Fighting for everyone’s mother: What the disappeared in Myanmar still ask of us

Originally published on ABC There is a picture from the evening I keep returning to. Three people are leaning into one another, heads almost touching, laughing. And in their hands, more photographs. That is what they were bent over, what had drawn them in so close. Old pictures, from long before any of this. The young faces of people who are now missing, a daughter and a father, a mother and her child, all of them decades younger and free, faces from before the country closed around them. Three people who each carry a missing parent, looking together at images of those parents when they were young. The photographer caught them laughing. You would not guess, looking at it, what each of them holds. A father in prison. A mother detained, her whereabouts unknown. And between them, a man who was himself held for nearly two years before the world bargained him free. We had gathered at a leisure centre in the western suburbs of Sydney to mark a birthday. Not a celebration exactly, because the woman whose birthday it was could not be with us. She is Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate who led Myanmar’s democratic opening, detained by the military since the coup of February 2021 and held ever since in conditions the world is not permitted to verify, with no reliable proof that sheis alive. Her supporters now speak simply of a campaign for proof of life. She is where she has been for years, held somewhere we are not permitted to know, her age advancing in a silence the world has mostly stopped noticing. And yet the room was warm. That is the thing I want to try to describe, and to think through, because it took me a while to understand what I was seeing, and longer still to understand what itasks of the rest of us. I had come expecting grief, and grief was there. But it sat alongside something I did not have a name for initially. People who had every reason to be hardened were instead soft with one another. They brought food and pressed it on you. They embraced for too long. They passed the old photographs hand to hand, naming who was who, laughing at the haircuts and the youth in the faces, holding each other’s babies. And that was the word that finally arrived, standing in that hall: family. Not as a metaphor. As the literal thing happening in the room. I had been playing a song that week, on a loop, the way you do when something you cannot quite name needs a soundtrack. A remixed cover, Afro Soul over the bones of Stromae’s Papaoutai. Papa, où t’es? Papa, where are you?