Enter your email Address

ENTROPY
  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Echoes of Infertility and Stifled Grief

      April 20, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Lost and Found

      April 14, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Elegy for a Tree

      April 12, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Coursing

      April 9, 2021

      Introspection

      The Birds: Little Bird

      April 1, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band

      March 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Finding My Voice

      March 9, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Fragment One

      April 14, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: To Fly Among the Birds

      April 9, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Another Red Ribbon – a nonbinary tale of absented love

      April 5, 2021

      Fiction

      Survivor’s Club

      March 24, 2021

      Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Fiction by Matt Goldberg

      March 24, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      an Orphic escape-hatch from the Hades of Literalization — Review of John Olson’s Dada Budapest

      April 19, 2021

      Review

      Claiming Space in Muriel Leung’s “Imagine Us, The Swarm”

      April 15, 2021

      Review

      Review: Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz

      April 12, 2021

      Review

      Review: Some Animal by Ely Shipley

      April 8, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS

      April 13, 2021

      Small Press

      Tolsun Books

      March 16, 2021

      Small Press

      Inside the Castle

      March 9, 2021

      Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch

ENTROPY

  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Echoes of Infertility and Stifled Grief

      April 20, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Lost and Found

      April 14, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Elegy for a Tree

      April 12, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Coursing

      April 9, 2021

      Introspection

      The Birds: Little Bird

      April 1, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band

      March 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Finding My Voice

      March 9, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Fragment One

      April 14, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: To Fly Among the Birds

      April 9, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Another Red Ribbon – a nonbinary tale of absented love

      April 5, 2021

      Fiction

      Survivor’s Club

      March 24, 2021

      Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Fiction by Matt Goldberg

      March 24, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      an Orphic escape-hatch from the Hades of Literalization — Review of John Olson’s Dada Budapest

      April 19, 2021

      Review

      Claiming Space in Muriel Leung’s “Imagine Us, The Swarm”

      April 15, 2021

      Review

      Review: Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz

      April 12, 2021

      Review

      Review: Some Animal by Ely Shipley

      April 8, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS

      April 13, 2021

      Small Press

      Tolsun Books

      March 16, 2021

      Small Press

      Inside the Castle

      March 9, 2021

      Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch
ConversationFeaturedFictionInterview

“Until the deep past and the present are able to touch”: A Conversation with Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint

written by Joe Milazzo March 29, 2018

In reading over Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint’s gracious responses to my (typically trying-too-hard) questions about her fine debut novel The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven (Noemi Press), it occurs to me that I’ve let genre lead me astray. The post-apocalyptic is now too much monetized, studio set-pieced, and Westernized in its pop appeal to provide much of a key to the ways in which Thirii’s book, as Laird Hunt notes, is presided over by a “fierce, loud hush.” Maybe what’s needed instead is a reinvestment in what Vivian Sobchack once termed postfuturism. To wit: “Technology never comes to its particular specificity in a neutral context for a neutral purpose. Rather, it is always ‘lived’ — always historically informed by political, economic, and social content, and always an expression of aesthetic value.” Consider, for example, the ways in which the 19th Century’s bad actors made “colonization” synonymous with “modernization.”

But there’s no going back now, or so they say. Contrary to my urge to revise these Qs’ suppositions and extrapolations, I know I should instead follow the example set by Thirii in both her As and in her fiction. For hers is groundwork in a profound sense. If you’re willing to get in there (as they also say) and till the same soil as the author, you’ll reconnect with the rich compounding that defines that medium — one in which “beginnings and endings” (to quote Jenny Boully’s advance praise for The End of Peril) don’t dissolve once and for all but persist in mixing.

The following questions and answers were exchanged between February and March of 2018.

— JM


“A mythopoetic work that traverses both time and place, The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven tells the story of a return from emigration, the traumatic moment when the narrator—a young woman with a baby in her care—is confronted with her inheritance of historical violence and environmental devastation.”

1) How would you describe your relationship — first, as a reader; second, as a writer — to post-apocalyptic narratives? Certain familiar tropes orbit the setting of The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven,

As a person who was born in a postcolonial country under a dictatorship, I am going to make the bold statement that most of the world’s population (i.e. the “global south”) already live in the post-apocalypse. The apocalypse was invasion and imperialism. That was the end of the world as my ancestors knew it. So for me, the post-apocalypse is not speculative; it is real. It is not a vision of the future, but of the present.

When I encounter post-apocalyptic narratives set in the industrialized Western world, I find that the real question these narratives pose is not, “what if this happens?” but instead “what if this happens to us?” In The End of Peril, I wanted to move beyond that obsolete question. There is a familiar apocalypse in the novel — the “breach” of the domed city where the narrator grew up — but in the context of the novel, that event becomes the opposite of an apocalypse. It becomes the seed of hope for the “renewal” which will undo the colonization and exploitation of the post-apocalyptic harbor city where the narrator was born.

2) Your book is also a kind of genealogy, albeit one that transcends any single notion of family. Within the world of this novel, there’s this Hegelian drama surrounding invasion, mongrelization (I apologize if this language is triggering; there’s a paucity of seemly vocabulary around this topic) and ethnicity. (“My mother does not let me forget I am descended from the enemy.”) At the same time, the novel’s narrator is very much cognizant of the privileges bequeathed to her by her parents and grandparents. How did the various meanings of inheritance shape your understanding of character in the novel?

