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Modern Burmese Literature
Modern Burmese Literature
BURMESE TEXTS
The Burmese historical chronicle, short stories, movie scripts, and plays in
PDF files that can be read in Adobe's Acrobat Reader.
This list of authors and their works focuses on writings that
have a social-critical aspect to them.
A lot of this criticism is directed at colonialism and the influence
of foreigners on Burma.
This is not a new tradition in Burmese literature.
The Burmese chronicle
(U Kala's Maha Yazawinkyi) published in the early eighteenth century
attributes the downfall of a king, King Tabinshweiti,
to the influence of an itinerant Portuguese soldier who
taught him to drink and carouse.
A lot of the criticism in the authors below was directed
at aspects of Burmese
society that they wished to see changed.
Probably the most popular author in Myanmar today is the French-influenced
feminist Gyu (pronounced "Jew").
Note that I am restricting my attention here to established
classics of the U Nu period (roughly 1948-1962).
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Journalgyaw Ma Ma Lei
This woman could very well be the greatest Burmese writer of
the twentieth century, male or female.
People outside of Burma have focussed
a lot of attention on her work recently.
Her novel
Not Out of Hate
which addresses the impact
of the West on Burmese culture has been translated into
both English and French.
Her novel Blood
which addresses blood relations
forged between Japanese and Burmese
during World War II
is currently being made into a film
in a joint Burmese-Japanese production.
My favorites are her short story collection
A Slow Stream of Thoughts
and her Burmese Medicine Tales.
All the short stories in the
short story collection
A Slow Stream of Thoughts are interesting to read.
In One Blade of Grass
she depicts a situation
where the rich wife of a military officer treats a child servant
like a slave or actually more like a household appliance.
There's a lot of hyperbole in the treatment of master-servant
relations here, but the story does a good
job at bringing out the features of oppression that one often finds
in countries where income inequalities are extreme.
In Far and Near one of my favorites,
a young woman tries her hand at
managing the family rice mill only to learn about
every possible form that government corruption as
applied to rice millers can take.
There's so much realistic detail the story must be at least
partially factual.
By the end the government officials seem no better than
the rats that gnaw through the rice sacks in search of their plunder.
In Coffee a picture of utter destitution is drawn.
Like the story A Little Blade of Grass
this story also deals with master-servant relations,
but the old woman who is the focus of this story
doesn't live in the master's house and consume his
food.
She knows how to defer
to the wealth and status of the wealthy neighbors that surround her
and cater to their every need,
but it does her little good in the end.
A Pretty Face is a satirical story directed
at those young women who abandon traditional Burmese dress
for western fashions and make-up and those young men
who are always working for their own advantage.
Kheimari is about a young girl whose parents
die and who is drawn gradually towards life as a Buddhist nun,
but once she becomes one is forced into a life as a professional beggar.
A popular film was made based on this short story.
This Heat is about the misery and grief of an old
unmarried woman who works like
a maid doing the work of a wife for her older unmarried
father.
In A Slow Stream of Thoughts a woman's husband and her son-in-law
both take lesser wives. She writes of all the suffering that the old woman has
to bear because of her daughter and grandchildren.
Danger of Rebirth (or "Samsara Danger" or "Cycle of Rebirth Danger")
is the story of how an office clerk becomes a monk after his second marriage fails.
In Please don't emulate this, sir
a newly married husband encounters gets trapped by all the comforts of married life.
He wakes up late in the morning and eats the food that his wife prepares for him,
while his wife wakes up at the crack of dawn, cooks,
and goes off to work selling boiled beans and rice.
Thein Pei Myint is also known as the "Modern Monk"
Thein Pei Myint
because this was the title of the controversial book
that he first gained notoriety as an author with
during the late colonial era.
This book is still entirely banned in Burma and although I have two
copies of it now, it took me a month to find the first copy.
It's subject matter is certainly scandalous.
It's the story of an itinerant monk preacher who engages
in romantic liaisons with some of his followers and a nun.
After the book was published he was forced to apologize to
the Burmese Sangha (the ecclesiastical organization of monks
in Burma).
In a volume of auto-biographical reminiscences named
The Modern Age, a Modern Person, a Modern Monk: Thein Pei
he published
in the mid-70's he pulls together a number of articles that
appeared in magazines
debating the merits of the book after its publication in
the late 1930's.
Thein Pei Myint claims that what he has written is based on
breaches of monastic discipline that were actually
occuring at the time.
(similar to the sexual misconduct by some famous monks
in Thailand recently)
If indeed Thein Pei Myint is pointing his critical eye
at the Burmese Sangha then this book is different from most of the
books of the time which have an anti-colonial theme.
I haven't read the book yet,
but if and when I do I certainly will do some background research
to find out whether Thein Pei Myint's claim that the book's
aim is critique and not just titillation
has any ground to it.
As an act of penance the next book he quickly published his next book
Evil god of the Modern Age
which took the venereal
disease Syphilis as its subject. I've only skimmed it
with the help of my Burmese friend Than Soe,
but a lot of this book seems very reminiscent of what's
happened during the AIDS epidemic in the gay community of
San Francisco or currently among many people
in Northern Thailand.
The main character is not rich enough to marry his sweetheart
so he falls into a life of prostitutes and drinking
and contracts syphilis from
one of them.
