Majeed Amjad -- Naqsh

Gar-e-Natamaam

By Dr. Syed Aamar Sohail

Published by Pakistan

Writers Cooperative

Society, 2008

Pages: 440

Price Rs350

Literary Age is an abstraction. Every period has a voice of its own incorporating a multitude of voices and expressions overlapping and hard to define at the same time. In Urdu poetry, the era of Meera Ji, Rashed, Faiz, Akhtar-ul-Iman, Munir Niazi, Nasser Kazmi and Majeed Amjad remains brilliant. Overshadowed by his contemporaries, Majeed Amjad remained almost unknown and the least acknowledged till 70s.

I vividly remember the dismissive laughter of my well-read and serious friends when I read out a few lines of Majeed's Amjad's poems to them. He was different, not in conformity with what we were familiar with. Later an intense sympathy and admiration grew as we focussed more. His first collection, the only one to be published in his life Shab-e-Rafta appeared seventeen years after Faiz's Naqsh-e-Faryad and Rashed's Mavara. Although his poems got regularly published in all reputed literary journals, he never received any attention from the critics or readers.

When he was found dead in his residence in Sahiwal in 1974, it was realised that a major poet had gone unattended. Javed Qureshi, the then Deputy Commissioner, did valuable efforts to preserve and compile the works left behind by Majeed. A committee comprising of Javed Qureshi, Abdul Rashed and Amjad Islam Amjad was formed by the government for the purpose. Consequently his posthumous volume Shab-e-Rafta ke baad was published in 1976 earning him a well deserved acknowledgement. Surprisingly the copies of his book disappeared from the market within days. Abdul Rashed claimed: "I kept five copies of the book while the rest was handed over to Amjad Islam Amjad". The poems were also subject to harsh criticism. Many questions have remained unanswered over the years.

Recently a book Majeed Amjad -- Naqsh Gar-e-Natamaan has been published by Dr. Aamer Sohail, an educationist and a research scholar with three books to his credit. The book is his PhD thesis in which he has successfully given some answers to the controversies surrounding the poet's life and poetry.

Not much is known about Amjad's life because he spent all his years in Sahiwal -- alone and withdrawn from the main literary scene. The book unfolds a few unexplored aspects of his marital and personal life. All the material has been gathered from different and conflicting statements of the writers and people who knew Amjad. It was also alleged that in Shab-e-Rafta ke baad the text was manipulated and changed to offer it as a document in favour of the modernistic literary theory. While many versions of the collection appeared later, Sohail claims that in spite of a few mistakes the text has never been altered or modified. Nonetheless, he rates Khawaja Zikaria's selection as the most authentic one.

Over the years, Majeed Amjad has earned a place equivalent to Rashed and Faiz. His poetry displays a sincere intensity of a disillusioned and a morose outlook on life. His works are replete with a constantly recurring theme of human helplessness. His turbulent subjective experience helped him create some exceptional and unique pieces – unprecedented both in content and tone. Although he had a deep insight into the tradition of Urdu poetry, he refused to conform. He writes: "The flow hampers the impact of my poems. The thought content of my poetry is such that if a reader stops and reads, he would enjoy but if he reads in a flow he would miss the essence".

Amjad experimented with the form to an extent that his last poems were wrongly perceived as prose poems. This also initiated and helped the prose-poetry to establish itself in the years to follow. A unique poet, he succeeded in creating a poem very powerful but different from the works of his contemporaries. One finds an element of story telling in the majority of his poems. Very few of his poems finish on a single page.

Dr. Aamer Sohail has discussed in detail the salient features of Amjad's poetry while giving critical comments on his contemporaries too. Faiz, according to him, created under the influence of the progressive ideology with a pre-determined mind set. Hence he compromised the poetic aesthetics due to his ideological commitment. Meera Ji couldn't produce poetry of lasting relevance due to his bohemian life style while Rashed, though an extremely powerful craftsman, failed to offer variety. It shouldn't be necessary to find faults with his contemporaries in order to make Majeed stand out because he is an author of significance.

The author is critical of the manner in which Amjad is still treated by some critics like Aziz Hameed Madani who refuse to accept him even as a good poet. The reason for this dismissal could be Majjed's non-Urdu speaking and suburban background. What matters is that Majeed Amjad has finally earned the status he deserves. Moreover, he is one poet who has the strongest influence on modern poem and would remain a role model for many of us practising poetry today.

