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poetic delight Zia Mohyeddin column Penance unrewarded A whole month without seeing a single play or a movie, but for an occasional viewing of Tonight, the current affairs programme, no television. I was determined to remain a hermit - meet no one, ring no one and go nowhere, not even to the nearest Waterstone.
How not to write about Pakistan An emerging international platform for Pakistani literature or a careless confluence of interests? By Moazzam Sheikh
Granta Granta Publications, 12 Addison Avenue, London W114QR Pages: 288 Price: £12.99 As I read through Granta's special issue on Pakistan, I can't shut out two things from my mind: a quote by the British Prime Minister Disraeli that "The East is a Career," which Edward Said used as an epigram to his influential Orientalism; and a couplet by a 19th century Urdu poet: Na liberal sey, Na Tory say Atta Nikal Sakta Nahin, Choonay ki bori sey (Neither from the Liberal nor the Tory; impossible to extract flour from a sack of limestone..) As one plods through the issue it is hard to figure out whether it is about Pakistan, about people who write about Pakistan or writers and artists with connection to the sorry country. The cover does say Granta 112: Pakistan, but the romantic in me wants to believe it is to showcase Pakistani literary and artistic talent. But either way, one is reminded of the sloppy (read: lazy) job the Brits have been known to have wreaked upon their lesser subjects. There is carelessness and there is disregard for seriousness on part of the editor(s). After a careful look it becomes obvious that it is more of hodgepodge than a seriously thought-out engagement with a country's writers. Mohsin Hamid and Mohammad Hanif are fine novelists but the pieces included fail to rise to an international standard, and while Hanif's Butt and Bhatti is enjoyable (barring the title), Mohsin's piece gives the impression it was written in a hurry. There are much better short fiction writers in Pakistan (Ikramullah and Asad Mohammad Khan to name a few) whose works have been translated and could've lifted the short prose section. To further disorient the reader the author of a fine debut collection, Daniyal Mueenuddin, has been reduced to writing a poem. Is he a poet too? Hasina Gul's poem has been translated but we don't know from which language. In the web exclusive version, Mohammad Hanif has in fact tried his best to allude to the poets who should've been paid attention to but that has fallen on deaf ears. It is extremely unfortunate of Pakistanis, especially the speakers of Punjabi, to not have read and been acquainted with Najm Hosain Syed's oeuvres, though his name is misspelled in the web exclusive area. Urdu's foremost writer of our generation, Intizar Husain is respected for his fiction across the South Asian literary landscape and beyond but is not good enough for Granta. And how does one make sense of Jamil Ahmad (whose piece 'The Sins of the Mother' reads well) ending up in the esteemed company? What is the criterion or connection? While the section Reportage turns out to be perhaps the most telling where majority of non-native informants outnumbers the native variety (no intentional pun here!), the insipid opening prose sets the tone with few notable exceptions, not to mention careless writings. Take this for example: "Razia motioned to the shelf where an oversized book bound in green moss-like velvet lay, and two servant girls carried it to her. Since they were Christian, the girls could not touch the sacred volume and so carried it slung on a shawl between them. They placed it on a table and stepped back." If the servant girls are not allowed to touch the book, how did it end up inside the shawl before the whole narrative gets slung? I smell a missed opportunity for slap-stick comedy here. Perhaps Mohammad Hanif could step in, with his rare gift for black comedy!? Jane Perlez's piece on Jinnah is also disappointing, both in information and style as she barely rises above cliché. She pedals a certain line that casts Jinnah as a closet sectarian without ever mentioning the role the West has played, led by Eisenhower's administration that calculatedly gave the rightwing Islamist nuts a space and atmosphere to grow into a monster (that now threatens us all) to counter Soviet influence by crushing or stunting the Left in the Third World. If it is Jinnah's "Islam in Danger" slogan that is responsible for Pakistan's mess, then, how do we explain the tragic fate of Afghanistan? Certainly the answer, sadly, in both cases is not Jinnah but the US. Also, if instead of relying on her influential friend(s) in Pakistan, had she read Eqbal Ahmed, she might have known that Jinnah never actually used the words to the effect of "Islam in Danger". Granta could've asked Ayesha Jalal or Mubarak Ali to contribute a