There are some great proverbs the Karen and the Burmese have, the one’s I’m about to share with you are pretty explicit in their political undertones. Actually let me rephrase that, once the proverb has been explained to you it’s message is explicit, the proverb itself is often an abstract what the?
It goes something like this. “The dog wants to eat the elephants penis but it never reaches the ground”. A bit abstract? Want to know more?
Well basically it can be interpreted like this. The dog is the democracy movement or the ethnic nationalities movement. The elephant is the Burmese military. For many years the democracy movement and the ethnic nationalities movement have been striving for democracy and peace. They jump increasingly higher in their attempts to achieve this but as yet they have been unable to reach the elephant’s penis: ie. democracy.
And another.
The bird says to the elephant. “Please do not destroy my nest and my family by blundering through the forest”.
But the elephant ignores the bird’s plea and destroys it anyway.
So the bird calls on his friend the crow to come and help him. The crow appears and pecks out the eyes of the elephant making him blind. After this the bird’s friend, the fly, appears and lays maggots in the elephant’s bleeding eyes, and the elephant dies from the disease.
The bird represents the Karen and in this proverb they have to think creatively about how to deal with their oppression because physically the elephant is much stronger than the little bird. The bird (the Karen) cannot win through force. So they ask for help from the crow (the international community) and the fly (their fellow countrymen) to work together to get rid of the elephant (the Burmese military).
What is the significance of the particular animals? Padi tells me that the dog or the bird is a peaceful creature, a nurturing and cunning creature, and therefore a good representation of the Karen. The elephant is a big, lumbering, destructuve creature and therefore representative of the Burmese military.
There is a good deal of humour and the dirty joke in many of the Karen proverbs. I think this love of humour is used to relieve some of the trauma they have faced. But it also provides them with a little of the satisfaction needed to continue the struggle, and to survive. Words can be more powerful than swords. The Karen rarely paint themselves as superior or more intelligent in such proverbs, just more creative. In much the same way they rarely portray the Burmese as brutes, rather just stupid. There is somehow a gleeful satisfaction in painting someone as deficient in mental capacity rather than physical capacities.
Does anyone know any others, or perhaps even ways they are used in other countries and cultures?
Hi Rachel, ” The dog want to eat teh elephant penis” is not the Karen Prover. It is Burman proverb. I think you need to change it. We do not want to steal other people’s proverb and make it in to ours.
Each proverb has seven different meanings. When we want to explain something to some one if we talk in a normal way it’ll take two hours. So instead of talking that way the Karen use Proverb instead which is very short and save the time. The elders will not tell us everything. They will say it in proverb and we listen and have to think to understand it. We need to think it by ourselves. So to avoid understand the meaning of the proverb wrongly, we always have to think hard. They train us to use our brain and think by oursevles. But if we are not sure we understand it corectly or not we can ask them and they will explain. I like this way of teaching.
Kwehsay
thanks kyaw kweh. i had placed the burmese up but the system doesn’t like the burmese characters so I’ve removed it for the time being and changed the reference from Karen to Burmese.
A quick question. Do all these proverbs have seven meanings and what is the history of this? Do the 7 meanings fit into specific categories or are they always different?