The new wave
Pakistan's most promising, up-coming writers in one book
By Huma Imtiaz
The Life's Too Short Literary Review 01
The Magazine of New Writing from
Pakistan
Publisher: Siren Publications
Pages: 114
Price: PKR 395
Sponsored by the Zohra and ZZ Ahmed Foundation, and published in collaboration with the British Council, the Life's Too Short Literary Review is a far more pleasurable read than the words, "literary review'' and ''in collaboration with the British Council'' might suggest. A medley of writings with a photo essay, a handwritten note and an excerpt of a graphic novel thrown in, the greater part of this journal is made up of short stories that won the Life's Too Short short story competition held earlier this year, judged by authors Daniyal Mueenuddin, Kamila Shamsie and Mohammed Hanif.

Zia Mohyeddin column
The brightest jewel
PART I
The Majlis-e-taraqui-e-Adab has done a great service to Urdu literature by publishing Aqueel Ruby's translation of Sophocles' 'Oedipus Rex'. I am saddened to note that an organisation as prestigious as the Majlis did not bother to ask a sub (or even a sub-sub) editor to check the spelling of the names of renowned authors, dramatists and universally known characters.

 

review

Age of autobiographies

Holding pincers in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other, the author takes memoirs and autobiographies to his lab and dissects them all

By Arif Waqar

 

Pusnavisht -3

Author: Dr Parvez Perwazi

Published by Naya Zamana Publications Lahore, 2010

14 B Temple Road, Lahore

niazamana@yahoo.com

www.niazamana.com

Price: Pak Rs 400

Pages 336

 

Dr Parvez Ahmed Perwazi had been an Urdu language teacher in Japan and Sweden. After his retirement, he moved to Canada where he is living a happy, comfortable life and is free to follow his lifetime pursuit of reading all sorts of autobiographies and writing critical notes on them.

His strange preoccupation with autobiographies attracted my attention years ago when I met him in Stockholm. I had gone there from London to cover the International Urdu conference for BBC, and Perwazi had come from Uppsala University of Sweden, where he was conducting a course in Urdu, for his Scandinavian students.

What started as a routine academic exercise, ended up as an addiction -- a strong obsession to read any book that claims to be an autobiography. By the turn of the century, Dr Perwazi had critically studied more than a hundred Urdu autobiographies. In the year 2003, he published a survey of seventy one selected autobiographies under the title Pusnavisht or Post Script. It discussed, among others, the autobiographies of social, political and religious leaders like Hussain Ahmed Madni, Shorish Kashmiri, Z.A.Bokhari, Sir Zafarullah Khan, Qudratullah Shahab, General Jehandad Khan and also famous literary figures like Josh Malihabadi, Kishwar Naheed, Gopal Mittal, Ram Laal, and Deevan Singh Muftoon. The book was received with much enthusiasm both in academic circles and among general readers.

In the next four years, Dr Perwazi collected another eighty autobiographies for the next volume of 'Pus-Navisht', and later the two parts were merged into one impressive volume of 640 pages, containing the critical survey of as many as 152 autobiographies. This time he scrutinised, among others, the memoirs of Ahmed Nadeem Qasimi, Ehsan Danish, Mukhtar Masood, Sheikh Ayaz, Amrita Preetum, Qurratulain Hyder, A.Hameed, Masood Khaddarposh, Justice Muneer, Altaf Gauhar, Dr Kiran Singh, Roedad Khan, Gen. Attiqur Rehman and of course our good old Gen Pervez Musharraf.

Memoirs and biographies have been the most popular genre in Urdu non-fiction and our readers were well familiar with those who like to tell us either about their own life stories or about other people's achievements or failures. But now the readers were face to face with a person who would collect, read, analyse, criticise and scrutinise these biographies to distinguish fact from fiction.

It is noteworthy that young Muslims, who had directly experienced the events of 1947, had entered the twilight years of their lives by the late 1980s. Some of them had spent a long and successful career in politics or military of this new-born country, and it was time for them to narrate their life stories and tell the new generations about their 'noble deeds' and their personal contribution in establishing and consolidating a new Muslim homeland. That is one reason we see a mushrooming of autobiographies in the late 1980s and early 90s. In this flood of memoirs, full of claims like: "I made it clear to Mr. Jinnah…I told Liaqat Ali…I instantly sent a note to Iskandar Mirza…my PA rushed to Fatima Jinnah…I called Ayub Khan and told him…I advised Bhutto to…I called Benazir and alerted her about…" the poor reader would wonder: how come Pakistan turned such a disaster in the presence of all these loyal generals, intelligent advisers and patriotic politicians!

