A word about letters

Playing to the gallery?



By Kazy Javed

Strange things are happening in the Swedish Academy headquarters in Stockholm. They have picked a playwright for the Nobel Prize for Literature who is widely known as an outspoken critic of the US-led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, likens the Bush administration to Nazis and regards the prime minister of his own country, Mr Tony Blair, a ’deluded idiot’ and ’mass murderer’ for his role in invading Iraq.

But Harold Pinter is not the only critic of US policies who has been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize. They have also honoured Mohammed EIBaradei with Nobel Peace Prize for 2005. He is the Egyptian director general of the UN nuclear watchdog IAEA and is admired by many for his refusal to lend his support to the charges that Bush administration had brought against Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq.

This is a good omen. It shows that the Swedish Academy is now moving out of the US shadow. If it had taken these steps earlier, some eminent writers of the past century like R K Narayan, James Joyce, Bertolt Brecht and Simon de Beauvoir would not have gone to their final resting places without being decorated with a Nobel which is still widely considered the highest accolade to which a writer can aspire.

Harold Pinter has been rightly described by Horace Engdahl, head of the Swedish Academy, as ’’the towering figure in English drama in the second half of the 20th century.’’ Born in 1930s in London, he first appeared on the literary scene as a poet. Many years of his youth were spent in a Shakespearean company as an actor. His maiden novel The Dwarfs never saw the light of the day. He began writing plays in 1957.

His first play The Room was performed in Bristol University in the same year. The Dumb Waiter was his second play which was performed in 1960. However, it was Pinter’s third play The Birthday Party with which he achieved his breakthrough into the first rank of his contemporary playwrights.

The play is about a birthday party being arranged for a certain Mr Stanley who had taken refuge in a deserted boarding-house and who insists that it is not his birthday. The play, first staged in Cambridge in April 1958, failed to attract people. Pinter was not disappointed. After a few months, he himself directed the play making it a phenomenal success.

Since then, he has written many plays for stage as well as radio and television.

Man’s failure to communicate with his fellows and his doomed struggle to find a place in the world are two main themes of Pinter’s plays. They make it easier for the literary critics to include him in the category of the Theatre of the Absurd.

Sometimes, it is said that Pinter is more popular in the outside world than in his own country where he is often referred to as an ’angry old man’.

His plays have been translated into many languages and staged in many countries. But none of his pieces has been rendered into Urdu. He is not even read by many of our literary pundits. However, I remember an evening when Safdar Mir talked at length about Pinter’s plays. Mir particularly admired his two plays, A Night Out and A Slight Ache.

I wrote about Pinter’s place in the absurd tradition in my book about theatre of the absurd which was published in 1980s.

Now that he has won a Nobel, it can be hoped that his plays will be discussed once again in our part of the world and more will be written here about him.



Typewriter’s tale

The only famous typewriter of Urdu literature remained in my study for two nights past week and caused me nightmares. I dreamt of Saadat Hassan Manto knocking at my door at the dead of the night. I opened the door and found him furious.

’’You have my typewriter here in your house?’’

’’Yes sir,’’ I mumbled. ’’I got it only to give it to Dr Khalid Aftab.’’

’’Who’s he? What has he to do with it ? Is he a new story writer?’’ he demanded.

’’Your ignorance, sir, is not praiseworthy. Dr Khalid Aftab is the first vice-chancellor of the Government College University.’’

Manto relented a bit. ’’You mentioned some ’college university’. What is it?’’

’’Oh. It’s our new fad. Half of our colleges have been turned into universities. The celebrated Government College of Lahore was the first victim,’’ was my answer.

Manto was not appeased. He wanted to know if his typewriter was to put to auction to get some money for repairing the cycle stand in the college. He was particularly worried that his machine could fall to some modern fictionist. ’’You know, I have buried many stories in the machine,’’ he confided to me. He feared that some crafty fictionist could steal them.

I led him to the sitting-room. ’’Manto sahib,’’ I explained while he was sipping coffee, ’’it goes without saying that this typewriter once belonged to you. You typed many scripts and stories on it during your days with the All India Radio (AIR) in Delhi. Many of your friends and critics have written about it. But you seemed to have forgotten an important fact about it: You sold it to Noon Meem Rashid whom we now remember as the father of modern Urdu poem. He was your companion at the AIR. After his retirement from a job at the United Nations, Rashid settled in London with his English wife Sheila. After her husband’s death, Sheila gifted the typewriter to Saqi Farooqi who is one of finest contemporary Urdu poets and has been living in London for many years.’’

