A glance inside
Matthew Harrison
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The Lizard Cage, by Karen Connelly (Random House Canada, 516 pp., $34.95)
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Karen Connelly talks about the Burmese tales she put into The Lizard Cage
We don't hear much about Burma these days. More recently known as Myanmar, the country's ruling military junta is equal to North Korea's Kim Jong-iI or Iraq's former dictator Saddam Hussein in terms of cruelty. But with little in terms of strategic value in which to entice the rest of the world to take notice, the tiny country, nestled in between India, China and Thailand, is largely forgotten. "There is this black cloud over it, and even though Burma shares significant borders with those three countries we seem to not see it when we look at a map of that region," says Governor-General's Literary Award winner Karen Connelly in a phone conversation about her debut novel, The Lizard Cage.
But personal stories do escape from time to time, often collecting on the border between Burma and Thailand where fleeing Burmese refugees recall their experiences. Others' tales are kept alive by aunts, uncles, parents, spouses and children who are all in some way connected to the national prison experience of the Burmese people. "You never had to go six degrees of separation to find someone who was connected to somebody in prison or had been imprisoned... That's an incredible characteristic of being Burmese," Connelly tells me.
One political prisoner in particular - Ma Thida, a young female writer who was sentenced to solitary confinement for writing short stories - caught Connelly's attention in 1995. "I've always been fascinated by that accident of geography. Where you're born makes such a huge
difference. We [Thida and Connelly] share such close parallels in our lives and yet she was imprisoned for 20 years," says the author.Connelly begins her novel from the outside looking into Burma: Near the Thai border, a Buddhist youth, fleeing prison, is brought before some unknown men and asked to talk about Teza, a political prisoner he knew on the inside.
"Forbidden to write or receive letters, he [Teza] has devised dozens of ways to send a message," writes Connelly in The Lizard Cage. "Every political prison has an elaborate fantasy of messages. Sometimes, the right moment never comes, or the message gets trapped in the cell with the man who wrote it, incriminating him as only words can. But sometimes the messages escape, slip through to the other halls, where friends live. Sometimes the words pass through the first brick wall surrounding the prison, and the second one. They move secretly through the great iron gates. Hands take the place of the prisoner's legs. Messages walk out into the world and speak."
Connelly's poetic prose and her meticulous details - from the hundreds of lizards Teza eats raw to his prized contraband of random bits of newspaper that his cheroots come wrapped in - transform his cage into a world that's impossible not to become intimate with. Despite not having actually experienced the grim realities of a Burmese prison, Connelly delivers a powerful dose of realism only slightly offset by the contrived plot.
Otherwise, The Lizard Cage is a powerful novel that gives Burma, in the author's words, "a place in the popular imagination in the West."
Karen Connelly will be giving a reading at Nicholas Hoare Books (419 Sussex Drive) on December 6 at 7:30 p.m.
