Interview: Mac McClelland's Battle For Burma
By Marcus Gilmer in Arts & Entertainment on Mar 9, 2010 5:30PM
Mac McClelland is on a mission. She's on a mission to help bring to light a war that's been raging for decades, resulting in humans rights abuses that would horrify the normal person, but a war, that goes unnoticed day after day. Her mission is Burma. But she's done more than talk, she's spent time in Thailand working with refugees and now she's sharing their ongoing story in For Us, Surrender Is Out Of the Question. Part memoir, part historical narrative, McClelland delicately weaves her own story working with a memorable, sometimes rambunctious, group of refugees while also detailing the history of Burma's ongoing war between ethnic insurgents and its government, deftly intertwining the two stories into a narrative that's striking in its ability to be humorous one moment and shocking the next but never betraying either the gravity of the situation or the spirit of the refugees she's assisting.
McClelland, an Ohio native and later a Katrina survivor [full disclosure: Mac and I first crossed paths in New Orleans], now lives in San Franciso where she writes for Mother Jones. As she hit the road to promote For Us, Surrender... (read an excerpt here), she took a few minutes to talk to us about why she went to Burma in the first place, the delicate balance of tone in her writing, and how she feels about the war in Burma so often being overlooked.
Mac McClelland, Wednesday March 10, 7:30 p.m., The Grafton, 4530 N. Lincoln Ave, Free
Chicagoist: Can you give us some background to how you wound up going to Thailand and got involved with the Burma issue in the first place?
Mac McClelland: I was goofing around on the internet and saw something about these huge refugee camps in Thailand that were full of refugees from Burma but I couldn’t really find out much about what was going on. This was before I started grad school and after I finished grad school, I kept coming back to it. I guess it was haunting me that there was this thing going on that I didn’t know anything about that seemed like a really big deal. So I went back to it and it had gotten worse but there still wasn’t that much information about it. I emailed one of these organizations and asked them if they needed a volunteer in Thailand and they said, “Sure, come on.” They didn’t really tell me much about who worked there or what they did there so I basically just showed up and tried to figure out what was going on and how I could help.
C: How long were you there?
MM: I was in Thailand for six weeks the first time, which is the time-frame of the book. I’ve been back since but that first time was six weeks.
C: What ultimately drove you to write the book?
MM: The guys - the refugees - that I lived with were the most amazing people in the world. It was the characters that made me want to want to write this the most. They’re hilarious, they’re hot, they’re drunk, they love Jesus, and they have crazy jobs where they risk their lives all the time. So they were the impetus for it but when I started looking into it, doing tons of research and devouring all the information and history that I could, I found the history of the country [Burma] was really interesting, the history of their war - between the Burmese government and these ethnic insurgents - was interesting. It’s the longest war in the world, 61 years old, and no one’s ever heard of it. All this information, the circumstances, surrounding these characters was just as compelling as they were.
C: The book is a mix of personal narrative and a historical account of the ongoing battle in Burma. The historical background is obviously important for context of the personal narrative. What was the most difficult aspect of writing the book, striking that balance?
MM: The hardest part of doing both was selling the idea. Editors responded, “You can either do a memoir or you can do history but you cannot do both.” It took some time to find someone who understood my vision, which [laughs] of course I thought was brilliant. I thought I could do it, I just wasn’t sure how. And I ended up at Soft Skull and found someone that thought it could work well. But even when I first talked to my editor there, they asked, “So how are you going to do this?” and I said, “I…don’t know.”
I moved different pieces of it around, different pieces of the narrative. And as it turned out, I did parallel narratives, alternating with each chapter. I kept the history shorter because it’s harder to follow that information than to follow this story of these guys. When I had the first readers go through it, they didn’t really notice the switch between narratives and that was the first time I really knew that we had managed to strike a pretty good balance. I was really excited about that because both parts are really important to the story.
