Remembering Maung Hmek aka Shwe Yoe aka James C. Scott (1936-2024)
On 17 July, Aaron Scott wrote to me on his father’s behalf; the senior Scott was in hospice care and anticipating death, but “comfortable and surrounded by family love.” Having suffered from heart and kidney failures, Maung Hmek had decided to pull the plug on himself, declining dialysis and other medical interventions, but he was still following Myanmar affairs. That day Aaron read to his father an New York Times piece about the Myanmar resistance leader poet Maung Saung Kha. That prompted him to write to me. It was his thank you and good bye.
I can’t say I knew Professor Scott before 2010, the year I started my “poetry post,” though I was besotted with his agrarian anarchist ideas long before that. In September 2010 I received a copy of Map: Collected and Last Poems by Wisława Szymborska, he mailed out from his Yale office to my then home in Helsinki, Finland. I was surprised to see his signature “Shwe Yoe” in Burmese [ရွှေရိုး] on the title page.
He wrote, “I have taken my name from James George Scott—I admire his book ‘The Burman [His Life and Notions]’ and it turns out that we were both born on Wednesday evening so I was entitled to a name with the same sound pattern. I wrote a lecture entirely in Burmese, with corrections by my teacher in Mandalay…” I was so enthralled with Szymborska I translated most of Map into Burmese and returned to him a collection of Szymborska poetry in Burmese in due course.
By 2020, as a Burman would change his name to suit their circumstances, Shwe Yoe had changed his name to Maung Hmek. Perhaps the name change was prompted by an astrologer’s counsel. Perhaps by his attempt to decolonize—the original Shwe Yoe was a British colonial officer.
When we met in early 2016 in Yangon, he was working on a biography of the Irrawaddy, treating the river as a living entity. He was thinking of an Irrawaddy/Ayeyarwady initiative along the lines of Peter Seeger’s efforts on the Hudson River, that would “combine natural history, environmentalism, and the arts of song and poetry and storytelling.” As I relocated to Sagaing in 2017, a few minutes walk from the Irrawaddy, and saw with my own eyes the destruction of the river, mainly by sand dredging day and night for a myriad of construction projects in the region, I saw the urgency of the book. I believe, despite his failing health, he managed to deliver what would possibly be his last book to the publisher.
I crossed the US borders in August 2016, and one of the questions in the US customs clearance form was “have you been near livestock lately.” I wrote to him about that, mentioning that I wanted to be near livestock and would like to visit his farm in New Haven. He immediately welcomed me but my visit never happened. By the time I got to see him again in December 2023, he was at Yale New Haven hospital, recovering from a cardiac problem. He was hollow-cheeked, size-zero, and bed-bound, but still hosting a stream of visitors, debating with some of them, without a break, as the hospital only allowed two visitors per patient at a time.
Thanks to the efforts by Maung Hmek and those who are near and dear to him at Yale, there is a teeming Burma-Myanmar community in New Haven today, most of whom arrived in the US following the 2021 coup in Myanmar. He also helped a number of Burmese refugees in Thailand since the Myanmar coup.
Maung Hmek was not just a thinker but was an engaged activist, who wouldn’t shy away from action. Among other things, he also revived the Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship, a bilingual open-access journal of Burma Studies. If Maung Hmek was in a situation to report to the CIA as a Rotary International Fellow in Yangon and Paris in his postgrad years, he had more than redeemed himself by turning against the state and state apparatuses as one of the most influential anarchists of our time.
In December 2018, Maung Hmek endured a huge loss when his barn, which was his study, on his New Haven farm burned to the ground. Vanished with the barn were almost all of his 5,000 academic books, his papers and notes, 500 bales of hay, and a computer. He wrote to me following the calamity:
“I have been trying to regain my footing and to figure what’s missing. So, what had been normal academic activities have become far more tortuous and slow. Thank goodness I am a stoic. I have invented a stoic adage for myself that might have been (but wasn’t) invented by Marcus Aurelius: ‘Whatever you build and write will be destroyed, by flood, by fire, by time, by enemies, by well-intentioned friends. So,…relax, build and write.’”
ko ko thett is a Burma-born poet. He has published widely in both Burmese and English, and taken part in a number of literary festivals, from Sharjah to Shanghai. His translation work has been recognised with an English PEN Translates Award. ko ko thett's most recent poetry collection Bamboophobia (Zephyr Press, 2022) has been shortlisted for the Walcott Prize. He lives in Norwich, UK.