A new world of meaningful signs
Sheherbano Hussain's on-going show at Rohtas Gallery in Islamabad is part and parcel of her single theme -- the fortune and misfortune of human existence
By Aasim Akhtar
"A natural perspective,that is and is not."
-- Twelfth Night
It is not an accident that so many of her subjects are drawn from classical mythology and its legends of divine transformation. The body can always be magically transformed into something else.

A Dickensian tale from Kabul
Dear All,
Following the astonishingly successful, Khaled Hosseini books (The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns) and Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil, comes another novel set in war ravaged Afghanistan. The new book is British journalist Andrea Busfield's debut novel Born Under a Million Shadows, a story narrated by a young Afghan boy who in the opening sentence of the book says, "My name is Fawad and my mother tells me I was born under the shadow of the Taliban".

The view that Pakistan is facing an existential crisis is sustained by three factors -- the fear of disintegration being a permanent feature of the Pakistan psyche, the danger of implosion caused by poor governance, and the emergence of a force strong enough to smother the state.

People acquire confidence in the permanence of their collective identity by its long history and their memories of having protected it against external threat and subversion from within. The people of Pakistan have never had this kind of confidence in the immortality of their state.

To begin with, fear of the state's demise was innate in the circumstances of its birth. It owed its existence to a conjunction of diverse forces and the ordinary citizen could not dispel the thought that the direction of these forces could be reversed. The people prayed more often for Pakistan's survival than for its strength and prosperity.

The custodians of the state deemed it expedient to nourish the fear of the state's unscrambling in their own limited interest. They consistently argued that it was necessary for the people to blindly submit to their rulers, even when their commands and expectations of the people's loyalty were in flagrant breach of reason and codes of civilised governance. These rulers tried to conceal their incompetence and lack of respect for the citizens' aspirations by constantly harping on the threat to the state's integrity. They made the state look so fragile that its existence could be threatened by a federating unit's call for autonomy as promised in the Pakistan resolution or even by a score of people's chant for civil liberties on Lahore's Mall Road. The unending chorus about the brittleness of the state convinced the people that the threat to Pakistan's survival was real.

The Pakistan rulers received great help in perpetuating their people's fears from their Indian counterparts. Whatever the genesis of the confrontation between India and Pakistan and the merits of their respective standpoints, the people could perceive the threat to national security in a tangible form. And, finally, the events of 1971 convinced the Pakistanis that their state could in fact disintegrate. Nothing has happened over the past 38 years to help the people overcome their apprehensions of the state's instability.

For many years now quite a few political analysts, and occasionally the rulers too, have argued that internal discontent poses a greater threat to Pakistan than any external force. Three factors have aggravated the threat of an implosion. First, poor governance has alienated the people to such an extent as to make patriotism a hazardous pursuit. One by one the state has abdicated its benevolent functions and at the same time its reliance on coercion has become more and more oppressive and irrational.

Secondly, the rulers' resolve to run a federation as a highly centralised unitary state has gravely undermined the bonds of federal unity. A large number of people in the less populous provinces have been deprived of their sense of belonging to or of ownership of Pakistan. No state can forever withstand the centrifugal forces Pakistan's rulers have in their infinite folly allowed to grow.

Thirdly, Pakistan has fallen a victim to the theory of dual sovereignty. The Objectives Resolution dealt a severe blow to Pakistan's solidarity by creating multiple instruments of sovereign authority. According to it, the elected representatives were merely agents of the people and the latter were only trustees of sovereign authority that had been delegated to them by the Almighty. This theocratic structure of power created more grounds for legitimate rebellion than are available to citizens of a modern state.

The people could rise against their elected representatives if the latter, their agents, failed to fulfil their contractual obligations. They may also resort to direct action if the trust under which the Almighty had delegated His authority to the people (and not to any government) is betrayed. In plain words, this meant sanctioning defiance of the state if its writ was perceived to be in conflict with God's injunctions. The constitutional gymnastics performed by Pakistan's rulers and the political culture nourished by them have created a situation that a very large percentage of the people, especially in the dominant province of Punjab, may reject constitution and the law in favour of anything claimed to have been Divinely ordained. This is the most dangerous component of the threat of implosion.