Much of the book takes place in the hospital wards and depicts
the suffering of the Syphilis patients there.
A selection of Thein Pei Myint's collected short stories was
translated into English as part of a master's degree in Burmese
literature in the mid-60's and then republished in the
Cornell Southeast Asian Series.
My favorite is Her Husband or Her Money an old
widower strives to win the affections his rich neighbor,
a widow.
He dreams of the difference that all this money will make in his life.
He eventually marries her, but the life he leads is a far cry from what
he expected.
The woman works him to the bone and when their lives are both put into danger
when a robber breaks into the house, it becomes painfully apparent that
she really doesn't love him, when she seems willing to sacrifice his life
to save her money.
True to his reputation as a man who held nothing as sacred
he also published two little scathing essays
in which he questions the value of traditional Burmese literature,
the literature which preceded colonialism and contact with the west,
mostly poetry and plays in verse.
The first essay
Literary Rebels of Former Times argues that flattering the
king was the driving force behind the literature written in the court
of the Burmese king.
He also lists a number of writers that in his opinion
went against this dominant trend of flattery and false praise.
The second essay U Ponnya,
Eloquent Language with Shallow Meaning criticizes
the so-called "Shakespeare" of Burma, the poet U Ponnya
who was beheaded after making one too many ironical quip
about those around him.
Ludu U Hla was a journalist and the writings of his that
I find the most fascinating are the oral histories
he collected from people from a diverse range of occupations
including a boat master, a bamboo raftsman, the keeper of a
logging elephant, a broker for Steele Brothers
(a large trading company during the colonial period),
and a journalist.
His collections of indigenous folklore from most of the ethnic
minorities of Burma was a heroic undertaking despite the
fact that he probably should have tried rendering them in their
local languages (many of which are almost extinct)
before rendering them in formal Burmese or at least
that's the respect for the indigenous language that a modern
day folklorist would be expected to have.
This author served as a civil servant in rural Burma during the
colonial period. He wrote a lot of small sketches based on his
observations of rural life many of which are critical of
political and economic institutions, colonial and indigenous.
Paccantarac (or "The Backwaters" or "Limbo")
is a glimpse at life in a small Burmese fishing village before
World War II. It depicts the harsh circumstances in the village
and the petty feuds that arise among it's inhabitants. The Auction takes place during the colonial period.
The story is a depiction and implicit critique
of a fishery auction, a western economic institution
not particularly well-suited
to the Burmese as the story shows. The Eve of an Election takes place before World
War II during the colonial period. It describes
the political factionalism that was arising among Burmese politicians
even at this early date and which would only increase in
post-independence Burma.
A Crazy Man's Shoulder Bag is a collection
of crazy little tidbits that has reached the status of a classic
as can be ascertained by its having been included as required reading
in the school curriculum not so many years ago.
(this appears to have changed recently.)
An Oral Chronicle purports to be an oral history or
chronicle passed down from father to son about events
in the court of King Badgyidaw who ruled Burma
in the early 19th century.
It's full of dialogues taking place in the royal court
which makes it unique and interesting.
Almost all books dealing with the Burmese king and his court
are written in verse or a highly formal prose.
In Thaka Ala published just before the 1962
coup that would change the face of life in Burma for 36 years,
U Nu paints an extremely ugly picture of corrupt politics
both among the high ranking politicians in power at the time
as well as among the communist leaders who were gaining ascendancy.
This is a play in the vernacular,
a genre that hardly exists in Burmese literature.
This work certainly has pretentions to being a critique
of the current state of politics in Burma at the time
(around 1960)
and in this critical stance it resembles
Thein Pei Myint's Modern Monk.
Like Modern Monk it deals with scandalous sexual liaisons
not much in keeping with traditional modes of Burmese behavior.
This time the scandalous sexual liaisons are
among politicians both to the left and to the right.
If and when I have access to Burmese newspapers and archival
records from the time I would like to find out
whether this book is political propaganda
(it was published right before an election that U Nu won)
or whether its criticism has some basis in fact.
In It's Just Cruel (or "Man, the Wolf of Man")
U Nu describes how in a colonial context
rich landlords were able to get
away with just about any crime they wish to perpetrate.
The play
The Sound of the People Victorious
is about the havoc that communist ideologies can wreak in a family.
U Nu was Prime Minister
at the time he wrote it.
Strangely enough the first production of the play seems
to have been in Pasadena, California.
It later became a popular comic book in Burma
and feature film made at the height of the cold war 1950's and
produced in the United States.
Some people in Burma can even remember
having had to study it in school
when they were kids.
One person I talked to in Yangon the capital of Burma
even remembered a movie theater
being burned down after a showing of it.
The Ten Elements of Elegant Speech (author unknown)
This collection of ten rhetorical techniques for
gaining the advantage in any sort of discussion along with
the little tales that accompany them is short and
interesting to read.
The origin of this list of techniques is not clear,
but at least the names of a few of them go back many hundreds
of years.
The earliest full list of them with accompanying tales
I've seen is in a Burmese reader dated 1906.
What I'd really like to know is whether
the actual origin of the stories lies in the Burmese monastic
tradition, Burmese folklore, Burmese law, or whether they
were in some way inherited from the British.
No one seems to really know for sure.
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