Myanmar Issue |

Exteriors and Interiors: The Women

Mae Yway

A collaboration between Mae Yway & Nandita Jaishankar*

The photographs speak through silences. Each picture, framed in monochrome tells the story of a different woman.

They are everywhere –
Women pasted steadfast to the wall,
people’s favourite posters, billboards and ads; Silhouettes of women,
Coy women,
Painted women smiling over rattan partitions

Who is she?

The woman who rides the train utterly depleted? Is she like Tin May from Nwan Hlya Ein A Pyan**? And who is she, this young mother working hard to feed her child?

Eyes cast down, hands that don’t stop toiling, Despite all, a woman of one against the crowd.

But when the day is done
everything falls away.
Possessor of mountains in symphony with plains, sinuous, graceful vales,
the woman is a landscape laid bare.
Light floods across her breast;
She is a country unto herself.

She waits, poised, for the perfect moment. For under these curves,
tectonic plates can be found.

Marylise-Vigneau-2

Marylise Vigneau, From the series Ma Bai Dar, Yangon, 2014-15 Digital