’’I never heard of the poet you are counting among the finest,’’ Manto disrupted my conversation. ’’Anyway, if your story is true, my typewriter should have been in London. Why is it in you room?’’

’’If you allow me, sir, I’ll narrate the whole story. Farooqi being alive to this machine’s importance... ’’

’’Its importance is simply because of me,’’ Manto again interrupted me.

’’Certainly. But it also owes some of its distinction to Rashid,’’ I said expecting a backlash. But Manto kept mum. I continued: ’’Anyway, Saqi Farooqi handed the typewriter to Iftikhar Arif during the latter’s recent visit to London with the request that it be passed on to the Government College University.’’

’’This fabrication,’’ Manto observed, ’’is understandable. But it doesn’t explain the machine’s presence in your study.’’

’’It’s simple affair. I got it from Iftikhar Arif who’ll come from Islamabad tomorrow and present it to Dr Khalid Aftab who has promised to set up a section for literary antiques in his university.’’

Manto got the point but seemed to have some misgivings about the fate of his machine. He got up and left the room without shaking hands or saying goodbye.

I heaved a sigh of relief.

Manto’s typewriter has since been given to the Government College University at a simple ceremony held in Sir Fazal Hussain Auditorium. Intizar Hussain, Iftikhar Arif, Dr Sohail Ahmad Khan and Asghar Nadeem Syed spoke on the occasion. A new book on Manto, Saadat Hasan Manto; Pachaas Baras Baad, was also launched there. The book, compiled and edited by Dr Sohail Ahmad Khan, has been published by the university.

A valuable contribution to the university’s newly established section for literary antiques is to come from Javed Tufail who is the son of the illustrious editor and publisher of the literary journal Naqoosh. Many of the best-known Urdu literary writings of the middle decades of the past century were published in Naqoosh. The late Muhammad Tufail preserved their manuscripts and handed them to his son.

Javed Tufail could make considerable money by selling these old manuscripts to some Indian or western museum, but he believes that we should now stop selling our heritage. So he announced at the ceremony to hand over to the university the complete file of the Naqoosh, handwritten manuscripts of dozens of writes as well as letters of many famous men of letters including Maulana Hali, Ameer Meenai and Allama Iqbal.

He entrusted some of the manuscripts lying with him to the vice-chancellor at the ceremony. Their list included four short stories of Manto as well as Ashfaq Ahmad’s masterpiece Gudriya.

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Breaking New Grounds
By Ayesha K.

Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy has become somewhat of a celebrity in Pakistani circles: at twenty-six, she has made documentaries on the rise of religious fundamentalism in the northern regions of Pakistan, how Pakistanis viewed the U.S. Presidential race, and on the everyday life of Saudi women. Apart from the fact that she has courageously taken on these sensitive topics, Sharmeen proved her skills as a filmmaker by securing regular screenings of her documentaries on the Discovery Times Channel and PBS Frontline World, and winning accolades from the New York Times, who said, ’’A first-time filmmaker, Ms. Obaid is compassionate but not sentimental’’. In June 2005, she became first non-American to be awarded the prestigious Livingston Award.

Born in Karachi in 1978, Sharmeen credits both her city and parents for giving her the freedom to explore topics that piqued her curiosity. EGO had a little tete-a-tete with Sharmeen to understand what drives this Pakistani phenomenon and how she perceives Islam’s place in the modern world, and the role of women in that world.



Describe your most recent documentary, Women of the Holy Kingdom.
It is true that some sort of reform is in the air for women in the Middle East. In Kuwait, women have been granted the right to vote, in Saudi Arabia women are being allowed to own their own businesses so these are encouraging signs. Unfortunately, very little media attention was being paid to these sorts of advances and I wanted to document these changes. Women of the Holy Kingdom is my personal journey to Saudi Arabia to examine the growing women’s movement there and to explore the reforms being initiated by the Royal Family.

Sharmeen Obaid Website





How did you like Saudi Arabia? Do you think it is excessively backward when it comes to women’s rights?


