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review
City with many stories A word
about letters
review Combining an ambitious metaphysical reach with a sharp attention to the detail of common things, Naeem Pasha clearly establishes himself as a serious voice in contemporary poetry By Aasim Akhtar Tulip in Sand Dunes By Naeem Pasha Arch Press, Karachi, 2007 Price: Rs 1250 Naeem Pasha's vibrant
trilingual poetry -- English, Urdu, Punjabi -- inhabits that middle realm
between the fabulous and the matter-of-fact, between In line after shapely line, not to mention a pair of prose poems that give a good name back to that much-abused form, Pasha evinces an imagination strangely prepared for everything. Naeem Pasha is a surrealist whose sly humour and extravagant images become stays against mortality, "rendering all he loves possible beyond our merest bodies." By joining the pleasures of his cool, intellectual surfaces to a tone of emotional urgency, he creates a surprising, particular, inimitable art. Whether mapping the 'stale memories', or 'coffin closed armoured convoys', or love's disconnections, Naeem Pasha's witty, elegant poems and their subjects go way out on a limb. His is a deceptively breezy voice that does not let the reader escape the dark knowledge of human contingencies. Tulip in Sand Dunes, tastefully designed with images to complement the text, has much to tell us about our language's animated flow, its tow and undertow. This is a brilliantly corporeal first book, focused with lapidary clarity on the transfiguration of quotidian experience, its appetites, its unassuageable longings; crossing, transforming, and transgressing boundaries; always paying extreme and active attention, which is the apotheosis of compassion, which is an act of love. Yet the poems in this anthology are neither elegies nor protests. Some of them -- especially the Urdu nazms -- while they have the original to serve as detailed ground-plan and elevation, build themselves a robust home in the old country, in its vernacular architecture. They are, in the main, love poems in which the focus, charged with desire and with memory, is necessarily also a focus on mutability, on the body's other transformations, on the minutiae of illness, on the fevers, altered consciousness, self-abandonment, which sometimes cruelly resemble the extasis of sex. Pasha has also created formally complex longer sequences which synthesise the mythic and the erotic and raise them to Rilkean meditations. Every poet at once reinvents himself and writes with a fugal centrepoint of influences. For Pasha they are, perhaps, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Wallace Stevens and Gerard Manley Hopkins. But Pasha's own voice is unmistakable: direct, witty, passionate, and desperate, in poems with the crucial acid to etch themselves on the reader's consciousness. Reading Tulip in Sand Dunes is like swimming across the surface of an ocean: beneath the playful shift and glitter of the poems themselves is a deep supporting reservoir of thought and learning. Skipping through space and time from subject to obscure subject, brimming with esoterica and academic allusion, above all these are sly and riddling poems, united by a reluctance to yield up their meaning easily. This willful trickiness begins with the collection's title. Rather than providing a definition, Pasha makes us work for one, scattering frequently contradictory hints throughout the collection. (A flower in my womb blossoms/in this war-torn desert) and (Loving you is nothing, nothing,/compared to yearning for/a tulip in sand dunes/on a moonlit night/in high tide/and watch it/wash away). It's common lore though that Pasha has a great facility with language, 'one of the best ears in poetry' and 'perfect pitch'. More surprising is the cumulative evidence of his achieved naturalness, of the erudition and artifice that underlie even the most casual-seeming poems. Perhaps inadvertently, Pasha has created an accurate self-portrait in his 'Prussian Green Leaves of Mine'. Like the poem, some of his work is stylised and relies overmuch on convention. In 'Prussian Green' he has already begun to undercut the poetic devices on which he had continued to rely. And the conventions he chose early on -- the trope of the autumn leaf, the romantic linking of love and death -- naturally holds more than literary interest for him. Over the years he developed them, built a set of personal associations around them -- in short, made them his own. Other signs of a mature poet are discernible in some other poems. An impulse toward formal control and a simultaneous drive toward relinquishing it are played out thematically in such complementary poems as 'When Will There Be a Day'. Later on Pasha is not so coy about the scatological 'it', but riddling opening sentences or cryptic titles remain his rhetorical trademarks. But alongside the street-wise voice of 'Life Is Coming to an End', we hear sonorous intonations of a rather precocious sage in such pieces as 'Being Lonely So Long'. And in fact it is the quieter rhythms of the early imagistic lyrics that continue to predominate. But into these songs of active engagement with world events and with the art 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 'Yesterdays Today' is eroded. Pasha has a lovely and unusually rigorous sense of form, and knows how to learn from the past without being stifled by it. He is close to Neruda, in his spontaneous-seeming poems with their depths of emotion