The diaspora turns the lens on itself: the work is not the applause, it is folding the chairs. A poem by Ko Ko Aung.
This poem was written for Myanmar’s diaspora and resistance community, and for myself as part of it. Since the 2021 coup, those of us living abroad have carried our grief through organising: events, vigils, fundraisers, submissions, the long, unglamorous work of keeping a cause alive from a distance. That work has held us together, but it has also strained us. We argue over whose name comes first, who was thanked and who was not, who did the work, and who claimed it. This poem, “Cohesion,” is an honest, at times uncomfortable, look at that pattern. It is not written in blame but in self-examination, and its argument is simple: the regime, the Department, and the politicians are not our hardest problem. We are. And we can be something else, as we have been before, in smaller rooms and on harder nights. I offer it in the hope it might prompt reflection, and I would welcome disagreement.
Cohesion: for a community that keeps saying it wants to come together
Everyone agrees we need to come together.
No one agrees on the order of the names.
Look around the room. Count the chairs. Notice who carried them in. Notice who is sitting in the front row asking why their organisation was not mentioned first.
We have built a habit of counting credit more carefully than we count the dead.
We send messages that begin with with respect and end with grievance and arrive the day before or the day after, never the week before when the work began.
We give advice like weather. We tell each other to slow down, be inclusive, take care, from the comfort of chairs we did not help carry in.
We say we should do more and then we wait for someone else to say alright, I will.
We say the word community like it is one thing.
It is not one thing.
It is the people who drove forty minutes to set up and left before anyone could thank them, and it is the people who shared the post and called it our work.
It is the group chat where someone will write the village is gone and someone else, three messages later, will ask a question about a poster.
We are not bad. We are scattered, and tired, and holding so tightly to the little we have left that sometimes we cannot tell the difference between being overlooked and being erased.
This is the wound talking. We all carry it.
But the wound is not a strategy. And grievance is not a contribution.
If we want a movement we have to stop auditing it and start building it.
If we want to be a people we have to do the unglamorous work of being one, which is not the part where the choir sings and the room weeps, but the part where someone stays back to fold the chairs and nobody posts about it.
The regime is not our hardest problem. The Department is not our hardest problem. The politicians who cannot find us on a map are not our hardest problem.
We are.
And we can be something else.
We have done it before, in smaller rooms, on harder nights, when there was nothing to win and we showed up anyway.
That is the country we are trying to remember.
We do not get there by being right with each other.
We get there by being there for each other.
So bring the chairs. Bring the food. Bring the quiet, unposted, uncredited hours.
Bring whatever you have that does not need your name on it.
That is the work.
That has always been the work.
Ko Ko Aung is a Myanmar-born, Sydney-based immigration lawyer and writer.
He works closely with refugee and diaspora communities and writes on Myanmar diaspora themes.
