Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, Names for Light, Graywolf Press, 2021.
Names for Light traverses time and memory to weigh three generations of a family’s history against a painful inheritance of postcolonial violence and racism. In spare, lyric paragraphs framed by white space, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint explores home, belonging, and identity by revisiting the cities in which her parents and grandparents lived. As she makes inquiries into their stories, she intertwines oral narratives with the official and mythic histories of Myanmar. But while her family’s stories move into the present, her own story―that of a writer seeking to understand who she is―moves into the past, until both converge at the end of the book.
Born in Myanmar and raised in Bangkok and San Jose, Myint finds that she does not have typical memories of arriving in the United States; instead, she is haunted by what she cannot remember. By the silences lingering around what is spoken. By a chain of deaths in her family line, especially that of her older brother as a child. For Myint, absence is felt as strongly as presence. And, as she comes to understand, naming those absences, finding words for the unsaid, means discovering how those who have come before have shaped her life. Names for Light is a moving chronicle of the passage of time, of the long shadow of colonialism, and of a writer coming into her own as she reckons with her family’s legacy.
“Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint’s acute language casts a constellation of birth-charts, which in turn broadcasts light through the generations of a remarkable family story. Names for light celebrates storytelling’s role in survival without excluding the animating presences of absence and silence. Here, past and present converge, creating a brilliance that lights up the limits of what can be known. A guidebook for every world – above, below, between – Names for light is a stunning achievement.”— SELAH SATERSTROM
“History, like light, is porous, multitudinous, endlessly haunted. Names of Light gives form to the unresolved and inaccessible remnants of the past, all of the ghosts that are proliferated just by our moving. We are constantly ghastly and ghostly, the text reminds us, and the indeterminacy of flesh is the indeterminacy of family and legacy. Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint is one of the most remarkable writers of our time, and Names of Light is a piercing and heartbreaking revelation.”— JANICE LEE
“Thirii Myint’s Names for Light is a reincarnation of Thirii Myint, who is a reincarnation of her great-grandfather, the son of a princess, each version of self a sly haunting. A fairy tale of displacement, this book cradles imagined homes and remapped homelands—unmappable and pure. Myint’s geographies and her syntax will echo inside you like luminous ghosts: opulent and ruthless and profound, like drowned sapphires waiting to be reunited with the wind.”— LILY HOANG
“In sharp, clear-cut prose, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint refracts the structural violence and long reach of colonialism through the prism of her family’s history. Each page is a lens held up to light and rotated, inspected, and held in mind. A gorgeous book.”— SARAH GERARD
“Thirii is driving an important autobiographical rickshaw into the 21st century. Her task with Names for Light is to be alternative, to use ghosts and reincarnations and Spanish-speaking-Asians as vehicles that hope to break the barrier and drive beyond the grammar of immigrant porn. Her work is obediently exploratory and layered, rich in research and imagination. Thirii’s zany and inventive Names for Light is also designed to challenge one’s concept of immigrant privation: how to make its nuance absence visible and social-emotionally available without succumbing to cliché and memoiristic predictability. Painted not in ash and alternating between first person and third narration, there is so much here Thirii is willing to make visible: emotional ethnic intelligence, Bamar consciousness, high child mortality rates, infidelity that behaves more closely to death, Sittwe, 8888 ayekhin, love missives delivered in a borrowed book, matriarchal sacrifices, Spanish speaking Asians, vomiting ghosts that live in mirrors, weaponized eating disorders, gambling, migraines, maybe Boston, maybe Madrid, maybe South Bend, maybe Providence, a place where no chickens are left behind, a place where imagination and memory get reborn, reincarnated, reenacted, a place where ghosts can pretend to be photographs. As you can see so clearly for all double immigrants: her ambition is snow, snow falling. Let her lead the way. Into the light that is her brother and beyond. ”— VI KHI NAO
In this hypnotic memoir, Burmese-American novelist Myint (The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven) looks to myth and folklore to explore her family’s legacy. Ghosts, reincarnated relatives, dark omens, and imagined scenes populate a timeline that oscillates between the author’s forbears’ past and present day, stretching from Myanmar, where she was born in 1989, to Thailand, California, Spain, and Colorado. In lyrical prose, Myint straddles dream and reality beginning with a mythic take on her great-grandfather, who “died a man but was reborn as me.” Lived experience is overlaid with speculative history, as Myint, who moved to the U.S. as a child, mines the alienation—sowed by the colonialism and racism endured by generations of her family—that has rendered her “a ghost” throughout her life. To fill the void of loneliness surrounding her, she pieces together her family’s past, from her mother’s “cursed” home in Yangon and her parents’ marriage on a lake that was “constructed by the British” to her older brother’s illness and death (“I also believed he had drowned in the lake”). While her poetic narration is indisputably alluring, the nonlinear story line can sometimes become taxing. For those willing to put in the work, this serpentine narrative is a thing of beauty. - Publishers Weekly
A writer born in Myanmar and raised in Thailand and the U.S. traces how her family history has haunted her personal journey.