It was at this point that Dr Perwazi appeared in his white overall, holding pincers in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other. He took all these memoirs and autobiographies to his lab and with the ruthless objectivity of a scientific observer, dissected them all.

Writing your memoirs, according to Dr Perwazi, is not a casual job. It's a serious business because each word you write shall be judged at the touchstone of truth, objectivity and factual accuracy. In the theoretical part of his book, Dr Perwazi quotes Philip Guedallah as saying, "Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary and on the west by tedium." These restrictions are even more strongly applicable to an autobiographer, who according to Perwazi, is a tight rope walker and a slightest distraction can throw him into the abyss of darkness. In addition to this, today's biographer is producing raw material for the historian of tomorrow and any defect, flaw or weakness in his material can cause long-term problems.

The third collection of Dr Perwazi's articles on autobiographies is now in the market and with this the total number of Urdu memoirs discussed and analysed by him comes to 221. In his latest work: Pus-Navisht Sivum or Post Script: 3, he has brought under scrutiny 69 new books, including the biographies of the present Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, Raja Tajummal Hussain, music director Naushad, the poet Saqi Faruqi, Kishwar Naheed, Malik Meraj Khalid, film writer and actor Sikkay-dar, Air Martial Zafar Chaudhri, the ex Indian president A.P.J Abdulkalam, and the famous philanthropist Abdu Sattar Eidhi, to name a few of them.

In his autobiography Chah-e-Yousuf se Sada Gilani says, "Nawaz Sharif was facing an ever increasing diplomatic pressure to call back the armed forces from the Kargil front, so he had an urgent meeting with President Clinton and informed him that if Pak forces were told to retreat from Kargil, there could be a strong backlash from the army. However President Clinton assured him that there won't be any such reaction, and he insisted on a quick withdrawal of Pak army from the Kargil area. Immediately after this one-to-one meeting in White House, Nawaz Sharif had to announce the pullback of Pak army, in a joint communiqué."

That's what Gilani says in his book, but Dr. Parvez Perwazi takes him to task and writes in his analysis,"…I'm sure Mr. Gilani had not seen President Clinton's autobiography My Life'in which Mr. Clinton has clearly said that Nawaz Sharif had expressed his wish to visit USA on 4th July but Clinton told him that he could be allowed to visit USA only if he assured, in advance, that the Pak army would be completely pulled out of Kargil area…and when Nawaz Sharif gave assurance to the effect, only then he was allowed to visit USA". (My Life page:531)

Examining Raja Tajammal Hussain's autobiography Jo Bachay Hain Sung Dr Pervazi has pointed out several factual errors. For example it was Justice Teja Singh who was named on the Radcliffe Boundary Commission as the sikh representative and NOT justice Boota Singh, as suggested by Tajammul Hussain. Dr Perwazi has also pointed out that the Congress nominee was Justice Mehr Chand Mahajan which the author has failed to mention, and another error was made by him when he said that Bhola Bhai Desai presented the Congress case, whereas in fact it was Motilal Setalvad and the Sikh case was presented by a famous lawyer of Lahore named Sardar Harnam Singh.

Perwazi is all praise for people like Mushtaq Wajadi and Major Akram, who have candidly expressed the events of their lives without any exaggeration, but he is very bitter about those who have written their memoirs either to boast of their 'glorious' past or just to vent their venom against their colleagues and contemporaries.

If you happen to be a retired army general, bureaucrat, politician or diplomat, and have the slightest ambition of writing your wonderful memoirs, please be warned that you are now living in the Perwazi era of autobiographies: a man in white overall, with pincers in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other, is anxiously waiting for any new memoirs.

 

 

The new wave

Pakistan's most promising, up-coming writers in one book

By Huma Imtiaz

 

The Life's Too Short Literary Review 01

The Magazine of New Writing from

Pakistan

Publisher: Siren Publications

Pages: 114

Price: PKR 395

 

Sponsored by the Zohra and ZZ Ahmed Foundation, and published in collaboration with the British Council, the Life's Too Short Literary Review is a far more pleasurable read than the words, "literary review'' and ''in collaboration with the British Council'' might suggest. A medley of writings with a photo essay, a handwritten note and an excerpt of a graphic novel thrown in, the greater part of this journal is made up of short stories that won the Life's Too Short short story competition held earlier this year, judged by authors Daniyal Mueenuddin, Kamila Shamsie and Mohammed Hanif.

