Self is subtext. Our lives are charted by a narrative that is not our own. We write about it, over it, and write against it, but it is till the thing that dictates what we write.

Colonial presences did not embed themselves in other cultures, nor did they allow space for the conquered peoples and territories to re-embed within their own. Instead, colonialism created in its wake a transnational vacuum in which identities were lost, until there were none left except that of the conquerors. Therefore, the only way to be within the world for subaltern peoples was to mimic. This realization adds yet another layer to the story of my middle name, “Dausae,” or “silver sword,” one that foregrounds a pattern at the heart of the continued Karen struggle for resistance and existence: nationhood. And the concept of nation is more a realized impossibility than an achievable form, for it persists in “atavistically looking backward to the past and looking forward to the future where the nation seemingly is never quite in the present” (Rajah 518). The Karen struggle is not only one of spatial territory but of cultural belonging as linked to space–like a sword held horizontally to the ground they reflect both sky and earth, yet are exist as neither. They are merely a reflective surface used strategically. Because colonial powers had excised whole populations for their temporal and spatial planes, they are forever bereft of a sense of belonging or wholeness. Instead, the conquered must fabricate their bearings within an alien empire, making meaning from a past, present, and future that is not, and could never quite be, their own.

Ananda Rajah argues that it is precisely the loss of identity as incurred by colonial powers that necessitates imagined national formations—an origin, a name, a face, and a future. According to Rajah, “full-blooded” nationalism occurs after ethno-histories and then corresponding ethno-nationalisms are crafted, creating an imaginary membrane of distinction that can be linked to political and territorial sovereignty (520). The Karen, who were culled by British colonialism and missionary efforts to mimic the civilized world, were first bereft of a cohesively pluralistic ethno-history, so that new ethno-histories could be (in)scripted that better undergirded imperial agendas. One extreme example is missionary Francis Mason’s once widely popular theory that the Karen were one of the ten lost tribes of Israel (Rajah 525)–interestingly, when the British were forced to abandon the Karen and their promises of nationhood, they also lost interest in sustaining the Karen origin story as part of the Christian narrative. Nonetheless, conversion to Christianity provided the Karen with a falsely absolute identity while also further cleaving them as a discrete and distinctly non-Burmese, even anti-Burmese, population.

During the 1886 Burman uprisings against the newly installed colonial administration, British defenses were bolstered by the Karen, who had organized under the umbrella of a shared origin—Christianity. According to the colonial perspective of J. B. Vinton:

“I never saw the Karen so anxious for a fight. This is just welding the Karens into a nation, not an aggregate of clans. The heathen Karens to a man are brigading themselves under the Christians. The whole thing is good for the Karen. This will put virility into our Christianity. . . . From a loose aggregation of clans we shall weld them into a nation yet.”

(Cited in Rajah 527-8)

Two things are of note from this passage: first, the fact that the Karen were originally a collection of diverse communities, a “loose aggregate.” Therefore, the reach towards a unified and streamlined ethno-nationalism was seeded by the missionaries, as much for their own sense of organizing category-bending ethnic ‘chaos’ as for their own methods of recruitment and empire-bolstering. The second concept I wish to draw your attention to is how the desire for nationhood was a colonial construct; and as such, it could only be attained—and never truly attained—through the myth-molding hand and subsequent mimicry of Western civilization. As Rajah stresses, nationhood in the shadow of empire “could only assume form, if not complete substance, by replicating the sociopolitical structures of colonial powers” (520). But what does it mean to exist as replication, as an echo of a script, a mere re-reading? What does that mean for the script itself, and what does that mean for the reader? Is it not only bolstering the indelible myth of Western narrative through re-alienating its counterparts? For, the very utterance of the myth—the celestially endowed nation—is perpetuating the reader’s own inability to disrupt and overwrite the colonial presence.

For the Karen, as with many other ethnic hilltribes in Burma, conversion to Christianity was “a process of reform through which Christian doctrines might collude with divisive caste practices to prevent dangerous political alliances” (Bhabha 124). When the missionaries realized they could not successfully indoctrinate the Burmese, they turned to the hill tribes to create mirror-images of empire, and therefore the illusion of empire versus non-empire being the only two possibilities for existence—the ‘non’ being a harbinger of non-existence. The “civilizing potential” of the Karen established for them an arena for the expression of nationhood, however counterfeit that desire might have initially been. According to one of the forerunning missionaries in Burma, Adinoram Judson, “Whilst Burmans were constructed as possessing monstrous agency—untrustworthy, arrogant, brutal and highly resistant to Christian teachings—the Karen were portrayed as lacking agency—characterized in patronizing tones as backward children, harmless and easily converted . . . like an empty jar” (as cited by Lwyn, 64). Though the Karen might be impressionable, I feel that this weakness might also have been their greatest strength in a changing world of peoples-in-flux under empire—but we’ll get to this later.