In this uniquely structured memoir—sleek, poetic paragraphs surrounded by plenty of white space on each page—Myint introduces herself as the reincarnation of her great-grandfather, a relative of the royal family in Myanmar, where the author was born. She lived in Bangkok from the ages of 1 to 7, after which she and her family immigrated to California. Myint later lived in Colorado, Rhode Island, and Spain, but no matter where she traveled, she was never able to escape her ancestral history. Some of this is a matter of reincarnation: “When my great-grandmother finally died, she was reborn as my middle sister. My sister was my wife in our past life. My mother says I followed her into this life.” But some of it, Myint writes, has been a product of dissociation associated with inherited trauma. Many of her personal memories, she notes, came to her in the third person, meaning that she pictured herself as a character in the scene rather than an inhabitant of her body. Due to this disconnection, Myint tells her own story in the third person while narrating her family history—much of which she did not personally witness—in the first person. Additionally, she tells her ancestors’ story from past to present, but her own from present to past. Braiding these opposing timelines and narrative perspectives creates an innovative structure that effectively contrasts the author’s deep enmeshment with her family history with her distance from reality. On a line-by-line level, the book is spectacularly lyrical, and each word feels perfectly chosen. Some readers may struggle with the chronology and unnamed characters, but the text is undeniably powerful.
An imaginative and compelling memoir about what we inherit and what we pass on. - Kirkus Reviews
Blank space is difficult to employ in a book. It can be read as emptiness or it can offer a reader breath, pause, reflection, meaning. “Names for Light,” a memoir by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, makes ample use of blank space, between paragraphs, strings of thought, scenes and events. When not used, what’s there is jumbled and scattered.
A writer need not be concerned with where she comes from, but for memoir this is its core project. For Myint, who was born in Myanmar before moving to Thailand, the United States and Spain, it is a painful and intrusive question. A question that, by its very asking, suggests she does not belong, a question that displaces her. She balks. Beyond the naming of places (Leymyethna, Gayan, Denver, Sittwe, Yangon, Minbu, South Bend, Hinthada, Madrid), she doesn’t get to the difficulty of the question as a writer — and by this, I don’t mean a place on a map. I mean the stink and cringe and failure and noise and laughter that make a life feel real and lived, the thing that makes a person tick.
We are told that one “can be a ghost while one is still alive … if one carries what one cannot remember. Empty memories, blank memories, absent memories.” This thinking allows the author to get away with being vacuous. When we encounter the “I” in this story, it is often at a distance, “the observer, the outsider, always in the middle of a story but never at the center of it.” She sometimes switches to the third person to refer to herself, as if afraid to speak from the first, to own the voice and power that could be. She tells us, “I do not like to make decisions, to take risks, to assert or involve myself. … I prefer to … keep myself to myself.” And this is what she achieves in her writing — she keeps herself to herself. In doing so, she makes the question of where she comes from illumined and voluminous.
Myint’s narrative shape is barely there. We get blips and cracks, “a trace, a strip, or a corner of the memories,” a “memory of a memory.” This family history is often recounted through others, like this: “My father said my grandmother said” and “My other grandmother, my mother’s mother” and “My mother said my great-grandmother and great-grandfather.” This makes the prose clunky and cluttered, and the people difficult to feel and see and hear and remember.
The language is so concerned with and looking pretty that what the story is about — political upheaval, death, heartbreak, violence, discrimination, the immigrant experience — is barely noticeable. The parents, particularly, don’t feel like real people, since we never get them in their adult mess. She takes at face value the story of her mother “discovering love letter after love letter” from her father with the unquestioning trust of a child. So often, Myint approximates with “I do not know if,” “I wonder,” “I imagine.” This is a writer who does not know and is comfortable in not knowing. The gaze flinches.
