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ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION
Anna Allott
Although the accounts of her life do not record when the young Burmese girl, Ma Tin Hlaing, first showed a talent for writing, they all without exception mention that the work she wrote when she was 37 years of age, already widowed and with three small children, won a government-sponsored literary prize, having been chosen as the best novel published in Burma in 1955. In spite of its heroine’s tragic end, the novel was also very popular with the reading public, going into at least five editions during the 1950s and 1960s.1 This introduction will attempt to suggest some of the reasons for the success of Not Out of Hate (Monywei Mahu), a novel which seems to reflect aspects of her own life more directly than her other works of fiction.
Ma Tin Hlaing was born on 13 April 1917, in a village near the small town of Bogalei in the district of Hpyapon, a rice-growing area of Lower Burma. This is the same area in which Not Out of Hate is set. She was the fourth of five children born to the manager of the local branch of Dawson’s Bank, U Pya Cho, and his wife, Daw Hswi.2 She first went to the American Baptist Mission School in Hpyapon, perhaps as a weekly boarder as it was some distance from her home. By the age of ten she had passed the seventh standard examination at the government school in nearby Bogalei, after which she was sent to continue her schooling in Rangoon at the Girls’ Myoma High School (Myoma Amyothami Kyaung). Before she was able to complete her tenth standard (graduation) exam, the sudden breakdown of her mother’s mental health obliged her to return home to take over the running of the household; she was just fifteen years old. (In Not Out of Hate, the young heroine’s mother abandons her home and family, when her daughter is only thirteen, to enter a convent.)
Ma Tin Hlaing, clearly exceptionally intelligent, was now also politically aware, having been influenced in Rangoon by the tide of nationalist feeling that was gathering strength in Burma in the early 1930s. Back in Bogalei she joined the local branch of the Dobama organization when it was formed in 1936, and became its secretary. She met the organizations’ leaders when they visited the town, attended their meetings, and joined them in writing articles and making speeches against the British. Being a keen follower of the Burmese press, she happened to read an article mocking Burmese girls for spending their time playing badminton, which provoked her into writing a spirited reply urging women to be as active and enterprising as men. This piece was published, with her photograph, in the leading Burmese daily of the time, Myanma Alin (The New Light of Burma), the chief editor of which, U Chit Maung, was a fervent nationalist—and also a confirmed bachelor. He was impressed by the article; they met and, to his fellow journalists’ amazement, were married about a year later in 1938, when Ma Tin Hlaing was twenty. (The heroine of the novel marries an older man of 37 when she is still in her early twenties.)
The following year U Chit Maung started his own paper called Gyanegyaw (The Weekly Thunderer) and Ma Tin Hlaing took on the management of the finances. Without her business ability and competence the paper would not have survived. It was from this time that she began to write under the pen name Gyanegyaw Ma Ma Lay (Ma Ma Lay of The Thunderer).3
The war years from 1940-1945 must have been extremely full for Ma Ma Lay. She continued writing as a journalist; she began writing short stories, the first one appearing in The Thunderer in 1941; she wrote a first novel (Ahpyu, only published later, in 1947), and a second one as well (Thuma [She], published in 1944); and she had three children. Although she had wrought a transformation in the day-to-day life-style of her bachelor husband, the one area in which she could not and did not try to influence him was that of politics. Like most of Burma’s leading nationalist politicians, U Chit Maung was greatly influenced by Marxism, a circumstance which helped to determine the political philosophy of his paper, Gyanegyaw. At the beginning of World War II, U Chit Maung and his wife moved from the center of Rangoon to a village outside the city, where it happened that their next door neighbor was Thakin Than Tun, later to become Burma’s leading communist. Hence many of Ma Ma Lay’s close friendships were with nationalist leaders, some of whom later became communists or supporters of very left-wing, anti-government policies. This led some people to think that Ma Ma Lay herself was a communist, and undoubtedly contributed to her arrest in 1963 and subsequent three-year detention.