C: One thing that kept coming up for me when I read the book was the tone. I’ve read your writing before, but there’s almost an… I don’t know, irreverent tone in your memoir chapters that spills into the historical background chapters. On the one hand, it seems essential to the cohesive nature of the book. But on the other, did you ever worry about it turning readers off because it seems like you weren’t taking the subject - the war and the human rights issues - seriously? Did you ever have to tinker with the narrative with that in mind.
MM: Oh it was a huge concern. Partly because when I was pitching the book, my agent would forward me these emails back from editors, “This is a nice idea and it seems like an important story but her voice is really obnoxious” or “The tone of this is scathing” and they hated it. So I definitely had this crisis of confidence - was it too “voicey” or too strong. I called some friends around here [San Francisco] while I was writing it and told them, “I’m worried my voice is out of control, that it is too irreverent, that it’s too…not dry.”
It’s sort of ridiculous that you’d worry about your prose being too lively but because of some of the feedback I’d been given…At the same time, I feel that if that proposal had been coming from a man, they probably would not have reacted so strongly, that there’s this really strong voice in the narrative. But that’s [laugh] my feminist bias and I can’t actually prove that.
But when it was all said and done I went back and read those chapters- you know, nobody wants to read about history, nobody cares what happened in Southeast Asia in 9 B.C. So when I went back and reread those chapters the fact that I had written them the way that I usually write, which is essentially the way that I talk, these were so much easier for me to read. So I decided to stick with it and I had an editor who was really supportive and he told me, “Don’t worry about it, just write the way that you write, and if we have to turn you down later, we will.” I’m glad that I stuck by my guns with that even though it was really hard because I was worried other people would not take to it at all.
C: So you’re happy with how it all came out?
MM: I am! I’m actually - and you know me, you know I’m pathologically confident - I knew these guys made an amazing story. No matter who’s telling it, the information, it’s so good. And the characters are so good so I had a lot of faith in that. When I had to reread it for my final edits, I thought that it had turned out better than I had expected. Especially because it’s so important to me to tell these guys stories and I love them. It’s so critical that people understand what’s going on there, I owed it to them to produce something that would be readable for the word to get out.
C: Do you still talk to those guys - those refugees - on any sort of regular basis?
MM: Some more often than others. They’re scattered all over the place and a lot of time it’s hard to get in touch with them and language barriers are much tougher over phone than in person. But I’ve seen a bunch of them since my first visit and I still keep up with them on Facebook and email.
C: How many times have you been back since that original visit?
MM: I went in 2006 and then again for a month in 2008. I was in Thailand and crossed over into Burma both times.
C: Are you going back any time soon?
MM: I’d like to go back because it’s really dear to me and there are still people there I really care about. But I probably won’t be back for a while because of work. I’ll definitely go back but it’ll be a while.
C: There were the riots in 2007 but aside from that it seems that this is constantly in the background. Do you worry about the way this war has been overshadowed, the way we tend to consume these events - like the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile this year - and then eventually move on like nothing happened?
MM: I do, actually. It keeps me up at night. The thing about Burma is that so many people have never heard about it in the first place. I’m so obsessed and so immersed as far as Burma is concerned - I’ll be doing something, like brushing my teeth, and listening to the radio and they’ll mention something in Yemen that's driving refugees out of there and I’m like, “Okay, why are we reporting this but not reporting the very similar thing - except ten times worse - that’s going on in Burma?”
It’s the great untold story and I don’t understand how it has managed to stay completely out of the news because the information is so horrific you would think it would be juicier to a reporter. But then news things come that are more immediate, more important because this war between ethnic insurgents and the Burmese government has been going on for 60 years. That’s not news. It’s the opposite of news.
But it still happens, the atrocities that are committed every day are so severe that if you compare disasters- they’re all crucial stories, but if you’re comparing disasters, you can put Burma up against anything that happened in any day and it would be news-worthy from a strict humanitarian point of view. So it’s just a matter of getting the word out and people understanding the situation. And the information out there, it’s just not as visible and that’s what I’m trying to do: make it more visible.