A word about letters
By Kazy Javed
A 'bad' woman tells her story
Kishwar Naheed seems to have a sort to fixation of labelling herself as a "bad" woman. The titles of two of her books are index to this tendency: One is The Letters of a Bad Woman and the other is her autobiography that has been named a A Bad Woman's Story. Is she in the habit of looking at herself from the eyes of others -- the way her favourite writer and intellectual guru Sartre would have dismissed as a nauseous example of bad faith?

Half Moon

By Taufiq Rafat

Publisher: Taufiq Rafat

Foundation, 2009

Pages: 137

Price: Rs 200

Taufiq Rafat, the leading poet of the English language in Pakistan did not get published in a book form till very late though his poems had been carried in various anthologies and selections a number of times. He was well known and recognised well before his Arrival of Monsoon hit the stalls in 1985.

It appears that some of his poetry never saw the light of publishing and at least one play Foothold dramatically read a number of times (and perhaps staged once) had remained inaccessible to the readers of poetic verse. The recently published Half Moon (Poems 1979-1983) was thus a refreshing addition to his very scant poetic publications. Taufiq Rafat had been writing in English for his entire creative lifespan and acknowledged as the best English poet of the land. Had he lived in these times he would have found the environment less hostile than when he wrote, passively fending off his critics. The question of language has been a contentious one since the imposition of colonial rule in the subcontinent. It has been felt that English had been an instrument of oppression. Language as a product of culture was seen as alien to the local environment, construed as foreign and not homespun. In the beginning it was also seen as smothering the authenticity of experience, that it was acquired, second hand and imposed.

I wonder what the speed

Of communicable thought

should be

To sublimate this now

And this one. And this one

Our frustration has been

That words have a

posthumous tone.

This was not a question that was limited to only one language, because many saw the number of languages even within the local dispensation also as being discriminatory. It has also been held by the proponents of the local languages that their languages like Bengali, Punjabi, Pushto and Sindhi has been unfairly treated by giving preferential treatment to Urdu which is seen as without local roots. Urdu has also been viewed as an instrument of oppression by local intellectuals and poets. The movement in East Pakistan was based on language as being an instrument that divided the people rather than brought them together. Taufiq Rafat's poems were not located in any other part of the world except in this region and the moment one opened the book and started reading, it become pretty obvious.

Now the furnace doors are

really open

And in this weather of

weathers

The laburnums are losing

their lamp

October seems far away

Another country almost.

One would expect

Words to droop like

surrealistic clocks.

The landscape was local and so were the seasons, the smells, and then the characters that figure in his poetical landscape all from the same locale. There was nothing foreign about the characters and situation in his entire poetic effort. For this new locale and situation if there was need to coin a new phrase, create new imagery, Taufiq Rafat was quite willing to do that and successfully did, for these images were evocative in nature. They carried with them the smell, the touch and the feeling that were homespun and very local in complexion.

It is not so much the sun

That has turned the heat on,

As these laburnums, whose

flaming

brands collectively stun

Wearing only large yellow

beads

Their shadows sit on grass

blades

And stare sightlessly up

At a sky that daily recedes.

Even he played along the speech rhythms and at times it appeared that the local speech rhythms are getting over and taking hold of the language, the way it was being expressed.

One more test of faith, like

the blank moment

Last evening, when the new

moon's point

Frustrated the millions

underneath

By failing to prick the

heavens, and

Save the believers a day's

erosions

If done badly, this may appear to be tampering with the English language or going out of the way to make a point, but with Taufiq Rafat the tone was low-keyed, almost like a whisper , the unsaid being said without visibility. He was not a poet who brandishes his images, he was not the one who flaunted his experiences through metaphors that might shock and awe -- the novelty of something being said -- instead he was a poet who did not work in broad strokes but very meticulously made subtle changes in tones and hues, on the surface appearing to be same and mundane. The characters too were not in a position to make a loud gesture, instead appeared to be representatives of sad silent humanity.

Loneliness means

impenetrable walls

Streaked with betel juice and snot, and a single

skylight high up

Through which the air

dribbles in

Like saliva from an old

mans mouth

Loneliness is cleaning of

fingernails

With used matchsticks…..

These days the acceptability of English as a language that is universally spoken and not directly associated with the place and people of its origin has gained currency. The many commonwealth countries that gained independence from Britain have elites that speak and write in English and the dominating influence of the United States and the growing influence of Australia had made English into a language that is spoken all over the world, and has been so over a period of time to have struck its own roots in various lands as well.

As English is being seen as an international language and spoken and written in various parts of the world, its importance has been increasingly realised as a vehicle for creativity. Post colonial literature too has added to the significance of English as a language that can have an existence outside the territorial limits of England. The large number of writings in India fully illustrates this point. The corpus of writings has made the existence of English as legit. Taufiq Rafat had been an advocate of using English as a vehicle for creative expression since he started to write poetry in English after independence. He was much criticised and decried but he made English the vehicle of his experiences, rather than only imitate the sensibility and idiom of the poetry written in Britain by the British. He called it the Pakistani idiom and his acceptance, thought, late in coming is now a certified reality.