It took me about 4 months to get access to Saudi Arabia. Apparently my film was going to be the first film about women’s rights in the country and the government wanted to thoroughly vet the proposal before giving me access. But when I finally made it into the country, it was very rewarding. Saudi Arabia is a very difficult place to film, women seldom leave their homes unaccompanied by men and when they do, they are covered in head to foot in their black cloaks and do not take too well to television cameras. So it took time to convince the women to speak to me and to get access to their lives.



But it was worth it, because a lot of these women are anxious to bring about changes, they are lobbying the government and the clerics to gain more rights and I think to an extent they are succeeding. Saudi Arabia is unlike any other Muslim country because of the extreme segregation in society which was hard for me to swallow at first and something which had a hard time dealing with even after I had spent 6 weeks there.



Men and women have separate entrances in office buildings, restaurants, shopping malls etc and the religious police is on hand to make sure that people comply. But despite this I found young men and women using mobile phones to communicate with each other in malls, in Jeddah there were home restaurants that allowed men and women (who aren’t not related to each other) to eat together, but of course there’s always this fear that one will get caught and get hauled off to jail!!



I do think Saudi Arabia is excessively backwards when it comes to women’s rights and that’s because of the Arab culture. In Riyadh, a young journalist aptly summed up the Saudi mentality for me saying that ’’we may have shopping malls, we may drive BMW’s and use modern technology and cell phones, but our mind is still that of a Bedouin living in a tent’’ and he could not have been more right. Saudi women still have a long way to go because a large segment of both men and women don’t want to see change in society.

’’Reform may be in the air in Saudi Arabia, yet as Pakistani filmmaker Sharmen Obaid discovered on a recent trip to the kingdom, reform there is a relative term. In her fascinating film, what passes for progress to Saudiwomen is permission to work in manufacturing -’’ Wall Street Journal
Some people think you choose to exaggerate the problems in Islam because it gets you press at a time when Muslim-bashing is controversial and popular.



What would you say to your critics?
Actually I have two types of critics, on one hand I have people who say that I show the rise of fundamentalism in Pakistan which creates a bad image for Pakistan. On the other hand, people say that I show Pakistan to be a very modern country by filming fashion shows, rock concerts and plays like Vagina Monologues. So i’m a little perplexed!! I’m a journalist, and as a journalist I have to show both sides of the story. My films don’t bash Muslims at all, we all know Islam is being hijacked by a group of people who claim to be Muslims, but in reality they are just terrorists using Islam for their personal gain which is the message two of my films convey (Terror’s Children, Re-inventing the Taliban) I have received hundreds of emails from Pakistanis and others who say that my work reflects the reality on the ground in Pakistan.



What, in your opinion, is the fundamental problem facing Islam today? Is it in need of a reformation, philosophical and ideological?


I think most of the problems facing Islam today stems from two basic issues: education and the economy. There are very few Muslim countries that are educating their youth. I mean real education, not the type you get at a madrassah. Without education, the basic structure of society changes and there can never be progress. Look at Pakistan, look at Afghanistan, look at countries like Syria, Libya etc. How much of the budget is spent on education? Also look at the economics of the Muslim world, countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and Egypt where unemployment rates are high and where disillusioned youths roam the streets looking to while away their time. These are the very people who get recruited to extremist organizations. I think if we fix these two problems in some way we will reform the Muslim world.

Islam doesn’t need reform, it’s the Muslims who do!!

’’Sharmeen Obaid not only looks at the reality of the existence of the radical Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan but also shows that their aggressive agenda may not last too long.’’ The Hindu (India)
Do you face any challenges being a documentary maker who is Muslim, a woman and from Pakistan?


I’ve always been taught not to look at my race and gender as a factor in anything. And that’s how I work, I never think of myself as a women journalist, I think of myself as a journalist. I don’t only think of myself as a Pakistani, I think of myself as a citizen of the world. I think that kind of thinking opens up many doors for me. Of course, that said, there are many many things that I do as a Muslim woman that perhaps a Muslim man would not be able to get away with!!



Michael Moore is out rightly and unabashedly subject in his documentaries. Do you think that it’s okay for documentaries to nudge the viewer towards a particular point of view?


I think that each filmmaker has a point of view, whether they admit it outwardly or not. That is the very reason a filmmaker makes a documentary film. Some like Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock are subjective, while others make their point of view just more subtly.