However, none of the threats to Pakistan would have caused alarm if no agents of disaster were in sight. Such agents are now fully visible. They were created and trained by Pakistan's own forces. Seizing the standard of Islam, without any legitimate claim to its ownership, they are weaning Pakistanis away from their state through a mix of deception and terrorism. They are not strong enough to destroy the Pakistan state's integrity and they could be beaten off without much difficulty if the state could mobilise its powers against them.

Those challenging the state of Pakistan, and their objectives could range from Pakistan's disintegration to its transformation into a new state, have been made stronger than they are by a set of circumstance operating against the existing state. The confusion raised by ideology wallahs has disrupted the unity of the state's organs and its instruments of power. There are serious doubts that the state is able to commission all its levers of power for meeting the challenge. Besides, the global environment has been so thoroughly polluted by the advanced world's misadventures over the past several decades that any outside power coming to the help of Pakistan can be branded as an enemy of Islam. That also increases the people's alienation from the state.

Above all, the hordes ravaging the northern parts of the country are deriving comfort from the numerous pockets of their well-wishers across Pakistan. They can be found in government, in political parties, among professionals and in the media, and even among lawyers who seem to have closed their eyes to the threat to the judiciary and their calling itself.

All of this only shows that the threat to the state of Pakistan is real and ought to be taken seriously. Nobody can say, as yet, that matters have passed the stage of redemption. The collapse of Pakistan is not imminent; it is not even likely in the short run. The Pakistan state can certainly survive, only such a happy conclusion cannot be taken for granted. Those who wish to save the state will have to work for this end -- soon and in requisite measure.

A truth in art is that whose

contradictory is also true.

--Oscar Wilde

Muhammad Zahir Ahmad is known in the world of art by his adopted, unusual name -- Ahmad Zoay. This duality is witnessed in his paintings too. His work is a combination of two -- sometimes joint, often split -- characters. Two halves which are distant and yet compliment each other.

To some extent, this segregation of self can be viewed, physically, in his diptyches, which contain two female figures as the mirror image. Apart from this literal dissection, his other works also indicate the divided personality of the painter. Zoay was at NCA for two years but soon emerged as mainly a self-taught artist, with distinct palette and typical strokes (The name Zoay was also acquired at the institution for some peculiar reason). Today, his work is recognised for its uncommon pictorial substance, colour combination and urgently-applied paints.

More than his artwork (some of it being shown from April 30 to May 15, 2009 at Drawing Room Gallery, Lahore), it is the persona of Zahir Ahmad that is a subject of speculations and scandals. The notion of Ahmad Zoay, the nonconformist individual who stays away from centres of art powers and is a misfit in social circles, is widely acknowledged. Likewise, his surfaces are vibrant, expressive, and rather explosive in appearance.

Yet, in essence, both Zoay and Zahir are not dissimilar. The recent body of work brings a synthesis of two other aspects of his personality: his fascination with the human body – nude female with certain parts prominently projected -- and his background in the Punjabi primarily Sufi poetry. In the exhibition at Drawing Room, canvases with figures in almost naked state and verses from Bulleh Shah and other Punjabi poets are displayed side by side.

Even though the two visuals or subjects do not seem to match initially, one can trace a link in his way of working. To start with, the manner or style of depicting human body and the text is identical. Lines bursting with energy formulate the contours of females as well as suggest the text from Sufi literature. Similarly, the choice of hues (vivid reds, greens, blues and oranges) in both types of images connects the two areas of his interest.

However, more than the formal elements, it is the intent of the artist that turns two apparently different contents into one. In fact his specific position in expressing (instead of exploring) Punjabi diction is significant in order to decipher the relationship between written word and painted visual. So if poetry is about rejecting the burdensome norms of society and rebelling against oppressive codes, the imagery in his painting also defies the accepted standards of aesthetics. The juxtaposition of vigorous colours and unpredictable way of resolving pictorial problems, clearly convey his distinct style, which serves to unite the two sides of his creative output.

