KyiMayKaung

Burmese Poet Tin Moe: In Memorium.
by Kyi May Kaung (Ph.D.)

One of the most onerous things one has to do, is write an obituary when a fellow poet, artist, writer or dissident dies. I just opened my computer file where tributes to three other notable people who worked for Burma and freedom are still lying quietly, some published, some not.
I first met poet Tin Moe when he wrote to the radio station where I was working in Washington D.C. He wanted to leave Burma and work overseas. This was in 1997. No one at my former workplace did anything to help him, though I showed his letter to another writer and to the then manager, who was in a position to offer him a job.
Tin Moe was already a famous poet and had been in prison a few years. Time passed. I was offered the opportunity to write and produce a weekly program in air on Burmese and international dissident poetry. I started with a piece on the poet Naing Win Swe, who had died in the jungle with other freedom fighters. I thought naively that I would do one weekly column and the next week my material would run out and there would be nothing left to talk about. I did not yet know the extremely important role that poetry plays in oppressive systems like the Burmese one. Every week, I used to get poetry leads from friends and acquaintances and poetry fans. They sent me hand written or transcribed poems, remembered poems, rare editions from Burma and carefully hand copied pages of poems which had been inked out of Burmese magazines by the official censors. My poetry column went on and continued for over three years until my time at the radio ended.
Towards the end, I underwent a good deal of job harassment, resulting in my losing my job in February of 2001. About 1999, Tin Moe arrived in the United States on a visit. I understood that he had managed to emigrate with the help of his daughter, who then lived in Belgium. I did a program on his poetry and translated some of his poems into English. These were featured in an interview about him, based on the radio interview, which I sent to Burma Debate. It is still on line.
A mutual friend said she “would practice videography” by filming me interviewing Tin Moe in my Washington D.C. apartment, so we set up a date. My friend drove Tin Moe over and helped him get back to the house where he was staying.
Tin Moe was a short plump man who looked “typically Burmese” and seemed to be always smiling, despite the vicissitudes of his life. I was reminded of the late writer John Gardner’s words, that “whatever smiling faces they present to the world,” artists and writers always have trauma in their backgrounds. I learned that in addition to the years in prison, Tin Moe had also lost his wife. But he seemed to show none of this on the surface. He appeared even jolly, like a Burmese Santa Claus. He wrote bits of poetry good naturedly for my friend’s seven year old on small scraps of paper, sitting at the same level as the child.
In this interview I asked him when he first learned he was a poet (he said he still did not consider himself one) and what had been the predominant poetic influence in his life. He said, “I’m a very simple person. I yearn for the village where I was born, among the peanut fields.” He then told me that the primary motif of all his work, whether he mentioned it ostensibly or not, was the symbolism of the yay gyan zin, or water pot on a roofed stand, which is outside every village in Burma, to offer drinking water to thirsty travelers. I restrained myself from reminding Tin Moe that the earthen water pots weren’t so hygienic, because people had to drink from the one tin cup provided, and dunk the cup each time into the water pot. Nor did I say that all the tin cups I had seen were all chained to the pots, so as not to be stolen. But it was certainly a beautiful image. Visions of the round-bellied earthenware pots, unglazed and therefore “sweating water” and oh- so cool, and the mini-rice fields of sprouting bright green paddy plants around each pot danced before my eyes. This was indeed the pure and simple Burma we all wish to return to.
I also asked Tin Moe about the influence that two other great poets, Zawgyi (U Thein Han) and Minthuwun (U Wun) had had on his work.
He stopped and said: There is nothing so beautiful, so wonderful and SIMPLE, as the poems of Zawgyi and Minthuwun. So pure in their shining simplicity.
I could not agree more. He told me that the children’s nursery rhymes set to music which I learned as a child growing up in Rangoon, were not traditional, as I had thought, but had all been written by Minthuwun. Maung Lay Yay, Hta Par Tau (Dear younger brother, do get up, the dawn’s early light – or ta kyaw hna kyaw tay ko thee, hget kyar hnoke palee – stanza by stanza she threads her song, bird of the hnoke palee – which I find impossible to translate – Bird of the teasing beak? Bird with a playful mouth?
I learned also that it was Tin Moe who had written the first grade primer with which we all learn our three Rs in Burmese in Burma. An email from a Burmese dissident just pointed out how brilliant these are.
At the very beginning, when all we have learned are single alphabets, such as A, B, C, D and Ka Kha Gha Ga in Burmese, Tin Moe made poem sentences of single alphabets, such as:
Ma Ma Wa Wa Hta Ka, which I always loved and have put on one of my painted ceramics. Fat Older Sister Get Up and Dance! And when we have learned a bit more such as the vowel sounds -- Nga Ei Du Nar The -- My knee hurts!
I asked Tin Moe which was his favorite poem. He did not pause long before he replied, “Htee Kale Ne Ma Ni – surely, Miss Red with the Little Umbrella,” a nursery rhyme.
Tin Moe and Burmese democracy leader and Nobel Peace Prize Winner Aung San Suu Kyi’s family friends gave me copies of the poem he had written for the funeral of Suu Kyi’s husband, the late Dr. Micheal Aris. I still have, somewhere under my piles of paper, because it is too painful to look at, a funeral program from 2005 for our late friend Daw Taw Myo Myint of Los Angeles, devoted wife, mother and committed dissident, whom Tin Moe also knew and admired. I remember he wrote that Taw was taw te, that is, kind, righteous, good, intelligent, smart, royal, proper, just like her name.
On another occasion, in the summer of 2001, famous student leader of the 1988 pro-democracy demonstrations, Moe Thee Zun arrived in the United States. Moe Thee, I found, also had a deep interest in the arts and literature and at that time was working on his own memoirs. Moe Thee went and fetched U Tin Moe from Boston in his car (he had just got his driving license) and brought him to stay at his apartment for a while. Moe Thee then got the idea that he needed to put descriptions of political events between episodes in his own story, so why didn’t he interview me? I had been about 20 years old in 1967, when the anti-Chinese riots took place, when Moe Thee himself was just an infant.
When I arrived at Moe Thee’s apartment in Rockville, M.D., an impromptu soiree was in progress. The front door was propped open, and one of Moe Thee’s close friends was actually sitting slung across the threshold. It was 10 AM on a Saturday.
At the dining table, Tin Moe suddenly burst into a classical song. I told Moe Thee what I could remember of the disturbances of 1967. When it started getting close to lunchtime, I thought we should all chip in and get pizza. But Moe Thee took us all along with him to a neighbor’s house, where we all sat down to a magnificent home cooked meal. Tin Moe remembered all the names of my artsy relatives in Rangoon. On another occasion he read poetry at the Free Burma Coalition.
I don’t know how to honor one great poet, except with the words of another, --Welsh poet and nationalist, Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
*
R.I.P. – Which I realize now spells “rip.” A friend, writer/historian Bijan C. Bayne, says this is “Rooted Inspirational Poetry.”

January 23, 2007
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