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
