I just heard Aung San Suu Kyi and her Desert Island Discs. I enjoyed the choice of Here Comes the Sun, and of Pachelbel’s Canon. I was intrigued by her choice of a Tom Jones standard, which actually she had not heard before (!). I was not so happy with John Lennon’s Imagine – sadly becoming more of a dirge which has not stood up to time, I think.
I was very struck by her assertion that her father was her “first love and best love”. She was two years old when her father was assassinated, so I am fairly sure her memories of him are all received ones. I then think of her reasons to “love the army” – which essentially centre around the fact that this is “his” army, her father’s army.
Her life and drive thus seem to me to be a powerful meditation on all-pervading presence of an invisible, absent father ( who, moreover, was sacrificed in blood for the sake of a people) from whom she feels blessed by an unconditional love.
Maybe because of this, those Bible readings
she did for her ailing Grandfather spoke to her in equal measure to the
teachings of Buddha. Either way, what also comes through – and her voice
betrayed this often – is a hardness against sentiment and familial love, which,
in her life, has had to play second fiddle absolutely. I wonder how her sons
are doing.
The spiritual life which
Aung San Suu Kyi embraces is one which puts the whole business of family life
and personal relationships in a second-place perspective.
The programme is here
I came across these few lines from 2013 while clearing out old
files — fragments from long‑ago emails that I can never quite bring myself to
delete. They have the same quality as forgotten photographs: a recognition and
reminder of the people we were and the times we lived in.
These particular lines were written after listening to Aung
San Suu Kyi’s Desert Island Discs. I remembered her assured voice, her curious
choice of a song she had never heard, and the way she spoke of her father — a
man she lost at two — as her “first love and best love.” A love for an absence.
It was interesting how how this inherited devotion shaped her loyalties. It was “his” army, her father’s army.
As I wrote at the time: I wonder how her sons are doing.
The years that followed cast a harsh light on that
intuition. Suu Kyi’s silence during the Rohingya crisis, her refusal to acknowledge the suffering of those outside her
inherited circle — all of it suggested an ordering of affections in which the
symbolic stood before the human, the nation before the neighbour. Augustine
would have called it a question of “ordered loves,” though the idea hardly
needs a name to be recognised.
Her Desert Island Discs recollections have plenty of stories of a former cheerful, connected and happy family life. And yet here she is in later life, feted by all who admire her political stance and battles for justice, and her obvious sacrifices which follow in the footsteps of that absent father.
Confucian thought seems to be useful here. It begins with the near: the family, the household and the daily rituals that cultivate attention and care. Confucius is wary of devotion directed toward distant abstractions.
Seen through that perspective, Suu Kyi’s filial piety appears as a love shaped by myth rather than relationship. This devotion enabled her to make those heroic and extreme sacrifices, but in making those sacrifices, she cut through Confucian order, and so in spite of her stand against tyranny, she lost the Mandate of Heaven - expressed in large part by the loss of goodwill from the West - which could and should have seen a more fruitful outcome for her sacrifices and for the country of Myanmar.