The driver feeds us music.

Since the speakers are at

the back

It hits the occiput

With a thunderous thwack,

The singer is dead now.

I never liked his voice

anyway.

Home is still a hundred

Beam-dip, beam-dip

miles away.

There has been immense pressure to expose the writings of Pakistanis to the English -- speaking and reading world. Since the corpus of writing in English is limited at home, the translations were much sought after and a few translations have also been made and appreciated. But the original writings in English, though on the increase, have relatively been few and far between. The original writings in English from India in comparison have been very large and may have been the impetus for looking anew at literature written in Pakistan.

Nothing to do, nothing to say

Time to move away.

Words are salt at the top,

This soil is all used up.

------

Herta Muller has just won the Nobel and this victory comes to her after other small and large prizes, mainly in Europe. Anyone who has read some of her cannot deny the talent and intensity in her prose; the art with which she deconstructs not just what's framed but often the prose itself. Take this from her highly complex novel Traveling On One Leg, for example: "They knew how to skillfully avoid passersby on large streets swarming with people. Irene stayed a step behind them. Then Irene saw that the people close to her carried the city they were living in on their back. In moments like these Irene realized her life had run down to observations. Observations rendered her unable to act."

Or from The Man With The Matchbox included in her first collection Nadirs: "Every night the village burns down. First the clouds burn."

And in Oppressive Tango from the aforementioned collection: "I walk through the cemetery gate and the bell is in front of my face. The stroke of the bell is under my hair. The stroke is in my pulse next to my eyes and in my weary wrists under the tangled fern. The knot that dangles from the rope of the bell is in my throat."

Critics have detected in her work nightmarish impressions of childhood, trauma, fragmentation of both content and context, unreliability of memory, inversion of formal order of things and breakdown of façade of normalcy. She achieves this with the use of paratactic sentences as if her narrators don't trust her words or their logical progression. Her text crackles with the hint of being unstable; it pushes impermanence to the centre of her narrative. The experience of reading her prose is intoxicating not only because it's beautiful but because it is a cave whose dark mouth invites the reader in who can't resist.

To read her is akin to listening to a child who doesn't want to distinguish between verbs and nouns -- who wants to speak at her own terms. Her narrators make actions and phenomena adjust beside each other with pronounced unease. Her prose beckons attention while it scratches the reader's eye and pulls it back to the previous sentence[s]. The music one detects in her prose cannot be trusted for what it is for one also hears discord, counterpoints resisting harmony. There's very little light-hearted humour in Muller's prose such as in her short story Workday: "I get up, take off my dress, put it on the pillow, put on my pajamas, go to the kitchen, get into bathtub, take the towel, wash my face with it, take the comb, dry myself with it, take the toothbrush, comb my hair with it, take the sponge, brush my teeth with it. Then I go to the bathroom, eat a slice of tea, and drink a cup of bread."

What elements came together to create Herta Muller?

Is it eternal sadness that tangos with human history throughout? Is it the unceasing unfairness that female sex has had to endure? Is it modern European history? Does it result from being defeated? Or being of German ethnicity and being a minority in a modern nation state of no consequence? Many critics have described the mood of her prose as having resulted from the oppressive nature of the communist regime of Romania. But even under most difficult circumstances people do manage to laugh, have fun and bring some joy to their lives. All one has to do is take a look at what African Americans have managed to create -- from slaves narratives to blues and all that jazz and tremendous body of literature, both serious and comical, full of anguish to satirical. Same is true of the European Jews who suffered centuries of pogroms culminating in the shameful episode of Holocaust. Palestinian writers, too, have written works which sparkle and sizzle with humour, sadness, joy and satire under extreme inhuman conditions. One simply has to read The secret life of Saeed, the ill-fated pessoptimist: a Palestinian who became a citizen of Israel by Emile Habiby to know that. So what does make her prose so different?

Since 1950, ethnic Germans' desire to migrate to Germany from Eastern Europe has been two-fold: to leave the stifling environment in communist countries and be a minority no more. The latter has been a disorienting and traumatic experience. These ethnic Germans were called Germans in their countries of origin and, once they migrated, were reduced to Aussiedler (foreigners) and Alien Germans. Herta insisted that she and her poet husband, who endured persecution under Ceausescu's rule, be treated as "political refugees."

Her ancestors came to the region, known as Banat, which became part of Romania only in 1918, in 1716 under the protection of the Austrian Empire. The Germans of the Banat region are known to have fiercely resisted assimilation, doing their best to cling on to their identity with regards to language and culture. The fate of these proud people took a depressing turn after the World War Two.

Hitler's Third Reich gave German citizenship to these ethnic Germans under the NS-Volkstumspolitik. Nazis used the doctrine of Heim ins Reich to germanise occupied territories with the help of ethnic Germans, many of whom served in the German army and Waffen SS. Among other reasons, Nazis used the existence of these German minorities outside the borders of the Reich as a pretext for military expansion. With Germany's defeat, the German minority of Banat (as in other places) suffered tremendously, were deported from their homes to the camps in Siberia. They were only allowed to return after 1950. Just as European powers forced protection over their respective religious minorities within the Ottoman Empire as the latter grew militarily weaker and dependent on European financial help, Germany, being Cold War partisan, insisted on recognizing the East European Germans as fellow brethrens to destabilise communist countries.