I wanted the narrator to be a character who has to grapple with the intersectionality of identity, someone who cannot fit herself easily into the category of victim or oppressor. Of course, all identities are intersectional, but I think some people have the privilege of not always recognizing that, while others, like the narrator, does not, because her “differences” are visibly marked on her body — “the girth of [her] thighs,” her “wild” hair, etc.

The narrator is myself and not myself, and the way she is othered in both the domed city and the harbor city is based on my own experiences of growing up in the U.S. and returning to Yangon, the city where I was born, as a young adult. My first few days in Yangon, I remembered feeling elated to finally be in a place, for the first time in my life, where the majority of people around me looked like me. I quickly realized, however, that though I thought the people in Yangon looked like me, they didn’t think I looked like them. My teenage cousin said I was the “fattest” Burmese girl he had ever seen, and almost everyone I met asked me where I was from, which is the same question I was constantly asked growing up in the U.S.

Among liberal/progressive circles of which I am a part, hybridity is almost always celebrated — I’ve often been told I’m lucky that I was raised bilingual, or that I’m both Burmese and American — but in my novel, I also wanted to explore the psychological and emotional burden of having to embody hybridity. I wanted to create a character who is both privileged by her various inheritances (for example, she is able to escape both the harbor city and the domed city in moments of crisis “on account of blood”) and at the same time, is torn apart by them.

3) Is this novel is a history, it is very much a woman’s history. Yet the narrator’s own sense of gender is often rather fluid. (“I was born a girl but my mother’s prayers came true. Now that I have reached manhood, my mother is driving me mad.”) And she resists identifying with traditional feminine roles: mother, wife, daughter. If, as the narrator states, “women are usually blamed,” what accusation is she herself trying to elude?

I don’t view The End of Peril as a woman’s history because so many of the ancestral or mythic figures in the novel are male — the narrator’s paternal grandfather, maternal grandfather, the king, the enemy chief, and the chief’s son — and the narrator uses these men to construct her sense of lineage. I also don’t think the narrator resists traditionally feminine roles in order to elude anything. She resists them in part because they were what entrapped her in the domed city, and, in part, because she feels she cannot fulfill them.

4) Some of the most arresting passages The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven concern mythology. Specifically, a mythological narrative (one perhaps the invention of the narrator’s father) that serves as a counterpoint to the narrator’s own journey. At what point in the process of writing this novel did this mythology reveal itself to you?

The mythological narrative thread has been a part of the novel since I started writing. The thread is inspired by my father’s retellings of U Kala’s Maha Yazawin or Great Chronicle, an early 18th-century canonical Burmese text. The king’s daughter and the chief’s son were characters who grew out of one specific story in the Maha Yazawin, a story about a Bamar prince and a Mon princess who fall in love while their kingdoms are at war. In the novel, I wanted to reimagine this story in a non-heteronormative way, and have the chief’s son and the king’s daughter be foils for each other as well as for the narrator and the girl, who are the ones who fall in love with each other.

5) As history gets faster, does forgetting accelerate too?

No, I think as the mythological sections accelerate towards the end of the novel, the narrator’s memories proliferate, until the deep past and the present are able to touch.

6) As other observers have pointed out, the novel packs a tremendous amount of world-building into a very compact space. In fact, the novel’s open structure and its tendency to place elements in parallel rather than fasten them to cause and effect create a perception of depth through the power of suggestion. As the author, did you find you sometimes had to resist the temptation be more elaborate in your descriptions and/or expositions? If not, why not? If so, how so?

Actually, I had to resist my tendency to withhold even more in my descriptions and exposition. I don’t withhold information on purpose, but sometimes it’s hard for me to calibrate my mind with the mind of a potential reader, because I experience the world in an associative and diffuse way. In my writing, I’m always making associative links, both mentally and emotionally, and I prefer to allow those links to drive the narrative forward rather than my own expository interventions.

7) Do you believe that literature can be timeless? How would you respond to someone who praised your work by saying you “write for the ages”?

I would hug that person, because he would probably be my father, who is the only person I know who would say “write for the ages” earnestly. And yes, I believe literature can be timeless, but also that all good things — the sky, babies, food — is.

8) The narrator seems to believe that her world can be renewed. In that sense, she’s not terribly different from a Parzival — or a high Modernist. But she also admits early on in the novel that  “My mother ha taught me about reproduction when I was a girl, and I never understood that word, for nothing is created again, but always created or the first time.” The more I thought about this in the context of the narrator’s guardianship of “the baby,” the more I began to worry about her real motivations for keeping the child alive. And that seriously complicates my ideas about the narrator’s heroism. (Perhaps a sacrifice is looming, or so a skeptical reader in me cautioned.) If you can imagine an ideal reader for The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven, what relationship would you want that individual to have with your narrator?

