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Down the Rat Hole: Adventures Underground on Burma's Frontiers
This is a new memoir of the author's journeys among the brave indigenous peoples of some of Asia's most remote and violent regions.
- GenresNonfiction
200 pages, Paperback
First published July 19, 2006
About the author
Edith T. Mirante
3 books3 followersEdith Mirante is an American artist and author of Burmese Looking Glass: A Human Rights Adventure and a Jungle Revolution published in 1993 and Down the Rat Hole: Adventures Underground on Burma’s Frontiers published in 2005. Her most recent book, Down the Rat Hole, is about a hidden world of guerrilla warfare and jade trading, the AIDS pandemic, rainforest destruction in Burma western border among the Arakanese, the Chins and the Kachins. She is also author of several reports about politics, human rights and environmental issues about the Chins among others; “The Chin Compendium (1997)”, “Ashes and Tears (2001)” (A report a bout Chin/Burmese refugees in Guam), the “Razor Edge” (Survival Crisis for Refugees from Burma in Delhi, India-2004) and “Mithuns Sacrificed To Greed: The Forest Ox of Burma's Chins (2004)”. Her commentaries are regularly broadcast on the BBC World Service, she's lectured for Amnesty International and Greenpeace, her articles appear in New York Times, Asiaweek, and she's given evidence about Burma before the US Congress and the European Trade Commission and International Labor Organization. Ms. Mirante is founder and project director of Project Maje.
(from http://www.calvin.edu/january/2012/mi...)
(from http://www.calvin.edu/january/2012/mi...)
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July 9, 2008
Edith Mirante has spent her life working in temporary jobs so she could spend much of her time traveling. Only she isn't just a world traveler, she helps to spread independence in the most dangerous places. You wouldn't know it to look at her. I happen to work at one of those places where she works on-call to make that money, and I overheard her telling another about this book of hers.
I don't usually read daring travel memoirs, but it helps if you've met someone, and it helps that I wanted to know more about Burma. All I knew was, SLORC=BAD.
This book covers over 10 years of her travels into Burma. There are tantalizing references to her previous life in Thailand, and how she was deported for her subversive activities (one would need to read her first book, I presume, to find these details: Burmese Looking Glass). I found myself wanting to know more about why she loved Burma so. You get glimpses of her daring personality, mostly downplayed, when she lets slip little tidbits like this:
My earliest memory, from before I was two years old, had me up against the baby gate at the top of the stairs of my family's old house, demanding in whatever speech I had to be let out, to be let through. I still loved a border violation. Evading a checkpoint, busting a gate, climbing a fence would always make me happy. It got me into Burma.
More often than not, it seemed, that's exactly how she did get into Burma, calmly risking her life and bringing health info, hand to hand combat lessons, messages for revolutionaries, her opinions on war strategy, as well as gifts for her hosts. She smuggled out taped interviews, traveled as an "artist" and treated leech bites with Bactine. She went where other travelers never went.
She is the driving force behind Project Maje, and the voice behind the videos from Salon that are found there. Considering how much SLORC controls the media in Burma, this is no doubt a valuable resource of the history of resistance in Burma.
I find myself admiring her matter-of-fact conviction that armed resistance is necessary, and bemused that she even did her bit to support that resistance. As a pacifist, I have no response to that. This attitude got her places no other foreigner could go, I'm sure. Perhaps if faced so squarely with a ruthless force like SLORC, my pacifist conviction would be shaken, I don't know. I do have to wonder what is missing though. What details about the violence would I dwell on that she accepts with gritty pragmatism? Would I see acts destined to continue the violence while she would see spirited steps toward independence?
I don't usually read daring travel memoirs, but it helps if you've met someone, and it helps that I wanted to know more about Burma. All I knew was, SLORC=BAD.
This book covers over 10 years of her travels into Burma. There are tantalizing references to her previous life in Thailand, and how she was deported for her subversive activities (one would need to read her first book, I presume, to find these details: Burmese Looking Glass). I found myself wanting to know more about why she loved Burma so. You get glimpses of her daring personality, mostly downplayed, when she lets slip little tidbits like this:
My earliest memory, from before I was two years old, had me up against the baby gate at the top of the stairs of my family's old house, demanding in whatever speech I had to be let out, to be let through. I still loved a border violation. Evading a checkpoint, busting a gate, climbing a fence would always make me happy. It got me into Burma.
More often than not, it seemed, that's exactly how she did get into Burma, calmly risking her life and bringing health info, hand to hand combat lessons, messages for revolutionaries, her opinions on war strategy, as well as gifts for her hosts. She smuggled out taped interviews, traveled as an "artist" and treated leech bites with Bactine. She went where other travelers never went.
She is the driving force behind Project Maje, and the voice behind the videos from Salon that are found there. Considering how much SLORC controls the media in Burma, this is no doubt a valuable resource of the history of resistance in Burma.
I find myself admiring her matter-of-fact conviction that armed resistance is necessary, and bemused that she even did her bit to support that resistance. As a pacifist, I have no response to that. This attitude got her places no other foreigner could go, I'm sure. Perhaps if faced so squarely with a ruthless force like SLORC, my pacifist conviction would be shaken, I don't know. I do have to wonder what is missing though. What details about the violence would I dwell on that she accepts with gritty pragmatism? Would I see acts destined to continue the violence while she would see spirited steps toward independence?
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review