This is just a collection of folktales, but it is hard to understate how unique is the opportunity to read these stories in English. As far as I know, there is no collection like it.
Many of these stories are quirky and unexpected to the native English speaker. Although some of the translator’s prose was edited heavily for grammar and organization, my edits have been only to make the stories more understandable and engaging to the reader.
I am grateful to Mohammed Rezuwan, who spent many, many hours collecting and translating these stories, for allowing me the opportunity to contribute to this important project. He has deeply impressed me in his efforts to raise awareness of the Rohingya plight, all while living in an incredibly difficult situation in a refugee camp in Bangladesh.
The Rohingya people are the most persecuted and traumatized that I have ever encountered. For many years, the government of Myanmar has transparently pursued their extermination. The Rohingya have lost their basic right of citizenship, as a result of their country’s Citizenship Law of 1982. They are stateless.
The genocide of the Rohingya people is horrific, like every genocide. But it is also fairly unique, in that it has proceeded with little international recognition and even less that has been done to halt it. It is very nearly a genocide that has succeeded. The majority of the world’s Rohingya people currently live as refugees, struggling every day to survive in the harsh camps to which they have been doomed.
As in other persecuted populations, the protection and perpetuation of the Rohingya people’s cultural heritage is often secondary to their immediate survival; so long as the Rohingya people live in turmoil and displacement, their cultural traditions will slowly evaporate. Given enough time and without interventions, this genocide will one day be complete and the Rohingya people, as they are today, will cease to exist.
The conflict in Arakan and the genocide of the Rohingya people is complicated. It is driven by historical grievances, ethnic tensions, and powerful economic interests, and there are violent extremists on many sides of the conflict. There will be people who are angered by the publication of these stories, likely because they have a stake in the outcome or in the promulgation of the conflict. Deniers are also a feature of genocide.
I first visited the Rohingya refugee camps in 2018 as part of a team to document intangible cultural heritage and personal stories from Rohingya refugees.
In interviews, the people we found spoke almost endlessly of killings, assaults, rapes, and other unimaginable savagery. In some ways, the cruelties the Rohingya have been subject to have consumed the Rohingya culture; it was difficult to find a musician willing to perform a song about something other than genocide. In listening to the recordings of their performances, I often find myself overcome by the tragedy of their impossible plight.
When thinking about the plight of the Rohingya, I sometimes reflect on a conversation I had with Ali Akbar, a talented musician I met in Kutupalong Refugee Camp, the largest refugee camp in the world. He had a scar where he had been stabbed several years before by Rakhine extremists while he worked in a field near his home in Myanmar.
He once asked me, half-jokingly, “Had I grown up and had plenty of food to eat, a comfortable place to sleep, and not been scared every day of my life, do you think I would have grown to be tall like you?”
Alex Ebsary
September 2020