Is it a dream, a perfume, a whiff of breeze or just a passing moment?

Or is it fog, or a cloud or a shadow, or is it you?

Classics are born once in decades. History incredibly remembers them. What is the worth of life's work of a man or his words that came out of sheer sensitivity for his fellow people's plight, one really wonders? Few words evoke such awe and respect as the poetry of Faraz Sahib commanded. Endowed with a rare intellect and transcendental vision; his poetry lives and will certainly continue to impact our social psyche for a long time to come as works of all great writers and thinkers of similar standing have done over the ages. His poems and ghazals are reminiscent of his classic diction:

My poems, my ghazals

All are for you

Your favours

Plaints too

All I dedicate to you

Images of faded times

That you may recall

Faraz, a master of poetic imagery, a pan humanist of the rarest sort, alluring composition of magnetic expressions, sublime blend of life and love, was bold enough to experiment with many genres of poetry and is credited with creating a distinct style, rhythm and diction. Romanticism, realism, human rights, political oppression, mythology, nostalgia, haunting romance and a belief in the supernatural are some of the themes that find frequent mention in his effortless poetry. Bitter and sweet; his poetry is imbued with love for the common man and strong revolt against a system that denies human rights and freedom of speech. He was awarded Hilal e Imtiaz in 2004, in recognition of his glorious literary achievements. He returned the award in 2006 after becoming disappointed with the government and its policies. "My conscious will not forgive me if I remained a silent spectator of the sad happenings around us. The least I can do is to let the dictatorship know where it stands in the eyes of the concerned citizens whose fundamental rights have been usurped. I am doing this by returning the Hilal-e-Imtiaz (civil) forthwith and refuse to associate myself in any way with the regime," a statement issued by the poignant Faraz. His thought-provoking style is reflected in these lines:

I am touched by the affection of the people of this city

but the hands I kissed turned out to be daggers

Faraz knew the art of maintaining equilibrium between the theme and its aesthetic expressions. His ghazals and love poems are distinguished for both these qualities i.e. unusual degree of intensity of feeling combined with ingenuity of expression to establish its own distinctive style. This brought him immediate popular acclaim, particularly among the youth who felt in this part of his writings the pulse of their own heart-beat.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz once said: "Faraz is the most facile poet because it provides the poet with a lavish store of ready made images, symbols, metaphors and other poetic devices perfected by the great masters in Urdu and Persian to choose from and to pass as his own".

Ahmed Faraz was the peoples' poet. His exceptional poetic sagacity and creative methodology has enthralled the mind of the readers and spectators immensely. He always proclaimed; my pen is the trust of my people; my pen is the judge of my conscience. His tribute to a pen is classically inventive:

The Pen is victorious

It wrote

What you and I are today

The pen wrote

If the tongue is tied

Hands take to the spears

If the lips are sealed

Prison walls speak

When the word is chained

It becomes the sword

The destiny of the tyrant

The word is life's dignity

The pen is victorious

The pen wrote

I was praying hard for his health and life when I heard the last clipping on one of the TV channel last August informing that Ahmed Faraz is seriously ill and he is under critical medical care. The touched voice of this stalwart will be missed immensely by the world of art and culture. He is no more but his poetry lives on. "Your name will be written with everlasting ink on the pages of eternity."

If we look at the long and impressive list of women who have written fiction in the 20th century we would have to find a place for Edna O'Brian in the front rank. Her style is lucid and her language is lyrical without being arch or pretentious.

As a successful writer Ms.O'Brian visited Bombay in 1970. Like all visiting celebrities she was lionised and taken to all the rights spots including (for some strange reason) the not very famous film studio where I was filming, a Merchant-Ivory production titled 'Bombay Talkies'. That is how I met her. She was a handsome woman with an English-rose complexion just entering her middle age. Here admires who hanged around were desperately anxious to engage her in a discussion about post-modern literature, but she fended off their entreaties with remarkable aplomb. On the few occasions that we met over lunch or dinner I found her conversation to be a delightful mixture of Irish blarney and English reserve.

Many years later, during a spree in Los Angeles, I picked up Edna O'Brian's biography of James Joyce. The book was a joy and a delight and it compelled me to go through Ulysses again, after nearly half a century.

