ZEKE Fall 2019

BOOK
REVIEWS
NO PLACE ON EARTH
Photographs by Patrick Brown,
text by Jason Motlagh and
Matthew Smith
FotoEvidence Press, 2019
208 pages | $60
In August 2017,
Myanmar’s army
attacked hundreds
of thousands
of ethnic Rohingya
Muslims in northern
Rakhine State,
killing civilians,
raping women and
burning villages. Hundreds of thousands
fled across the Naf River to neighboring
Bangladesh. The violence against the
Rohingya had been percolating since
the 1970s in one of the longest planned
genocides in human history.
After the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides
of the 1990s, the world proclaimed
“never again.” Once again, genocide has
been perpetrated on civilians, but this time
there has been no Truth and Reconciliation
Commission nor International Criminal
Court prosecutions. None of the perpetrators
have been held accountable. The
Rohingya lost their citizenship in Myanmar
and have lived in protracted statelessness
and displacement, living in internment
camps in Myanmar or sprawling camp settlements
across the border in Cox’s Bazar
in Bangladesh, denser than Manhattan.
Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu
Kyi’s administration oversaw the genocide
and has done nothing to help the survivors.
But this doesn’t mean that the Rohingya
don’t have a voice.
Photographer Patrick Brown was living
in Thailand in 2017 and was able to
immediately travel to Bangladesh as the
first survivors arrived there. This book is a
powerful account of what he saw, serving
as important evidence and required reading
for policymakers who have turned a
blind eye to this war crime.
“Genocide is about the survivors—the
living. The survivors in these pages bear
witness to the horror ..they are a testament
of the enduring will to live and the
resilience of life” says Matthew Smith,
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of
Fortify Rights, in a moving opening essay.
Many of the photographs in No Place
on Earth are dark—both in tone and in
subject matter. As one survivor, Nazmal
Islam said “we don’t have any light in
our life, everything is dark.” The opening
pages depict ominous and thick monsoon
clouds over dark seas. These are followed
by spreads of buried shrouds, women in
veils, brightly colored parasols against
the night sky, candlelight gatherings in the
camps and moonlight shadows. Despite
the grimness, Patrick’s photos still manage
to find beauty. (One criticism: the captions
carrying vital background information
come pages after the photographs, causing
the reader to have to flip back and
forth to get the context.)
Telling the stark truth of the Rohingya
survivors today, Brown includes devastating
children’s drawings of the violence,
blood, fires, and helicopters flying over
their villages. Veteran human rights
investigator, Peter Bouckhaert, writes how
the children will forever be afflicted by the
severity of their trauma. “We confront the
depths of human depravity towards fellow
human beings. What these children have
witnessed will leave them forever haunted.
But it should haunt us as well.”
Then, there are the riveting testimonies
and stories of survivors that each read
like a thriller, accompanied by Brown’s
stunning portraits. Rajuma Begum from
the village of Tula Toli recounts how she
was separated from her husband (later
reunited), her son thrown into a fire, how
she was raped, but managed to escape.
These harrowing and very detailed
accounts were collected by Jason Motlagh,
writer and director at Blackbeard Media.
The darkness lifts a bit and the images
turn to skies awash with beautiful sunsets.
A peaceful portrait of a baby resting on his
father’s chest as they recline in the camp.
Children play on a makeshift ferris wheel
celebrating Eid after Ramadan.
Unexpectedly, Brown includes full-page
portraits of machetes, sickles, axes, and
hoes--the handmade tools of the Rohingya
that were used to farm their lands and harvest
their gardens that were taken from them
by the military and wielded against them as
weapons of war. Today, these tools resume
their original purpose: helping clear trees,
build bamboo shacks, till small vegetable
plots and rice paddies and bury the dead.
Returning to Myanmar is not an option
for Rohingya unless they renounce their ethnicity.
As one survivor says, “We have no
place on earth where we can find peace.”
But Brown says, “Photography forces
a confrontation, a reckoning by putting a
face to the cruelty. These were witnesses
and they live on.” It is also an attempt to
show that the oppressors haven’t won.
—Barbara Ayotte
54 / ZEKE FALL 2019