Names for Light

I spent almost exactly a year, the first year of my life, in Yangon. This does not make me feel like it is where I am from. I think one should remember the place where one is from. One should have at least a single memory. Though from the nativity story of the awakened one I know that, regardless of what I remember or forget, I will always be connected to the place where I was born. I know from that story and other stories of childbirth that women return to their childhood homes to give birth to their children. The place where one is born, though it may not be the place where one is from, will always be the place where one’s mother is from.

The awakened one’s mother, the queen, however, did not make it back to her childhood home. She gave birth to the awakened one in a grove halfway between the palace where she lived and her parents’ home where she was born. She held on to the branch of a sal tree, and as she was standing, the awakened one emerged from her right side, where a white elephant had touched her in a dream. The awakened one was thus born in an in-between place, neither his mother’s home, nor his father’s, but a grove of flowering trees, the flowers just blooming.

Thirty-six years after the birth and death of my brother, I asked my mother a question I had never asked her before. What was his name?

Not the name I had always known him by, the name my parents called him, a nickname, his home name, which I will not repeat here, outside of the home. Not the name meaning older brother, an endearment, which could even be flirtatious if used on a boy who was not actually one’s older brother or cousin. Not the name my brother must have earned only after his death, since he became a big brother only after he died. Not the name my parents used to tell us about him, the older brother who would always be younger than us.

I was not asking my mother for that name, a name made up for children. I wanted to know the name my parents had given him before he died. The name they had given him at birth, the one that he was meant to carry through a long and complex life.

I am always looking for beginnings. The first that was lost, the brother I never met, the country I cannot remember. I am always looking for the moment when I can enter the stream of myself. It is not the moment of my birth, but long before that. The moment of my parents’ union, their wedding held on a mythical bird floating in an artificial lake, their love that began with a borrowed book, with a handwritten letter. Or the moment of my previous death, in my great-grandfather’s body, hiding in the jungle from the war. Or in a stranger’s body, shot in the streets by the first soldier who pulled the first trigger.

There is often a price to pay for in-betweenness, for finding beauty and resting there, as the awakened one’s mother did, and seven days after his birth, she died. With her death, the awakened one was cut off from the memory of where he was born. In Bamar, the word for womb has the word for home inside of it. The womb is our first home, and many times as a child, I used to rub my head against my mother’s belly and ask if I could go back inside. She would laugh and say I got too big, I wouldn’t fit anymore, and I would laugh, too, but it made me sad. There was no way home, no way back. I was blocked by my own body. Sometimes I wish I had memories of Yangon so that I could claim it. So I could say, Yes, that is where I am from. My sisters have memories, of my grandmother’s cooking, of playing with my grandfather, of attending school. My eldest sister remembered walking to school through the woods, having to pass by the caged pigs, who scared my sister, and once she got lost and ended up spending the evening at a neighbor’s house, unable to find her way home. I have heard their stories so many times it is like their memories are mine, but I know that they are not. I have no memories.

My mother said my brother’s name. She said it soft and quiet, but without hesitation, as if she had been waiting all these years to say it. It was only after his name left her lips, left her body, that my mother seemed to realize that she had spoken it aloud. The spell was broken. I had finally asked the right question.

I had not known that there would be an answer, that my brother would have a different name from the one I had always known him by, that he would have a real name, a name that he was meant to use when he grew into a man. It was as if my mother only remembered this name when I asked her, as if she were surprised by the knowledge she still kept inside her. The name she had given her firstborn child. There was a sadness in her voice when she said it, but also hope. What does it mean? I asked, though I always resented it when strangers asked me the same question about my name. I was no stranger; I had a right to this knowledge.

In the beginning, then, there was my parents’ wedding on Karaweik, a replica of a royal barge, a palatial hall shouldered by two giant birds gliding on the water. The mythical birds golden with red tails, the guardians of my mother’s nightmares. My mother had not wanted an extravagant wedding; it was her father who reserved Karaweik for the reception. Only the best for his daughter, no matter the cost. The cost, my mother believed, was my brother’s life.

My mother believed birds were a bad omen. She had dreams of the barge burning on the lake. A royal barge built long after the royalty was killed or exiled. Birds are terrifying because they upset the hierarchy of the universe. Lowly animals flying close to the heavens, reptilian, winged, celestial and bestial. As a child, I imagined the thirty-one planes of existence suspended above and below one another, the human realm below the celestial realms, and above the realms of animals, hungry ghosts, demons, and hells. Birds flying overhead always made me feel like I was at the bottom of the ocean.

The word for home in Bamar is the same as the word for house. Aain, a dwelling, a shelter, a residence. A hollow word, whereas home is full. Aain, like the sound of a gong, or a singing bowl struck on its side. A sound that opens, that begins. Home sounds like a mouthful, like the feeling of fullness, of bloating, homeland, expanding to cover the earth. One can fall ill from the idea of home, the idea of its loss, homesickness is felt in the body, though it arises from language. There is no abstract concept of home for the Bamar. There is a people, a land, a country, all words that evoke patriotic feelings, but home, aain, is very private, very intimate, and every house is a home, not only the house that belongs to me. Even haunted aains are someone’s homes, the ghosts’, perhaps, for the dead too need places to live. In English, there is no such thing as a haunted home. In this language, all ghosts are unhomed, and people without a home are ghosts.

In the beginning, there was a borrowed book, with a love letter tucked inside. So, as a child I borrowed book after book, from the school library, the public library, and the shelves of generous teachers, in search of that first book and that first letter. I never found the letter, and in its absence, I would fold myself into the books, bury myself in them. A figure of speech, to bury oneself in books, but an accurate one, for reading for me was a bit like dying. When I read, I left my body for a little while and as a ghost haunted others’ lives and watched over them, even inhabited or possessed them. But maybe it was the books that possessed me, that filled my body, so that for years afterward, I was caught in this cycle of acquiring and purging my ghosts, of reading and writing, reading and writing. Dying slowly, dying bit by bit, not until I was dead, but only until I found it: the moment of my beginning, which would not be mine alone, not mine at all, which, I believed, would necessarily exclude me. A moment that took place long before my birth, and long after my death. And though I never found the love letter, I did find bookmarks, scraps of paper, receipts, grocery lists, ticket stubs, and, once, even a polaroid of a girl in the back seat of a car, staring straight into the camera.

My brother’s name, my mother said, means light.

Not a burning, dazzling light, not brightness, but soft and pleasant. Do you understand? my mother asked. I can’t explain.

To me, his name sounded like the word for enter, for inside, win or winn, my mother’s name and my mother’s father’s. A light shining from the inside. A window lit up at twilight, in winter, the snow and the sky the same white-blue and the window a small glimpse of yellow, glowing softly in the quiet cold. Clear and wide vacant space, another translation I found of my brother’s name. The space between the stars, or between the earth and the moon. The light that travels that wide expanse.

♦

Excerpt from Names for Light: A Family History. Copyright © 2021 by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, graywolfpress.org.