Whenever I listened to the “silver sword” story (in which my great-great-grandfather was awarded for his reputable character in support of the British administration) I used to only listen for one telling: that of recognition and pride. Only upon later re-tellings of this narrative, did I begin to detect the reverberations of a submerged script; one in which the Karen were elevated as model, Christian almost-citizens and the Burmans were denigrated as inherently untrustworthy and jealous. When my grandmother Nunu recounts the story, she sometimes stresses a distinction between the Christian Karen and Buddhist Burmese, who worked under her grandfather and inhabited the village he oversaw. When asked about this distinction, she begins to recite a legacy that in some ways under- and over-writes the name “Dausae”:

“We [the Karen] are more easily adapted to discipline, we listen to elders or those who are more educated. We are disciplined and we do our job honestly and your elders will trust you…right?”

Right? The ending of the above statement, which is part of the recording you will hear, is meaningful in its uncertainty. First, it reifies the repetition of a script disembodied from reality, hence the hesitation, and the need for assurance that the reader ‘got it right.’ Second, it underscores and awareness of the gap between interviewer and interviewee—was Nunu saying what she thinks I want to hear? Nunu was therefore concerned about two interlocking frames of meaning: the narrative of colonization as civilizing, and the subaltern narrative being tailored towards authorized forms of Western academic thought. As you listen I want you to be aware of the ways in which colonial myths are inscribed into the worldview of the colonized, and then re-inscripted by ‘post’colonial methods of inquiry. There is no solution for this. These narratives only offer ambivalence; and it is my hope that in their repetition, something might be made of the friction and flux between the stories and the selves they tell into being—not so much a form of reality, but a process of reality-shifting, bending, negating, and recreating.

As Bhabha suggests, the processes of mimicry revealed through (post)colonial stories is both a death sentence and a survival code. And, it not only complicates the notion of selfhood within empire, but more largely, the concept of nationhood within empire: “[Mimicry] problematizes the signs of racial and cultural priority, so that the ‘national’ is no longer naturalizable. What emerges between mimesis and mimicry is a writing, a mode of representation, that marginalizes the monumentality of history, quite simply mocks its power to be a model, that power which supposedly makes it imitable. Mimicry repeats rather than represents” (125). I feel as though my family’s stories of empire and exile embody the ambivalence of mimicry both at the personal and national levels. Similar to mimicry as writing, mimicry as storytelling unsettles history as absolute and underscores the incongruence of empire and nation. Storytelling, too, embodies the repetition of a lie—for if the lie of (post)colonial belonging and nationhood cannot be adapted into reality, if its blueprints cannot be integrated-in-imitation, then they can only be refracted-in-imitation.

“Present military mentality is conditioned by [the] colonial period. It’s like a colonial army occupying the country. They behave like a corporate body, serving its own interests . . .  That tradition is derived from [the] colonial period.”

(Dr. Aung Kin, Burmese Historian, from Inside Burma: Land of Fear, 1996)

According to the English language dictionary, Merriam-Webster, a refraction is: “the change in the apparent position of a celestial body due to bending of the light rays emanating from it as they pass through the atmosphere; also:  the correction to be applied to the apparent position of a body because of this bending” (www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/refraction). I like to think of storytelling as a refractive process that contains the ambivalence of Bhabha’s mimicry; for not only does it “continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference” from the narrative striations of empire (122), but it also demands a re-positioning of the “celestial body” of Western narrative, to make space for its counter-mirages. The process of telling a story from a subaltern position is one that must cut through discursive layers in order to be exposed—layers of myths, truths, counter-myths, and counter-truths. If the imprint of colonialism cannot be erased with the nation-building catharsis of the conquered, then it must be excavated through reiteration.  Only then can the ethno-histories created and distorted by the contours of empire begin to redraw its lines, creating new frontiers from its boundaries, and new beginnings from its endings.

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