It is one thing to be able to put feelings on paper and another to make a reader feel what we write. The narrow line between being a note taker and being a writer is worth discerning. We are told:
“This place repeated enough times begins to sound like displaced.”
“Because the verbs are left un-conjugated in Burmese, left untouched, the same word describes the past, present and future.”
“Island. In English, the two-syllable word is paradisal. … In Bamar, the one-syllable kyun, with its elongated vowel, is dismal, claustrophobic.”
These are wonderful observations of language, but the writing does not move them beyond being duly noted. It certainly sounds like poetry, but it is not poetry.
The material Myint has before her is compelling, but they are memories and stories that are not hers. This is the problem for the children of immigrants and refugees when we set out to write memoirs. However special we think our lives are or however much we accomplish, our stories always pale in comparison — even more so when we lean on others’ to write our own. We, whom “nothing has ever happened to,” are never as compelling as our parents. - Souvankham Thammavongsa
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/books/review/names-for-light-thirii-myo-kyaw-myint.html
The 32-year-old writer Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint was born in Burma, now Myanmar. She lived briefly in Bangkok before emigrating to San Jose, California with her family before she turned eight. Myint has no solid memories of Burma other than what has been dutifully told to her by older sisters and parents. Her family fled the country shortly after pro-democracy protestors were crushed in 1988 by the military junta that still wields absolute power. Myint’s father, an educator, managed to secure a teaching job in Thailand which became their escape route to America. During the past decade, Myanmar has drawn the world’s ire for the government’s ferociously vile ethnic cleansing of the Rohingyas, a Muslim minority, who have been fleeing in massive numbers to Bangladesh.
Myint is struck by the violent history and current upheavals in Myanmar. But this knowledge does not preclude her rising irritation with Americans who, after finding out where she is from, annoy her with intimidating questions about her homeland, and wait for her to express gratitude for being in America (which she intentionally withholds). She is thankful for her new opportunities that have taken her to a teaching career at Amherst College. But she doesn’t identify as American. The concept of “place” remains opaque for her. She is inextricably caught up in the turbulent stories of her family’s past and has grown weary of answering questions about her ethnicity and skin color. She writes, “Whiteness is not a color or a race or an ethnicity but a construct of power, the power to speak, to tell stories, not only about oneself, but about other people.” Yet questions linger over her narrative. Whom is she writing for? Is she trying to reveal or conceal? Is she deceiving herself or trying to deceive others? Is this an attempt to reconnect with a family that obsesses her, but from whom she seems estranged? The mystical beauty of her prose, which seems to speak to us in intermittent revelations, transports us elsewhere, but it is an unnamable place, a territory of lostness.
In Names for Light, she anoints herself as the family chronicler, and speaks of the elaborate preparation ritual she has undertaken to begin her task. She writes:
“There are no marks on my body from a previous life. Unlike my eldest sister, I was born perfectly blank, perfectly bare. For years, I waited for a mark to appear, a sign of who I was or had been or would become. I searched my body, read and reread it carefully. The sharp point of a tooth, the shape of my hands, the places where I could not bear to be touched: my back, my pelvis, under my chin. I was afraid to change my body in any way, to leave my own mark upon it. I got no tattoos, no piercings. I never dyed my hair, and the one time I had it chemically straightened, I shaved it off afterwards. I believed I had to keep my body plain and pristine if I was to receive a sign.”
Myint floats backwards in time and tells us of her paternal great-grandmother who was left widowed with many children. She wonders how her great-grandmother handled the distress. Most of her children got into serious trouble. One became a gangster, another was imprisoned, still another died in a street fight. Only her paternal grandfather seemed sturdy enough to withstand the turbulence and he would become the father of her father. She admires her great-grandfather and father’s centeredness but there is a part of her that fantasizes about her great-uncles and their unrestrained wildness thinking “If I had a thousand lives, I might have been more like my great-uncles: braver, bolder, and wilder. But I have only one life, at least one life at a time, and in this life, I am my father’s daughter and my grandfather’s granddaughter. Like them, I am the observer, I am the outsider, always in the middle of the story but never at the center of it.” But we hear the irony in her proclamation. After all, she is the writer; and thus has supreme power to embellish or omit whatever she chooses to, without asking anyone’s permission. Thus, she becomes the center, and all others rest beneath her.
