Originally published on ABC
There is a picture from the evening I keep returning to. Three people are leaning into one another, heads almost touching, laughing. And in their hands, more photographs. That is what they were bent over, what had drawn them in so close. Old pictures, from long before any of this. The young faces of people who are now missing, a daughter and a father, a mother and her child, all of them decades younger and free, faces from before the country closed around them.
Three people who each carry a missing parent, looking together at images of those parents when they were young. The photographer caught them laughing. You would not guess, looking at it, what each of them holds. A father in prison. A mother detained, her whereabouts unknown. And between them, a man who was himself held for nearly two years before the world bargained him free.
We had gathered at a leisure centre in the western suburbs of Sydney to mark a birthday. Not a celebration exactly, because the woman whose birthday it was could not be with us. She is Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate who led Myanmar’s democratic opening, detained by the military since the coup of February 2021 and held ever since in conditions the world is not permitted to verify, with no reliable proof that she is alive. Her supporters now speak simply of a campaign for proof of life. She is where she has been for years, held somewhere we are not permitted to know, her age advancing in a silence the world has mostly stopped noticing. And yet the room was warm. That is the thing I want to try to describe, and to think through, because it took me a while to understand what I was seeing, and longer still to understand what it asks of the rest of us.
I had come expecting grief, and grief was there. But it sat alongside something I did not have a name for initially. People who had every reason to be hardened were instead soft with one another. They brought food and pressed it on you. They embraced for too long. They passed the old photographs hand to hand, naming who was who, laughing at the haircuts and the youth in the faces, holding each other’s babies. And that was the word that finally arrived, standing in that hall: family. Not as a metaphor. As the literal thing happening in the room.
I had been playing a song that week, on a loop, the way you do when something you cannot quite name needs a soundtrack. A remixed cover, Afro Soul over the bones of Stromae’s Papaoutai. Papa, où t’es? Papa, where are you? It is a child’s voice asking after a father who is not there: where did he go, when is he coming back, who will I learn to be a man from now that the one who was meant to teach me is gone? Stromae wrote it after his own father, who was killed in the Rwandan genocide, and the song carries that double thing, a nursery-rhyme bounce over an unfillable hole. It surfaced again in that hall, in front of those old pictures, because it asks the exact question these families live inside. They take your parent, and then what? Where do you go? Who teaches you now?
What we owe the disappeared
There is an old intuition in moral philosophy that our obligations track presence. We owe most to those before us, those who can call on us, whose faces we can see. The stranger far away has a weaker claim than the neighbour at the door, and the dead, having passed beyond the reach of help, are thought to release us from duty altogether. You cannot wrong someone who is no longer there to be wronged.
The disappeared trouble this neat arithmetic, and they were the unseen centre of that room, the young faces being passed from hand to hand. A person detained without word is not dead. But neither are they present in any way that lets the ordinary machinery of obligation work. They cannot call on us, be visited, written to, argued with, held. The whole point of a disappearance, as a technique of power, is to place a person exactly where that moral intuition would quietly let everyone off the hook. Out of sight, out of reach — and so, the logic runs, out of mind. Authoritarian states understand this better than philosophers do. They do not only remove a person. They remove the person from the field of obligation, and they count on absence doing the rest.
What I watched that evening was a community refusing the arithmetic. The claim of the disappeared, in that hall, had not weakened with distance or with silence. It had grown. The very thing meant to release people from duty, the unknowing, the not being able to reach, had become the thing that bound them tighter. They owed more to the missing precisely because the missing could ask for nothing. The old photographs were a way of saying it without words. We hold you here. We keep your face among us. You are not gone while we are still looking at you together.
Reparenting
How do you discharge a duty to someone you cannot reach? You cannot feed them, or free them, or even find them. And the answer the room had arrived at, without anyone announcing it, was this. You honour the bond to the one who is gone by becoming that bond for the ones who remain.
When the state takes your mother, the people standing beside you in the same loss become the ones who hold you. The grief does not only get shared. It gets reparented. The aunties moving through the room with plates, the elders, the hand that lands on your shoulder when your voice breaks, all of it is kinship assembled in real time to stand in for the kinship that was torn away. The regime subtracted a mother, and the community answered by becoming a thousand mothers. Papa, où t’es? the song keeps asking, and the room had quietly worked out an answer. Here. In whoever is left standing beside you, passing you a photograph of someone you both lost.
That is what I now think the phrase means, the one that came to me that evening and that I cannot put down. We were fighting for everyone’s mother. At first I took it simply, that we fight for each missing parent as if they were our own. But it goes further. The duty we cannot discharge toward the disappeared, we discharge sideways, toward each other. We cannot mother the one who was taken, so we mother the child she left. In the fighting, we become mothers to one another. The phrase is not only a cause. It is a description of what the room had become. A family the regime did not intend to create, made out of the very people it tried to scatter.
The son of the woman whose birthday we marked was among us, bent over those pictures with the others. He carries his own version of all this, a private grief made public by his mother’s name, a personal loss that became a symbol whether he wished it or not. How much is asked of the children of the detained, how they are made to be brave on behalf of the rest of us. But he was not carrying it alone, and neither was anyone else. In a room reconstituted into family, no single person has to be the whole of any grief. The weight is distributed. So is the holding. The child in the song asks his question alone, into an empty house. The people in that hall were asking it together, over old photographs, and answering it for one another.
The warmth and the indictment
I do not want to romanticise it, and this is the part that gives the warmth its real weight rather than letting it stay merely sweet. This family is chosen, and fierce, and beautiful, and it should not have had to exist. Every reconstituted kinship in that room is also the evidence of a crime. People should not have to become each other’s parents. They should not have to keep their loved ones present by passing photographs around a hall, because their loved ones should simply be present. That they have made something tender out of this, with grace and food and too-long embraces and laughter over old pictures, is at once the most hopeful thing I have seen in years and the most damning. The warmth is real. The warmth is also an indictment.
And it places a quieter obligation on those of us who were only witnesses, and on those reading this who were not in the room at all. If the claim of the disappeared does not weaken with distance, then it reaches past that hall. It reaches us. The community in the western suburbs has worked out how to honour people it cannot reach. The question the rest of us are left holding is whether we will let their faithfulness shame us into our own, or let distance do the work the regime intended it to do, and quietly forget.
So I keep returning to the pictures of the three of them over the photographs. It is not a picture of people surviving their loss. It is a picture of a family that authoritarian power accidentally built by trying to destroy families, and of an obligation that refused to die when the people it was owed to were taken away.
They were looking at the young faces of the people they have lost, and they were laughing, because the faces were dear to them and because they were holding them together. This is why they keep her name spoken aloud, and ask the world to demand proof she is alive: so that absence is not allowed to do the regime’s work for it. The regime tried to orphan a whole people. The people refused to stay orphaned. Papa, où t’es? They gathered in a city far from home, bent their heads over old photographs, and to the question the song never stops asking, they made themselves the answer. They held one another’s missing as if they were their own.
Because by then, they were.
And they should never have had to be.
*Ko Ko Aung is a Sydney-based immigration lawyer and human rights advocate for the Myanmar diaspora. He maintains a weekly practice of Vipassana meditation, which informs his professional focus on institutional integrity and the rule of law.