What inspired you to become a filmmaker?


I was at Smith College when the tragic events of 9/11 took place. At that time I was freelancing for newspapers (in the U.S. and Canada) and studying politics as an undergraduate when I decided to make a major career change, I realized that writing articles about the Muslim world was not enough because my readers in the United States could seldom imagine the conditions, environment I was talking about, so I turned to documentary filmmaking, as a way to make Americans understand what life is like in the Muslim world. And once I began documenting real life stories, I was hooked!!



When i’m in the field meeting people, interviewing them, filming them, I forget what the outside world is like, because the people I profile and work with, become my world for those few weeks or months. I’m passionate about meeting new people and seeing the world through their eyes. I find that quite addictive actually. Whether it’s the soldiers in Kashmir or the Afghan refugee children I profile in my films, each character allows me into his or her world and I get to see that point of view (it doesn’t matter whether I agree with their point of view or not). This is what motivates me and pushes me to go on. I am most creative when im left on my own in the field to wonder around, meet people, speak to them without interference from the authorities.



What are you working on now?


I am just completing a short film for Channel 4 (U.K.) in Pakistan. The piece explores the Pakistan army’s efforts at curbing extremism in the country.

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Manto’s fact and fiction




By Intizar Hussain

AN Urdu typewriter, after travelling long distances and passing through different hands, has eventually reached Lahore for being preserved in G.C. University as a precious relic reminding us of Manto. Iftikhar Arif, chairman Academy of Letters came from Islamabad to hand it over to the university, where the vice-chancellor Dr Khalid Aftab received it with thanks in a ceremony held on the occasion of 50th death anniversary of Manto.

It was a historic ceremony as the university received a number of valuables for its newly-established museum. Javaid Tufail, son of Mohammad Tufail of Naqoosh fame, reached here with some precious handwritten manuscripts under his arms. They included a few short stories of Manto, Ashfaq Ahmad’s Gadariya, and a number of letters from Ameer Minai. Javaid Tufail presented them as a gift to the said museum and promised to give much more from the literary wealth Adara-i-Naqoosh has in its possession.

Academic and cultural institutions in Pakistan don’t enjoy in general a very good reputation in respect of the preservation of our cultural possessions. How has this university been able to win the confidence of the givers in the brief period after its birth. Credit for it should first be given to vice chancellor Dr Khalid Aftab. The Urdu Department is now headed by Prof Suhail Ahmad Khan, who seems trying to provide a wider perspective to Urdu teaching. The other energetic soul associated with this department is Asghar Nadeem Syed, who can take credit for organizing literary activities in a new way.

Credit should be given to this Urdu Department to commemorate Manto’s 50th death anniversary in a way which befits a university. It arranged a function which brought for us the good news of the establishment of a museum in the university. And the two chief guests invited here Iftikhar Arif and Javaid Tufail came laden with precious gifts for this museum. The spirit of generosity shown by Javaid Tufail on this occasion augurs well for this newly-born museum.

As for the gift of the Urdu typewriter, it has a history of its own. Perhaps it was during years of his stay in Delhi as a Radio artist that Manto had purchased this type-writer. A large number of drama scripts were then typed on it. But at some stage for reasons unknown to us, Manto decided to dispose it off. Noon Meem Rashid, who was posted on Delhi station in those years, offered to purchase it. Rashid deserves our thanks and our praise for preserving the machine with him unto his death keeping in view its value because of its association with Manto. That tells about Rashid’s deep regard for his distinguished contemporary. In accordance to the will of Rashid, his wife handed over this typewriter along with his books to Saqi Farooqi, who handed it over to Iftikhar Arif with the request of presenting it as a gift to G.C. University.

The Urdu Department also brought out on this occasion a special volume titled as Sadat Hasan Manto, Pachas Baras Bad. G.C’s journal Ravi has been in the practice to get contributions from known writers, not necessarily belonging to their own educational institution. As opposed to this practice, this journal, compiled by two students Shamsher Hayder Shajar and Naveedul Hasan, has taken care to see that contributors are exclusively the students and teachers belonging to their own educational world. These articles taken together may be seen as an attempt of a reassessment of Manto, now when 50 years have passed since his death.

