Inhabiting Others: Charmaine Craig on Writing ‘Miss Burma’

In conversation with Craig about her last book, autobiography and fiction, her process in writing, the empathic leap that good literature requires of us and more.

The Union of Burma, 1949: in a newly independent nation-state, the Karen people began an armed rebellion against Burmese rule. The British had promised them autonomy, but instead their territory became a part of the Union of Burma. Their struggle became one of the longest civil wars in history, but is one that is little known.

As a writer of fiction, how does one represent oppression and violence in a different place and time? How does one do justice to personal stories while telling a political history? How does one fictionalise the life of one’s own mother and family members?

Charmaine Craig’s Miss Burma searches for answers to these.

It is a historical epic, tracing 40 years of Burmese history, from British colonialism through World War II, Japanese invasion, the early years of independence, and finally General Ne Win’s military dictatorship that began in 1962. But it complicates that national history by telling it through the lives of members of the long-persecuted Karen community. And through those lives, it is as deeply personal as it is political. Actor-turned-writer Craig based the protagonists on her grandparents and mother, working on gathering, researching and fictionalising their stories for over a decade.

Benny, based on Craig’s grandfather, has always been on the margins in Rangoon. He is orphaned at seven and sent to study in Calcutta. When he returns, he can no longer speak Burmese. A Jew by birth, he marries Khin and adopts her Karen identity.

Their eldest daughter Louisa grows up to be crowned Miss Burma and marry an army commandant. As she rises to fame and the country falls to dictatorship, she must come to terms with her identity, her family’s past, and her people’s history.

At the Jaipur Literature Festival last month, Craig spoke to The Wire about autobiography and fiction, her architectural process in writing, the challenges of teaching creative writing, and the empathic leap that good literature requires of us.

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Writers often seem to talk about a kind of ‘madness’ they need to write, about not knowing where they’re going to end up. How did this work for you in so careful and layered a novel as Miss Burma?

I have what one might call a bifurcated process in writing. An early phase of writing a scene is taking notes in a free-form way, not bothering to write perfect sentences. But after that the iterative process of revising is much more architectural than intuitive. I take a lot of notes in a more conscious mode and really try to understand how that scene or passage is going to cohere artfully, how it is going to move. In order to do that, you have to find the rhetorical through-line, as you would in a math equation or a philosophical proof. So it’s a dance between the messy, organic first flood of ideas and then the analytically vigorous shaping of the ideas into something that can stand up and advance the story. I’m always looking to resist my first impulses, actually. I may think a scene needs to go one way or a character needs to feel one way. It’s my conscious self that then looks at what I’ve written and says, that’s cliché. It’s my conscious self that searches for the character’s unconscious motivations beneath the edifice of the expected.

That said, I agree with what I think Flannery O’Connor said, that the writer and reader need to experience a kind of shock in the scene. Part of representing life on the page is representing the ways we don’t know what we are doing and surprise ourselves. There has to be an element of the unknown or even danger.

How did this ‘architectural’ process unfold in the actual writing of a scene in Miss Burma?

About two-thirds into the novel, there’s a scene in which the character based on my mother is crowned Miss Burma. I had to find a way to weave in a picture of what was happening to the country at that time – that is, falling prey to the ruthless machinations of the man who became the dictator – and find a way this character was put in a box by the media, estranged from her family, estranged from her friends, etc, etc. I had a list of 20 things I wanted to accomplish in the first two pages. I first wrote in a rush – thoughts, ideas, lines, images – in a kind of fugue state. Then I took a lot of notes about what was happening politically, the details I needed to get across, my philosophical pondering about how someone like my mother who was a double minority could have risen to become a national beauty queen. Then I printed everything out. The four pages of what turned out to be the final scene began as 80 single-spaced notes. Then I stood back and put them on the floor. I cut them up and moved them around in a very architectural way until I saw how they could cohere and advance.

The reason the chapter is called ‘The Great Pretender’ is because my mother loved that song. What held all these ideas together was her accepting that for a long time she was going to be pretending. That became the rhetorical glue.

In ‘teaching’ creative writing, it seems both would be big challenges – getting students to let go and discovering self-control. Do you encounter pre-conceived notions that you have to work to break?

