Pens of Longwood: How a Rohingya Poet is Helping his Community Rediscover Their Voices

Amidst violence and strife, Ali Mayyu found refuge and resistance in his writing. Now, he is passing it on, teaching Rohingya youth that their voices matter

A mural made by Rohingya through the Rohingya Memorialization Project. Each sub-image is an individual person’s story)

By Rohan Sundaram

Ali Mayyu was first set on his path to being a poet by his grandfather. “We had a ritual. After dinner, my grandfather used to take me to his bed, sometimes take me on his lap and used to [recite to] me the Rohingya lullabies, Rohingya folk songs, and sometimes spoken poetry,” he said. From there, Mayyu began reading poetry voraciously. He was inspired by Burmese and Hmong poets, many of whom were considered revolutionaries simply because they were writing poetry. Decades later, as a refugee in Cox’s Bazar, Mayyu would join their ranks, risking prison and worse, to practice his calling as a poet.

He first realized that poetry was his calling at the age of 17, when he found himself on a bus headed out of Rakhine state. A month prior, he had submitted two poems to the Best English Magazine, a Yangon-based literary magazine – his first time trying to get his work published. Eager to find out if his poems had been selected, he decided to travel to a nearby city, and find a magazine shop that had the latest copy. 

“I was scanning every single page of the magazine, and suddenly I saw my name printed for the first time. It was the moment that made me feel that I am existent. When our government didn’t accept our existence as a Rohingya community, as an ethnic group in Myanmar,” Mayyu said. 

From that point, amid violence, displacement, and threats from local gangs and authorities, Mayyu kept writing. “Writing is my existence. It’s my identity. Whenever I write I feel I am alive. I am liberated. Whatever was happening in the outside world, and how much risk I was encountered with, within poetry and writing, I felt safe. No one could touch me in the world of my writing,” he said.

Yet, for many Rohingya, speaking up did not come naturally, said Dario Colmenares, Program Director for the Global Initiative for Justice, Truth and Reconciliation (GIJTR). Working in Cox’s Bazar at Kutupalong, the world’s largest refugee camp, Colmenares encountered difficulties in encouraging Rohingya, particularly women, to speak about their experiences. According to Colmaneres, this was partly because conservative Rohingya families often insisted on male family members being present during any conversation with their female relatives. But even outside of the ambit of their male relatives, Colmaneres and his team found that Rohingya women remained disinterested in telling their stories to anyone, even to other women in their community. “They would not tell any stories just because they didn’t have that in their everyday activities, they were not used to sharing their stories,” he said.

However, this began to change in the safe, female-only space of GIJTR’s Women’s Literacy programs. “The first process was getting them to just speak. And speaking was teaching them to tell their life stories in a very general sense: ‘Ok, so I was born in XYZ village, and I am now living in this refugee camp because I had to run away from my village’. That’s it,” said Colmanares. 

The act of formulating and then writing out a generic sentence describing their lives had a profound effect on the women. They began to look forward to weekly sessions, excited to learn how to write about “very simple things, simple dilemmas like how to keep their clothes clean with the water system,” said Colmanares. As they grew more comfortable with talking about themselves, they began to seek ways to describe the violence and trauma in their pasts. In private sessions with their teachers, the women volunteered to tell their stories, “and the teacher would write them down, and they would help the women read the stories, and understand that those words referred to her story,” said Colmanares. 

At 22, after fleeing the violence in Rakhine state, Ali Mayyu continued his poetry and activism as a refugee in Cox’s Bazar. During this time, he encountered other Rohingya youth who had found their voices and clearly wanted to be heard – publishing raw and emotional social media posts in English. This reminded Mayyu, an avid fan of a good metaphor, of the onions he used to buy from his village grocer, “The shopkeeper would put the onions inside a basket, and I would see the onions sprouting their leaves through the basket,” he said. “When I saw Rohingya youth writing about their emotions, posting on Facebook, I wanted to give them a field, rather than a basket. Where they can grow, they can sprout, and produce more onions.” 

That was the genesis of Art Garden Rohingya, a collective that conducts workshops for budding poets and artists and publishes their works. Co-founded by Mayyu and his friends, it has since published hundreds of poems by Rohingya refugees in English, Burmese, and Rohingya, and showcased their paintings, embroidery, and photography at exhibitions in Bangladesh and Canada.

At the same time, the GIJTR was attempting to bring art to non-artists as well, through its Rohingya Memorialisation Project. Under the program, Rohingya refugees were guided by trained professionals, both Bangladeshi and Rohingya, in using art as a medium to express themselves. Through simplistic images, they produced large murals and embroideries that stitched together their various life stories, culminating in an exhibition in Dhaka with over 200 pieces of art. “I never knew you could use art to tell difficult stories. And now I’m teaching my community to do it,” said one of the Rohingya facilitators, reflecting that art had become a way for her community to heal, and recapture the agency they had lost through war and displacement.

For Mayyu, the other, equally important part of his art and poetry workshops has been reconnecting Rohingya youth with Arakan art forms. “The oral tradition is [an] integral part of Rohingya culture. In ancient times, in Arakan, the Rohingya ancestors used to compose lullabies, folk songs, and folktales,” said Mayyu. Those art forms, he says, were not lost simply to time. “It was cultural genocide,” he said, “[it was] in the face of persecution in Myanmar, [that] the community members gradually lost this oral tradition”.

Mayyu, who now studies the loss and death of cultures at the University of Waterloo, says that both displaced and diasporic Rohingya communities have lost much of their artistic traditions. “When I was in the refugee camp, I [could] see that my parents remembered those oral traditions. But my eldest brothers and sisters did not have that knowledge. They were not singing the lullabies to their children,” said Mayyu. So with Art Garden Rohingya’s workshops, which Mayyu remains heavily involved with, he makes it a point to remind students of the cultural and historical significance of the art forms they are re-learning.

However, after decades of persecution, Mayyu says that community leaders consider maintaining the Rohingya identity a lesser priority, prioritizing instead efforts at activism and international advocacy. For them, identity is simply less “visible”. But in carrying on his own family’s traditions and rituals, Mayyu continues to do his part at home, “My wife and I keep singing these lullabies and folksongs often to the kids. My first girl remembers a couple of Rohingya folk songs. I keep encouraging my friends, ‘Do this man. It’s very important. Let’s not [let this] disappear’,” he said.