A few stories recur throughout her narrative. One involves a brother who was born to her parents first, and who died shortly afterwards because he could not hold down his nourishment. She believes that years later, when her sister began putting her finger down her throat to induce vomiting, she was perhaps mourning the death of the brother she never knew. The brother that still haunts their mother’s dreams. Myint writes “Vomiting was the activities of ghosts … ghosts could not speak or touch or bleed, but they could vomit. Vomit or ghosts, the ultimate others, the abject, that which can be rejected from the body, in death or in times of distress when reality is rejected …” Myint frequently refers to her mother’s thwarted ambitions and an uncomfortable competitiveness between them. Yet in another way, Myint’s family remain muffled by her separation from them. She never mentions any demonstrations of love or tenderness between any of them. Nor are there any remembrances of her mother or father comforting her when she was sick or distressed.
Myint occasionally disrupts her rhythm and speaks to us in a plainer, more brittle voice. She admits to an inclination to keep her suffering from others. She tells of her gratefulness in having found an affectionate white man whom she plans to marry. She marvels at his ability to grasp the freely associational nature of her writing. She talks about her student’s difficulties when writing about love. She writes about her mother’s depression when they first came to California. When she was young and would misbehave, her mother would say “Do you want something bad to happen? Do you want your mother or father to die?”
At its simmering core, Names For Light is itself the “place” where the family’s past – and Myint’s dynamically evolving present — approach each other. The tug and pull of these forces, and the broader awareness of tyranny in the world, comprise an environment for the reader that is both demanding in its multiple vectors and gratifying in its patterning and acute intelligence. - Elaine Margolin
https://www.ronslate.com/on-names-for-light-a-family-history-by-thirii-myo-kyaw-myint/
Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint’s Names for Light, winner of the 2018 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, questions the meaning of home. The memoir gathers interwoven vignettes of past and present, examining themes of genealogy and displacement. Myint confronts the ambivalence of belonging and alienation, discussing colonial and post-colonial violence, racism, micro-aggressions, and othering, as well as her painful experience of marginalization in the United States, where she grew up, and abroad. From the unwanted touch of her skin to the inquisitorial curiosity of strangers over where she “really” comes from, she expresses her tiredness and understandable rage. In a climate of rising anti-Asian hate crimes, this book is an urgent call for change.
What immediately stands out in the urgent call is Myint’s clear voice, as she explores personal and historical issues through lyrical evocations of cities and town such as Yangon, Madrid, South Bend, Sittwe, and Hinthada. At first, the locations overlay in a dizzying recollection, each chapter taking place in a different setting, conveying the author’s sense of inherited and acquired displacement. But the varied geography is an invitation to remember lived experience despite uprootedness and, perhaps most importantly for Myint, provides a canvas on which to appose orally-transmitted heritage to re-center among constant movement.
To recreate this oral heritage, Myint creates dialogues with family and the ghosts of family no longer with her. She believes to have embodied the reincarnation of her great-grandfather. The memory of her elder brother, who died as a newborn, also never leaves her. Her elder sister, she believes, is the transmigrated soul of their great-grandmother. The evocation of her ancestors nods to the belief in the interconnectedness of all things and the difficulty of escaping one’s fate. Referring to an old photograph hung in the room which she used to share with her two sisters, Myint notes: “For many years, I looked at it as if looking into a mirror, as if by my looking I could conjure the ghosts of my great-grandfather and my great-grandmother. I looked and looked at this photograph until I felt as if we were the ghosts, my middle sister and I, we, the remnants of these people.”
Myint seeks to populate missing pieces of a family story, one which links her both to the intimacy of her great-grandfather and a sense of safety. Memory merges the emotional and physical when she recalls, like him, similar health woes, serving to carry a form of identification and projection, crucial to Myint’s own reconstructed narrative:
I do not know how much ash is produced when a body is burned. Ash is the remainder, the residue, the remnant or trace, the vestige of a body after it has burned. Ash is what could not burn, or what had to be created so something else could be destroyed. In this way, we are all each other’s ashes. I am my great-grandfather’s ash. I am the story that was told about his death, or the story that was created from his death, though many years later.
Here, Myint embraces a world of haunting recollections, omens, and traditions—including Buddhist teachings on the transience and non-binary nature of our existence and what to call home. Her family story is reclaimed and is revived through her.
