Let the Circle Be Unbroken

Episode #496: Jak Bazino, a French novelist with more than a decade of lived experience in Myanmar, discusses his novel Breaking the Cycle as an attempt to make sense of the country’s Spring Revolution by situating it within a much longer, unfinished struggle for freedom. He argues that Myanmar’s current uprising is not an isolated crisis but the latest chapter in a historical arc that stretches back to the independence era. Through fiction, Bazino seeks to help readers grasp that continuity in a visceral way that conventional reporting often cannot.

The novel is structured around two intertwined timelines. One unfolds in 1942 during the Japanese invasion of Burma. A British archaeologist identifies a votive tablet believed to point toward the location of sacred Buddhist relics. Working with a Burmese woman who provides essential local knowledge, and accompanied by a British colonial officer, he begins a deliberate search for the relics. As the war closes in, the group attempts to preserve the tablet and the knowledge it represents by evacuating it by plane. The aircraft crashes in remote jungle terrain, abruptly ending the search and freezing the mission in history. The story then jumps to 2024, during the Spring Revolution. Displaced civilians and resistance members stumble upon the long-forgotten wreckage and find the tablet. Initially understood only as an old religious object, they carry through an active war zone, where possession itself becomes dangerous. Information about the tablet eventually finds its way outside Myanmar, and scholars and others figure out its connection to that abandoned wartime search. This creates new risks, when external pressures collide with the immediate survival needs of those still living inside the conflict.

Bazino also confronts unresolved problems within the resistance, including internal divisions and gender inequality, insisting these issues cannot be postponed without shaping the society that emerges after the war. Through the main Burmese character of Khin Yadanar, a young medic aligned with the Chin Defense Force, he articulates a broader ethical vision of resistance that values care, endurance, and responsibility alongside armed struggle.

Despite the novel’s darkness, Bazino maintains a guarded hope that the Spring Revolution can finally break Myanmar’s recurring cycles of domination and defeat. “I really want this book to show that actually [breaking these cycle] can happen,” he says, “even if it’s not easy, and it’s not certain.”