Readers Place

Karen Connelly interview/review

Podcast interview available at open democracy.

Author Interview (Orange Broadband Prize)

1. What sparked The Lizard Cage ?

During my first trip to Burma, many Burmese people, upon discovering I was a writer, told me that I really ought to write a book about what was happening there. And they were right. I originally thought the book would be a collection of essays and interviews about how Burmese artists and other creative people survive under dictatorship, how they get around the censors, both the exterior ones and the ones that become internalized after living so long under systematic oppression.

The Burmese regime is bizarrely Orwellian, and it fascinated and inspired me immensely to meet so many dynamic, creative people who found various crafty ways to keep working, to defy the censors, to continue thinking and talking and growing – in effect, to keep insisting on life. Their sense of rebellion was very spirited and infectious; they had wonderful senses of humour, too. They were the most interesting, passionate people I had met in years, and yet they lived under so many different kinds of constraints.

I saw how the impulse to be creative and the impulse to revolt against oppression – or at least to not be destroyed by it spiritually – are drawn from the same source: to live an authentic life, a life in truth. That is why so many governments (perhaps all governments?) are suspicious of artists and writers and innovative thinkers. In extreme political situations – under dictatorship, for example – that suspicion metamorphoses into fear and violence against.

But then I was blacklisted from Burma, and couldn’t continue my interviews with people there. So I went to the border, and realized I had to keep writing my book, but it would be a novel, and reflective of one of the most uniting, common experiences of creative and political Burmese citizens: the experience of living in prison.

1. Where did the character of Teza spring from? How did you go about writing him?

Teza is based on a composite of real Burmese individuals. One of them is the real-life singer and songwriter Mun Awng, who luckily left Burma before he ended up in prison. He lives in Norway. Another is the student leader Min Ko Naing, who was recently released after serving twelve years in solitary confinement for his role in the 1988 democracy uprisings.

Another is the student leader Moe Thi Zon, whom I spent a lot of time with when I lived on the Thai-Burma border, when he was working as a dissident there. But Teza is also himself, purely, a character in a novel. I wrote him by getting to know him intimately, by imagining him into existence, using all the knowledge I had about Burma and by thinking deeply about stories I had been told by Burmese friends. The novel was under construction for almost a decade – that was a lot of time to get to know him well.

1. Please tell us something about your interest in Burma, and in Buddhism. How did both develop?

I’ve been interested in Buddhism since I first lived in Thailand when I was a teenager. As a decadent sensualist-passionate and grasping by nature! – I was and still am moved by Buddhism as a philosophy of calmness, release, non-violence. Buddhism is also a religion of great compassion and connectedness: good ideas in our nasty disconnected world.

When I was younger, I didn’t have the patience for meditation, which is a big part of Buddhism, but as I got older I needed more sanity and peace in my life, so I became a crisis meditator! And now I meditate regularly, even when not in crisis.

Many of the former political prisoners I got to know when I was writing The Lizard Cage talked about the value of meditation while they were imprisoned, particularly if they spent time in solitary. Many of them told me that meditation kept them from going insane, or from falling into serious depression.

It’s a very powerful practice for peace-making – to just sit still and breathe and not think. I wish a few world leaders would take it up!

1. When did you first realize that you wanted to write fiction?

I’ve been writing fiction since I was a little kid, but I knew I wasn’t old enough to write a good novel until I reached my late twenties. Even then, it took me very long to finish one. In the meantime, I was writing travel books and poetry.

1. And what did you do before you started writing?

I’ve never really done anything but write. And travel and learn languages. I teach and edit as well, to make a living, but I was formulating the words “I AM A WRITER” from about age 10. Very cheeky child.

1. What are you working on now?

A memoir about a love affair with a Burmese revolutionary, another collection of poems. And I have notes for two more novels, but must decide which one to do first.

1. Please could you tell us about what’s on your bookshelf? The old stuff, the unread stuff, the favourite books, the passing enthusiasm …

Here’s a brief scan of the shelves and the tables and the floor: Old and beloved: An Intimate History of Humanity , by Theodore Zeldin. New and impressive and lovely to read: Radiance , by Shaena Lambert. Inside , by Kenneth Harvey – a brilliant prison novel. Old and beloved: George Seferis’s poems, both in Greek and the excellent translation by Rex Warner. New and unread: Christopher Logue’s War Music . In the midst of reading and enjoying: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel , by Jane Smiley.