Myint also shows that home is expressed not only in herself and her immediate family but also in geography—in land. Mynit intertwines the personal and the historical, writing about Myanmar’s own troubled history. Myint’s reflections on Myanmar and nationalism are timely and illuminating, given the military’s takeover earlier this year and continued brutalization of protesters. She remembers the politics of the country’s independence, the 8888 strike during summer 1988 which saw the eruption of mass protests, explaining that ayekhin or “protest” contains the word “write” in the national Bamar language. “An ayekhin was an effort to write history, with one’s body, with one’s life,” she adds, positing the body as a fragment but also a tool which can be directed towards justice and a larger purpose.
At times, Myint struggles to claim an “I” commonly attached to an ipseity. The shadow of her family seems to consume her. When narrating her memories, she prefers an illeism, a third-person singular narrative, to perhaps help with a perceived loss of agency, dissociation, and to regulate her own story. “People without a home are ghosts,” she writes. By the end of the memoir, Myint comes to see that memories can be “inexact,” and she ruminates what she remembers as much as what she doesn’t. Names for Light is a poetic love letter to the people who make us who we are, and a reminder of the difficulty some face to find one’s way home. - Farah Abdessamad
https://blog.pshares.org/finding-home-in-thirii-myo-kyaw-myints-names-for-light/
Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, The End of Peril, The
End of Enmity, The End of Strife, A Haven,
Noemi Press, 2018.
An unnamed narrator returns to her ancestral home in an environmentally depleted harbor city with a baby in her care. She has escaped from what she calls "the breach"--the collapse of the climate-controlled domed city where she grew up. From a thread about the narrator's childhood, we learn that the breach was caused by the hysterical growth of the genetically-modified trees in the domed city, a growth which is spreading over the earth. From a thread about the history of the harbor city, we learn of an ancient war that was fought there. In the thread which follows the narrative present, there is a storm which floods the harbor city. The narrator's mother disappears and the baby falls ill. The narrator then journeys to city's river to preform the funeral rites for her mother and cure the baby. At the river, the three narrative threads come together.
In The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint explores the beauty and the pain of constructed realities—the stories we tell and the worlds we build for ourselves. This debut book curves in on itself, doubling back and retracing its steps to create an ever-more intimate portrait of a woman between two cities: the domed city of her youth, which was built by her grandfather, and the titular harbor city, which once acted as haven for an ancient king under attack. Though long past, the history of this harbor city is very much alive in the narrator, as she is a descendant of both the city’s king and those who attacked him. “The city fell and the two peoples are one people now,” she tells us. “In my body, I am one person.” This comingling of attacker and attacked sets the stage for what might be called a book of blurring. Pressing reality mingles with myth and the spectral dead exist among the living. So, too, are lines blurred between human and animal, corporeal and natural: blooming trees swell and curl tendrils round a dying father; a sleepless princess carves the moon with her sharpened hair.
Perhaps the most significant blurring is the one between the narrator and her mother: “My mother,” she says, “…did not want to be reminded of the permeability of the body, of my body, which had invaded and opened hers.” There is also the narrator’s concern for her own baby, a child she winds close like a spool of thread and worries over. “I want it [the child],” she says, “to better understand what it is like to be a woman, for the baby may one day become a woman…The choice of gender the baby will one day make is heavy.” Musings like this one call us to reexamine motherhood—what does it mean? What does it require? And where—if ever—does it end? - https://www.arkint.org/reviews-1#the-end-of-peril-capsule-review
A good example of what independent presses have to offer is Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint’s The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, A Haven. No formulaic pap, no ‘been there, done that.’ Just fine, original storytelling. At first I tried to pin down a genre for Myint’s book. Then I relaxed and let her story take me to a horrific ecological event that ruins a city and upends the lives of its people, all who are unnamed. We have the narrator, her family, and “the baby.” There is also a friend called “the girl” and assorted others, including a king and his family and numerous enemies.
The book takes place in two cities: One is the large harbor city, the other is a manmade domed city that protects its inhabitants from what’s going on outside the dome. The domed city is never given a formal name, but we learn that the king’s men retreated into it “when they could no longer hold back the enemy. The end of peril, they called the city. The end of enmity. The end of strife. It meant all of those things. The city was their haven.”
At some point the protective dome is compromised by what Myint terms a breach, and it has everything to do with trees. Our narrator is very attentive to the baby and explains what the harbor city used to be like:
did you know once there were trees? [ . . . ] I try to describe the sound of wind rustling through leaves, the way the leaves would flutter, and how the sunlight was tinged green inside the woods, how clear that light was.
