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