Of course, it appears quite difficult to make an assessment of a writer soon after his death. Personal prejudices for and against him are still alive. Moreover, the tragic event of death creates an emotional atmosphere which hardly allows an objective study of the writer. Of course, in the case of Manto, old prejudices still linger on. Even then, half a century is sufficiently a long period allowing critics to study and judge him in a dispassionate manner. What is encouraging in the case of this study is the fact that student writers in particular appear seriously engaged in the study of Manto. Different aspects of Manto’s fiction, including his experimentations in symbolic mode of expression have been covered in different articles.

Along with these short critical studies is an article by Mohammad Saeed, who has chosen to study in a researching way the period when in post-partition years Manto was at his height in his creative journey and was at the same time under heavy attack because of his individual approach to human problems arising out of bloodshed and migration on the eve of partition. He was under fire on one side by the progressives and on the other by the rightists. Mohammad Saeed has, however, concentrated on his battle with the progressives. He, in this respect, has probed in all kind of writings, including personal letters of writers involved in the controversy and has brought into light Manto’s ideological differences with the progressive movements and his bitterness against those progressive writers, who at one time were his friends. Instead, a new relationship is seen emerging both on the level of thought and on personal level. It was Manto’s relationship with Mohammad Hasan Askari. It too has been discussed in a researching way along with its literary implications.

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Zia Mohyeddin column

Notes towards the understanding of Chekhov Part I

It surprised me to learn that a drama enthusiast to whom I recommended Chekhov found his plays to be lifeless, static, boring and ’’without any action’’, as he put it. I would have thought that our temperament responds to the plays of Chekhov; there is something about their lack of definiteness, their blurred edges, their inconsequence and their lack of discipline which appeals to us. Have we really become hard-headed, blunt, unemotional, unimaginative creatures?

The Chekhov method is one of the subtlest instruments the theater has yet evolved. Chekhov never attempted to plumb great philosophical depths, nor to interpret life in terms of excitement and spectacular display. What he wished to do was to reveal human beings to one another. He chose the sphere of society he knew best and he depicted it with extreme delicacy.

The society upon which he had concentrated much of his time was in its decadence and Chekhov was able to convey it with perfect sympathy. More than any other modern dramatist, Chekhov sees that people are made up of a combination of irreconcilable elements and he does not attempt to reconcile them. His characters are rarely altogether sympathetic and rarely altogether unsympathetic. The producer of his plays is often trapped by the Chekhovian ’atmosphere’; he forgets that Chekhov, with his brooding intelligence, usually contemplates man’s folly and a world in transition with the quizzical eye of a born humorist. He ignores the innumerable finger-posts provided in the play and creates a pastiche full of ridiculous excesses. For a whole generation, the English directors, fooled by the air of kindly melancholy that prevails in his works, turned The Cherry Orchard into a tear-jerker.

In the palmy days of Moscow Arts Theatre, a new Chekhov play was treated as a god-send. Stanislavsky did not straight away put it into rehearsal, but studied it round a table with the whole cast. The entire process went on for weeks, months, before the drastic step of taking the play to the stage was even considered. Stanislavsky tells us that in this way everybody concerned was so intimately acquainted with the characters that their embodiment on the stage became a comparatively simple matter.

And yet he misinterpreted. After he saw a run through of the play, Chekhov had to remind Stanislavsky, that it was a comedy.

The fecklessness and inconsequence of many of Chekhov’s characters have provoked the contention that the plays themselves are feckless. Nothing could be more untrue. Chekhov’s plays are more consciously schemed and tautly constructed than most other plays. The thematic material winds in and out of them like the motives of a musical composition, binding them together and weaving the whole into a pattern whose shape can be appreciated only in retrospect.

In Chekhov’s plays, the story is disclosed not in a consecutive manner but by the slow revelation of things that have happened in the past and their effect on the present. Here is a group of men and women, coming in and out of each other’s lives, uttering their thoughts aloud, sometimes aware and sometimes not aware of the futility of their existence. There is an air of transiency that pervades the whole play.

Chekhov’s plays have been likened to a symphony and the analogy isn’t altogether incorrect. As in music, he begins by stating his theme right in the beginning. Often, the keynote is struck in the first speech as in The Three Sisters. Olga, one of the three sisters, says --

’’Father died a year ago on this very day, the fifth of May... It was very cold, snow was falling. I felt as though I should not live through it, you lay fainting as though you were dead. But now a year has passed...’’