Besides the structural level of treating text and heavily textured figures in a singular scheme -- sweeping brush strokes loaded with paint -- the Punjabi substance not only blends the two parts of his exhibition, it binds the artist to this soil. Phrases of Punjabi poetry and lines that shape the voluptuous maidens in gaudy costumes, emanate from the person who is eager to project (his) Punjabi identity and his association with this language and society.

Actually his fondness for Punjabi subjects is understandable. Many writers and activists are trying to restore the status of Punjabi language in the society and so is Ahmed Zoay.

It becomes slightly problematic when artists who are deeply devoted to safeguard their cultural heritage, both in the form of language and visual idiom, are not prepared to respond to other issues -- mainly related to their craft, time and place. For example, the Punjabiness of Zoay serves as a great incentive for the painter to produce highly charged canvases, but it also confines his potential as an artist. One feels that Zoay has the ability to offer a lot more than what he has been creating for a number of years.

That's why the works in the present exhibition -- which date from 2003 to 2009 -- do not have much variation in terms of subject matter, style or technique, except that the colours keep becoming more sharp, pure and primitive. Seen in retrospect, Zoay seems to have decided upon a certain imagery and method of painting. Perhaps that is why the new works of Zoay lack an element of surprise or excitement for the viewer.

Salman Rushudie, the ultimate displaced writer of our age, once stated that writers have only one home, their language. Similarly artists also have only one bonding or obligation: their art. Even though art cannot be divorced from matters of life, including identity, faith, feelings and politics, in the matter of preferences, art is the most important cause. Only if Zoay and other sincere souls like him realise this, they will discover that art can be rooted in one region like a rose but its impact (fragrance) can not be contained in one locality, even if it is circumcised under the name of geography, community, ethnicity or even language.

Mohammed Hanif shot to fame after the rave reviews that his recently published book A Case of Exploding Mangoes received, though, he has been writing both plays and fiction for the past many years.

Starting his career as a journalist in Pakistan, Mohammed Hanif's flair for the written word was immediately recognised as he has consistently built on his natural ability to become a writer of eminence. But the journalist in him made him acutely aware of the problems and issues that bedevil a society like Pakistan. His approach in writing is, therefore, polemical and immediate with no effort spared to catch the moment before it becomes only a leftover for the historians to dissect at some later date.

The play The Dictator's Wife was about the wife of an absolute ruler. The character of the wife added another dimension to the life of a ruler. It called for more generosity and a merciful approach that might be selectively beneficial to the many who seek justice and relief in a very oppressive setup. This underpinning drew attention to some let up but had ironical overtones.

The play thus revolved round the tender moments, the life spent together, the hardening of the attitudes, the surrender of that tenderness to the ruthlessness of power politics, the expression of love and mercy, but stifled with love turning into an instrument, a symbol of inversion, of tyranny and oppression itself. All these shades became apparent as the play unfolded and made the character complicated. It was the tale of the good gradually turning to evil without the dosages of some therapeutic syrup.

The play resonated. In societies, like Pakistan, the perennial problem has been the desire of a ruler to exercise power absolutely without the limitations that may have been attached to it through some checks provided in the constitution. The constitutions have been set aside, scrapped, held in abeyance or simply ignored in his pursuit of exercising absolute power. And it is always some noble cause that is ascribed for overlooking or ignoring the constitution. In Pakistan, religion, state and poor have been the pet themes against which indictments are drawn for the termination of one rule and the beginning of another -- and is now becoming clear that this cycle will either continue endlessly or the niceties of paying lip-service to some cause, like the constitution, will be done away with altogether.

Writers have suffered absolute rulers and many in Africa and Latin America have tasted the brutality and the use of force, which has grown out of the desire to see the person and the state as one. The person and the dictator are always seen to be synonymous with the state and the implication that harming one will harm the other is meticulously worked out to the full. So one has read and experienced with horror the goings-on in The General in his Labyrinth and The Autumn of the Patriarch that can easily be recounted by many in countries like Pakistan. Mohammed Hanif, being a writer with his pulse on the health of the people and nation, is sensitive to the fallout and implications of such a state of affairs in the country and its impact on the people.

