Burma Chronicles

AUTHOR: Delisle, Guy

ARTIST: Guy Delisle (illustrator)

PUBLISHERS: Delcourt (French); Drawn and Quarterly (English)

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2007 (English translation, 2008)

Publication History

Upon arriving in Burma with his wife, cartoonist and animator Guy Delisle did not intend to write a travel memoir about his experiences there. The author of two previous travel memoirs—Shenzhen (2006), about living in China, and Pyongyang (2005), about working as an animator in North Korea—Delisle was working on another book, which he never finished. He has not written books on all of his travels; he has also lived in Vietnam and Ethiopia, though neither inspired a full-length work. However, in Burma, he looked at his notes halfway through his yearlong stay and found that he had enough material and interest to write the book. Burma Chronicles was originally published in French as Chroniques birmanes (2007) and translated to English by Helge Dascher for a 2008 Drawn and Quarterly publication.

Plot

Burma Chronicles opens with Delisle at home in Canada, preparing to travel with wife Nadège and infant son Louis to Guatemala, where Nadège is being sent for a year to practice humanitarian medicine for Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders. Delisle prepares for their trek to Central America by watching Star Trek with Spanish subtitles. A moment later, in the sort of comic twist emblematic of their journey, they learn MSF has decided to send them to Myanmar (Burma), a Southeast Asian country unfamiliar to Delisle and one that, to his chagrin, uses a language not available on the Star Trek DVD. Thus, Delisle begins his journey to a nation U.S. president George W. Bush labeled an “Outpost of Tyranny,” totally unprepared for what he will find, as an affable, curious, but culturally ignorant accidental tourist.

When they arrive, however, Delisle’s concerns are not grand, nor political; instead, he is preoccupied with the everyday trials and travails of being a new father. Louis has been crying the entire flight, and when the family arrives in the capital city of Yangon, jet-lagged and exhausted, they find that MSF has not set up a permanent house for them. In his first few days in a guesthouse that MSF has lent them temporarily, Delisle is more concerned with protecting Louis from open wall sockets and figuring out how to give him a bath than with going out adventuring.

However, before he even has the chance to leave the house, Delisle is reminded that he is living in a dictatorship: He reads a Time magazine left by the previous tenants, in which pages are missing; they have been cut out by the censorship bureau, which intercepts all press before it arrives in Burma and clips out unflattering articles. Even in his everyday life, Delisle finds, he cannot escape the reach of the totalitarian government.

The Delisle family begins to settle into Burma with their permanent house and their guard, Maung Aye, whom Delisle likes but never quite understands. Nadège begins her medical work at MSF, which often takes her to remote areas of the countryside. At home, Delisle works hard on finishing a children’s book and starts an animation group for local Burmese graphic artists while taking care of Louis. He often walks Louis around his neighborhood and finds the Burmese flocking around them whenever Louis is around. In their social life, Guy and Nadège attend events in the expatriate community, with MSF doctors and members of other humanitarian organizations, who tend to discuss the great medical problems in Burma—malaria, rampant AIDS, and heroin abuse—and how the Burmese government makes it so difficult for them to perform their jobs helping with these problems.

During this time, Delisle becomes increasingly aware of the complex plight of the Burmese people and the difficulties in helping them. Early on, Delisle speaks freely about his disdain for Burmese censorship and dictatorship. Throughout his stay, Delisle wants to see Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi, a political prisoner of the Burmese government, who had been under house arrest for the previous fifteen years. He walks by her walled property with Louis and is turned away; ultimately, the closest he ever comes to seeing her is by briefly driving by her compound, which is guarded by the military and laced with barbed wire. He momentarily imagines forming a nonviolent protest to save her but plays with Louis instead.

Later, Delisle critiques the Burmese government to a visiting journalist, which he promptly forgets about until the article is published. When Delisle shows this article to his animation students, they become fearful that they will become associated with his negative comments and be taken away. Frightened that the government will find the article and come after his students, Delisle frantically collects all editions he has distributed. The next session, one of the students who worked for the government does not show up.