And before many moments, she states --

’’Father was given his brigade and came here with us from Moscow eleven years ago... everything was already in flower; it was warm, and everything was bathed in sunshine. It’s eleven years ago and yet I remember it all as though we had left it yesterday. Oh dear! I woke up this morning; I saw a blaze of sunshine. I saw the spring and joy stirred in my heart. I had a passionate longing to be back at home again’’.

We have the theme stated almost in full, and it is never long out of our ears until the curtain falls on the last act. To be something that one is not, to be somewhere that one is not, to be back in the past or to be in the future -- and, finally, the realisation that frustration will succeed longing as inevitably as autumn succeeds summer -- that is the theme of the The Three Sisters, but only Chekhov could have expressed it with such variety and such virtuosity, without inducing a sense of monotony.

Each of the sisters in turn discloses her longing, born of memories and all the other characters in their ways contribute to the common theme. Every character is building on the future or on the past. Each one is disenchanted with the present and this disenchantment, when intensified, produces a haunting confession. Listen to Irene, one of the sisters:

’’I’ll be your wife and be faithful, and obedient, but there is no love. (Weeps). I’ve never been in love in my life! I’ve been dreaming of it for years, day and night, but my soul is like a wonderful piano of which the key has been lost.’’

The heart-breaking moment comes in the last act. The music of the regimental band fades away and the three sisters stand with their arms round one another. Irene, the schoolmistress, lays her head on Olga’s bosom:

’’A time will come when everyone will know what all this is for. Why there is this misery; there will be no mysteries and meanwhile, we have got to live... we have got to work! Tomorrow I shall go alone; I will give all my life to those to whom it may be of use. Soon winter will come and cover us with snow, and I will work, I will work.’’

Olga, who senses the pain, embraces her sisters and speaks of a future when their present suffering will pass into joy and happiness and peace will be established upon earth. It is a perfectly ordinary, sentimental speech, but pray observe how the last three lines elevate it into an exceedingly moving monologue:

’’The music is so cheerful and gay and I want to live... Dear God! Time will pass and we shall be gone forever... our suffering will pass into joy for those who live after us... our lives are not finished yet. Let us live... the music is so gay, so joyful and it seems though a little more and we shall know what we are living for, why we are suffering... if only we knew -- if only we knew!’’

And the curtain comes down.

(to be continued)

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The avenue of expression


By Deepti Priya Mehrotra

The work of Pakistani women writers is now being acknowledged all across the globe

“Words for me are just balm — they soothe me when the anguish is too deep,” mused the Lahore-based writer Feryal Ali Gauhar. “In an increasingly insecure world, a woman speaks of conflicts generated, engendered and perpetrated by men.” Gauhar studied political economy at McGill University, trained in documentary film production in Europe and teaches film at Lahore’s National College of Art. Her first novel The Scent of Wet Earth in August was published by Penguin-India in 2002 and she has recently completed a second novel No Place for Further Burials, which focuses on the American presence in Afghanistan.

Gauhar was one of four women writers speaking in the basement lecture room of New Delhi’s India International Centre on September 22. The occasion was the release of And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women, a collection of short stories by 24 Pakistani women writers, published by Women Unlimited. The other three writers present were Muneeza Shamsie (the editor of the volume), Humera Afridi and Sabyn Javeri-Jilani.

While Shamsie and Gauhar live in Pakistan, Afridi is at present based in New York and Sabyn in London. In fact, of the 24 short story writers in the anthology, half live in Pakistan while the other half are based in the West.

Gauhar was particularly eloquent about being in India: “I traversed the narrow alleys of Chandni Chowk as a child. I remember the family packing a few belongings and travelling by train to Amritsar, from there to Bharuch, then a tonga and a bullock-cart ... I’m still travelling. Coming here is very difficult, because it is like being home and yet not being home.”

Afridi traced her urge to write to the state of virtual exile she has been in since childhood: “My family left Pakistan and I grew up in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). I don’t know whether I would have become a writer if I hadn’t been torn from Pakistan. I began writing poetry when I was 16 and, ever since, writing has become a sort of home. The UAE was a hostile and alien environment, where my identity was always being questioned. The desire to compensate for my dubious identity became an impetus for my writing.”

