Burmese writer/actvist Khet Mar, 'made of steel,' settles into City of Asylum on North Side
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Khet Mar, a Burmese writer, by her house in the Mexican War Streets; the mural was painted by her husband and deals with Burmese life and her writing.
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It's hard to imagine, sitting with Khet Mar in her fragrant home on Sampsonia Way, that this is the same world in which prison guards would kick a tiny woman for hours and a short story about loneliness would intimidate the generals.
In City of Asylum Pittsburgh, an enclave in the Central North Side, Khet Mar is safe from persecution but sometimes, she said, her heart aches to be back in Burma.
"Sometimes," she said, her hands stacked like saucers in her lap.
"I want to be helping political prisoners."
The country in Southeast Asia that was officially renamed the Union of Myanmar in 1989 has been gripped by military repression for five decades. It is the country of Aung San Suu Kyi, in whose shadow Khet Mar organized protests, distributed pro-democracy writings and was regularly arrested, beginning in her student years at the University of Yangon.
A poet, essayist and fiction writer, Khet Mar, 42, said her grandmother, whom she adored and lived with as a young girl, "told me stories about colonialism before we went to sleep." The stories of living under British rule sounded almost romantic in comparison to the military junta she grew up under.
Khet Mar -- whose name, like all Burmese names, represents neither a given nor a family name -- is City of Asylum Pittsburgh's third resident writer. She was chosen to come here because her situation was known by several organizations that refer people in need, said Henry Reese, a co-founder of City of Asylum Pittsburgh.
He and his wife, Diane Samuels, founded City of Asylum Pittsburgh in 2004 when they bought a house near their own and fixed it up as a refuge for persecuted Chinese poet Huang Xiang. The couple, whose home is City of Asylum's headquarters, has since renovated homes on the alley for novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya of El Salvador and Khet Mar. Her husband, artist Than Htay Maung, painted a wrap-around mural with Burmese writing on the house where they live with their sons, who are 14 and 10.
First Published March 27, 2011 12:00 am
