Coming From the Art: Can Creatives Take Down Myanmar’s Military Junta?

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Above, pictured next to Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, is Zayar Thaw, founder of Myanmar’s first hip hop group Nitric Acid in 2000. Thaw also led the Generation Wave youth movement, a pro-democracy campaign launched in the wake of Myanmar’s Saffron Rebellion in 2007, which saw hundreds of civilians across the country brutally gunned down in the streets. Using graffiti and rap to spread his message, Thaw was arrested in 2008 by the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s armed forces which have held the country in an iron grip virtually unbroken since 1962. He was released amid widening liberalisation and democratisation in 2011 and immediately turned his attention to politics. Thaw spent the next 8 years as an elected member of the Burmese House of Representatives, under the newly installed National League for Democracy (NLD), until a violent coup in February 2021 saw the Tatmadaw return to power. Thaw was promptly arrested under dubious terrorism charges once more and, on 23 July 2022, he was executed.

Thaw is, however, survived by a new wave of rap artists displeased with the Tatmadaw’s return to power. A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with Rap Against Junta, a group set up to platform hip hop artists protesting the military dictatorship in Myanmar. RAJ was founded in response to the fateful 2021 coup, when they set up speakers in the streets of Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, and hosted a cypher for local hip hop artists looking to voice their discontent. Both of the group members I spoke to had chosen to wear balaclavas during our interview, an understandable precaution given the recent treatment of Zayar Thaw. “If you ignore politics, it will come to your kitchen”, Jimmy tells me.

Historically, hip hop has been no stranger to protest, having provided a strong organising force during the 2011 Arab Spring, and it is not the only form of culture which has seen a political slant since the coup. The Chinland Defence Force, a guerrilla army based in the Western state of Chin that claims to have killed upwards of 1000 Tatmadaw soldiers since 2021, has its own power rock theme song featured in a recent ABC documentary.

Meanwhile, RAJ’s logo itself depicts the three-finger salute, a pro-democracy symbol popularised by pop culture icon Katniss Everdeen from the Hunger Games.

Credit: @rapagainstjunta

Towards the end of our conversation, RAJ Project Manager Jimmy mentioned that there was an exhibition hosted by the pro-democracy New Burma Campaign in Camden, UK. I arrived to find a room filled with colourful pamphlets, posters and videos created by Burmese creatives, communicating crucial protest information in endlessly innovative ways. One image depicted a woman throwing up the three-finger salute in one hand whilst cradling a baby Pikachu in the other. “For the future of little Pikachu”, read the caption. Another featured a closed eyelid on a black background which, when scanned by a specific phone app, would open to reveal depictions of various crimes committed by the Tatmadaw. One of the exhibitions’ organisers informed me that this particular poster was successfully used to slip under the radar of military officials patrolling the streets.

Credit: Sam Rockman (@rockersalmighty), at the Camden Open Air Gallery (@camdenOAG)

This does, however, also indicate a significant barrier to Burmese artists’ ability to affect change - art and free expression are heavily restricted under the current regime. “They don’t like educated people. They will just kill you”, a member named Htike tells me. Many of the group’s listeners aren’t in Yangon for fear of repercussion and, indeed, RAJ is one of the few groups left who are continuing to release music criticising the government. Jimmy himself fled to Bangkok after the coup; Htike, on the other hand, had remained in Yangon but fully accepts that he may face punishment in the near future: “I have already spent 27 days in jail, if I have to face another 3 years, I’m ready”.

I asked both what they thought of the phrase ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’. “Not when it’s bullets”, Jimmy shot back, followed by a bittersweet laugh. The military junta is vicious and pervasive, and RAJ clearly don’t have faith that rap alone will be able to turn the tide. One of the Camden Open Air Gallery’s organisers told me something similar- for many of the collections’ contributors, art wasn’t considered an alternative to protest, but rather a necessary part of life in-between protesting. It was their way of making sense of the madness of recent years.

Credit: @sp.mcc

This is not to say that art is altogether impotent. It is artists who are providing valuable documentation of the struggle, reporting, bottom-up, live on the scene. Their audiences are both immediately local, such as the augmented reality eyelid, and impressively global, such as RAJ’s music. However, it is the current living conditions that remain the primary concern for many of these creatives and thus community organising is necessary, and fighting always a possibility. Jimmy’s words about politics coming to your kitchen echo back to me.

So, to answer the question at the beginning of this article: art cannot take down the dictatorship. Not alone. But in many ways, creatives are fighting a different battle. The artists I spoke to clearly believed that art couldn’t replace protest, and in doing so their creations became all the more genuine. These creatives are not creating propaganda, they are creating for themselves, to make sense of their experiences. The fact that this resonates with others means that it makes sense of their experiences too. On the ground it will likely be a long road ahead, but in the hearts and minds of these creatives, as well as those that they resonate with, their creations actively invest in the narratives of and perform the society that they’re fighting to live in. At some inexplicable, intersubjective level, the rawness and ingenuity of the music and art I saw made me want to believe in the legitimacy of their struggle too. That is one weapon the military junta is yet to get its hands on.

Words: Solomon PM (@sp.mcc)