Afridi went to America to study English at Mount Holyoke and Carnegie Mellon universities, and is these days completing her Masters in creative writing from New York University. She has taught English in Jeddah, Dubai, Dallas and New York City. Having lived in six places during the past 10 years, she feels her writing “is neither here nor there. Moving so much, I have taught myself to appropriate cities. The novel I’m writing is situated in six places. Moving can, finally, be liberating ...”

Sabyn Javeri-Jillani was born and studied in Karachi. She moved to England five years ago and writes for Pakistani and British publications on culture and entertainment. “In South Asia, we come from such rich traditions of storytelling. All of us have many stories within us,” adding, “Karachi remains central to my work. I find that physical distance enables you to reach out to those nooks and corners of your mind and unravel memories. My writing explores the question of being suspended between different cultures. I write about home, but is home the place where you have your roots or the place where you take wings and fly?”

Muneeza Shamsie was born in Lahore, educated in England and lives in Karachi. She noted that the theme of ‘quest’ runs like a thread through all 24 stories in the collection. She recalled that as a student in England, “I couldn’t find a context for myself in geography, history, science or literature. South Asian writing attracted me because it challenged the empire.” Having edited two anthologies of Pakistani English writing — A Dragonfly in the Sun (OUP, 1997) and Leaving Home (OUP, 2001) — Shamsie feels that Pakistani women writers are at the “extreme edges” of both English and Pakistani literature.

While Shamsie is ‘regrettably’ monolingual, Gauhar speaks and writes in Urdu, Punjabi and English. She writes a column on political economy in the newspaper Dawn, but much of her creative writing is in indigenous tongues. “I wrote The Scent of Wet Earth in Urdu and Punjabi, and later translated it into English,” she reveals. “Instinctively, I find it contrived to write in a language so distanced and not even adequate to convey the emotional landscapes of a people. How can I write of the degrees of sadness mingled with joy in the month of saavan (monsoon) in the English language ...?”

Gauhar believes that the process, and not the product, is important for her. “The process of writing keeps me sane.” Gauhar described three years spent making a film on four colourful characters in Shahi Mohalla (literally ‘royal neighbourhood’, as Lahore’s red light area is euphemistically called). She felt privileged to have met and got to know such people. She notes that traditions like dastaangoee (literally, storytelling) are to be found in regional languages, but not in English — “globalization has destroyed a lot.” When asked whether she would like to write a novel in half-English and half-Urdu, Gauhar quipped, “Yes, par aap publish karenge?” (Yes, but will you publish it?)

All four writers reflected on their state of being ‘hybrid’, as South Asians who write in English. Afridi noted that she writes for a multi-ethnic diaspora, as much as for herself. Gauhar acknowledged there are pressures on the writer today. Her novel No Place for Further Burials features deaths of Afghans and Americans in Afghanistan and was considered too sensitive for publication in America, because the American public has been deliberately misinformed about the number of American militiamen killed in Afghanistan. It is a test of integrity whether a writer succumbs to such pressure or remains true to the essence she wants to share. Gauhar noted, “For me, any death is a death too many, whatever the colour of the corpse.” Afridi wryly noted that you don’t usually earn from writing fiction, so it can sometimes be difficult to justify such writing to one’s own self.

On a question on women’s writing specifically, Gauhar remarked, “Writing may be the only avenue of expression for many women. Men may whistle, saunter around and behave badly. In Pakistani society, we women do not whistle, wink or make salubrious noises. Women who were courtesans discussed sexuality over the centuries, and strung words together to compose songs. But those who composed at home were not recognized. It is the positioning of women — performing is out of bounds for us, as it was for middle-class Indian women a hundred years ago. You cannot sing and dance without being noticed, but you can write quietly.”

The evening succeeded in bringing about a deepened understanding and awareness of the concerns of contemporary Pakistani women writers. Indian writers share many of these concerns. Clearly, direct cultural and literary exchange across our borders is an idea whose time has come. — Dawn/WFS Service

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Zia Mohyeddin column

The taste of Dresden china

Part 2

’Centering’ is perhaps the most important aspect of an actor’s physical training. It involves locating the place, roughly in the middle of the torso, where all the lines of force of the body come together. It is only when an actor has the ability to find his centre that he achieves a flexibility in his body.

