Not Out of Hate. Ma Ma Lay
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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