In mid-1945, the Japanese having surrendered and the British colonial government having returned, the family moved back from the village to a northern suburb of Rangoon. Unexpectedly, when life should have become easier, U Chit Maung was taken to the hospital and died there on 2 April 1946; they had been married only nine years. This could have been a tragic turning point in the story of Ma Ma Lay’s life and the end of a brilliant career, but it was not. Though heart-broken at the loss of the man she loved, the person who had been her inspiration and guide in this early stage of her career, she drove herself to continue writing. She poured her love and grief into a moving account of her husband and their brief time together, entitled Thulo Lu (A Man Like Him). This work, one of her longest books, appeared in 1947. It has been praised as her best work, standing as a landmark in the development of Burmese prose writing and displaying all the narrative skill, tension, and passion of a good novel.
At the same time, she continued to bring out the Gyanegyaw every week, even managing most weeks to write the leading articles herself. The hazards facing journalists in Burma during that turbulent postwar period (though not yet the arbitrary censorship that came in the 1960s) are well illustrated by the fact that an unwelcome mention in her paper of an item of news about the politician Thakin Tin led to an attack on the paper’s office. In spite of the serious damage caused by this attack, she managed to continue publication. In December of that year she took on the job of editing the magazine Kalaungshin, a periodical started by the newly formed League of Women Writers, in line with her firm belief in the importance of the equal participation of women in all walks of life.
The failure of Western medicine to save her husband’s life, together with the fact that her daughter had developed rickets during the war years, set Ma Ma Lay searching for alternative ways of treating disease, and she began to take a serious interest in traditional Burmese medicine. This interest was to remain with her for the rest of her life; indeed, in her later years treating and advising patients, as well as writing guides to medical treatments based on traditional diets, came to take precedence over fiction writing and journalism. In the opinion of some who knew her then, she developed a quite unjustified faith in the power of special diets coupled with cold showers to cure all ills. But we are jumping too far ahead.
In June 1947 a publication appeared on the Rangoon literary scene which was to be the main vehicle for bringing Ma Ma Lay’s writing regularly, quickly, and cheaply to a wide readership for the next thirty years. Shumawa was a new monthly literary magazine which included short stories and serial novels, poetry, cartoons, and serious articles on literature and culture, together with plenty of advertisements, all aimed at a wide readership. Her work, both fiction and journalism, which continued to appear in Gyanegyaw between 1947 and 1952, was also featured in this new magazine after 1952, thus greatly increasing her popularity as a writer.4
The internal politics of newly independent Burma do not seem to have attracted Ma Ma Lay, but after 1948 she began to participate in international activities. In that year she toured India; she was also elected to the chairmanship of the National Writers’ Association, a singular honor for a woman. In 1950 she made her first visit to Japan, and in 1952 she was part of a cultural delegation that toured China and the Soviet Union. Later in the 1950s Ma Ma Lay became caught up in the Soviet-led international peace movement, as can be seen from her articles with titles such as “The Flag of Peace.” In 1958 she went as a delegate to the World Anti-nuclear Rearmament Congress in Japan, and on her return wrote a very powerful piece about Hiroshima. In December 1956 she was again in India, this time with two other Burmese writers (Dagon Taya and Paragu) to attend the first Asian Writers’ Conference. We get a glimpse of her physical appearance at that date from a memoir, written at the time of her death in 1982, by the writer Paragu. He tells us that during the conference a telegram arrived from Rangoon announcing that she had won the Translation Society (Sarpay Beikman) prize for her novel Not Out of Hate. Paragu arranged for the organizer of the conference, K. Anand (author of the English-language novel Coolie), to announce the news to the full session of writers. Dr. Anand, a Punjabi by birth, expressed his pleasure that the conference should be marked by having such a nationally honored Burmese author as a delegate, and finished by saying, “Please will the Burmese lady writer who resembles a beautiful Punjabi woman be so kind as to stand up.” Paragu confessed that he was taken aback; he had not realized that this competent, hard-working, outspoken journalist and fellow writer was also, in the eyes of certain foreigners, a strikingly attractive woman. (In 1959 she married her second husband, the writer U Aung Zeiya.)