A lot of students adhere to the adage ‘show, don’t tell.’ Which can lead to a lot of facile showing and a paucity of brilliant telling. What I’m seeing most often in this age of Facebook and Instagram is students feeling they need to feature themselves in their fiction. They need to write in first-person, the story needs to be innovative and flashy, the characters or the narrators need to be stand-ins for themselves. It takes a lot of convincing to encourage them to experiment with inhabiting another. They largely perceive this to be an outdated mode and one that is too modest, too quiet.

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Your own book has an autobiographical base. How is writing about someone else different from writing about yourself?

I was drawn to both fiction-writing and acting because I am interested in empathically embodying another but in doing so in shoring up a kind of commonality between the self and the other. I think all great fiction tends to be an invitation to empathy. The protagonists might behave in reprehensible ways, but through the process of entering the character’s deepest consciousness we converge with him or her. In real life, we can never experience that leap into another’s subjectivity. We just can’t. That is such a draw in fiction.

Does writing about others become complicated politically for you?

If we just repeat our own values and ideas in fiction, it’s very easy to slip into a didactic mode. That deprives our readers of the opportunity to engage in deeper dialogue, which can only come when we’re really willing to listen to a different perspective. Writers are born centrists in some way, because they need to resist ideology and reductionism, and engage in complexity, contradiction, paradox, big questions that are not easily answered. That’s the only way forward even politically.

Were you tempted to write the novel in first-person?

I first wrote an entire novel in first-person, which I not just wrote but revised and doubled in length. I spent years on it. It was narrated by someone very much like my mother at the end of her life, to her American daughter, a person very much like myself. It was a braided narrative, with one strand dealing with the woman’s reckoning of her past in Burma and the other dealing with the daughter’s reckoning of the consequences of that past. That novel was about the inheritance of trauma.

But I realised that while the novel might have had its qualities, it emanated from my ego and my literary ambition. I wanted to feature poetic and literary thinking and language. I was all too aware that if I featured history and politics the novel would be cast as a corrective book. But I had to slay my ego in order to serve the story. One couldn’t understand my mother and why she had to repress the past without understanding the history of my mother’s people. To fully feel for her meant getting myself out of the way, not just as a character but my literary ambition. I still tried to bring in my high standards for sentence, paragraph, scene. But that was much harder to do in the historical epic the book became.

How did you achieve that balance between the personal and the political?

It took a lot of trial and error. You have to find the correlation between what is deeply afflicting each character personally and the historical-political dimensions. I needed to find those intersections when the characters would have exerted a counterforce against the crushing force of history itself. Even after I thought I’d arrived at the right place, my fantastic editor at Grove suggested how we might pull back the political even more.

The way my mother and grandfather told their stories it was as if fate was pulling them along. In order to give them agency and find those intersections I had to turn them into characters. I had to dream my way into the central questions of their lives. It was like a distillation process: what was the central gesture and what was the opposite of that? We’re all filled with dueling instincts. For example, when my grandmother was eight years old, bandits of the majority group disemboweled her father, and she rushed forward to stuff his intestines back into his body. Listening to this, it seemed to me, how could she go on in the face of this human evil? And yet there was this counter instinct to save. When we meet her in the novel, she’s standing at the edge of a jetty and she has an instinct to slip into the water and disappear. We don’t know and even she doesn’t know consciously why. So on the one hand there’s the gesture of wanting to disappear and on the other the oppositional gesture of saving and surviving.

That tension was the engine pushing her through history even while she was internally displaced.

Has your work as an actor fed into your work as a writer?

I love acting for the same reason I love writing, which is that it is an empathic leap into a character. One of the greatest lesson I received as a young actor was when I was studying at the British American Academy of Drama, taking a class on acting Chekhov. My esteemed teacher leaned in and whispered in my ear, “Play every line the opposite of what Chekhov says.” And all of a sudden, I was acting really well! That was a lesson in two things: what subtext is, and also the complexity of human motivations in every instant. I think the more we as fiction writers can evoke those levels of perception the more lifelike our scenes will be and the more consoling for people. I think one of the ways fiction can be kind is by actually representing humans as they are – which is complicated creatures.

Can you tell us something about what you are working on now?

The novel I’m beginning to work on now has a character that feels uncomfortably close to myself. So we’ll see if we’ll have to slay her once again.

Nandini Majumdar is a freelance writer based in New Delhi and Varanasi. She also works on projects in education and the arts with NIRMAN, a non-profit organisation (www.nirman.info). She is the author of Banaras: Walks Through India’s Sacred City (Roli Books, 2014) and five children’s books, including Satya’s Boat (Tulika, 2014).