Names for Light

“Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint’s acute language casts a constellation of birth-charts, which in turn broadcasts light through the generations of a remarkable family story. Names for light celebrates storytelling’s role in survival without excluding the animating presences of absence and silence. Here, past and present converge, creating a brilliance that lights up the limits of what can be known. A guidebook for every world – above, below, between – Names for light is a stunning achievement.
”

“History, like light, is porous, multitudinous, endlessly haunted. Names of Light gives form to the unresolved and inaccessible remnants of the past, all of the ghosts that are proliferated just by our moving. We are constantly ghastly and ghostly, the text reminds us, and the indeterminacy of flesh is the indeterminacy of family and legacy. Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint is one of the most remarkable writers of our time, and Names of Light is a piercing and heartbreaking revelation.”

“Thirii Myint’s Names for Light is a reincarnation of Thirii Myint, who is a reincarnation of her great-grandfather, the son of a princess, each version of self a sly haunting. A fairy tale of displacement, this book cradles imagined homes and remapped homelands—unmappable and pure. Myint’s geographies and her syntax will echo inside you like luminous ghosts: opulent and ruthless and profound, like drowned sapphires waiting to be reunited with the wind.”

“In sharp, clear-cut prose, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint refracts the structural violence and long reach of colonialism through the prism of her family’s history. Each page is a lens held up to light and rotated, inspected, and held in mind. A gorgeous book.”

“Thirii is driving an important autobiographical rickshaw into the 21st century. Her task with Names for Light is to be alternative, to use ghosts and reincarnations and Spanish-speaking-Asians as vehicles that hope to break the barrier and drive beyond the grammar of immigrant porn. Her work is obediently exploratory and layered, rich in research and imagination. Thirii’s zany and inventive Names for Light is also designed to challenge one’s concept of immigrant privation: how to make its nuance absence visible and social-emotionally available without succumbing to cliché and memoiristic predictability. Painted not in ash and alternating between first person and third narration, there is so much here Thirii is willing to make visible: emotional ethnic intelligence, Bamar consciousness, high child mortality rates, infidelity that behaves more closely to death, Sittwe, 8888 ayekhin, love missives delivered in a borrowed book, matriarchal sacrifices, Spanish speaking Asians, vomiting ghosts that live in mirrors, weaponized eating disorders, gambling, migraines, maybe Boston, maybe Madrid, maybe South Bend, maybe Providence, a place where no chickens are left behind, a place where imagination and memory get reborn, reincarnated, reenacted, a place where ghosts can pretend to be photographs. As you can see so clearly for all double immigrants: her ambition is snow, snow falling. Let her lead the way. Into the light that is her brother and beyond. ”