During the 1950s in Burma, for writers such as Ma Ma Lay who were concerned about the future of their country and the way society and the economy were developing, it was no longer as clear as it had been before independence who was to play the villain in works of fiction. In fact literature and culture were increasingly politicized, and disagreements over the role of literature in society became more bitter and more frequent. Many left-wing writers proclaimed that literature should follow the path of socialist realism, should aid in building a new socialist society, and should be of benefit to the working people.5 One of the reasons for the popularity of Not Out of Hate may have been that it took the Burmese reader back to the immediate prewar period, when the population was reassuringly united in its political aspirations; the work could be enjoyed by right and left wings alike.
At the beginning of the 1960s a considerable number of writers decided that they would form a separate organization, outside the National Writers’ Association, to be called the Writers’ Literary Club (sayeihsaya sapei kalat) for the pursuit of purely literary activities. The club was established on 26 February 1961; Ma Ma Lay was among the 38 writers present who signed their names in agreement with the aims of the group, and it was she who was chosen to be the general secretary, evidence of the respect and prestige she continued to enjoy as a writer at the time.6
However, within a year the political situation in the country was to change in a way that eventually left very little freedom of action to those writers who were not in favor of using their literary talents to support the building of the “Burmese Way to Socialism.” In a coup in March 1962, a military government led by General Ne Win seized power and confined leading politicians to prison. Writers and journalists were at first wooed and encouraged to put their talents at the service of the “revolution”; a nation-wide literary conference was organized by the government in November 1962, at which the chair was taken by the writer Thein Pe Myint, a former communist. As chairman of the reception committee, Ma Ma Lay should have had the right to speak first, but Thein Pe Myint negotiated to prevent this from happening. Certain younger writers, unaware of the difficult position in which Ma Ma Lay found herself, criticized her behavior, at which point she decided she had had enough and resigned from all official positions.
Although an advocate of socialism, Ma Ma Lay soon came into conflict with the policies of the military regime. She had never hesitated to criticize injustice, corruption, inhumanity, pretentiousness, or hypocrisy, especially in her short stories. Despite her resignation from literary office, such was her reputation as an influential writer and outspoken critic of government corruption and inefficiency that she was not to be left in peace. On 14 December 1963 she was arrested at her home by officers of the Military Intelligence Service, on the pretext of having assisted Bo Let-ya, a former minister of defence and close comrade of Aung San, escape capture by the government. She was taken to prison and detained for a total of three years and two months before being released on 5 February 1967. Happily, she was allowed pen and paper in prison, with the result that she had a long novel ready for publication when she emerged.
In the last fifteen years of her life, while devoting an increasing proportion of her time to medicine and healing, Ma Ma Lay wrote two more novels, a biography of a famous Burmese actress, and numerous articles for newspapers and magazines. In one of these novels, Thwei (Blood), published in 1973, she used the story of a Japanese girl’s search for her Burmese half-brother to examine Burmese attitudes toward Japanese. The work was so effective that when it was translated into Japanese it was voted the best foreign novel of the year. An invitation by the Japanese government to visit Japan and receive the prize enabled Ma Ma Lay to make one last trip abroad in October 1980. Ma Ma Lay died peacefully at her home on 6 April 1982, but because of the general fear that she was still out of favor with the Ne Win regime, the death of Burma’s most important modern woman writer passed virtually unnoted by the official literary establishment.
The first question that a would-be reader of Not Out of Hate will likely ask is, “What is it about?” The second may well be, “Why has it been chosen for translation?” To a certain extent, the two questions can be answered together. The story is set in Lower Burma, in the town of Moulmeingyun, in the years 1939 to 1942, just before the outbreak of World War II. It tells how an intelligent but naive young girl from an ordinary Burmese Buddhist family is attracted to an older, completely Westernized Burmese man; of their marriage and her unhappiness at the gulf she discovers between her own way of life and that of her husband; and of her illness and death. It is not primarily a novel about politics, though the main political events of the period play an important part in the development of the story. Rather, it is perhaps first a study of different types of love: unselfish love, which can allow the loved one to go free; selfish, suffocating love, which in seeking to hold tight only destroys the loved one; caring love of an elder sister; and anxious love of a daughter for a sick father. The novel’s underlying ideological issue is the threat which the Western way of life poses to Burmese culture and traditional family relationships. It is for the insight that it offers into a Burmese view of all these topics that Not Out of Hate has been translated into English.
