“Even when I breathe the sky’s air,
 I am not human like you are.“
-That’s me, a Rohingya. (p. 48)

Hunted. Tortured. Shunned, but still alive.

At some point, we’ve all glimpsed the fleeting images and headlines of Rohingya refugees flash across our screens. But we pause and then scroll on. Mayyu Ali’s gut-wrenching memoir Eradication: A Poet at the Heart of the Rohingya Genocide (co-authored with Emilie Lopes and translated into English by Siba Barkataki), makes us stop, think and rethink. This book is a wake-up call for all those who complacently watch autocratic, brutal regimes walk over their countrymen, preferring to wear a mask of ignorance and forgetting to be human. First published in French in 2022, Eradication shattered my myth of peaceful coexistence and universal brotherhood.

Pain and art have a longstanding relationship. And for every closed door, there’s a new one opening. Ali, living with the chronic pain of being brutally uprooted, let his words become his purpose. With help from French journalist, Emilie Lopes, Ali’s book is a reminder that the pen is mightier than the sword, and faith still anchors shattered souls.

For many of us, genocide is a history lesson, primarily confined to the Holocaust, Hitler, and World War II. But Ali’s story reinforces it is a living nightmare, changing masks with changing eras and finding new geographies.

In his three decades of existence, Ali has survived persecution, walked through the fires of hell with his family and community.

A Childhood Stolen

Ali’s childhood memories in Myanmar’s Arakan region are tender, days spent playing with Buddhist and Hindu neighbours, sharing the same sky, the same fields, the same laughter. Then came the slow corrosion of government propaganda. Military uniforms and maroon robes unleashed terrors that no human should have to go through.

Neighbours turned into aggressors. Familiar faces became threats. The most brutal conflicts, Ali shows, begin not with a bang, but with the quiet, systematic poisoning of trust: “Our own land had become the burial ground of our culture.” (p. 34)

That line sliced through my lazy reading, for it wasn’t just about physical destruction, but a masterful erasure of memory, of belonging, of what makes us human.

The Power of the Pen

Born in a simple household, living in a peaceful neighbourhood, Ali’s dreams were small. His parents were uneducated, so they wanted to educate their children and the children did study to the higher secondary school level. Ali dreamed of becoming a teacher. But discriminatory laws crushed those dreams. His grandfather’s land was confiscated, his brother imprisoned in Saudi Arabia, his father reduced to a fisherman and life was bare survival. Their identity, culture, and livelihood were stripped away before they were forced to flee to Bangladesh.

While his friends pursued university education, Ali found solace in writing. With no Rohingya poets or writers to look up to, he penned his anguish in a journal: “Writing wasn’t a vocation; it was the only solution that I’d found for my disturbed psyche, like a shield that protected me.” (p. 46)

Every word was a defiant gesture against erasure: “They could very well erase my name, my identity, my culture, but writing would allow me to leave an indelible mark on the world.” (p. 49)

His first poem appeared under a pseudonym in a Burmese magazine, and Rahmat Ali became Mayyu Ali, named after the hills where peacocks once danced near his childhood home. For all of us, who take language for granted, this was like a thunderbolt: to write even when the world has declared you non-existent shows remarkable strength. Reading Eradication by Mayyu Ali reminded me that writing is so much more than plain words, it is a shield and survival.

Genocide begins quietly: a revoked birth certificate, a seized plot of land, a slur. Ali recalls being called “Kalar”, a racial insult, and notes the absurdity of being denied a future simply because of religion.

Echoes of History

The scale of the crisis is staggering, around 740,000 Rohingyas fled Myanmar to Bangladesh, creating the world’s largest refugee camp in 2017. Not just being forced to flee, they were tortured ruthlessly,-men, women and girls were raped; children were burnt alive; there are mass graves of men and boys in Myanmar. Just reading this sent shivers down my spine.