Valentina Glajar points out the German immigration authorities looked at Volkslisten records in order to prove the credibility to the claim of being ethnic German. It was a normal procedure to check, in those lists, whether a member of the family had collaborated with the Nazis or not. Herta Muller and her husband had no difficulty proving their claim thanks to those lists.

This reviewer believes it is this background and the persecution of the European Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and Leftists that shape her fiction and create a context of her Nobel victory. It is in essence a Eurocentric victory wherein the world outside the West has a very little say.

It is pertinent to comment on the similarity between Muller's style and one of Urdu's most intense short story writers Khalida Husain. Open either one of her two collections at any point and the reader will experience the similarity. A sample from her story Enemy: "Therefore every thought is a decision and in order to protect herself from those decisions she hid herself in corners and crevices, knowing every moment too is a decision and she stands, every moment, inside a witness box and therefore those decisions, those moments chased her as she continued to hide herself in corners, crevices, cracks. In such dark places where the possibility of her passage didn't exist."

We have two trajectories here. One writer in Romania writes a short collection of stories, is acknowledged, encouraged, rewarded -- Herta Muller won the 1998 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for The Land of Green Plums -- is translated into major European languages, attracting scholarship; the writer from Pakistan jolts the Urdu literary scene in the 60s but nothing much happens beyond that -- no major translations into (South)Asian languages, no major academic work on her prose. For family reasons she completely disappears from the literary scene to re-emerge after a few decades while her European counterpart is supported by her poet husband and society. One remains fierce, the other is tamed.

Kishwar Naheed seems to have a sort to fixation of labelling herself as a "bad" woman. The titles of two of her books are index to this tendency: One is The Letters of a Bad Woman and the other is her autobiography that has been named a A Bad Woman's Story. Is she in the habit of looking at herself from the eyes of others -- the way her favourite writer and intellectual guru Sartre would have dismissed as a nauseous example of bad faith?

I find it hard to answer in the affirmative because I know she is a woman of immense confidence and courage. She is a model for South Asian women, who made a choice during her teens to take up the challenges of the world and has remained committed to it.

Born in a conservative UP family, which made her wear the burqa at the age of 8, Naheed has got herself acknowledged as a leading feminist, poet and social worker.

Her autobiography was published in Urdu under the title Buri Aurat ki Katha in 1994. Now the Oxford University Press has brought out English translation of the volume titled A Bad Woman's Story. The translation has been done by Durdana Soomro, an avid golfer who lives in Karachi and has already won admiration for her translations of Pakistani writers from Urdu to English. Some of these pieces were included in the anthology Fault Lines that hit the bookstands last year.

In her autobiography, Naheed gives many reasons for her being a different type of woman. Her love marriage at the age of 19 was perhaps the first step. She writes that her romance was still at the embryonic stage when her brother got wind of it. The result was "a hasty engagement and wedding was arranged. It all happened in such a hurry that neither the family nor the friends of the bridegroom knew about it."

The bride was turned out of her parents' house with half a kilo of ladoos, a sack of books and a box full of the cups she had won as prizes as a poet and debater. The couple got into a tonga and arrived at a house on Abbott Road, Lahore where each room was occupied by a different tenant. "Our wedding night," she says, "was also strange. We both felt like thieves and were a little scared."

The marriage soon turned sour. Kishwar has given an account of her unhappy matrimonial life and the hardships she faced in bringing up her two sons to whom her autobiography is dedicated. She has also written about the hard work that she undertook in order to keep her body and soul together.

As an author and translator, Kishwar Naheed has a lot of experience of dealing with publishers. She has narrated some of the events in her book: "One publisher came with quite a thick book to translate. He was also in a hurry to get it back. His office was in Rawalpindi. Every week I would send him the pages that had been translated and he would have them typed out. I translated the 700-page book in three or three and a half months. Within fifteen days of the translation being completed, the book was published. I only found out when I saw it in the bookstalls. With great excitement I opened it. What a surprise! My name wasn't there! When I complained to the publisher and demanded my money, he said, there were so many mistakes in your translation that I had to get them corrected by someone else. To credit you would not have been appropriate.

I said, Then you should have credited the person who had done the corrections; and tell me also who it is. But all these questions and allegations were an everyday occurrence for him, getting the worked done in the cause of revolution and then doing a 360-degree turn so you would be left flabbergasted. The same thing has happened to many translators in Pakistan."

A Bad Woman's Story is not the story of one "bad" woman. It tells the tale of countless Pakistani women who had the audacity to say "yes" to life during the middle years of the past century. If Kishwar Naheed is most prominent among them, it is because she did not only stand up against social, cultural and political oppression, but also propelled others to stand-up against incumbent traditions through her own example and through her powerful poetry.