Not Out of Hate. Ma Ma Lay

      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