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review In
the twilight zone
Zia Mohyeddin column
review “Ayub Khawar has
done something that only he could do,” comments Gulzar, the famous Indian
poet, screenwriter and filmmaker. He is referring to Khawar’s latest book
‘Mohabbat ki Kitab’, which is, in fact, an experiment where the writer
has demonstrated his skill to deal simultaneously with three layers of
creativity: poetry, music and drama. Verse Play may seem like a
forgotten genre today but, as we all know, it had been the order of the day
in Europe for a long period of time: from Greek tragedy to Ben Johnson,
Marlowe and Shakespeare, all major works were rendered in verse, and
Goethe’s Faust also followed suit. It was quite recently that drama in
verse fell out of fashion, and T.S. Eliot was perhaps the last exponent of
this genre in English language. In Urdu, however, the rise
and fall of verse play is a different story altogether. In the mid 19th
century, Nawab Wajid Ali Shah of Avadh, created a genre of dance-drama, which
he named as Rahs, but it was in fact based on the folk traditions of Bhagat,
Swang and Rasa. An enthusiast of performing arts as he was, Nawab Wajid
staged several musical plays, and inspired by them a contemporary poet Agha
Amanat wrote the famous Inder Sabha, which soon became a prototype for all
stage writers and entertainers of the day. In the late 19th century,
Inder Sabha reached the Parsi theatre, which itself was an amalgam of music,
dance, poetry and prose, but still a far cry from what we now know as manzum
drama, which became popular only after the advent of radio in the
subcontinent. All India Radio, and later, Radio Pakistan, became a hub for
poets like Shad Amritsari, and Syed Razi Tirmizi, who could successfully
dramatise their verse… and thus emerged the unique forms of “Ghanaiya”
— the radio-musical, and manzum drama, the verse play. The 1950s were the heydays
of versified plays on radio but, sadly, the musical drama suddenly stopped in
the mid 1960s when a new medium was introduced, and people started mounting
high antennas on rooftops, to catch clearer signals for their weekly dose of
tv drama. A brave new lot of
playwrights was waiting in the wings to show their expertise in the new
medium. They were almost exclusively prose writers as no poets were
entertained at this time. Most of them were short story writers or
journalists like Munnu Bhai, Ashfaq Ahmed, Bano Qudsia and Enver Sajjad, who
had already established themselves in the realm of literature. The days of historical
romance and musical fantasy were over and an era of realism had started where
people would speak in their everyday language, in a matter-of-fact way, and
discuss contemporary issues in a real-life setting. This tradition of realism
still continues and following in the footsteps of early PTV, some private
channels have also done wonders in this field. Now, in an atmosphere where
Radio Pakistan has long been a dead medium, FM channels can’t even think of
producing classics, TV plays claim to have gone wholly realistic, stage
simply cannot afford to accommodate any verse play, and the genre of
“literary play” in the book form is totally out of fashion. One wonders
what incited Auyb Khawar to publish a book like ‘Mohabbat ki Kitab’,
which neither falls into any category of popular or sellable stuff, nor can
be produced as a radio or TV play. The answer lies partly in
the preface written by Gulzar: “Ayub Khawar has done an experiment in
playwriting. Apparently it’s a three-fold experiment: poetic, musical and
dramatic; but actually there is also a fourth dimension to it…the cinematic
dimension. Yes, it can be filmed, and it shall be filmed,” says the veteran
filmmaker. The plot is not different
from any other story of two love-struck youngsters who are trying to find a
way to be together, but are parted forever in an act of brutality too heinous
to comprehend. A couple of things, however, make this tale unique: first, the
inanimate characters (mobile phone, mirror, pen, book, moon etc.) that act
side by side with humans, and second, the author’s decision to make it a
hundred percent verse play, implying that even stage/camera directions will
also be given in verse. This doesn’t seem to be a
casual or random decision; there certainly is a well thought out reason
behind it. Ayub Khawar believes in smooth continuity and full absorbance of
the audience in the narrative. He, therefore does not risk even a minutest
change in rhythm, by shifting his text from verse to prose…not even for the
stage or camera directions. Another unique feature of
the book is its high quality production: the publisher has been generous to
use white shiny 80gram paper, and the best available Urdu fonts of Naskh and
Nastaleeq. The title design demonstrates innovation by showing two
silhouetted figures under a red umbrella, walking slowly towards their doomed
destination. Muhabbat ki Kitab Author: Ayub Khawar Publishers: Readings,
Gulberg, Lahore Pages: 178 Price: PKR 295
In
the twilight zone The ‘adult’
graphic novels at The Last Word stick out for their neat, hardbound calm
among the dizzying jumble of superhero comics, baiting the desultory
afternoon browser to pluck one out just for the joy of engaging with a
beautiful book. I pick Audrey Niffeneger’s ‘The Night Bookmobile’. A woman in a bright blue
dress and crimson nail polish clutches an open book to her heart; eyes
squeezed shut, a strained expression on her face most often associated with
fervent prayer. Behind her, from floor to ceiling, stacks of vibrant books
fill a room that’s too snazzy to be a library, too sombre for a bookshop. This is a book designed
with the express purpose of enticing bibliophiles and the trick is working on
me. Between the fishing out of the debit card for a (relatively) cheap book I
had picked out earlier and the last wistful glance at the room’s enchanting
motley, I lean over and grab this one I cannot afford. I decide it’s worth
the purchase for the cover alone. The lyrical quality of the
jacket echoes in the novel’s poetic style which opens with its protagonist
wandering the streets of Chicago “at that quiet time of morning when the
cicadas have given up but the birds haven’t started in yet.” Wandering
aimlessly to clear her head after a fight with her long-time boyfriend she
chances upon the Chicago Version of the Alif Laila Book Bus blaring ‘I Shot
The Sherriff’ from the corner of a street. Against her better judgment
she engages in a conversation with the bus driver who invites her in with a
card that reads ‘Night Bookmobile — Hours Dawn to Dusk’. The room she
slips into is subdued and pleasant, smelling of “old, dry paper, with a
little whiff of wet dog”; books stretch out endlessly within it. All the
ones in the first shelf are children’s books, some have catalogue numbers
on their spines, others don’t, and the numbers seem to belong to different
systems. She wonders if Mr.
