“Behind the Barbed Wire” by Leila Zak
Leila Zak is a 16-year-old student living in Hong Kong. She is an avid writer, activist, and lover of foreign languages and cultures. Through her initiative Flowers for the Future, she designs and delivers monthly lessons, book discussions, and creative writing workshops to girls in Kabul, Afghanistan. She also regularly works with refugees in her city, and their stories are often reflected in her writing — hence the subject matter of her debut novel, Displaced and Erased. Self-published earlier this year, this work of historical fiction narrates a period of ongoing history in Myanmar — the Rohingya Refugee Crisis — through the eyes of a Rohingya adolescent to whom everyday atrocities have become a new normal.
Author Foreword:
This piece, an excerpt from Leila's novel, is loosely based on stories from real refugees — one of whom, named Azira, she had the opportunity to meet and converse with in person. The excerpt narrates the central protagonist's first encounter with the military and one of the many open-air prisons that exist across Myanmar, in which over 100,000 Rohingya are currently detained. Leila's objective was to employ the power of language to galvanize readers of different backgrounds and upbringings to empathize — and more importantly, to act — in the face of decades of compounding injustice.
Gaunt and hollow-eyed, they stared through the mesh: people who didn’t look like people, enshrouded by a sickness that seemed to cling to the air. They were stick-thin, no more than skin and bone, and swimming in a scent so rancid I could taste it through the rain. Some stood hunched over with their hands on their knees, while others were keeled over on the ground, or leaning on one another for support. What each one of them shared, though, was the same hopeless acceptance staining the little life they had left in their eyes.
They were desensitized, more animal than human, trapped in a communal cage, and left to bathe in their own sick. They barely blinked as they looked up to receive my arrival, and through the lethargic mist of shock and fear, they looked hours—if not minutes—away from death.
Further back inside the enclosure, a group of four men were face-to-face with the ground, suspended above the wet earth by nothing other than their hands and toes. They were forced to do push-up after push-up, over and over again, at the mercy of none other than the two young soldiers standing in listless cruelty over them.
I watched in horror as one of them collapsed into the earth, endowed with relief for no more than a couple of seconds before pushing himself back into formation with terrified alacrity. As the soldiers began to swing their whips, I couldn’t suppress my grimace. The man’s back was made a battlefield as he was subjected to an endless series of whips and lashes that seemed to never stop coming. I wanted to cover my ears, to muffle the sound, but I was locked into place. I couldn’t move.
The longer I looked, the more I felt like I was going to collapse, too. There was a woman with two hollow caverns, gaping depressions where her cheeks should have been, clinging to the steel brambles that divided her from the outside world. Desperation marred her trembling hands as the fence rattled weakly beneath her grip. Despair, so raw that I had to look twice, distorted her gaze as it met mine, eyes imploring, begging me to do something—anything—to get her out. As if I could.
It was only when the soldiers tired of swinging that the whipping from behind her drew to a pause. But even so, the men labored on, their muscles rippling in fearful compliance, enduring it all in a silence that described their pain louder than any curse, groan, or grimace could.
I couldn’t bear to watch it any longer. I forced myself to tear my gaze away, but wherever I looked, there was only more suffering. It was a soldier’s playground—a sandbox enclosed by guards and barbed wire where shovels and toys were replaced by whips, rifles, and machine guns.
As I stared at the pitiful creatures, stunned into stupefaction, I couldn’t help but realize something—a nagging revelation that drew goosebumps to my skin: they didn’t look like they were
ethnically Burmese. And at that thought, a shudder of icy foreboding was sent rippling through me. They looked like Nadia, they looked like my brothers, and... well, they looked like me. It was then that an icy cocktail of dread and understanding flooded over me. I willed myself to shake my acquiescence away; I couldn’t be indecisive—not now. I willed myself to run, but the fists shackling me into place were too tight.
Without taking even another moment to think, I conjured up the will and the breath to scream. I opened my mouth, my chest on fire, and let my voice split open the sky. Making use of the gloved hands holding me down as support, I drove my arms into theirs, and, suspended in mid-air, began to kick, batter, and thrash. Commotion ripped through the three soldiers and I, and in a flurry of arms, gloved hands, and weapon shafts, I wasted no time in ripping myself away from the paths of the flying hands hurtling toward me. They were trying to stop me in my tracks, but I wouldn’t let that happen. I wouldn’t freeze this time—not again.
And so, I took off, relying on chance alone to work in my favor. And, as if fate itself was at play, I managed to barrel straight into the soldier on my left as he fumbled to get me back under his grip. Panic drew a swarm of butterflies with burning wings into my chest, but even despite how it burned, I forced myself to extend my stride, propelling one leg after the other as far as each pace would take me. Flames were licking up my legs as I ran, but there was no way I was going to stop now.
They had started running too. The soldier I had crashed into swung his arms in a clumsy attempt to intercept my path, to which I had just managed to swerve out of the way. Sliding out of arm’s reach, I heard yelling above the thunder thrumming through the sky, but it only gave me reason to run faster. The wind was liberating, rushing through my hair as I hared down the muddy path and into the brush. I caught a glimpse of Nadia as she waited for me, poised to pick up her pace as soon as I’d reached her ground, and the second I did, we took off together, not daring to look back.
I embraced the rain as my feet sunk into the muddy ground, offering brief footholds that stabilized me against the raging wind. The jungle, flying by us as we ran with the storm, was a swathe of green and brown, undergrowth and overgrowth, land and sky, as it soared with us at our sides. The wind, carrying the storm—and us‚ our lives—drove us on through the suffocating foliage, and as we neared a hollow that opened out into the plain ahead, the sinking feeling that had submerged itself within my chest finally seemed to lift. Until then I hadn’t dared turn around. I couldn’t bring myself to rip myself from the reverie of relief and exhilaration washing over me. Then I turned around, and the gunshots started blasting.
The sound of bullets being fired split the air in two, commanding silence through even the sickening clamor of the storm. My ears seemed to burst as blood roared inside of them, and each blast filled my mouth with the overwhelming reek of earth as it struck through bark and fern alike time and time again.
Run: that was the only thought raging through my mind.
Run faster, I urged. But at the same time, I was running out of breath. Breathe in, run, breathe out, repeat. The cycle was never-ending.
Dancing through the undergrowth and choking on the fear that rolled off of us in waves, it became an increasingly hopeless effort attempting to dodge the bullets hurtling past. I stiffened as one whizzed past my ear. Any closer, and it would have ripped right through me. I fought to breathe, but as much as I heaved, I could only take in so much air with every breath. It was no use; we were slowing down.
