They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but in today’s Myanmar the two often go hand in hand.
Since the military coup in 2021 that ended a brief period of democratic government and led to a bloody crackdown on protesters and political opponents, poets have become unlikely warriors.
One rebel force is led by the poet and human rights activist Maung Saungkha, 32, who became a national figure when he was sentenced to six months in prison in 2016 for a subversive Facebook poem about the president.
Having never dreamt of picking up a gun, in 2021 he decided that peaceful protest must be abandoned in favour of armed resistance.
“Poetry is important in the revolution. Poets are involved in the revolution, and their poetry also encourages people to become involved in it,” he said this week, communicating from his base in eastern Myanmar through an intermediary.
“In our country, poets are rebels. Regardless of any administration or regime, poets from a country with injustice have rebellious blood.”
The stories of young Burmese who, like Saungkha, made this improbable journey from poet to fighter are captured in a new book, Frontline Poets: The Literary Rebels Taking on Myanmar’s Military, to be released in June by the publisher River Books.
After a devastating earthquake in March that killed at least 3,700, according to figures from the military government, a ceasefire was declared. However, the junta, led by Min Aung Hlaing, has been accused of breaking it and fighting continues.
Within the group founded by Saungkha’s, the Bamar People’s Liberation Army (BPLA), the rigours of military life are complemented by night-time poetry readings and visits to a makeshift library. When Saungkha feels the mood of his recruits needs a lift, he reads them one of his poems.
A favourite among the troops is My Eyes, Still Wet With Tears, about two comrades who died in battle while normal life continued for others. It starts:
The frivolous parties grew louder,
While the world, in tears, felt smaller.
‘Be strong,’
We comforted, clinging to each other as we fell apart.
The BPLA has its own online literary journal, called Bamar Rebel, to which fighters contribute poems, articles, essays, photographs and cartoons. A print edition is planned for when circumstances allow.
But Saungkha admits that poetry is taking a back seat to fighting. Perhaps, for now, the sword is mightier than the pen after all.
“To be honest, I write fewer and fewer poems now. I am busy with the military operations and managing the army. I write fewer poems by now because I am so busy mentally,” he said.
The new book explains how published poetry, readings and events form part of Myanmar’s cultural fabric. The dominant and deeply revered literary form, poetry has a strong record of challenging authority, including British rule and a previous junta that seized power in 1988.
“What’s different about today is that you have groups like the BPLA whose identity is very connected to their identity as poets.People are using everything they have, both words and weapons, to try to remove the military from power,” said Joe Freeman, a journalist and researcher who is co-author of the book.
Throughout history poets have been drawn to war, from Homer to Lord Byron, Walt Whitman and George Orwell, who served as a policeman in 1920s Burma.
In the First World War, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were among a generation of war poets who brought the horrors of modern warfare to a readership at home for the first time.
However, even set against this long tradition the proportion of fighters writing poetry, or poets becoming fighters, in Myanmar is unusually high.
There is at least one other armed group led by poets, and a strong presence throughout the resistance of writers, artists and teachers who have abandoned relatively comfortable urban lives for a difficult existence in jungle camps.
The BPLA now numbers more than a thousand personnel. It played a significant role in the offensive by allied rebel armies that had seized control of one third of the country by late 2024.
Many poets-turned-fighters have paid with their lives. A student named Aung Khant Zaw, who won a PEN Myanmar poetry competition in 2015 with a poem about peace, later took up arms. He died in action, aged 30, in March 2024, shot in the neck.
Yoe Aunt Min, a poet and environmental campaigner in her mid-twenties, has learnt to live with insecurity.
“I chose to take up arms because I wanted to protect myself. I couldn’t tolerate being treated with insolence,” she says in the book.
Aunt Min, who is now a senior BPLA member, says she finds it cathartic to continue writing verse during the conflict.
“We never know when a bombardment might hit, and in a matter of minutes, everything could be turned into pieces and ashes. But I’ve come to realise that creativity can still flourish even in the midst of insecurity,” she said.
One of her poems is about her love for a young woman in the resistance who was then stationed elsewhere:
The last ship, the last traveller; the last train
Looking straight into your eyes
You give completeness and absence
At the same time
In awe and surprise
The book’s co-author Aung Naing Soe, a Burmese writer, photographer and documentary-maker now resettled in the US, said: “We learn a lot of poetry at school, all the classical poets. Then, in your teens, you read the revolutionary poets and when a crisis happens, you are inspired by them.
“All of us want to contribute something for the betterment of the nation, including people who never thought they would use a weapon.”