With increasing resistance from the Burmese government, MSF closes its mission in Burma, and as a result, Delisle’s trip comes to an end. He is doubtful about what sort of impact MSF or he can have on the many serious problems the Burmese face. As his stay ends, Delisle visits a Buddhist retreat for three days, where he must remain silent and meditate standing and sitting. After initially finding the experience remarkably difficult, he leaves the retreat feeling immensely peaceful, though this proves a fleeting sense. In the final panel of the book, Delisle stares upward in puzzled amazement at a fast-whirling hand-pulled Ferris wheel, showing him as puzzled, curious, and relatively ignorant about life in Burma as when he arrived.

Characters

•Guy Delisle is the author and protagonist. This friendly, self-deprecating French Canadian cartoonist and animator is perpetually clad in a frumpy T-shirt and shorts. He is a sensitive observer of life, a trait that drives his childlike curiosity, compulsion to cartoon, passion for the plight of the Burmese people, and nearly paranoid love for his son. While he may want to overthrow the oppressive Burmese government, he is more interested in his personal relationships and never sacrifices them for his politics.

•Nadège Delisle is Guy’s wife. She is a lithe, active, and courageous doctor for MSF, and her humanitarian work is the reason for their move to Burma. A working mom, she balances travel to dangerous, remote, war-torn regions of the country with caring for both her new baby and her Burmese co-workers.

•Louis Delisle is Guy and Nadège’s pear-headed baby boy and Guy’s silent companion as he wanders through the streets of Yangon. Louis is a gateway to the Burmese people for Delisle: The locals swarm Louis and Guy to play with the little Caucasian baby, a rare novelty. Also, Guy connects with the expatriate community when he takes Louis to day care. Most of all, Louis is Guy’s muse and keeps him ever vigilant against Burma’s hidden dangers, from open light sockets to poisonous snakes and rebel bombings.

•Maung Aye is a young, exuberant, rail-thin Burmese man who guards the Delisle house in Burma. He always greets Delisle with an enthusiastic smile, which happens to be bright red from his nearly constant betel-nut consumption. He is Delisle’s closest link to the Burmese culture, often translating for him perplexing events and surroundings.

•Aung San Suu Kyi, a.k.a. “the Lady,” is the Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader of the Burmese resistance and the absent heroine of Delisle’s journey. A political prisoner, she is allowed to leave the country but not her home, where she has stayed for the previous fifteen years, essentially cut off from the outside world.

•The Burmese dictatorship is the collective antagonist of the story, represented by nearly indistinguishable generals and soldiers in ornately decorated military fatigues. While Delisle occasionally sees members of the dictatorship in person, such as the guards in front of Aung San Suu Kyi’s house, the dictatorship comprises a largely unseen force, represented more in its influence than in its physical presence, such as in the missing, censored pages of Time magazine.

Artistic Style

Delisle said that he wanted Burma Chronicles to be a “postcard” home, one that might inspire more people to become interested in Burma and the situation of the Burmese people. In this way, Burma Chronicles is not unlike a stylized educational comic and, thus, is graphically readable: It includes spacious, uncrowded panels and simple iconography that helps the reader move through Delisle’s observations with ease. These observations are not linked together in comprehensive chapters but, rather, are depicted in short episodes (sometimes only a page) that are self-contained strips, each like an entry in a diary.

In the tradition of French memoirists who have worked with the publisher L’Association, such as Marjane Satrapi in Persepolis (2000) and David B. in Epileptic (1996-2003), Delisle does not make much effort to realistically depict what he sees and remembers. Rather, he presents the reader with images in a stripped-down, though highly expressive, cartoon style, one that no doubt owes itself to his experience as an animator. Delisle’s hand-drawn, sketchy panels suggest that what the reader is seeing is a subjective, impressionistic rendering of his experience, rather than an authoritative, objective account of reality. This is best seen in one panel in which he attempts to draw with his left hand after his right arm is sore; the product is a messy, inept cartoon, one that in its sloppiness captures his difficulty in drawing with the wrong hand.