The story is comparatively simple in outline. In the early chapters we are given a detailed picture of an extended Burmese family. The younger daughter, in her twenties, lives at home running the household and helping her father with his business accounts. The father, aged about sixty and in poor health, is a rice-broker dealing with British firms. An older daughter, close to her sister, is married to a government doctor. Their brother, the oldest child, is aggressively anti-British and is involved in the nationalist movement. The mother left the family several years earlier to become a Buddhist nun, but keeps in touch periodically. The principal household also includes an older sister of the father who has been like a mother to the youngest daughter, and a servant girl.
At the same time as we learn of the complex relationships among the member of this Burmese family, we also see how they react to the arrival of a new neighbor, whom everyone is surprised to discover, given the gossip and furniture that has preceded him, is Burmese and not English as had been supposed. Sent by a British firm to handle their rice-purchasing, he is a bachelor with Western education and tastes; he lives more in the style of a colonial official than of a Burmese. There is extensive treatment of the ways in which the life and ideals of the newcomer and the family differ. The youngest daughter is much impressed with the bachelor, and they eventually marry despite the misgivings of her family. This is the beginning of a series of events which end in tragic conflict and misunderstandings, and in the death of the daughter, a victim not of hate but, ironically and in a number of ways, love and caring.
If it were simply the story of an unsuitable marriage ending in disaster, Not Out of Hate would almost certainly not have made such an impression on the Burmese reading public. They must have felt that the daughter in some way symbolized Burma itself, struggling to maintain its own culture in the face of the many attractions of the Western way of life as glimpsed in the colonial setting. Here, after all, was an intelligent, competent young woman led to bring about her own destruction by abandoning the Burmese way of life, against the advice of her family. Further strengthening the symbolic aspect of the story is the theme of conflict between Western and traditional types of medicine that is present throughout. The daughter dies of tuberculosis, contracted from her father (who also dies), which Western medical methods cannot cure. Her husband has totally rejected the idea that Burmese medicine might be effective, and she is condemned to rely on painful and, in the end, ineffective Western doctoring. But here again the condemnation has been made—and submitted to—not out of hate, but love.7
All of this human drama is intertwined with events on the national scene: in 1942, with Pearl Harbor and Singapore fallen to the Japanese, the Burma Independence Army advances on Rangoon but soon young nationalists are at risk and are being jailed by the Japanese military government. That these forces tear people apart only worsens the existing family and personal difficulties, and the poignancy of the final tragedy is increased by the juxtaposition of political and human circumstances.
It is interesting that Ma Ma Lay chose to write a novel about the years 1939-1942 rather than the period in which she was then living (the mid-1950s). Clearly her mother’s mental illness, her own return at a young age from school, her involvement in political activities, and her marriage to U Chit Maung, all during the years in which Not Out of Hate is set, were experiences on which she was able to draw. It is also very likely that, in order to provide an appropriate political context for the personal story, she felt compelled to choose the most recent point in Burmese history when the country was united behind a single goal—in this case, independence—rather than attempt to deal with the confused period of the mid-1950s, when disagreement was in the air and there was a certain nostalgia for the atmosphere in which all pulled together in the struggle for freedom from British colonial rule.
