think I'm extraordinary because I'm so
simple they can't believe it . . . I cannot think of mine as a sacrifice. I
think of it as a choice."

Barbara Victor's The Lady succeeds at least in tracing the broad outline of
Aung San Suu Kyi's curriculum vitae. She is the daughter of independence
leader Gen. Aung San, modern Burma's most famous martyr, who was
assassinated in 1947 when she was 2 years old. Educated abroad since age 15
-- first in India, then in England, at St. Hugh's College, Oxford -- her
sense of identity, if not destiny, was clearly bound up with her father and
homeland. One of her letters written to the man she would marry, British
academic Michael Aris, conveys her sense of noblesse oblige: "I only ask one
thing; that should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty to
them."

That call of duty came in 1988, when Suu Kyi happened to be in Rangoon,
visiting her sick mother, just as a violent popular uprising against the
military government erupted. As the daughter of a national hero, Suu Kyi
suddenly found herself addressing mass rallies, calling for democracy,
drawing the world's attention with her forceful, graceful presence.

The pro-democracy movement was short-lived and brutally crushed, but in a
gesture of deluded confidence the military rulers decided to allow free and
fair elections. To their surprise alone, they lost -- a defeat they avenged
by placing Suu Kyi under house arrest and other National League for
Democracy leaders in jail, along with scores of suspects. Testimonies given
to the United Nations describe victims "tortured, beaten, shackled, and
nearly suffocated . . . burned, stabbed," while others suffered "salt and
chemicals rubbed into open wounds, and . . . psychological torture,
including threats of death."

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Aung San Suu Kyi at the halfway point
in her sentence, lofting her onto the international stage as an icon of
resistance (though failing to gain her release for another three years).
Today, while technically no longer under house arrest, she remains cut off
from her family in England, a virtual prisoner "in the larger prison of
Burma under authoritarian rule," as she puts it, and of her own stature as a
non-violence advocate and human rights activist. She may leave the country,
but only for good; therefore she cannot leave -- at least not without
seeming to abandon the struggle.

The Lady provides as coherent a digest of this woeful state as one is likely
to read by a journalist who arrived for a two-month visit with no special
previous knowledge of the country. Competent but not ground-breaking, it is
less a portrait of The Lady (as Suu Kyi is known in both friendly and
hostile circles in Burma) than of the circumstances surrounding her
accidental crusade against the State Law and Order Committee (popularly

known by its Orwellian acronym, SLORC).

This skewing is understandable: The author was able to interview the
ordinarily inaccessible senior members of the SLORC but not the infinitely
more articulate subject of her biography. No doubt Suu Kyi was declared
off-limits by the brass to whom the author was beholden for her stay.

Leaders who grapple daily with questions of morality, freedom, action,
responsibility and sacrifice are rare. Aung San Suu Kyi is one of them. How
to bring about change peacefully? What is the relationship between
corruption and self-deception? What are the responsibilities of a leader
advocating nonviolence in a violence-driven state? Rare, too, is the
freshness of her views, not least because of her singular blend of Burmese
humor and Buddhist pacifism, of laughter under fire and meditation as a call
to arms.

Recalling the example of Nelson Mandela, Suu Kyi has said, "something that
moves people to identify themselves with what is happening in Burma will
raise the level of their consciousness. And you can never tell what it is."

By now we can. It is Aung San Suu Kyi herself.