Oppenshaw, the bus driver and librarian has been running around stealing
books from different libraries. Further exploration of the
library leads to the discovery that all the books on its shelves are familiar
“from Jane Austen to Paul Aster, from Betty Crocker’s Cookbook to college
biology textbooks”, even her personal diaries. That’s when Mr Oppenshaw
tells her that the bookmobile is a complete collection of everything she has
ever read in her life, a concept as fascinating to the protagonist,
Alexandra, as it would doubtless be to anyone who is an avid reader. At dawn the librarian
promptly turns her out after which the next appearance the bookmobile makes
in Alexandra’s life is nine years later. Thus the stage is set for a rather
fascinating tale of magical realism and fantasy. “Here was consolation. I
wiped my nose on the back of my hand and surveyed the shelves. In the same
way that perfume captures the essence of a flower, these shelves of books
were a distillation of my life. Here was A Distant Mirror, by Barbara
Tuchman, which I remembered reading in a coffee shop while waiting for a
blind date who never showed up. Here was my paperback copy of Anna Karenina,
fattened by repeated reading. I picked up Gravity’s Rainbow. As I fanned
through the book I saw that the text stopped at page fifty-seven; the
remaining pages were blank. I had never finished reading it. A popsicle stick
served to mark the place I had not come back to.” The urge to own books and
the ways in which our reading defines us is at the core of ‘The Night
Bookmobile’. Imagine being led to a place that contains every single word
you have ever read including cereal boxes, periodicals and newspapers, even
your own diaries. Imagine a librarian whose sole job it is to keep track of
all that you read and keep updating your personal collection of books
accordingly. How would that change your
reading choices? What kind of connection would you feel for a person
accessing all your thoughts in the form of all you choose to read and write,
however discretely? For those captivated by alternate worlds where does
fantasy end and reality begin? Do books bring us greater clarity or further
confusion? What we read, what we highlight and what we leave unread can be as
intimate as our dearest thoughts and it is a fascination with all these ideas
that ‘The Night Bookmobile’ successfully manages to capture in its first
half. All the more disappointing
when such an intriguing concept is left criminally underdeveloped and the
book fails to explore any of the questions it raises in any depth. Hardly has the book begun
when it ends; the text not even as long as most short stories, leaving its
overarching metaphor dangling and incomplete. But despite that the nocturnal
ambience of a big city that it evokes so movingly, the life of a lonely woman
increasingly consumed by the books she reads, a dreamlike Chicago of late
rainy nights, music concerts, baseball games and a fantastical night
bookmobile that comes and goes of its own whim; the narrator’s almost
imperceptible sexual tension with the balding, asexual-looking eternal
librarian — a distant, ethereal man who knows her more intimately than
anyone else, and the idea of a place filled with all the books you have ever
read and thus been shaped by, is enough to call this a good purchase. ‘The Night Bookmobile’
is like walking through someone’s dream, with all the escapist thrill and
incompleteness of one. A dream you don’t want to let go of as you lie there
in the early morning twilight zone between sleeping and waking, vainly
fighting against the demands of the real world pressing down upon you.
I have been
re-reading Auden’s ‘The Orators — An English Study’, a book I bought
in Lahore, in 1951. I shouldn’t say re-reading because I only riffled
through it at the time and found it to be a bit of a ‘Finnegan’s Wake’.
A passage I had underlined reads: “Sun is on right, moon on left, powers to
earth. The action of light on dark is to cause it to contract. That brings
forth.” Nothing else was underlined so I must have stopped there and put
the book away. Looking for my copy of the
souvenir programme of “Measure For Measure” in my library I came across
‘The Orators’. Its dust-jacket was half torn and had become glued to the
binding. Ashamed, that I had not bothered to read it during all these years,
I sat down and went through it until I finished it. ‘The Orators’ is not
Joycean at all. It is about hero-worship in personal and political life,
school-day memories, and about ravages of war. It has a taste all of its own.