Not Out of Hate is Ma Ma Lay’s fifth novel. Unlike her previous ones, it was published by the Shumawa Press, not by her own Gyanegyaw Press. We learn from the foreword to the book how this came about. Ma Ma Lay had begun to contribute regularly to Shumawa the magazine, for which she soon became one of the most popular writers of short stories and articles. The editor, U Kyaw, asked her to write a long short story which was to appear in two installments in the issues of May and June, 1955. (This type of serialization encouraged continuing sales from month to month.) He was printing the second, and he thought final, installment; when he came to the end of chapter fifteen, he sent an urgent message to Ma Ma Lay to tell her that she had two more pages in which to finish off the story! At this point, Ma Ma Lay tells us, she exploded in frustration. All through the writing she had been pressured to hurry up, yet at the same time asked to keep the work as short as possible; how could a person write under such conditions? She told U Kyaw that she bitterly regretted having agreed to write the story for Shumawa instead of doing in as a complete novel in the first place and publishing it with her own company. Finally there was an amicable settlement; it was agreed that there would be no further installments, that she would complete the book as soon as possible, and that it would be published by the Shu-mawa Press as a complete novel with all the parts restored that she had been forced to cut out. The reader will notice that the events of chapters 16 to 21 move more slowly and lack some of the dramatic tension of the earlier ones. Elsewhere Ma Ma Lay tells us that she needed to be under pressure in order to write effectively.8
The novel in Burma has a relatively recent history; the first appeared in 1904. Short stories, published in daily and weekly newspapers, began to make their appearance in the following decade, and by the 1920s both genres were firmly established in the favor of the largely urban reading public. Almost from the beginning—and certainly from 1914, when U Lat wrote a famous work called Shweipyizo—most important Burmese novels had a political message, or at least political theme, which was that it was essential to maintain the dignity and integrity of Burmese Buddhist culture against the advance of Western education and technology, and that the best way to do this was to regain Burma’s independence from Britain. During the 1930s many historical novels were written, many of them with nationalist heroes. It is sufficient for us to examine in detail the foreword written by U Chit Maung for his wife’s first novel, Thuma (She), in 1944, to realize the extent to which the Burmese expected serious fiction to contribute to education and nation-building. The first point U Chit Maung makes is that the heroine of Thuma, Thet Thet, like the hero of his own prewar novel Thu (He), is a model character, the sort of person needed to set a good example to readers. Second, he says that a nation is made up of numerous households and families; if the families prosper then the nation will prosper, but quarrels at home lead to trouble, unhappiness, and inefficiency at work. Third, and for us most interestingly, he says that in building a new nation men and women are equally important.
If both work together in harmony they will soon build the nation upon a firm foundation. But at the present time there are many who look down on women, who pour scorn on their ability and refuse to give them a part to play. Recently I have noticed that the writer Ma Ma Lay has written several articles in Gya-ne-Gyaw about how women’s special capabilities could be used in national affairs, but these are little more than occasional flashes of lightning in the utterly black sky of the minds of those who believe that men are the masters of the world. With few exceptions, in films, novels, and plays women are shown as always turning in tears to men for help in time of trouble; a plot in which a woman finds a way out of difficulty by applying her own effort and intelligence, her own practical common sense, is very rare. So I welcome this novel as being just what is needed. If it had been written by a man, one or both heroines would have ended up in Rangoon, weeping. But as it was written by a woman of exceptional imagination, the two heroines are shown overcoming their difficulties honorably and in a most unexpected manner. This novel shows not only a woman writer’s intellectual ability, but also women’s hidden strength. We are shown that a woman can find a way of surmounting difficulties in a dignified and respectable manner [that is, without resorting to prostitution]. If women such as are portrayed in this novel would display their abilities in real life, then the tasks of nation-building and world-building would be easier and lighter. When the country produces more people like the heroes of these two books [that is, his own and his wife’s], Burma will enter the ranks of the leading nations of the world.
Quite apart from showing that U Chit Maung was an admiring husband, even an early feminist, this extract illustrates well the attitude of social responsibility which has characterized serious Burmese fiction from the beginning. Stories were designed to educate and set an example, as well as to entertain. It was not too much out of character, therefore, for left-wing writers to expect them also to help build a new socialist society.