The winner of the competition was Sadaf Halai's Lucky People, with Aziz A Sheikh's The Six-Fingered Man and Rayika Choudri's Settling Affairs in second and third place. In Lucky People, a housewife is perplexed by the lifestyle of her new tenants, members of Pakistan's media-boom middle class. Halai's greatest skill lies in her subtlety. Class conflict and stories of modernity encountering traditionalism always run the risk of sounding hackneyed as so many writers have taken on these themes, and often quite badly. Halai's voice is refreshing in its simplicity and emotional intelligence and is worthy of the first place award.

That said, Aziz A. Sheikh, with his poignant tale The Six-Fingered Man, is the author to watch out for. His story of two young boys idling away their days in games and adventures while growing up in war-torn Kashmir is an exceptionally accomplished story from a new writer and reminds one of the struggle that children must go through daily in the valley; trying to find new adventures while being ever aware of the bombs, gunfire and violence. One hopes Sheikh is working on a novel as he clearly deserves a large readership.

The themes in the anthology range from birth, death, a doll's wedding, trouble with the domestics, callous boyfriends, a romance with an exploding bomb as the backdrop, the vanity of old age, and people considered Pakistan experts abroad. Written for a local audience, Orientalist exotica, or as author H.M Naqvi once described it, the waft of tamarind, is conspicuous by its absence in the review and this sets apart the anthology from much of the writing one comes across in the Subcontinent.

But while most of the authors have managed to succeed in bringing a new touch to old themes, it is unfortunate that the anthology chose to end with its weakest story, Bina Shah's Not Another Voice, which feels dated and attempts to disseminate information where it should instead have aimed to create more convincing characters. Ms. Shah, less religion, more work on developing the plot.

The photo essay, Sign Your Name Across My Heart by Attiq Uddin Ahmed, shows up some of Pakistan's lesser-known wonders, highlighting the absurd and hilarious sights one comes across in Pakistan. For literary junkies, there is a page from author Mohsin Hamid's notebook, featuring a page charting out the course of what became The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Author Musharraf Ali Farooqui takes a break from translating of Urdu fantasy novels and is featured here penning the words for Rabbit Rap, an upcoming graphic novel.

And for those that like their fiction with a dose of masala, a must-read is the excerpt from Sabiha Bano's Challawa, a long-running story from the world of Urdu digests. Translated from Urdu to English by author Mohammed Hanif. Racy and amusing, Challawa makes for a rollicking read and is sure to create a buzz amongst those who are unaware of the original.

Although one does not wish to be overly critical of a brave effort by the publishers, one wonders about the lack of poetry or non-fiction in the anthology, and hopes that the second issue will see more from these two important genres of literature.

Edited by columnist Faiza S. Khan and published by Aysha Raja, the owner of the Last Word chain of bookstores who together run their publishing house Siren Publications, the first issue of The Life's Too Short Literary Review impresses with its design, and serves as a reminder that there are many talented authors in the country, waiting to be discovered and now there is a place for that to happen.

It is also heartening to learn from the publishers that the next Life's Too Short short story prize is not a one-time effort and that this year's prize is open for entries again, with Mohsin Hamid coming on as judge and two more to be confirmed in the weeks to come.

The Life's Too Short Literary Review 01 is available at The Last Word in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. Entries for the next competition can be sent to lifestooshortprize@gmail.com

Huma Imtiaz works as a journalist in Pakistan and can be reached at huma.imtiaz@gmail.com

 

 

Zia Mohyeddin column

The brightest jewel

PART I

The Majlis-e-taraqui-e-Adab has done a great service to Urdu literature by publishing Aqueel Ruby's translation of Sophocles' 'Oedipus Rex'. I am saddened to note that an organisation as prestigious as the Majlis did not bother to ask a sub (or even a sub-sub) editor to check the spelling of the names of renowned authors, dramatists and universally known characters.

It is a pity because in a hardbound book, Freud is spelled as FRIED, Laius as LIOUS, Marlow as MARLLOW and Antigone as ANTIGON. Even Sophocles is sometimes written as SOPHOCES. Ruby has acknowledged in the beginning that the English texts he has drawn upon are those of Robert Fitzgerald and Dudley Fitts. Alas! Dudley Fitts, in bold letters in the centre of a whole page, is printed as DUDLEY FITSS.

Why do we have such a cavalier attitude towards the spelling of names? It is a question that has amused and irritated me no end. It is not just laziness. We have a tendency to spell a name the way we think it should be spelled. We do not care to know how a person spells his name. His name, we feel, should be spelled the way we think it ought to be spelled. Ah well!

