Nomad Codes

His whole body trembled, a jittery pulse that reminded me of the characters in old Betty Boop cartoons. Taungbyon’s mediums are performers first and foremost, but this guy seemed to be deeply tranced out. Nobody—at least nobody normal —was home.
    Our stall was well placed to take advantage of the nearby orchestra, which was, as the kids say, going off. One drummer gripped a stick in either hand, rooting the rhythm with a primitive pulse, while another guy devoted himself to smashing cymbals together with seemingly careless ferocity. The heart of the orchestra was a circular drum station that allowed the bandleader to pivot around and strike twenty-odd small drums tuned with some sort of gooey clay. Two similar wheel-like consoles were devoted to brass and bronze gongs, tuned more or less to a major scale, with an odd half-step here or there. The shimmering and hysterical melodies of these gongs scampered dizzily over the monkeymind clank and clatter of the drums, with further bewitchment supplied by an ear-splitting oboe and wailing, mildly distorted vocals. It was the most madcap music I have ever heard, a brash and giddy bumblebee romp that called to mind a garage-rock gamelan orchestra banging out the soundtrack to some delirious and exotic Warner Bros. cartoon—call it Daffy Does Devil Worship .
    Dancing to these jarring and jittery beats, which shifted gears like Zappa at his wackiest, a bespectacled middle-aged woman in our stall became as one possessed. She started shaking, then began a sluggish stumble-dance, and finally dropped to her knees on the raised floor of the stall. A couple of older women immediately stopped their grooving and attended the woman with looks of great concern; later I learned they were attempting to prevent whatever nat had entered her body from staying too long and burning out her psychic circuits, or even killing her. Then, just as quickly as the entranced woman had slipped out our realm, her conventional personality returned. She had journeyed up to Taungbyon from her home in Yangon and looked like she worked in an appliance shop or some other vaguely middle-class endeavor. “I was just hearing the music,” she explained. “I don’t remember ...”
    A few moments later, the nat kadaw, responding to no obvious signal or ritual resolution, hopped up, shed his sprinkly ritual garb, and returned to the standard Burmese male gear of a skirt-like longyi and a button-down shirt. He walked away without engaging the devotees, his gig as Ko Gyi Kyaw finished for the moment. As J and I wandered off, the nearby orchestra reached one of its delirious crescendos, a sound capable of waking the dead—or, perhaps more accurately, of those who continue to live through us.

    I first heard about Taungbyon from Alan Bishop, the bass player and impresario behind the Sun City Girls. Alan first went to Burma in 1993 and has returned six times. He married a Burmese woman, and his adopted daughter, Thiri (pronounced “Theory”) helps create the charming and garish cover art for the bizarro world music CDs and DVDs that Bishop releases on his indispensable Sublime Frequencies label. He showed me footage of Taungbyon’s Nat Pwe, and it looked like Southeast Asian voodoo. My reaction was immediate and unbidden: This I have to see.
    Visiting Taungbyon meant visiting Burma, however, and visiting Burma gave me—a seasoned but hardly intrepid traveler—a creeping feeling of unease. This mild sense of dread emanated as much from the opprobrium of political incorrectness as from fears of guerrilla bombs or anal parasites. One of a very small number of old-school military dictatorships left in Asia, Burma—renamed Myanmar in 1989 by the ruling State Law and Order Restoration Council (these days known as the State Peace and Development Council)—remains a pariah state that practices forced labor, massive censorship, and a corrupt and criminally irresponsible economic policy. In other words, Burma resembles most developing countries, except for the fact that its generals don’t play ball with multinational corporations or, by extension, most nation-states. The famous democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi, currently under house arrest in Yangon, long ago asked foreigners not to visit the country, and many potential western tourists, especially from English-speaking countries, continue to honor her request. But many Burmese who hunger for democracy disagree with Suu Kyi on this point, arguing that