From Ma Ma Lay’s own introduction to her third novel, Sheik (Mind), published in 1951, we learn something more of her reasons for embarking on the writing of a novel. The work is about a young woman doctor, intelligent but not a good judge of character, who falls in love with and then is raped by a fellow doctor whom she trusts. Her life is shattered by the ensuing pregnancy. Ma Ma Lay tells us that she got the idea from seeing the film Johnny Belinda, in which a deaf and dumb girl is raped, becomes pregnant, and then is helped by a kind doctor. What struck her about the motion picture was the injustice of the situation in which it is the man who commits the rape and the woman who suffers afterwards. She decided to write a novel on this theme, a novel in which she would examine character and motive rather than simply tell a story. She confesses to being uncertain of her ability to portray and analyze character and emotion with sufficient skill. Although she had been writing fiction for some time, she had never written a love scene, let alone one in which a girl was forced to submit to a man; she feared that she would be unable to write it realistically.
Here we see how Ma Ma Lay was setting herself new goals, striving to bring the modern Burmese novel to the level of Western fiction. By the time she wrote Not Out of Hate, she had clearly gained confidence in herself. We also see that she was a committed feminist. Indeed, she always expected and demanded complete equality of treatment with men, and got it even when imprisoned. She also demanded that woman show equal effort and initiative. She did not believe that a woman should ever admit that she was inferior on account of her gender. As she says in A Man Like Him, she paid no attention to whether a person was male or female; she only took notice of their mind.
By September 1952, Ma Ma Lay already had written a fourth novel, this time not about a well-educated, middle class woman, but about the life of an ordinary peasant girl who worked in the paddy fields. Again we learn a great deal from her introduction to the work, entitled Kabamyeiwe (On This Earth). She tells us that her father was the manager of a large European-owned agricultural bank for which he was responsible for the management of 60,000 acres of paddy land. Although she was familiar with the details of the land-holding system, fixed interest rates, rules for delivering paddy, and so on from the regular meetings with paddy farmers who came to the bank to draw money, she realized when she decided to write about a peasant woman that she had no experience at all working in the paddy fields. Recalling a visit she had made to Thahton at paddy planting time a year earlier, she felt it would not be good enough merely to describe the young girls stooping over the young rice plants in the rain; she wanted to write so as to give a full picture of their living conditions and of the problems and hardships they faced in everyday life. She tells us that by describing the present difficult circumstances of the peasants she hoped to help bring about for them, as soon as possible, a new and just era, in the interest of peace and true independence for Burma. (Now, nearly forty years later, after all that has happened in Burma, there is a sad irony in such a statement.) The journalist in her wanted the novel to be authentic, based on actual peasant lives, reflecting the way peasants really spoke and what they really did. How could a person who had never in her life walked in a flooded paddy field write such a novel? She decided to make a close study of the subject.
As with her previous novel, she was constantly being pressed by the editor of Shumawa to give him something to publish for his readers. First she promised a story, then a long story, but as she wrote the work became longer and longer, exceeding the permitted length of a long serial, until the editor told her that they would publish it as a separate book. This enabled her to take her time and to accumulate background material. Even though she had been told that she was now free to write as long a work as she wished, she tried to keep the number of pages, and thus the price, down. Finally, she says, she left out passages dealing with new methods for farmers to pay land tax, and details of attempts to nationalize paddy land near Syriam! However well told the story might be, a novel loaded with such ambitious social purpose and such heavy educational content was not likely to win a popular literary prize.
Whether because of a lesson learned or natural development as a writer, however, when it came to Ma Ma Lay’s fifth novel, the one translated here as Not Out of Hate, creative inspiration seems to have taken over from, though not supplanted, social concern. There is no explanatory foreword of any kind, and the story and the characters are left by the author to speak entirely for themselves.
