The Tide's True Daughter: Saya Zawgyi's 'The Hyacinth's Way' (Beida Lan) as an Ecological Text

Abstract

This paper provides an ecocritical analysis of the depiction of the aquatic environment in the poetic sequence 'The Hyacinth's Way' (or 'Beida lan', comprising poems originally published separately in magazines between 1957 to 1981) by seminal Burmese writer Saya Zawgyi (born Thein Han, 1907-1990). The forty-poem sequence narrates the ebbs and flows of the feminized plant protagonist Ma Beda (or Miss Beda, a water hyacinth, 'Eichhornia crassipes') as she drifts along an unnamed waterway, in all probability the Pyapon River, a tributary of the Irrawaddy River in Myanmar. At various moments in the sequence, the narrative is conveyed in the first person, from Ma Beda's perspective as she relates experiences of exhilaration and triumph-while negotiating fatigue and physical obstacles, such as whirlpools and logs-in her passage up and down the river. Notwithstanding the sequence's prominent use of metaphor-principally, the alignment of the plant's journey to Buddhist ideas of being - 'The Hyacinth's Way', at the same time, demonstrates in-depth observational knowledge of riparian habitats, tidal rhythms, interactions between the species inhabiting the tidal ecosystem, ethnobotanical relationships between villagers and plants, and, arguably, the bioinvasive status of the hyacinth itself. Developing an ecocritical approach to contemporary Burmese poetry and applying concepts from the field of critical plant studies, the analysis characterizes 'The Hyacinth's Way' as an environmental text positioning the natural world as a chief subject of concern. While offering a persuasive allegory for the contingencies of human life from a Buddhist perspective, the poem concurrently underscores the fragility of freshwater aquatic ecosystems in South-east Asia. The paper concludes that, through the compelling voice of Ma Beda, Zawgyi presents a message of river conservation and the value of engendering respectful attitudes toward waterways and their ecologies through the persuasiveness of poetic narratives.