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profile Your
love for the riches
He who brought Africa to the
world
profile When I first read
the works of Zehra Nigah, three slim volumes, I had no idea of the strength
and depth of her work. Though, having read her once, her poems accompanied me
everywhere. “Zehra has not written anything since these many
days Though in this day and
night what
has she not seen! What to write and what to think? the thought is vague, the hand that shakes.” Not mad enough to say it
all But then not fasting with her truth Not so old to give up so But now willing to let it
go All thoughts kept in a trunk of amnesia! so easy, this life.” — Zehra Ney Bohat Din Se
Kuch Bhi Nahin Likha Hai (my translation of the first stanza,with apologies) “Interviews repeat
themselves and sometimes it is too much to talk about the history of my
poetic journey,” says Zehra Apa. So I think of leaving history aside and
talking to her about poetry only. Why did she write poetry? “There is no particular
reason. I do feel that a bit of it is temperament and poetry is instinctive
to human nature. It is somewhat natural — to express. Nature has bestowed
upon us a gift that we choose some words and we use those words to create a
rhythm, a situation or condition of rhythm. It is like a craft. If someone
knows this craft, then to use words in a rhythmic structure and turn it into
a poem is easy enough. In truth though, the poet must be familiar with the
classics of poetic excellence, the canon of works. And one has to determine
one’s way through intellectual pursuits, otherwise the brain becomes rusty,
and then poets start repeating themselves endlessly. All the machinery of
poetic endeavour starts to fall apart. To answer why did I really write
poetry is difficult. I wrote poetry because I could. It came to me. “And then with age and
maturity, one’s subjects keep changing. In the beginning, you might write
about going to the cinema, something humorous, an infatuation maybe.” Zehra Nigah has written
ghazal as well as nazms. She started with ghazal which is a strict form of
poetic expression and difficult to mould. She also wrote nazms. In ghazal,
the structure and form are very tight and I want to know how she navigated
between these two forms? “Firaq said that ghazal
is a strict mistress; it keeps the poets on a tight rein and has very less
space. A great poet has the capacity to use everyday vocabulary, and elicit a
depth of meaning from it. He creates a spark out of inanimate objects.” She implies that a certain
chemical process, a mysterious one, transforms words into a poem. “That
mystery, the realisation of that mystical process of words sparking to a life
of their own, has the ability to take one’s hand for a ride through
heavens. The aesthetic appreciation of poetry is like a delicate and
civilised human pleasure. The enjoyment of poetry, the way it creates
sensation, and the way one delves into one’s own self is nothing short of a
miracle.” Nazm as opposed to ghazal
is different. “It is more declarative than ghazal, more telling in its
formation. Unlike ghazal where every couplet must be novel, a nazm can have a
single theme; there is greater room for being experimental. Styles of
expression change with time with regard to their rhyme and metre. With these
changes in rhythmic patterns of poems, we also have prose poetry. But what
really works for us is poetry which has some sort of metre in it. That a poem
must have metrical pattern is in a way in our blood. And when I write poems,
they always have some sort of metre in them. That metre is what ghazal
writing instilled in me.” She recites some lovely
lines by Noon Meem Rashed to prove her point about metre and poetic
expression even in free verse. I am wondering about what
incites her to write poetry. What has been the strongest stimulus for her
poetry? “The first reason was partition. It never left me. In the
beginning, coming to Pakistan felt like a picnic but, after growing up, there
was a greater realisation and seriousness. When I was in eighth grade, I
attended a mushaira organised by APWA. That gave me confidence to write
poems. But then two incidents shook me; my grandfather’s and then my
father’s death. That changed my life. They had encouraged me but then they
were gone forever.” My work used to be
published in literary magazines like Naqoosh and Sawera, Adab-e-Lateef, Nai
Roshni from Lahore, and I was appreciated. My husband was a well read man, he
would also suggest books for me to read.” Some of the images in Zehra
Nigah’s work are very women-oriented. Like old trunks where women keep
linens, other domestic objects, cradles, etc. Does she think there is any
basic difference between men and women? Truthfully speaking, I was trying to
find out if she is a champion of women. Maybe a militant champion of women.