piece on Jinnah. Both have far deeper knowledge and understanding of the transformation Jinnah's image has gone through. Though it would be going too far to see it as a neo-colonial axis, confluence of interest should've been avoided in a literary anthology of this stature. And, finally, what is Basharat Peer and his piece on Kashmir doing in this issue? Is it because he is a Muslim or can speak Urdu? Wouldn't it have been a better idea to instead commission piece on the life in Kashmir that's been with Pakistan? As far as I know Peer was born in Kashmir and educated in India. Maybe Granta should've included a writer from Afghanistan and Iran too, not to mention France. I have been an admirer of Aamer Hussein's fiction for a long time and since his books are not very accessible in San Francisco's bookstores, I was eager to find and read his fiction in Granta. Not only was it a piece of non-fiction, it lacked his prototypical quality. Another bucket of cold water! What saves the issue from complete insignificance are contributions by Uzma Aslam Khan and Kamila Shamsie, and artwork by various Pakistani artists in collaboration with Green Cardamom, a London-based art organisation. Uzma Aslam Khan's fiction Ice, Mating is a stunning piece of writing. She exhibits tremendous control in dealing with language and ideas, most brilliantly evident in the title itself. Instead of choosing oppositional words such as ice and fire, she has pushed the envelope by replacing fire with mating. Kamila starts her narrative with 1987, two years after I had left Lahore. Although I would've liked her to trace the history of pop music (filmi or non-filmi) from the emergence of Alamgir and his dekha na tha kabhi ham ne yeh sama and not with Nazia Hasan, it was a delight to read her piece because she writes with such ease and charm regardless of the subject at hand. Her canvass is broad and she is aware of different forces at work in a culture such as of Pakistan. And she never sounds pretentious whether she's commenting on the evil of corporate power or dictators or unholy alliance between art and Coke. She is aware of her socio-economic perch and knows how to gauge the progression of Pakistan using shifting trends in pop culture and political forces that weave around it. I wish Granta had been similarly sensitive and treated the issue with the kind of respect it deserved. Just look at their website and notice how much professional care is evident in their upcoming issue: Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists. The issue is going to be published first in Spanish. Just imagine the kind of work that has gone in to translate all the works! And that's the only right approach for a literary magazine. It should never try to be Foreign Affairs. Email: moazzam@jps.net
A poetic delight Poet Farukh Yar's debut poetry collection contains brilliant juxtapositions, a wily self-consciousness and much more By Aasim Akhtar Mitti Ka Mazmoon (Poems) Author: Farrukh Yar Publisher: City Press, Karachi. 2006 Thaap Publications Price: Rs 150 Mitti ka Mazmoon is a book about panic. The word is never mentioned. Nor is the condition analysed or described – the speaker is never outside it long enough to differentiate panic from other states. In Farrukh Yar's world, panic is a synonym for being: in its delays, in its swerving and rushing syntax, its frantic lists and questions, it fends off time and loss. Its opposite is oblivion: not the tranquil oblivion of sleep but the threatening oblivions of sex and death. The poems' power derives from obsession, but Yar's manner is sheer manic improvisation, with the poet in all the roles: Woh ajab shaam thi Guftagu ke jaley taqchon pe dharey besabab hosley Neem-rau aahaton se ulajhtey rahey Ik hajoom-e-shab-o-roz saktey mein tha Dharknein pasliyon mein samati na theen Hijr ki aanch per qehr dhaaley gaye Aashna raston per kharey sarkasheeda shajr kaat daaley gaye Mauj-e-Aalam thi Woh ajab shaam thi The poems' desperate garrulousness delays catastrophe. Accumulation and reiteration avert some impact, some deadly connection. This is also the way one would address an absence, allowing no pause for the silence that would constitute response. If panic is his groundnote, Farrukh Yar's obsessive focus is a tyrant, the body. His title, Mitti ka Mazmoon, suggests as much. Sometimes the poems that most sharply delineate this obsession work from the moment outward and backward, in waves; sometimes we get eerie flashbacks, succinct, comprehensive, premonitory, as in the first section of Mujhey Bolney Do, lines that predict and summarise a life: Yeh jo khauf hai Meri guftagu, meri khamshi mein bhara hua Yeh jo gard hai mah-o-sal ki Meray khakdan pe jami hui Isey kaun laya shumar mein Isey kaun layey shumar mein Ke jahan-e-rang-o-khumar mein Na woh wasl aakhri wasl tha Na yeh hijr aakhri hijr hai For a debut like this