It is never easy to do a one-person thing on stage. In a conventional setting with a number of actors the action and the tempo of the play is maintained by the exchanges between the characters. The exits and entrances of these characters too give a change of perspective and an expectation of something different is about to take place. The movements of the various characters too provide relief against the delivery of the spoken word. But in one person show the emphasis is solely on that one actor and its every move is judged and seen ruthlessly -- because the attention is not shared. The performance, therefore, has to be crisp and the movement in tune if the interest of the play is to be sustained. This ability to carry the show single-handedly is a rare ability.

It was surprising and a pleasant one that the performer, Nimra Bucha, carried it off rather well. She did not let the tempo drop and was able to maintain the pace that is of critical importance in such a performance. Needlessly to say, the words were crafted to be pointed and addressed the issue directly but no credit can be taken away from the performance. Nimra Bucha may be new to stage in Pakistan but not new to stage in general. She has been on stage and radio in the United Kingdom and has acted in plays for BBC World Service and Radio 4. She was in the radio adaptation of the Midnights Children, the famous Booker award-winning Salman Rushie's novel. She was a part of The Dictator's Wife performed at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival last Year. She has also been involved with Baag Theatre, an actor's collective in Pakistan.

Hanif has also written for theatre and films. This was his third play -- the others were Marnay Key Bad Kia Ho Ga and Kamra No 1801.

"A natural perspective,that is and is not."

-- Twelfth Night

It is not an accident that so many of her subjects are drawn from classical mythology and its legends of divine transformation. The body can always be magically transformed into something else.

But in addition to being something else, Hussain is also perhaps trying to be somewhere else. There is always a sense in which she is reaching towards another form within or beyond pictorial space. What is meant to be at the centre of attention is, at the same time, liminal; it is always haunting the boundaries, edging out of or coming into the frame, almost slipping through the surface of representation, away from us, towards us, coming out of the back of the picture, blending into the walls like a maladroit tyro ghost. Elsewhere the subject of the work is established in disestablishment, in separating itself from the obvious and instead proposing itself as equivalent to some other object, to space itself or to the ethereal. She makes her pictorial imagery equivalent to a museum collection of stuffed animals, awkwardly crammed and jumbled, spilling out of a vitrine; equivalent to the angels in a series of Roman photographs; and above all, equivalent to the decayed, abandoned domestic interior, merging into its walls, disappearing into luminescence, or being made manifest by it, her silhouette erased by the clarity of sunlight.

As installed at Rohtas Gallery in Islamabad, the feeling is less of a busy workshop than a haunted house in the show entitled 'Ain-al-Qalb' or 'Through the Eye of the Heart.' Chosen by Hussain, the contents of the show include a wealth of objects and images, from a drawn pelvis that doubles as a crown and a profusion of photomontages to medical demonstration casts of human bodies and hearts replete with flesh, veins and arteries. If theorists of psychological prostration had been invoked to frame Hussain's work, she would emerge as a more attentive student of Lewis Carroll and the brothers Grimm -- and, more ambitiously and passionately, of older art: Donatello, Grunewald, the masters of the late Gothic period in Northern Europe.

But to connect these three-dimensional 'sculptures' to the body part work that preceded them -- a miscellany of organs, flesh and bones made of prosthesis -- is to see that Hussain's interest has always been more simply in the complicated but not always tragic predicament of embodiment. Humans are frail and leaky, is her first sculptural message. Our boundaries are insecure. Things spill out. With candour, forbearance and a sturdy sense of humour, very potent images can be made of the results. While her work has often been framed by identity politics, with its tendency to introspect, analyse, and then hone some more, and to see selfhood as a powerfully concentrated precipitate of cultural and biographical chemistry, it is actually more likely to express the many in the one.

Nevertheless, hers is no mere fairy-tale world, though much in it takes on the guise of fable and bugbear. The picture she holds before her viewers could easily be accused of exaggeration and falsity to fact, but it is part and parcel of her single theme, the fortune and misfortune of human existence.

The devilish brood contaminates everything human and real in Hussain's pictures. Certainly her entire attitude remains Catholic, but there comes into it a pungent vein of scepticism. The theme of transgression and punishment, still linked only tenuously with the afterlife, is brought down to earth. Which is why, in Hussain's paintings, everything having to do with earth itself seems as if it has undergone some dreadful cataclysm.

