Powerful debut novel centres on Burmese political prison
Edmonton Journal
Saturday, October 15, 2005

by Marc Horton

It was a ragbag of a kid on a dark and dingy sidestreet of Rangoon, the capital of Burma, who partly inspired Karen Connelly to create one of the most compelling fictional characters in years.

He became a template-of-sorts for Nyi Lay, a 12-year-old boy who is an orphaned gofer in a horrible Burmese prison, and one of the main characters at the centre of her debut novel The Lizard Cage.

It's characters like Nyi Lay and Teza, a political inmate of incredible courage, along with guards, some psychopathic and others sympathetic, that make her book an instant classic in prison and liberation literature. It is an intense, utterly unforgettable story of courage, oppression and glimmering hope.

"I met this kid in a dark rundown area of Rangoon," Connelly recalls in an interview prior to her appearance tonight at this year's Edmonton and Fort McMurray International Literary Festival.

"It was close to the train tracks and down this hill, and it seemed like a really bad area, but for some reason I wanted to go down and see it," she says. Connelly, who won a Governor General's non-fiction literary award a dozen years ago at the age of 24, is no stranger to the exotic ... or the dangerous.

She'd spent time on the Thai-Burma border with the guerrilla armies intent on overthrowing Burma's oppressive military dictatorship and had visited the country at least a half-dozen times. Fluent in Thai and with adequate Burmese, she'd been refused entry into the country for her activities in the past and was aware of the kind of squalor in which children there often found themselves.

"There he was sitting at one of the tea shop tables, and he was such an extraordinary little kid. He was obviously a worker who was on a break, and he was probably somewhere between nine and 12. Because of malnutrition, it's often hard to tell," Connelly says with the kind of observational detail that gives her book so much of its power.

"He was sitting there smoking a cheroot and drinking tea, and he was just like a little man. He was very exhausted, yet he still had a fierce dignity about him. There was this incredible separateness to him, and he had a very intelligent, feral face.

"That child, with whom I had such a brief but powerful encounter, became Nyi Lay in the novel." Her remarkable book is unconventional in that she has included photographs to evoke the text. Most of the photographs are her own.

"I wanted to include the photographs because a lot of people don't know where Burma is or what a Burmese face looks like," she says. She kept the photos close at hand in the 10 years it took her to write the novel.

"They're not literal, of course, but they are echoes of what happens in the novel, and they helped me feel connected to Burma when I was writing the book." The characters in her book are composites of people she knew in Burma, including the student protesters that she saw being carted off to prison by the military following the strikes of 1996.

"They're all based on people who I knew, people who were so brave as they faced off against the military. When you're around people like that or in situations with them you're going on adrenaline, but there's also something contagious about their bravery," she says.

Teza, the political prisoner who assists in attempting to get a new, more hopeful life for Nyi Lay, is based on Mun Awng, a famous folk singer who had to flee Burma because of his political activity.

Telling the story of Teza, Nyi Lay and the sympathetic prison guard Chit Naing, was not easy. "It was emotionally draining and very sad, and I often found that I had to set it aside and turn to other work," she says. "And it's not only Burma. There are so many places in this world where there are prisons like the one in the book, where people are jailed because they have written or have sung or have spoken a truth that the ruling regime cannot abide. "They are there because they exercised the simple human right to express themselves."