I first read Joyce's Ulysses as a post-graduate student of psychology. My tutor, Professor Latif, suggested that I should read the books as a study of the stream of consciousness – or rather unconsciousness. I wish he had mentioned that it was a memorable novel. I read it as a treatise and found it to be a different work.

Ulysses is a cerebral quest marked by strange, often bizarre changes of fortune. It is a novel (several novels) in which nothing and everything happens. It is not possible to describe the plot and it would be an over-simplification to suggest that Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, two of the protagonists are, in fact, Telemachus and Odysseus. The Odyssey is unending; the reveries and warnings, dalliance and laments lace the work in a language that has not been matched ever since. It is a quintessence of everything Joyce heard and overheard, invocation and supplications, litanies and profanities. Ms O'Brian is absolutely right when she says that "language is the hero and heroine". 

Today no one disputes that it is a weighty, epoch-making work of literature. It is also very funny. Molly Bloom, who cuckolds her husband, will not have a maid in the house for fear that she might cajole her husband (Leopold Bloom) in the WC. She herself is not averse to receiving amorous glances from men. The chapter, in which we read of Molly Bloom's licentious longings, is hilarious. Joyce was convinced that even the most painful of human experiences can be legitimately turned into comedy.

Dublin, the city, lives and throbs through every chapter; its streets and taverns, schools and libraries, graveyards and brothels come alive in Joyce's effulgent language. Dublin is ever present in Portrait of An Artist, as well, but in Ulysses it reverberates, not as a backdrop but as a character or, if I may use Joyce's words, as a "dudderty devil". He left Dublin at the age of 22 saying he detested it, but is a city which he never forgot.

All he possessed when he began his monumental work was a dingy bedroom, a wife who kept threatening to leave him and his unbending spirit. He had two children by now. O'Brian tells us that when he began the seven years labour of love on Ulysses, he had to "duplicate as lyricist, mathematico, astronomico, chemico, mechanico and geometrico". There was fighting on all fronts, the old order was collapsing, empires were tottering, but he worked with a conviction that he was doing something for the distant future.

Using a suitcase lid as a desktop, and equipped with maps and street directories and rhyming dictionaries he worked ten hours a day. He was scrupulous in his research; he kept pestering his friends, relatives and acquaintances to supply him with any bit of blarney they knew of and any 'goddam drivel' that came to their head. He had to have precise information: were the canals frozen hard enough in 1893 for people to skate on? What type of pianola was in Bella Cohen's brothel? What music-hall airs were played on it? His eyesight was worse than ever and he used different coloured charcoals just to be able to see what he had scrawled. Frequently he collapsed after a day's work.

But he would go on the next day, "poring over each word, not only for its rhythm, its sense, its aptness, its beauty, its vulgarity, its myriad associativeness, but sometimes for its prophetic core". He was embarked on a journey in which he would breach unknown frontiers. He was determined to bring his readers to a pitch of consciousness where they had not gone before.

Joyce's wife Nora, whom he never married, showed a remarkable lack of interest in the epic. "She read 27 pages and that", said Joyce, pointedly, "includes the title page". Not everyone else showed such unconcern. Long before its publication, excerpts of the book were serialised in an American magazine. Soon there was an uproar. The custodians of morality sued the editors of the magazine on the grounds that such scurrilous writing would corrupt young girls. The editors produced eminent litterateurs to testify to the beauty of the work. When the offending passages were read out to the court, two of the judges found it so incomprehensible that they asked for a week's respite so that they could read the entire episode. No one knows whether the judges spent the week pondering over Joyce's words or practicing their golf strokes. When the court resumed, they summarily convicted the editors and forbade them to publish any more instalments of Ulysses. Other publishers who had shown an interest in the book lost heart after the court conviction. (The book would not be published in America until twenty years after its first publication).

And when at last it was finished, (he called it a 'bitch-of-mother book') there were no takers for the biggest literally landmark of the century. After the American debacle, Joyce was in despair and thought his work would never get published. The circumstances that led to its publication turned out to be a Cinderella story; and although it did not put an end to his financial woes, he was famous at last.

The critics were not kind. Virginia Woolf called it the effort of a "queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples", and T.S. Eliot felt so threatened by its audacity that he said that "the book gives no insight into human nature". Yeats was the only one of his great contemporaries, who recognised his genius and wrote to Joyce to assure him of his many admirers in Ireland.