Hussain's realism has led her to invent a whole new world of meaningful signs. She no longer speaks the fixed and static language of symbols on which the Middle Ages had relied. These are not symbols in the accepted sense but explosions of meaning, phantasmagorias designed to lay bare the essence of reality. The result is a vocabulary of images; experiments with possibilities and are rich in suggestion. What Hussain has devised, then, are new prototypes of an unfamiliar sort.

Sheherbano Hussain is fond of juxtapositions. She is orientated towards narrative, using composite imagery to tell a story in a way that seems to hesitate between photography, the cinema and cine-novels such as Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad. Hussain, by contrast, employs composite imagery to undermine the structural mechanisms of photography; rather than using its mechanics as illustration, she deliberately cuts into, or ruins, the structure.

Hussain makes a play between the photograph as and as window -- a way of looking into space. Also played out here, however, is a second of Hussain's central thematics: that of time, and its capacity to endow the flatness of the photographic surface with a kind of depth. The photographic model for Hussain is that of instantaneity, a sudden and total but hitherto unknown image.

Hussain's interest in transformation and transition seems to be as much informed by reference to Greek mythology (in particular to Daphne and to Leda) as by the figure of the angel. There's something surreal in 'Island of the Dead Revisited', the feeling of intruding on a dream.

The ordeal by destruction is at its keenest in Hussain's work. A temptation is more than merely a roundabout expression of spiritual stresses, that it represents opposition and resistance to reality. It cannot be mere chance that, among Hussain's works, it is the temptation that impresses us most. This above all, and not so much the influences of mysticism, of moralising zeal, and of sceptical fidelity to an inheritance she knows well, is what characterises the greatness of the painter Sheherbano Hussain.

Dear All,

Following the astonishingly successful, Khaled Hosseini books (The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns) and Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil, comes another novel set in war ravaged Afghanistan. The new book is British journalist Andrea Busfield's debut novel Born Under a Million Shadows, a story narrated by a young Afghan boy who in the opening sentence of the book says, "My name is Fawad and my mother tells me I was born under the shadow of the Taliban".

But Fawad's story is not just about the Taliban or their excesses, rather it is about living life in the shadows of war and destruction, about carrying on with the business of living among families decimated and shattered by decades of conflict and violence. Most of Fawad's family has been a victim of this violence but he and his mother have survived and are trying to eke out a living on the streets of Kabul. Their lives are made even more difficult when the relatives they live with declare them a burden and ask them to leave. Fawad's mother is taken in as housekeeper by a likeable (and, of course, beautiful) western woman named Georgie who lives in a comfortable house with two other foreigners.

Georgie is caught up in a complicated affair with an Afghan warlord, her housemate James is a British journalist who drinks excessively and her other housemate is an American lesbian engineer named May. Fawad observes their lives, reflecting wryly on their foibles and eccentricities. In the process, his own life also changes, in ways he could never have anticipated.

Busfield creates an engaging narrator in Fawad -- naive and truthful but also wise. His narrative has elements not just of David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and Adrian Mole but of the narrator of L P Hartley's The Go Between (the book with the wonderful opening line "The past is another country...) as well.

Critical (and pedantic) readers are sure to find inaccuracies in the book and raise various objections, but overall it has to be said that this is a touching story and a very good read. It is not a misery book despite its very bleak setting and collage of tragic stories. Instead it is a sort of Dickensian tale of surviving squalor and adversity, it chronicles suffering without losing sight of the humour of various situations. The book tends more on the side of optimism and fantasy than Hardy-esque pessimism and suffering; and perhaps that is no bad thing: it is like the Slumdog Millionaire story: a tale of triumph over adversity.

This is a good story and Busfield's affection for Afghanistan, where she spent several years, is quite evident in the writing. Born Under a Million Shadows is also a bit of a novelty in that it is set in Afghanistan, yet remains optimistic in its overall outlook. 'Optimistic' and 'Afghanistan' in the very same sentence? Now that really is something new.

Best Wishes

Umber Khairi