to work, it cannot deviate from obsession (lest its urgency, in being occasional, seem unconvincing). Books of this kind dream big; they trust not only what drives them but the importance of what drives them. When they work, as Sylvia Plath's Ariel works, they are unforgettable; they restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form. But the problems of such undertakings are immense; Plath's thousand imitators cannot sustain her intensity or her resourcefulness. The risk of obsessive material is that it may get boring, repetitious, predictable and shrill. And the triumph of Mitti ka Mazmoon is that it writhes and blazes while at the same time holding the reader: "sustaining interest" seems far too mild a term for this effect. What holds is sheer art, despite the apparent abandon. Yar has a brilliant sense of juxtaposition, a wily self-consciousness, an impeccable sense of timing. He can slip into his hurtling sentences and fragments moments of vicious wit, passages of epigrammatic virtuosity: Janey kis sheher ko aabad kia hai tu ne Dharkanein bheegti palkon se bandhi jati hain Zindagi asr-e-hamageer mein be-ma'ni hai Janey kis peher Teray adl key aiwanon mein Neem hamwaar zameen walon ki faryad suni jaye gi Aks jo aik samey qurb mein they Dur nazar aatey hain Garm sanson ki mushaqqat se badan Choor nazar aatey hain Inevitability and closure haunt these poems. The deferred, the fated – impending loss and deserved punishment – suffuse every line. The poems draw a feverish energy from what they don't really believe: even as the speaker lives his strategies, he doesn't believe in his own escape. Not every poem operates this way. Yar occasionally locates a poem in loss as enacted, not implicit event. These are among his most beautiful poems, their capitulations heartbreaking in the context of long animal struggle against acknowledgment. One begins the book, positioning the reader as complicitous: Woh yaheen aas paas hain meray A.G. Office ki rahdaari mein Masjidon, Mandiron ki seerhiyon per Municipality ke bagh ke baahar To write what is human, not escapist has been Farrukh Yar's endeavour. He pursues his aim by folding autobiography and memory into the severe and fiercely truthful lyrics – poems presenting a constant tension between classical repose and the friction of life – that make up this exuberant debut. In poetry nervously alive to the maladies of the contemporary, yet suffused by a rare apprehension of the delights of the senses, Yar has relished the world while being unafraid to satirise it. In poems that can be sometimes decorative and plainly spoken, he permits his readers to share a keen and unsentimental view of the oddities, horrors and solaces surrounding them at the end of the day. More surprising is the cumulative evidence here of his achieved naturalness, of the erudition and artifice that underlie even the most casual-seeming poems. Riddling opening sentences or cryptic titles remain the poet's rhetorical trademarks. But along the street-wise voice of Audit Report Mein Pari Hui Aik Nazm and, to an even greater degree, Aitraaf, we hear sonorous intonations of a sage in such pieces as Aik Namukammal Noha. The literary traditions of South Asia (notably Pakistan) naturally enter into these poems, but far less obtrusively. Mostly, Yar focuses on the living history of the country, the everyday activities that continue to be performed as they have been for centuries. The sacerdotal aura they bestow on secular routines anticipates that of ritual poems. If self-irony sometimes undercuts aspects of his vocation, the value of that vocation is never in doubt. But into these songs of active engagement with nationwide events and with the sociopolitical scene there increasingly enters a counter-strain of bitterness and despair. Images of helplessness, passivity, and death begin to proliferate. Love, friendship, the meaningfulness of the past – all eventually come into doubt. Even faith in the constructive powers of poetry, literally and metaphorically demonstrated in the impressive edifice of Kahan Ho Tum is eroded. It is difficult, given the length of Farrukh Yar's characteristic poems, to convey in a review a sense of their cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, their purgatorial recklessness. In other words, this review has been difficult; because of the poems' interconnectedness, the temptation has been to quote a lot more. Such difficulty is, in itself, praise of the work. We live in a period of great polarities: in art, in public policy, in morality. In poetry, art seems, at one extreme, rhymed good manners, and at the other, chaos. The great task has been to infuse clarity with the passionate ferment of the inchoate, the chaotic. Farrukh Yar takes to heart this exhortation. Mitti ka Mazmoon is one of the best examples of profound wildness that is also completely intelligible.