and complexity and restrained knowledge. But he is a special variant of the cosmopolitan reader who yet is unmistakably of the people. The range of feeling is wide, humanly inconsistent: now boisterous, now wry or bitter, now sweatily coping with near-poverty or absurdly elated or softly miserable over crooked love and marriage gone wrong, or sinking into a landscape in sensuous reverie far from the din of the city. And on the other hand, he can make a gaudy pageant, with nearly cabalistic overtones. Combining an ambitious metaphysical reach with a sharp attention to the detail of common things, Naeem Pasha clearly establishes himself as a serious voice in contemporary poetry. In the circumstances, we might reasonably have expected a fuller selection than the present one, but we can hardly complain of lack of substance: Pasha can achieve more in one of his densely freighted sequences than many modern poets of English in the country manage in an entire collection. The selection reveals, with the clarity that comes of distillation, the recurrent preoccupations. Above all, it reconfirms our sense of the poet as a poet of paradox -- a visionary realist caught up between heaven and earth, sensitively registering both the gravitational pull of the mundane and the attractions of the obscure immensities he succinctly characterises as 'otherlife'. A lesser poet might have chosen simply to dwell on the contradictions implicit in his ambiguous position, but Pasha accomplishes something more difficult and more rewarding, moving between worlds with an ease that challenges the very notion of their separation from one another. In negotiations of this kind -- in the quest for forms of definition that are not narrowly restrictive and for forms of liberation that avoid amorphousness -- Pasha touches on some of the deepest concerns of art and life. How do we root ourselves, he implicitly asks, in a world of potsherds and clinker, without sacrificing our visionary potential? And conversely, how do we explore the vast, uncharted expanses of life without depriving ourselves of the shelter and sustenance our humanity requires? Such questions cluster in particular in 'Band Darwaza'. The same intellectual openness and flexibility may have been responsible for Pasha's avoidance throughout his life of any strict adherence to a single belief system. Neither purely rationalistic nor rigorous in his spiritual views, he uses transcendent or religious symbology to suit particular poetic purposes. At one moment he employs liturgical Christian language in describing himself as
I am a stained glass in the image of Christ I am as passive Maybe more so My nights are empty my days drag me, I await a cross. I have none in sight. My palms keep itching for nails.
Pasha's art is the real thing, intimately close to us, speaking for the sensibility we share but rarely objectify. Yet the poetry is much more than a series of personal confidences. Start with its simplicities of lively expression; it will soon carry you into the kind of awareness we all seek, vibrant, subtler than its immediacy might at first seem to allow, and never pretentious.
(The book is also available in Urdu under the title Dhool ki Chaadar)
Lahore -- Tales Without End By Majid Sheikh Society for the Advancement of Higher Education, Lahore, 2006 Price: Rs.500 Pages: 435 By Sarwat Ali Hamid Sheikh was in love with Lahore. He was a walking encyclopedia of the city and carried with him tales which either had been documented or were part of the lore. He had paid attention to what he heard from his elders, and so it seems has his son Majid Sheikh. The book Lahore, Tales
Without End is a selection from the articles that he wrote in Dawn and it
comprises some information which has been The history of Lahore too reads like a story, half-fact and half-fiction. Other than the oral tradition, certain references to documents have been made though. Lahore Qadeem by Mufti Tajuddin published in the Oriental College, 1867. Sharif ibn Muhammed ibn Mansur's Adab al Hard Waal Shuja compiled in 1236, Sarwar Lahori's publication in 1877 and Kanhaiya Lal's Tareekh e Lahore. One enduring myth had been about the river Ravi, and this may have had to be so because of its importance. Life of the city has depended on the abundant water supply that the river could dispense with. The enduring myth that there lay buried deep in the river bed a treasure has inspired attempts from time to time to dig out that treasure. As late as the dawn of independence a plan to dredge the river by a foreign company was abandoned because it was feared that the gold would be dug up and taken away. It was planned to line the sides of the River Ravi from the Indian border to the city and beyond. A massive embankment on both sides as well as to develop the city in a planned manner was the dream of Zafarul Ahsan, the first deputy commissioner of Lahore after independence. It was meant to make the river the centre of Lahore much in line with the way the city had developed before the coming of the British. But with the transfer of Zafarul Ahsan the plan was dropped. Even similar attempts later to revive that plan by building embankments for twenty miles, with a one mile by twenty mile lake to prevent the eastward slide of the city, to bring the walled city to the centre have never seen the light of day. Every book on a city has to begin from its origins. Probably the oldest remains of the old city called Lahore were in Mohalla Maulian for till the nineteenth century