EXODUS: Between Genocide and Me

In a green piece of land sandwiched between Mayu mountains and impassable tropical rivers in Myanmar’s west Rakhine, Mayyu Ali was born in 1991. Even before he knew the word nationality, his birth certificate was confiscated during a paramilitary operation called the Nasaka against his Rohingya people. As he grew older, he encountered a world where every human right was denied to them. He learnt how they were marginalized and discriminated against religiously, socially, politically only for being who they are. In 2010, he was rejected to be a school teacher in Myanmar while his Buddhist friends pursued all dreams. During the anti-Muslims riots in Rakhine State in June, 2012, Mayyu was stopped attending Sittwe University to pursue his degree. In the violence on 25 August, he fled neighboring Bangladesh. He is now one of those hundreds of thousands of Rohingya survivors who were haunted by stories of gang rape, mass killings and arson attacks that prompted the world’s fastest exodus since the 1994’s Rwanda genocide.In his young age, he faced many of the ways a human can suffer on this planet. His boyhood was ruined up in bitterness. His dreams were crushed and hope was shattered. His poetry book ‘EXODUS’ depicts pains, sorrows and vicissitudes of Rohingya lives behind genocide against his people in Myanmar. His poems reflect hues and loses of people during the deadly journey through the ranges of Mayyu mountain, barbaric ironed-fences at border and the weeping Naf river. Besides, his poetry is replete with suffering and despair of Rohingya people in displacement, exile and refugee camps across the world.