“I don’t think there is any difference between men and women, other than
on a physical level. Certainly none in their intellectual abilities. Women
are so mentally evolved! The quality of a woman’s brain is so elevated but
the sort of social divisions we have make us think that a good tailor is a
man, or a good musician, or a good poet or a prose writer. But what I see now
is that even compared to India the scope and vision of our women poets is
astoundingly great.” She makes an interesting
distinction between poetry and prose as divided between two regions. “Here
the depth in poetry is unfathomable though the Indians are better
storytellers. They know the craft. We have a great generation of young poets
but we do not have such prose writers at the moment,” she says. Zehra Nigah has also
translated Sylvia Plath and W. H Auden. “The beauty of a translation is
that one should not go beyond the parameters that a poet is drawn in one’s
own translation of their work. I found that very difficult. My forays in
translating Plath would go into all sorts of unpredictable ways. Her
“Morning Song” and “Lazarus” are such powerful poems.” caption Photo by Mayank Austen
Soofi.
Your
love for the riches How to get Filthy Rich in
Rising Asia Author: Mohsin Hamid Publisher: Riverhead Books Price $26 Pages: 228 Mohsin Hamid, the literary
magus who experiments with narratives and skillfully taps into the
imagination of the reader, has worked with second-person narrative in his
third book,
‘How to get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia’.
The author of
‘Moth Smoke’ (2000) and
‘Reluctant Fundamentalist’
(2007) has shifted from his previous literary techniques towards a
brand new and a relatively less explored pavilion in our part of the world
— the genre of self-help. The main character is
introduced to the reader as “you”. We discover how the book helps
“you” become a millionaire from the scratch. Considering this is a
‘self-help’ book, we understand from the very onset, the book only has
your best interest at heart. Hamid’s third book is an
interesting shift from his earlier books and narrative techniques that
accredit the diversity of his talent. In the book, we are exposed the story
of a lifetime of a man, “you”, who is trying to make it in rising Asia.
The city where “you” bud, bloom and wither has not been given a name but
it is difficult to divorce the constant relation of its descriptions to
Lahore. But as the story progresses, what remains important is how rising
Asia helps you rise to the status of filthy and rich or both. It is interesting to note
the constant pattern and strong connection of Hamid with his hometown Lahore.
All three books, totally different in narrative, share one thing in common:
Lahore. He has used Lahore as a definitive setting to tell a tale about
modern-day characters that are namesakes of Mughal royalties in
‘Moth Smoke’, the haven where Changez returns after the 9/11
fiasco in
‘Reluctant Fundamentalist’
and as an ambiguous setting in rising Asia where you thrive and work
to gain the riches in ‘How to Get
Filthy Rich in Rising Asia’. Hamid’s third book is a
page turner and is an immaculate display of witty satire mixed with cynical
intelligence, especially when it comes to understanding the depth of the
character “you” and his love, for the riches and for the pretty girl. Hamid has used deft prose
and episodic chapters that make the story flow. Each chapter starts with a
self-help directive which keeps the theme intact yet allows the characters to
develop and the story to move on. The last chapters are a reality check. They
very precisely illustrate how the returns of a lifetime of hard work can
disappear overnight in a capitalistic economy marked with bribery, corruption
and red-tapism. Once again, Hamid has
conjured up his charm and managed to send the reader’s imagination out for
a little exercise with his sophisticated use of words and experimentation
with narrative. He proves to be an important English language writer of
Pakistan in today’s day and age. At one point in the novel,
he says: “Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves.
Therein if you’ll excuse the admittedly biased tone, lies the richness of
reading. And therein, as well, lies a pointer to richness elsewhere. Because
if you truly want to become filthy rich in rising Asia, as we appear to have
established that you do, then sooner or later you must work for yourself.” If you want to become
filthy rich in rising Asia, or even if you don’t, you should definitely
read this book.