It is a work with one scheme and purpose, partly in prose and partly in
verse, to which Auden continues his exploration of new forms and rhythms. The
unfamiliar metric and the violent imagination of Auden makes ‘The
Orators’ a rare work of English literature. I quote here two
paragraphs. The first is cryptic; the second, in everyday plain language,
expresses the dreaded fear school boys have of being found out that they
indulge in forbidden practices. “O turn your head this
way, be faithful here. The working mouth, the flimsy flexing knee, the leap
in summer in the rubber shoes, these signal in their only codes.... Death
swots ungraceful, keen on his career; notes in his journal. I have never
lived – left handed and ironic, but have loved. Again. Always the same
weakness. No progress against the
terrible thing. Does Derek suspect? He looked at me very strangely at dinner.
No; no one must ever know, I must be careful to avoid sitting up with E alone
to late hours. The signed confession in my pocket shall remain unread,
always”. What follows is a
delightful poem, a chant rather, similar to the kind intoned by bullied fags
of an English public school. Beethameer, Beethameer,
bully of Britain, With your face as fat as
farmer’s bum; Though you pose in private
as a playful kitten Though the public you
poison are pretty well dumb, They shall turn on their
betrayer when the time is come, The cousins you cheated
shall recover their nerve And give you the thrashing
you richly deserve. In kitchen, in cupboard, in
clubroom, in news, In palace, in privy, your
paper we meet Nagging at our nostrils
with its nasty news, Suckling the silly from a
septic teat Leading the lost with lies
to defeat; But defeat shall force them
to find the nerve To give you the thrashing
you richly deserve... ‘The Orators’ also
includes six exuberant odes. The beginning of the first ode makes you sit up: ‘Watching in three planes
from a room over-looking the courtyard That year decaying Stub-end of year that
smoulders to ash of winter That last day dropping; Lo, a dream met me in
middle night, I saw in a vision Life pass as a gull, as a
spy, as a dog-hated dustman Heard a voice saying —
‘Wystan, Stephen, Christopher, all of you Read of your
losses’...... Wystan is Auden’s first
name, Stephen is the poet, Stephen Spender and Christopher is the
playwright-poet, Christopher Isherwod. The odes are full of poignant
vignettes: “Who will save? Who will teach us how to
behave? Youth’s the solution of
every good scout Youth’s a success Youth has the blessing of
the Sunday Express Youth says the bishop Youth says the teacher Youth says the bumslapper ‘Strewth’, says I They are most of them
dummies who want their mummies In Rolls or on bicycles
they bolt for mama......” And finally, an enchanting,
heart-warming epilogue, which is an absolute delight to read out, aloud: “O where are you
going?” said reader to rider “That valley is fatal
when furnaces burn Yonder is the midden whose
odours will madden That gap is the grave where
the tall return.” “O do you imagine,”
said fearer to farer, “That dusk will delay on
your path to the pass, Your diligent looking
discover the lacking Your footsteps feel from
granite to grass?” “O
what was that bird,” said horror to hearer, “Did you see that shape
in the twisted trees? Behind you swiftly the
figures come softly, The spot on your skin is a
shocking disease?” “Out of this house” –
said rider to reader “Yours never will” –
said farer to fearer “They’re looking for
you” – said hearer to horror As he left them there, as
he left them there. What
strikes me most about Auden’s poetry is that he expresses his themes —
psychological, religious, moral, ethical, and political — in a stylistic
manner. His words often conceal rather than reveal emotions. In form, his
poetry ranges from obscure modernism to the lucid traditional forms such as
ballads and limericks, doggerel and haiku. I doubt if any other 20th century
English poet experimented with so many meters. And I also doubt if any other
poet discarded so many of his famous poems that he found to be boring or
dishonest in the sense that they expressed views that he had never held but
had used because he felt that they would be rhetorically effective. Auden was anti-war. His
emigration to the United States in 1939 caused a huge stir. He was dubbed as
unpatriotic and ridiculed as a coward. (Other conscientious objectors too,
suffered the same fate). In America he experimented with writing poetry in
mid-Atlantic dialect — the language of international conferences — but
soon realised that the poems were flavourless and returned to writing in the
innovative, dynamic manner which had earned him such accolades as ‘the
undisputed master’ and ‘the modern poet’. According to Encyclopaedia
Britannica, “by the time of Eliot’s death in 1965, a convincing case
could be made for the assertion that W.H. Auden was indeed Eliot’s
successor, as Eliot had inherited sole case to supremacy when Yeats died in
1939”. Auden saw poetry as the
verbal expression of a national tradition. He believed that the “true poet
was like a valley cheese local and prized everywhere!” A prolific writer,
he produced twenty six volumes of poetry, six of prose, hundreds of essays
and reviews about literary history, music, religion, art and many other
subjects. He wrote for films, librettos for opera and four plays in
collaboration with Christopher Isherwood. His thought-provoking “Lectures
on Shakespeare” appeared posthumously. I regard him as one of the greatest
writers of the 20th century. |
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