Tortured by their own government, rejected by their neighbours, many were forced into labour, became victims of trafficking or casualties of unspeakable trauma. Bereft of money, home, nativity, it’s a wonder that they didn’t lose their sanity. And Ali has recorded all these atrocities in diaries, sent to the United Nations and other humanitarian agencies along with helping foreign journalists visiting the refugee camps.

But what horrified me most was the Myanmar regime twisting Buddhism, a faith rooted in compassion, into a justification for ethnic cleansing. The echoes are unmistakable: Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, the present wars in Israel and Gaza. The ideologies change names, but the brutality remains.

Resilience in Ruin

Yet amid all this, Ali’s resilience shines. Even after their idol Burmese Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi failed them, Ali chose to continue his resistance through words and education.

In the refugee camp, Ali started mental health therapies such as writing and art classes, opened a Facebook page, documented their cultural practices, introduced a Burmese school curriculum in the camps, and finally found the love of his life.

Under death threats by the violent Arakan Army insurgents, he was forced into exile with his wife. His daughter was born during this phase and then the relief came as his asylum request was accepted by Canada. Though reticent about leaving his family, he had little choice left.

To be free from fear, insecurity and to continue the work that would preserve the Rohingya culture, Ali is hopeful that his words will keep the momentum of change alive.

As I closed the last page of Eradication, more questions buzzed in my head. Had Ali managed to meet his parents, siblings and other community members in the camps? How does he perceive his life from here? What will his daughter grow up to be? Why didn’t the Rohingyas leave their god despite this genocide?

A Mirror to Humanity

Ali’s book is more than a memoir. It has given us a vital piece of reality that no future history book can overlook.It’s a lesson reminding us that autocratic regimes don’t just destroy others, they burn their own nations from within. The Rohingya crisis, like the Gaza crisis, is not just a story of persecution, it is about the barbarism that humanity hasn’t outgrown.

I’ve read Ali’s poems on Threads and Instagram, and browsed photographs of the camps on Emilie’s Instagram feed. And it makes me wonder, how can we be the smartest species on the planet if we haven’t understood the value of human dignity, peace and equality?  

About the Author

Poet-activist Mayyu Ali has been campaigning for years to denounce the genocide of his community, the Rohingyas. While living in the refugee camps of Bangladesh, he opened several schools for Rohingya youth and children. He has participated in several award-winning documentaries by BBC, and others, and works with NGOs. In 2019, he cofounded The Art Garden Rohingya, a Rohingya art and poetry project. He has also published two books in English, Exodus and The White Elephant. In 2024, he graduated with a Master of Arts in Global Governance from University of Waterloo. Currently, he serves as a Director of Rohingya Language Preservation Project of Community Rebuilding Centre, seeking to preserve Rohingya language and culture which are at high risks of extinction in the face of genocide in Myanmar and displacement in Bangladesh and other southeast Asian countries.

Emilie Lopes is a French reporter. She has collaborated with numerous newspapers such as Le Figaro, ELLE and L’Obs.

Siba Barkataki is an assistant professor at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Her areas of specialization include Francophone Literature, Indian Indenture Studies and Memory Studies. In 2010, she received the prestigious Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship and in 2015, she was awarded a UGC postdoctoral fellowship for her research in the field of Indian Indenture Studies.

Book Details
Publisher: ‎Pan (Pan Macmillan India)
Language: English
Pages: 248
Price: INR 499
Buy here

You may like to read
Indigenous Knowledge for Disaster Preparedness in Cox’s Bazar
A Long Season of Ashes by Siddhartha Gigoo: A Haunting Memoir
Takeaways from Salima Hashmi’s Memoirs: A Reflective Review
The Company of Violent Men: A South Asian Journalist’s Memoir
Book Review: The Nemesis by Manoranjan Byapari
Book Review: Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh
Book Review: Society Girl by Saba Imtiaz & Tooba Masood-Khan
Finding colours of Ukraine & Poland in India
BOOK REVIEW: THE SHORTEST HISTORY OF ISRAEL AND PALESTINE BY MICHAEL SCOTT-BAUMANN

This post is part of the Bookish League blog hop hosted by Bohemian Bibliophile