Using sparse, highly appropriate details, Delisle creates distinguishable, emotionally vivid caricatures of the people he meets and of himself, using only black, white, and gray. Delisle depicts himself simply, though with iconic detail: His fire-hydrant-shaped head, with wing-tipped black hair, is exceptionally simple, almost childlike. With this characteristic look, he is able to deftly capture his reactions and moods, essential to a story that is fundamentally about his impressions.

In depicting the unique architecture, engineering, and nature of Burma, however, Delisle breaks from this cartooning style and takes pains to render accurately what he sees in all its complexity, drawing with fine, precise lines, often contained in expansive panels. Conversely, when depicting a travel sequence, he strips the cartooning down to exceptionally simple iconography, breaking out the action into a crowd of thumbnail panels.

Themes

The most important theme in Burma Chronicles is oppression, which is best illustrated on the cover. Two guards posted outside the fenced-off compound of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi stare warily back as Guy pushes Louis’s stroller past them. “The Lady,” who was elected president by the population while under house arrest, represents the oppression of the dictatorship, which does not listen to its people. The reader also hears about, but never actually sees, the government that makes it difficult for MSF to carry out its humanitarian mission, thus leaving many Burmese to die of diseases such as malaria and AIDS. While these are the most blatant examples, most of the oppression is seen in the everyday aspects of life: in the missing pages in magazines and in a slowly loading Internet being monitored carefully by the government.

Censorship is another theme connected with Delisle’s journey. A major reason that Delisle never sees government oppression firsthand is that the dictatorship guards him and the Burmese people from seeing it, through their immense censorship and propaganda efforts. The real news, which cannot be found in the state-owned newspaper The New Light of Myanmar, is passed through whispered rumors. The problem with the rumors is that nobody really knows whether they are true, distorted, or false.

Guy, Nadège, and the MSF workers want to help the people of Burma but find that it is difficult as outsiders to help make this change. Thus, another important theme is altruism: How do people actually help those who are victims of oppression? When Delisle speaks out against the regime, he puts his Burmese friends in danger. Similarly, after MSF has decided to leave, Delisle speaks with an MSF doctor who points out that if they stay in Burma and continue to provide medical care, they will actually aid the regime rather than force the Burmese government to take care of its own citizens. Thus, Burma Chronicles demonstrates how thin the line between hurting and helping victims of an oppressive government can be for outsiders to that culture.

Impact

Delisle’s Burma Chronicles is firmly within the tradition of nonfiction comics: Harvey Pekar, Art Spiegelman, and Joe Sacco were publishing, and earning acclaim, with comics that dealt in reality decades before the Burma Chronicles. Comics depictions of life under an oppressive regime also began about sixty years earlier: In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, Danzig Baldaev was using cartoons to create exceptionally detailed and truly graphic factual recordings of torture in the Russian gulags. More recently, L’Association alumna Satrapi earned acclaim for showing life under the Iranian dictatorship in Persepolis, also illustrated in an animated cartoon style similar to that employed by Delisle.

Delisle, however, is one of the first comic travel memoirists, a subgenre of nonfiction. Whereas Pekar recorded his life at home, Spiegelman and Satrapi composed autobiographies, and Sacco and Baldaev were interested in factually recording their observations, Delisle uses comics to explore his subjective impressions abroad. While travel memoir is a popular genre in print text, Delisle is the first to make his career and popular mark as a comics travel writer. However, Burma Chronicles may not be his defining work, as his earlier work Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea (2005) presents a rare glimpse into a country that few journalists can report on and, as a result, has garnered greater attention.

Further Reading

Delisle, Guy. Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea (2005).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China (2006).

Sacco, Joe. Palestine (2002).

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis (2003).

Bibliography

Baldaev, Danzig. Drawings from the Gulag. London: FUEL, 2010.

Pekar, Harvey. Introduction to The Best American Comics 2006. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006.

Versaci, Rocco. “Creating a ‘Special Reality’: Comic Books Versus Memoir.” In This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature. New York: Continuum, 2007.