The book takes on a mythical quality as Myint writes, “I hold the baby close to me again, and I say very softly that the women were blamed for the sky flying away, because women are usually blamed . . . .”
Okay, but then, “The choice of gender the baby will one day make is heavy. [ . . . ] Is the baby my daughter? I wonder, as I look upon its sleeping face. Is it my son? Will it resent me for this gift I am giving it now, this life?”
Another time, she tells baby details about the breach: “I heard the sound of wings beating against glass [ . . . ] The sound was coming from the leaves. Green leaves budding and growing and pushing against the glass.”
Because of our narrator’s mixed origins—she descends from ancestors of the king and also the enemy—she’s not looked upon kindly by what’s left of the harbor city dwellers. When she wanders outside the dome, the people are thin and kind of scary. But here’s how the narrator describes herself: “I was fed by the wealth of the domed city, its green woods and added vitamins. [ . . . ] I am a big girl. Many people had to die so that I could live.”
The story loops back and forth between her father who designed the domed city, her forays into the harbor city to the home of her grandfather, her love-hate relationship with her mother, and the doings of the king’s family and its enemies.
We learn more about that mother, who apparently is gorgeous. She browbeats her daughter by saying the girl is not beautiful, is possessed and should have been a boy, and Mom tries to reshape her daughter’s face. That’s not all, as shown in this passage that says so much: “My mother used to hit me for chewing with my mouth open or sitting with my knees apart. [ . . . ] My mother did not hit hard, but I always cried. She made my father watch, which is what I could not stand.” Though the mother is an integral part of the tale, I’m wondering if there are any good mothers in literary fiction today.
At times The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, A Haven reads like a fairy tale, though resembling those original Grimm Brothers’ works, not the milder children’s versions. That’s the entertainment value of Myint’s book. More importantly, though, it reads like a warning against the environmental shenanigans taking place in our world today. It is both beautifully written and relevant. - Valerie Wieland
https://www.newpages.com/book-reviews/end-of-peril-end-of-enmity-end-of-strife-haven
In an interview with Entropy for her debut novel The End of Peril, The End of Enmity, The End of Strife, A Haven, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint explains how one of the nigh-parallel worlds occurring throughout is influenced by “my father’s retellings of U Kala’s Maha Yazawin or Great Chronicle, an early 18th-century canonical Burmese text.” Unfortunately for those who can’t read Burmese (including myself), it remains untranslated. Yet it also remains the scholarly trend to see the Maha Yazawin, in the words of historian Victor Lieberman in his 1986 essay “How Reliable is U Kala,” as “a pastiche of legends, local histories, biographies, and detailed court records” (Lieberman 247). To say The End of Peril is seeded with this composite character would be to walk in the forest of truth. This is not to say the novel is historical, intent on historicity, or can be relegated to a genre. In fact, what Myint understands about these labels—historicity, facticity, genre—is how they accrete to form lived experience. Myint understands the overflowing of the present.
Overflowing is the operative word here, as the story of The End of Peril centers around floods. There are two cities: the titular harbor city and a nameless domed city. The former was founded during what reads as both an ageless and ancient war between a kingdom and “raiders from the north” (Myint 8). They named their refuge hoping the symbolism of its name would echo throughout history. It did: it was the last place the raiders flooded into before the war ended. The survivors of the harbor city would go on to build the domed city, achieving in practice what the harbor city tried in name. The architect of this temple to endurance would steal away with “the daughter of a clan leader, an heiress to a conquered land, a descendant of the northern invaders” (Myint 8) and would eventually be grandfather of the nameless narrator. What prompts the telling of this story is her departure from her childhood home, child in tow, after the dome bursts and water floods in. In that formerly conquered land, The End of Peril, she recalls and lives these layers of historical ironies and symmetries that will continue to lurk in the novel.