Lohari Mandi was known as Kacha Kot -- the mud fort. This could well be the famous mud fort that was built by Malik Ayaz, the first Muslim Governor of Lahore. This is probable because in recorded history the main entrance to the mud fort was from the Lohari Gate. But the origins may even go further back into antiquity for in the Ramayan, a pregnant Sita located during her second exile in the Ravi area gave birth to son Loh or Lahu who was reared on the mound probably in Lahore. The temple of Loh still exists inside the fort. The Lahore of Kacha Kot era has continued to expand in three major leaps, each with a four hundred year gap. The eras of Raja Jaipal, Akbar and Ranjeet Singh marked the high point of the expansion. The determining features of the expansion of the walled city have been how and when the Ravi has changed its course, the existence of the Lahore Fort and how power has flowed from the rulers, the manner in which the population and economy of the old original walled city has changed over time depending on invasions, droughts and famines. During the times of Akbar the original wall on the western side to the right of Bazaar Hakeeman in Bhati Gate and on the eastern side to the left of Shahalam Gate existed. It then curved eastwards and formed a city that was kidney shaped depending on the flow of the curving river Ravi. The book is divided into sections, dealing with the history of the city, great personalities and that of significant events that had a bearing on the way the city developed later. Some of the personalities, of course, made a name by giving to mankind spiritual or physical comfort, some others survived the tide of history, ironically even hustlers, scoundrels, marauders and land grabbers are remembered through the names of localities. Legend has it that the Nizamuddin Aulia experienced Basant in Lahore during his visit to the shrine of Data Gunj Buksh and willed that his disciples celebrate life and spring with the same gusto as was done in latter's city. And since this has been a practice at the shrine of Nizamuddin Aulia in Delhi with kite flying, feasting and recitals of classical music. It is also assumed that Amir Khusro flew a kite on either receiving his pir or when he had recovered from illness. The book can also give rise to debate. It is generally assumed that Mubarak Haveli is in Mochi Gate and is the waqf property of the Qazilbash family. It was the Mubarak Haveli that was built by Mir Bahadur Ali, Nadir Ali and Babar Ali courtiers of Muhammed Shah. Mir Bahadur Ali was blessed with a son and it was henceforth called the Mubarak Haveli. In the same haveli Ranjeet Singh kept under surveillance Shah Shuja ul Mulk and forced him to surrender the Kohinoor diamond. In the book it is stated that Mubarak Haveli is in Bazaar Hakeeman and now has reverted to the original owners, the family of Syed Babar Ali after being in the possession of the Qazilbash family. Both these havelis besides sharing the name are also now imambaras. Such matters which may have more than one explanation should rest with historians and scholars. The book's capacity to generate debate cannot be denied.
A word about letters By Kazi Javed Rumi entices Fahmida Riaz Now that 800th birth anniversary of Maulana Jalalud Din Rumi is being celebrated in many countries around the world under the auspices of Unesco that has declared 2007 as Rumi's year, the 13th century Persian language poet of Konia has ensnared our most fiery and uncompromising feminist poet. Forty years ago, when 22
year old Fahmida Riaz brought out her maiden collection of poetry under the
title Pathar ki Zaban which according to Yasmeen Hameed immediately
established her as a poet, no one could Pathar ki Zaban represented the feelings of Pakistani women. But it was also censured as being sensationalist and some critics did not hesitate to go to the extent of declaring it pornographic. The book was followed by five more collections of poetry: Baden Dareeda, Dhoop, Kiya Tum Pura Chand na Dekho Gay, Apna Juram Sabat Hai, and Aadmi ki Zindagi. In addition to these volumes of verse, Fahmida Riaz has three novels -- Zinda Behar, Godawri and Karachi as well as a collection of short stories to her credit. She also translated Erich Fromm's book Man Alone and selected poetry of Sheikh Ayaz and Farogh Farukhzad into Urdu. All these books were well received and established Fahmida Riaz as a leading modernist writer. Intizar Hussain has now come out with the claim that Fahmida Riaz "is no more the kind of writer known to us earlier". She has undergone a metamorphosis and this has happened "under the spell of Maulana Rumi's mystic poetry". Another interesting thing is that it is not the Maulana's world famous Masnavi that has brought about the miracle pointed out by Intizar Hussain. It is Maulana's collection of ghazals known us Diwan-e-Shams Tabrizi that has caused it. Fahmida Riaz recently translated selected ghazals of the Diwan into Urdu. Some of these translations were published by Asif Farrakhi in his literary journal Duniyazad and now he has published them in the form of a book under the title Yah Khana-e-Aab-o-Gil. The launching ceremony of the book was recently hosted by the Pakistan Academy of Letters in Islamabad where Fahmida Riaz related the experience of change that she had undergone while translating Rumi's poetry. She also talked about her recent visit to Rumi's city, Konia, where she "saw the whirling dance of dervishes and returned enriched with a new awareness."