Perhaps the final words of introduction should be given to a fellow Burmese writer, Daw Saw Mon Nyin, writing soon after Ma Ma Lay’s death:
Her seat was empty at the general meeting of Burmese writers; at this meeting she was no longer able to attend as the delegate from Yangin district—Gya-negyaw Ma Ma Lay, who is held in such great respect by everyone for the clarity and excellence of her writing, and for her ability to give artistic expression to her thoughts and feeling. Her books were serious in intent, thought-provoking, informative, and have been accorded an important place in the history of Burmese literature. Anyone can write so as to produce a book. But not everyone has the courage to lay open their own life and recount it just as it is, or has the ability to portray it in its full reality. Her reader is carried away by the outstanding quality of her writing.9
We hope that something of this quality shines through in this version, the first Burmese novel to be translated into English outside of Burma.10
1. After 1964 the military government instituted a series of National Literary Prizes for different categories of work. Increasingly, political rather than literary criteria have come to determine the choice of prizewinners, with the result that some prize-winning novels have not been popular with the reading public and have not sold well.
2. The name Hswi is not Burmese and suggests that Ma Tin Hlaing’s mother was partly of Chinese descent.
3. The use of pen names is long-established and widespread in Burma; there are several reasons for this. Burmese names are short and often shared by many persons, hence writers customarily identified themselves by adding their place of birth to their given name. When novels and short stories were becoming established as new genres on the literary scene at the beginning of the twentieth century, certain writers of scholarly or religious works did not wish to reveal that they were also writing fiction. Later in the 1920s some young authors, keen to increase the number and readership of periodicals, would submit material under several different names at the same time. Other writers wanted to conceal their identity from rival publishers or from the authorities. In addition to identifying themselves by place of birth, writers frequently used the name of a magazine, such as Dagon (in the 1920s), or the words theikpan (college) or teggatho (university) before their own name or their chosen pen name.
4. Shumawa is difficult to translate with a single English expression. Literally it means “not to be able to have one’s fill of looking at,” “something one cannot look at enough.” This type of monthly fiction magazine, more than just a vehicle for short stories but not really a news magazine, had become well established in the 1920s; one of the best-known titles was Dagon. In the 100th issue of Shumawa, a special number published in September 1955, there is a list of the most regular contributors. Ma Ma Lay comes fourth in the list of 29, having contributed 31 pieces in all since the magazine’s inception in 1947. Of the 29 listed, only 4 are women; the two women with a greater total of contributions that Ma Ma Lay are both poets, which leads us to the realization that Ma Ma Lay was indeed exceptional in being almost the only serious, influential woman prose writer in Burma during the early years of independence.
5. In Burmese this is known as pyeithu akyobyu sapei. Such slogans were adopted by the military government after 1962 as part of the official policy toward literature.
6. It is interesting to note that one of the first activities to be organized by Ma Ma Lay for the members of the club was a series of lectures on the contemporary literary scene in countries outside Burma, starting with Great Britain followed by China and the Soviet Union.
7. The title Not Out of Hate is particularly interesting because it can describe much else in the novel besides the colonial relationship and the principal love relationship. Clearly, if somewhat more subtly, it may for example refer to the relationship Westernized Burmese have with traditional Burmese culture and society, or the relationship which the Buddhist nun in this story has with her family.
8. It is worth noting that the Russian “translation” of Monywei Mahu is a drastically shortened version—119 pages as opposed to 364 pages in the original Burmese edition. Even if one calculates two pages of Burmese as equal in length to one page of Russian, some 126 pages of Burmese have been cut to produce the Russian version. The resulting “novella” reads well enough, but it is not a translation of Ma Ma Lay’s novel, and was done without any reference to her.
9. From a memorial number of Shumawa, June 1982, pp. 163-68.
10. There have been at least two novels, or works resembling novels, translated into English in Burma, but they were intended for audiences there and not distributed elsewhere. The first was U Nu’s Man, the Wolf of Man, written originally in Burmese in 1941 while he was under house arrest, then translated and serialized in The Guardian Magazine (Rangoon) I (June - October, 1954) and II (November 1954 - January 1955). Also worth mention is the work by Lu-du U Hla, really a series of portraits of prisoners, translated and published a number of years ago by Kathleen Forbes and her husband, the botanist Than Htun.