Professor Aqueel Ruby, who has been studying Greek tragedy for many years, has done a sterling job in translating 'Oedipus the King'. His diction is devoid of hyperbole which usually mars the tone of the original text. His language is precise, and he has been faithful to Sophocles without being prolix. His translation must be praised for clarity and poetic quality.

Greek tragedy is one of greatest legacies the world has inherited in the sphere of literature. Despite the small number of plays extant and those only by the great dramatists – Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides – there is sufficient evidence to show why Greek tragedy should so influence drama through the centuries and why for the greater part it has become immortal. The expression of the tragic form of drama that spanned the 5th century BC excites and interests us even today.

It all began about the middle of the 6th century B.C. when the old rustic 'Dionysian festival of the earth' was transferred to Athens. Previously, the festivals held in the city of Dionysia (The Greeks consider Dionysus to be the god-father of the theatre) had begun to include tragic as well as comic contests, but the plays presented in Dionysia could not be presented in Athens – until an edict legalised the revival of plays by Aeschylus, after his death.

The plays to be presented for the drama during the competition in Athens were carefully selected by a playreader (specially appointed by the organising committee) who also chose the leading actor. Wealthy citizens were designated by law to bear the expense of a chorus of twelve to fifteen men. The chorus, required to sing and dance, was trained by a specialist.

Rehearsals were arranged, properties were purchased, and a pipe player was selected. A few days before the performance, the playwright, actors and chorus presented themselves in a place adjoining the theatre to announce the title of the play, the author's name and other details. The Athenian audience saw performances which were colourful, diversified and impressive. No effort -- or expense -- was spared in the preparation of the productions.

The masks worn by the actors portrayed general attributes like cruelty, suffering, etc., Characters were differentiated by means of the mask. Special masks were worn by mythological and allegorical characters like the multi-eyed Argo, or the snaky-haired Furies. Even realism was attempted. At the conclusion of 'Oedipus the King', the mask of the hero depicted a bloodstained countenance with mutilated eyes.

Fortunately, the acoustics of a Greek theatre were excellent and the voice of the actor could be projected to the utmost tiers with the aid of the open-mouthed mask that served as a sounding board. (It must be borne in mind that three to three a half thousand people attended a performance). Actors who had spent years in training were chosen for their voices. Good actors were so greatly in demand that they soon commanded excellent salaries.

The stage effect was vastly enhanced by the presence of the chorus that marched with aplomb in ranks and files from the wings, came and went as needed and mixed with the actors from time to time. In lieu of a curtain every new scene was ushered in and followed by a chorus. Even when it remained passive, the chorus did not stand frozen in a tableau; it continued to follow the story with descriptive movements conveying emotions of anxiety, terror, pity, hope and exaltation. The chorus did not always sing as has been supposed. It sometimes used recitative and even conversational speech in addressing the actors. Sophocles made excellent use of the chorus (and its interplay with the main actors) in Oedipus Rex. Like the actors the chorus too, was variously costumed and masked.

There was no dearth of colour in the productions. Mechanical contraptions afforded some partially realistic scenery. The sound of thunder and lighting was provided. A form of wagon-stage was rolled out or pushed out to reveal interior scenes (the permanent scenic façade was used for the descriptive passages of the play). Trapdoors enabled ghosts to rise from the nether world. A crane-like contraption swept the actor who impersonated as a god, across the acting area, suspended him in mid-air, and lowered him, sensationally, into the orchestra, (the circular dancing area for the chorus); gods were exhibited in heaven on a special platform and there were such special effects as Medea's departure in a chariot drawn by winged dragons.

One aspect of Greek tragedy worth remembering is that it is not cluttered with extraneous clowning and comic interludes. For the Greeks tragedies and comedies were entirely separate entities. In the contests which lasted several day tragedies were presented in the morning and comedies in the afternoon. Another reason was the convention which required every tragedian to wind up his series of tragedies with a riotous and bawdy after-piece, the so-called satyr-comedy.

The 5th century BC has been considered to be the golden age of Greece. There were many jewels in that century, (Herodotus, Thucydides, Pericles and Euripides) but none brighter than Sophocles.

It is unbelievable that a man who elevated the form of Greek tragedy to such heights was also an ordained priest bound to the service of Asclepius the god of medicine. What is even more surprising is that he was twice elected to the Board of Generals who administered the civil and military affairs of Athens. One does not associate creative writers with high finance, but Sophocles even held the post of a director of the Treasury Department which controlled the funds of the state.

(to be continued)

 

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