New books and reprints The best Urdu book on the life and personality of Rumi has been reprinted by the Book Home publishers of Lahore. Titled Maulana Jalalud Din Rumi: A Biography, it was written by Qazi Talmiz Hussain, a noted scholar and author of the first half of the 20th century who served as director of the Hyderabad Daccan's Institute of Translation. He was undoubtedly greatest scholar of Rumi in our part of the world who studied Rumi's poetry for many years and wrote four books on him. The importance of the book under review can be gauged by the fact that Maulana Syed Abul Hasan Nadvi took personal interest in getting it published after the death of the author. Publisher Rana Abdur Rehman deserves a pat on the back for bringing out a reprint of the book on the occasion of Rumi's 800th birth anniversary. Yasmeen Hameed's first collection of poetry, Pas-e-Aaina, appeared in 1988 and her fourth, Fana Bi Aik Sarab Hai, hit the stands in 2001. The poetry carried in these volumes depict slightly different feelings and attitudes despite a continuity of basic sensibility and worldview. Her preference for ghazal has also been on the wane with the passage of time while the intellectual content has been gradually growing making her poetry even more important for the understanding of contemporary educated and modernist South Asian women. But Yasmeen Hameed is not a feminist. Her poetry rather depicts the existentialist situation of modern life and age we live in. Maktaba-e-Danyal of Karachi which is noted for publishing literary books, has now brought out Yasmeen Hameed's one volume collection of verse under the title Doosery Zindgi. The finely produced 699-page tome contains the contents of her four collections. We all admire Munirud Din Ahmad for his remarkable Urdu translations of modern German literature which have been published in seven volumes. Five of his collections of short stories, too, are a valuable addition to contemporary Urdu fiction. His long association with the Homburg's German Orient Institute provided him with many opportunities to attend seminars and conferences around the world. Ahmad has now published his autobiography Dhaltay Saaey. The 599-page book has been brought out by Qausain publishers of Lahore. Ijaz Hussain Batalvi -- a remarkable storyteller, lawyer, teacher, essayist, poet, critic and, above all, a keen reader of literature -- never cared to get his writings published in a book form. They remained scattered in various newspapers and literary journals like Humayun, Adab-e-Latif, Adabi Duniya, Naqoosh, Nusrat, Swera, Alaamat and Muasar. Salman Hussain Batalvi, his son, compiled a potpourri of his pieces after his death and it has now been published by the Sang-e-Meel Publications of Lahore under the title Ijaz-I-Biaan. The 862-page book carries Ijaz Husain Batalvi's selected short stories, literary articles, speeches and poems. Noted poet, fictionist, translator and scholar of Greek literature Mohammad Salimur Rehman's Urdu translation of Homer's Odyssey under the title Jahangard ki Wapsi -- first published in the early 1960s -- has now been reprinted by Yakta Kitabain, Lahore. |
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the enchanted briar
roses of folk tales and the weeds poking through the asphalt at the local
station. Slyly narrative, lyrical, street-smart, and always fecund with
detail, his poems -- whether singing, dreaming, or mourning -- reliably
delight and instruct.
documented and much that has not
really been documented, except in the tales and stories that people tell each
other as part of a living tradition. He has built the case of Lahore as a
tolerant place. This ancient city after witnessing many civilizations, many
religions and numerable rulers has developed a culture of tolerance that only
comes with maturity and an awareness of change being the touchstone of
reality.
make the prediction that she will end
up as a devotee of Maulana Jalalud Din Rumi. But Rumi is a peerless enchanter
who won over many poets of our South Asian region including the redoubtable
Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, Khawaja Farid and Allama Iqbal.