The Embodiment of Freedom

I think of Aung San Suu Kyi, cloistered in her crumbling lakeside home in Rangoon for a better part of twenty-one years. I think of her in terms of curtains and upholstery,  fabric worn bare but perhaps fashionable again for the first time in decades, because isn’t that the way of things, to come around again just when they’ve almost been forgotten?

I stream video of her online at the BBC website, of her now and of her then. In one interview (now) she pronounces words like they’re solid things that sit uncomfortably in her mouth (a mouth full of marbles). I guess over the past seven years, her most recent spell of detention, she hasn’t had the opportunity to use them much, not to speak out loud anyhow. Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps she talks all the time, if only to herself.

I am struck by the look in her eyes (bunny in the headlights). Her eyes seem to shift, like all the movement of the outside world makes it hard to focus. In one picture, she reaches for a small, cellophane wrapped bouquet of flowers while looking uncertainly over her shoulder, as if seeking reassurance. Perhaps it’s being confronted with the digital age; mobile phones, the internet: things that didn’t exist when she was first confined.  Perhaps it’s the prospect of freedom.

And she could have chosen freedom once. Long ago, when her husband died. She could have left and campaigned for democracy free of the silencing fist of the junta. This is presumptous of me but I think, given the same opportunity, Mandela would have left Robben Island and continued the struggle with his comrades in exile. Then again, it hasn’t helped his holiness, the Dalai Llama – Tibet is all but a memory, his people exiles in their own land.

The media call her Myanmars’ best-known  prisoner of conscience, the embodiment of freedom, but there is something delicate about Aung San Suu Kyi, a fragility. Which is strange, considering how resolute she is, how firmly rooted to her ideals. I admire her, but I can’t help but pity her too.