That the novel is front-loaded with this genealogy might lead one to plant the flag of Genesis inside. That the novel explicitly mentions the first and second precepts of a Buddhist layperson might lead one to see the other three interlaced within. One could even see Baudrillard’s hyperreality where the Domed City “displayed the moon phases recorded in an old almanac” (Myint 30) and how the narrator, like an automaton, learned the harbor city’s script through a textbook of which “I write in that same font” (Myint 39). And, while all these are evocative, it’s a case of not seeing the trees for the forest. The End of Peril is a death struggle with Susan Sontag’s famous dictum, “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art” (Sontag 10). It is a novel about bodies—politic and individual—being interpreted through their ephemeral “legends, local histories, biographies, and detailed court records” (Lieberman 247). It’s about those same bodies’ struggle to experience this “feel[ing] like young animals” (Myint 17) in a world where both seem to remain endlessly at a distance. It is, like many great novels, a cipher. It is a hermeneutics of an erotics of art. - Justin Goodman
read more here: https://www.neworleansreview.org/the-end-of-peril-the-end-of-enmity-the-end-of-strife-a-haven/
There are no names in Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint's new novel, The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven. By forgoing names, the novel resists an easy grafting of a migrant story, an exile's story—it exists outside of context. This quality contrasts the book's characters, who, lacking names, must define themselves by their context: societal roles (mother, daughter, king's men), history (a war, an evacuation), and place.
The novel's narrator is poised between such markers, hesitating to make a decision for fear it will preclude other possibilities. "There is so much to choose, to give, and by giving, to take away," she says. She's in limbo between two cities, the harbor city of the present and the domed city of her past. She's between her roles as a daughter and a mother, and between the side of the enemy and the side of the king's men in a war that drove her family to the harbor city, the name of which means the end of peril, the end of enmity, the end of strife. The city's a haven, we're told, but not for her. She's been stranded there by history, and is, as her mother accuses her, "restless, a hungry ghost."
At the center of her current restlessness is a baby. It's not the narrator's baby, but it is in her care. The baby, too, is waiting between defined states. "I have not yet chosen a name for the baby. I have not yet chosen a gender," the narrator says. If decisions preclude some endings, we expect them to also result in others. The story therefore remains stalled in the purgatory of the harbor city until final decisions are made. Myint skillfully maneuvers the reader into a state of anticipation. We anticipate, as the narrator does, the mother's death or the baby's definition.
The narrator's own transience is something we get through memory: she shuttles us between the present and an alluring past. The past is also another place, the domed city, which we learn is an artificially controlled society, designed by the narrator's "father's father." In the domed city, people don't seem to die and the trees have been biochemically engineered to grow faster, stranger. The baby comes from the domed city. The baby's a seed of what that domed society wanted, some utopian vision, and it survived that city's breach and ruin. It becomes the narrator's mission to find a new place for the baby. If the baby can survive, her thinking goes, perhaps the old vision can too.
Part of the characters' inabilities to settle into the present is due to the fact that each one of them is haunted by the past. The mother is haunted by her younger self, which is stunningly captured in a description of her earlier, photographed version looking "radiant, glowing like an apparition, for the beauty of the dead is always eternal and transcendent, while the living decompose." The narrator is haunted by another, a girl she's left behind. The novel deftly stretches the mother and daughter between the places, a tension heightened in the narrator's case because her father's side is descended from the enemy. "In the domed city," she tells us, "my body was the spoils of war and in the harbor city, my body is the shame of war. I am a child of violence."
When the present tension rises, the narrator deviates into reverie, the surreal and enchanting story of a locked-away princess that the narrator's father, who died back in the domed city, told her when she was young. As the novel's pressure continues to build, the prose stretches its realist confines and scenes begin to stray into the surreal territory of these legends. Myint's language does this too, struggling as if it is under pressure to contain itself. It accumulates, brims, and finally spills into extravagant and beautiful passages, only to recede and begin accumulating again.
It's appropriate then, that when change comes, it comes as a flood. The world comes undone. The narrator is forced to flee the surges with the baby. The novel's end leaves the reader tethered, circling back on its invented folklore, the image of a collapsed dome, one city in ruins, another in decay, everywhere "wild grass dancing over the sand. Grass flickering like fire," and surging through it the purging waters.
"The renewal has finally come," the narrator tells us. The cleansing makes the ground fertile for the baby, perhaps, but it remains unresolved whether the change can save the narrator, who's also tethered, in her case by a lifeline traced out on her palm by her mother, a line that coils back to an abandoned city, and a girl left behind. - Mai Nardone
Interviews
Maudlin House— “Writer of the Week,” a column by Benjamin Lee, January 2019
Lighthouse Writers Workshop—"Catching Up With Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint" by Sophie Grossman, July 2018
The Rumpus—"Mini-Interview Project #145: Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint" by Joe Scapellato, July 2018
Electric Literature—"Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint's Surreal, Haunting Post-Apocalypse" by Tillman Miller, July 2018
featured in Vol. 1 Brooklyn
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