He
who brought Africa to the world Chinua Achebe,
Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic was best-known for his first
novel and magnum opus, “Things Fall Apart”, which is the most widely read
book from amongst modern African literature. Raised by his parents in
the Igbo town of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria, Achebe excelled at school and
won a scholarship for undergraduate studies. He became fascinated with world
religions and traditional African cultures, and began writing stories as a
university student. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting
Service (NBS) and soon moved to the metropolis of Lagos. He gained worldwide
attention for ‘Things Fall Apart’ in the late 1950s; his later novels
include No Longer at Ease (1960), ‘Arrow of God’ (1964), ‘A Man of the
People’ (1966), and ‘Anthills of the Savannah’ (1987). Achebe wrote his
novels in English and defended the use of English, a “language of
colonisers”, in African literature. When the region of Biafra
broke away from Nigeria in 1967, Achebe became a supporter of Biafran
independence and acted as ambassador for the people of the new nation. The
war ravaged the populace, and as starvation and violence took its toll, he
appealed to the people of Europe and the Americas for aid. When the Nigerian
government retook the region in 1970, he involved himself with political
parties but soon resigned due to frustration over the corruption and elitism
he witnessed. He lived in the United States for several years in the 1970s,
and returned to the US in 1990 after a car accident left him partially
disabled. Achebe’s novels focus on
the traditions of Igbo society, the effect of Christian influences, and the
clash of Western and traditional African values during and after the colonial
era. His style relies heavily on the Igbo oral tradition, and combines
straightforward narration with representations of folk stories, proverbs, and
oratory. He also published a number of short stories, children’s books, and
essay collections. From 2009 until his death, he served as a professor at
Brown University in the United States. Achebe won the Commonwealth
poetry prize for his collection Christmas in Biafra, was a finalist for the
1987 Booker prize for his novel ‘Anthills of the Savannah’, and in 2007
won the Man Booker international prize. Chair of the judges on that occasion,
Elaine Showalter, said he had “inaugurated the modern African novel”,
while her fellow judge, the South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer,
said his fiction was “an original synthesis of the psychological novel, the
Joycean stream of consciousness, the postmodern breaking of sequence”, and
that Achebe was “a joy and an illumination to read”. In 1975, his lecture An
Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s, “Heart of Darkness” featured a
famous criticism of Joseph Conrad as “a bloody racist”; it was later
published amid some controversy. He says the author turned the African
continent into “a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable
humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril”, asking:
“Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing
Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?” According to Brown
University, where Achebe held the position of David and Marianna Fisher
university professor and professor of African Studies until his death, this
essay “is recognised as one of the most generative interventions on Conrad;
and one that opened the social study of literary texts, particularly the
impact of power relations on 20th-century literary imagination”. His fourth novel, ‘A Man
of the People’ (1966), anticipated a coup that took place in Nigeria just
before the book was first published. “I’d ended the book with a coup,”
Achebe told the Guardian, “which was ridiculous because Nigeria was much
too big a country to have a coup, but it was right for the novel. That night
we had a coup. And any confidence we had that things could be put right were
smashed. That night is something we have never really got over.” His most recent work was
last year’s mix of memoir and history ‘There Was a Country’, an account
of the Nigerian civil war of 1967 to 1970. He went on to write what he
called a “limited harvest” of five novels. In 1990, a car accident in
Nigeria left him paralysed from the waist down, and forced his move to the
US. “I miss Nigeria very much. My injury means I need to know I am near a
good hospital and close to my doctor. I need to know that if I went to a
pharmacist, the medicine there would be the drug that the bottle says it
is,” he said in 2007. Achebe twice rejected the
Nigerian government’s attempt to name him a Commander of the Federal
Republic — a national honour — first in 2004, and second in 2011. In 2004
he wrote that “for some time now I have watched events in Nigeria with
alarm and dismay. I have watched particularly the chaos in my own state of
Anambra where a small clique of renegades, openly boasting its connections in
high places, seems determined to turn my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless
fiefdom. I am appalled by the brazenness of this clique and the silence, if
not connivance, of the presidency … Nigeria’s condition today under your
watch is, however, too dangerous for silence. I must register my
disappointment and protest by declining to accept the high honour awarded me
in the 2004 honours list.” — TNS Report |
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