Zia Mohyeddin column Penance unrewarded A whole month without seeing a single play or a movie, but for an occasional viewing of Tonight, the current affairs programme, no television. I was determined to remain a hermit - meet no one, ring no one and go nowhere, not even to the nearest Waterstone. And what were my reasons for such a rigorous self-denial? My left arm. It began with an on and off pain which was diagnosed as tennis elbow. The pain became regular; it shot up from my elbow to the shoulder, on to the nape of my neck and beyond. Physio-therapy did not help. I saw various orthopaedists who, apart from injections, prescribed different pills but nothing gave me any relief. I decided to go and see my doctor in England who has never treated me for anything serious, but is a nice, sympathetic soul. In his view the best treatment for my ailment was electro-acupuncture. By now my discomfort was so intense that I would have gone to a shaman had he recommended one. I extended my abstinence even to my reading habits. Until my arm got better, I would only read books which would induce sleep to my sleepless nights. The first book I picked up was, 'The Balfour Declaration' by Jonathan Schneer. Alas! It turned out to be anything but boring. Schneer's account leaves no one in any doubt that Britain's pledge (made in 1917) to support a Jewish homeland in Palestine was motivated primarily by the need to win the First World War. Many English Tories, of whom Lord Kitchner was the chief, believed that an engineered rebellion of Arabs against the Turks would enable England while fighting Germany, simultaneously to defeat Turkey. The arrogance of an Imperial power knows no bounds. On November 2, 1917, Arthur Balfour, the British foreign Secretary wrote to Lord Rothschild, the head of Britain's Jewish community saying: "His Majesty's government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for Jewish people..." It was not as though Palestine was an uninhabited tract which could now be occupied by the Jews. Palestine was a Muslim country and had been one for centuries. The decree to hand it over to Jews was not entirely unlike Hilter declaring that Austria - later Czechoslovakia - would henceforth be a part of Germany. Schneer's research is thorough and penetrating. He tells us that moments after the British cabinet had taken the momentous decision to give Palestine to the Jews, the diplomat, Sir Mark Sykes rushed and announced triumphantly to Chain Weizmann, the Zionist leader "It's a boy". The reason for this muddled, momentous pledge, Jonathan Schneer contends, can only be understood if it is examined in its complicated context. Britain, heavily involved in the First World War was locked in a bloody stalemate on the western front and desperate to break the power of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. The government actively began to spread its net in 1916. The High Commissioner of Egypt encouraged Sharif Hussein of Mecca to revolt against the Turks by offering him an independent emirate. My mind races back to the time when I arrived in Aqaba for the filming of 'Lawrence of Arabia', Aqaba is hotter than any other place I have ever been to. As Lawrence's guide in the desert I am to learn to ride a camel expertly like a Bedouin. I have been sent to Jordan six weeks ahead of the filming schedule. Apart from David Lean, the director, the only other actor, in this small military outpost, is Peter O' Toole, who is to play Lawrence. He, too, has to learn to ride a camel. The days are long and exhausting. Four hours of camel riding every day leave me utterly knackered. Every limb in my body is sore. My posterior is blistered. No balm soothes. I have to wear thick straps of plaster on my buttocks before I mount 'Ashab', the camel allotted to me. 'Ashab' is a moody, ungainly beast who doesn't show me the slightest recognition even after two weeks. O' Toole is doing no better but he claims that his camel is becoming friendly towards him. He only has two hours of practice in the morning. In the afternoon he spends time with the dialogue coach. There is a manual on the table in his tent, a kind of a dossier on Lawrence prepared by the production company. I ask him if I can have a look at it and he lets me. Most of it is based on some chapters from the 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom', but there are pointers: Lawrence is a loner, an academic; he is shy, withdrawn. He hates to be in the limelight; he is good at sword fighting. He seeks anonymity. He dies as a lost, lonely soul. Lean is going to immortalize, on celluloid, a great unsung hero. ************** How naïve I was. T.E. Lawrence made several trips to the Middle East as a field archaeologist until the outbreak of World War I, when he was co-opted by the British Military Intelligence - archaeology was a smokescreen - to make a military survey of Negev Desert. The Negev was of strategic importance, as it would have to be crossed by any Turkish army attacking Egypt in the event of war. The British Military desperately needed updated maps of the area with special attention to features of military relevance. Our Lawrence was a spy - a glorified spy, who will be remembered for having written a memorable autobiography. 'The Balfour Declaration' unfolds the plot hatched by Britain and France to achieve their objectives in the Middle East. By 1916 the two countries had reached a secret accord to carve up most of the Ottoman Empire between themselves. Britain would dominate Iraq; France would control Syria. Jonathan Schneer describes, with great detail, how the sharp worsening of the war situation prompted the Welsh wizard, Lloyd George (the British prime minister) to muster the support of world jewry. His minister at the foreign office is quoted as saying, "I do not think it is easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews". Nobody, says Schneer, appreciated the magic of the Jewish return to Zion more vividly than Lloyd George. He grasped the advantage of creating an outpost of the British Empire peopled by Jewish colonists to guard the Suez Canal. It is a remarkably interesting account of Imperialistic shenanigans. My acupuncture treatment was a fiasco. My condition became a lot worse than it was before the treatment began. The acupuncturist, a highly skilled practitioner told me that in the ten years of his practice I am the first patient not to have responded to his treatment, Ah well, I have that distinction at least, I said to him wryly. My penance was, unrewarded.
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