My “ideal reader” for The End of Peril is a young Southeast Asian American woman with literary aspirations. I wrote this book for her. I want her to have the privilege of feeling, for once, that a book was written specifically for her — not for a white audience trying to understand “her” culture or “her” history, but for her to relate to, to judge, and to criticize. She can have whatever relationship she wants with the narrator, but I hope she recognizes that the narrator is me and not me, another Southeast Asian American woman trying to connect, looking for “the join,” like Beloved’s ghost.

9) What has happened to names in this world?

I didn’t want to transliterate Burmese names into English and do violence to them, so I decided to forgo names altogether. The narrator too is wary of the power of naming. She refuses to name the baby because “there is so much to choose, to give, and by giving, to take away” and she refuses to tell the baby the names of trees “because the trees didn’t know about them and maybe wouldn’t have liked them.”

10) How would you describe your approach to prosody in The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven? To this reader, it’s both propulsive and tentative. The sentences don’t deviate much from a subject-predicate-object construction, modifiers are used sparingly, and both appositive and dependent clauses stand out in their relative scarcity. Almost as if the narrator does not have much time to “waste” in telling. (Even the passages that use the past tense feel as though they are in the present.) Do you view prosody as a regulating (or, to extend the engine metaphor, governing) aspect of the narration, or as more or less incidental to other narrative concerns? [Short version: in your own practice, how do you navigate the classic narration-narrative distinction… or divide?]

I think what you’re asking is, do I write based on sound (narration) or on story (narrative)? My short answer is both, and my long answer is that I reject the narration-narrative/form-content distinction altogether. A metaphor I often return to is the one Henry James offers in “The Art of Fiction,” that “the story and the novel, the idea and the form, are the needle and thread.” The needle for me is the musicality of language, and the thread is the narrative. They mutually regulate and govern one another.


Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint was born in Yangon, Myanmar and grew up in Bangkok, Thailand and San Jose, California. She is the author of The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven (Noemi Press). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Black Warrior Review, TriQuarterly, and Kenyon Review Online, among others, and has been translated into Burmese and Lithuanian.

She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant to Spain, a residency at Hedgebrook, and fellowships from Tin House and Summer Literary Seminars. She holds a B.A. in literary arts from Brown University and an M.F.A. in prose from the University of Notre Dame. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at the University of Denver, and the Reviews, Interviews & Translations editor of the Denver Quarterly.

“Until the deep past and the present are able to touch”: A Conversation with Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint was last modified: March 24th, 2018 by Joe Milazzo
AsiaAsian-AmericanBurmacolonizationGlobal SouthintersectionalityMyanmarmythologynarrativePostapocalypsethe novel
0 comment
0
Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
Avatar
Joe Milazzo

Joe Milazzo is the author of the novel Crepuscule W/ Nellie, two volumes of poetry — The Habiliments and Of All Places In This Place Of All Places — and several chapbooks (most recently, @p_roblem_s). His writings have appeared in Black Clock, Black Warrior Review, BOMB, Golden Handcuffs Review, Prelude, Tammy, and elsewhere. He is an Associate Editor for Southwest Review and the proprietor of Imipolex Press. Joe lives and works in Dallas, TX, and his virtual location is www.joe-milazzo.com.

previous post
Empathy and the Imagination
next post
Literacy Narrative: La Casa Del Rosa

You may also like

Resting His Eyes

June 6, 2018

New Fiction By Kate Garklavs: “Resolution”

July 31, 2017

Literacy Narrative: Hold the Air

February 7, 2019

Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like): with Kristi Coulter

October 20, 2017
Facebook Twitter Instagram

Recent Comments

  • parri Loved the article. Beautifully captured..stay strong. Something must await for you at the end of this path..

    How Bodybuilding Ruined My Life ·  April 2, 2021

  • Waterlily Heartbreaking, real, and often so vivid. Parents, family, the pain and the damage we carry for them and from them. There is a black void where bits and pieces of our soul take leave to as we watch our...

    Descansos ·  April 2, 2021

  • Neo G I hsve to check this out! Is that doom on the cover!!

    Dskillz Harris & Chile_madd – The Next Episode ·  March 28, 2021

Featured Columns & Series

  • The Birds
  • Dinnerview
  • WOVEN
  • Variations on a Theme
  • BLACKCACKLE
  • COVID-19
  • Literacy Narrative
  • Mini-Syllabus
  • Their Days Are Numbered
  • On Weather
  • Disarticulations
  • The Waters
  • Session Report series
  • Birdwolf
  • Comics I've Been Geeking Out On
  • Small Press Releases
  • Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like)
  • The Poetics of Spaces
  • Tales From the End of the Bus Line
  • Fog or a Cloud
  • 30 Years of Ghibli
  • Cooking Origin Stories
  • Food and Covid-19
  • YOU MAKE ME FEEL
  • Ludic Writing
  • Best of 2019
  • The Talking Cure
  • Stars to Stories
  • DRAGONS ARE REAL OR THEY ARE DEAD
  • Foster Care
  • LEAKY CULTURE
  • Jem and the Holographic Feminisms
  • D&D with Entropy

Find Us On Facebook

Entropy
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

©2014-2021 The Accomplices LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Read our updated Privacy Policy.


Back To Top