Suu Kyi

What doesn't come across so well in a video, or at all when she speaks in English, is the love and lightness with which Aung San Suu Kyi communicates with her Burmese people.  She knows how to wrap an audience around her finger, but honor them as she does so, by high regard and a kind of giving of herself.  The reserve of her English-speaking style is reversed when she speaks Burmese.  All is serious, honest, even highbrow, yet there is a sense of play, of joy, of peaceful strength flowing to the people.  She can answer a serious question with stories that build through crescendos of laughter.  Some anecdotes, many folk takes.

Idiomatic Burmese is especially a matter of constant allusions to a common font of folk tales and proverbs.  Suu Kyi pushes this further by not only alluding to these proverbs and tales as static cultural references, but diving in and adjusting them, making them funnier, fresher, and more pointed.  The effect on a Burmese audience is when she does this to transfix them.  It is as if she has taken the cultural furniture familiar to all and made it come gently but definitely to life.

This would be offensive if she misappropriated the proverbs, or indeed if she wasn't so much held in awe.  But because she is held in awe, and because she does do it gently, her breathing of life into these cultural proverbs and tales works.  That is one of the ways - only one, but what a way - in which she has come to embody the Burmese people.  She breathes life into the shared cultural heritage and by means of it drives home points of responsibility and hope for the future, of shared purpose and recognition of need.  It is the glory of folk tales and proverbs to be so used.

There is something of Lincoln in all this.  Why hadn't I seen that before?  Is it because I could not imagine anyone even comparing with Lincoln?  Because so much of his place in my mind is defined by his peculiarity, his glorious strangeness?  Probably, but she does compare.  (Rather as Mandela always recalled Washington to me.)

Her pitch for non-militaristic, non-violent change (in Burmese) was her own take on the means/end trope.  Said she: the means define the end.

(She also has that mystical quality that comes of her long house arrest and release.  Assassinated political leaders become martyrs, political saints.  But are dead.  Her arrest gave her some of that - in this case deserved - halo, but left her alive.  She has something of the resurrection about her.  It is almost too much.  You can see why the Tatmadaw feared her, and how, in fearing either to release or to kill her, they made her more fearsome.  What a demon she would be if devoted to political evil and not to good!)