It’s not just the traditional theatre that makes strong demands on the performer’s body. Frequently, in modern plays, actors are required to be engaged in a combat or a knife fight, as in Arthur Miller’s ’’A View From The Bridge,’’ which is an exhausting affair.

In classical theatre, Shakespeare in particular, actors have to run up and down steps and deliver speeches. More: They have to learn to fall forward or backward in a believable manner, without hurting themselves. All of this requires an enormous amount of physical stamina and skill. Unless an actor has trained himself to harness his muscular and emotional impulses within his body, he would be out of condition (for at least a week) after one performance.

Vocal demands on an actor playing in a modern, realistic play are nothing compared to those made upon him in the days of the classical Greek theatre. The amphitheatres of Athens may have been an acoustical marvel, but they seated as many as 15000 spectators.

A sound, robust, trained voice was not just enough. The language of the plays was, most often, poetry, with its complicated rhythms, sustained phrases and exacting meters. The performer had to go through intensive training to speak the lines distinctly and feelingly.

In Elizabethan England, Marlowe and Shakespeare wrote superb blank verse. Here is a speech by Faustus to Helen of Troy in Marlowe’s ’’Dr Faustus’’:

’’O’ thou art fairer than

the evening’s air

Clad in the beauty of a

thousand stars

Brighter art thou than the

flaming Jupiter

When he appeared to

hapless Semele;

More lovely than the

monarch of the sky

In wanton Arethusa’s

azured arms;

And none but thou shalt be

my paramour.’’

These lines were not just meant for Elizabethan times; they are still spoken in modern versions of the plays.

Marlowe’s seven lines of verse are a single sentence and, spoken properly, have to be delivered as one over-all unit, with the meaning carried form one line to the next. You may be allowed a beat before speaking the last line, but that beat is not a pause for regaining your breath.

No one can manage that. However, a fine classical actor can speak the entire passage as a whole, giving it the necessary resonance and inflection as well. A pause or two between the words, for breath, would mutilate the sweep of thought and imagery.

It is only after a performer has honed his vocal skills to a fine point that he can speak the verse with zest. Any performer today who intends to act in a classical play must learn to speak and project stage verse, which requires the same kind of vocal power and breath control as opera.

This is why we, in our country, cannot ever mount a classical play because our actors, wonderful as they are, have not equipped themselves with the necessary technique. I am not just talking of Shakespeare or Racine. Our actors would be hard put to tackle the heightened prose of Agha Hashr. Pray consider the soliloquies of Sohrab, which demand the same degree of breath control as the speeches of Hamlet.

Let us now consider an actor undertaking the role of Hamlet. (I have picked Hamlet and not Coriolanus or Macbeth because it is the dream of all actors to play the brooding prince). Let us assume that he possesses a resonant voice and has acquired the facility to speak all the extended phrases without an interruption, and with clarity, but is he intellectually equipped to have an accurate understanding of the words?

Here I digress a little. Most drama enthusiasts, in our part of the world, learn a Hamlet soliloquy (who can resist the ’’To be or not to be...’’ speech?), perhaps as a party piece. They then begin to emote -- having seen Barrymore or Oliver on tape -- without having understood the lines. Consequently, their phrasing and pausing is all over the place which, of course, means that they are unable to connect thoughts with feelings.

But to go back to our actor in preparation: once he has learnt to navigate the platforms and ramps that may be part of the stage setting, and mastered many of the techniques of fencing (he has to fight a duel with Laertes towards the end of the play), in other words, after he has learnt his craft and, more importantly, has learnt to wear his technique under his belt, he now turns his attention towards the understanding of the role.

This is when the real job begins, which is that of convincing the audience that he, Hamlet, is experiencing numerous emotions and often contradictory emotions: that he is aware of lies and treacheries taking place around him; that he is saddened by the death of his father and the hasty marriage of his mother to his uncle; that he believes his uncle has murdered his father; that he wants to murder his uncle but cannot bring himself to do so; that he berates himself for not being more decisive; that he loves Ophelia, but is repelled by the web of circumstances in which he is caught.

How does it feel to have such conflicting emotions about your mother or about your duty? No actor can convey these emotions unless he has developed the same inner feelings that Hamlet has, from time to time. An actor attempting to play Hamlet must understand, in his innermost depths, what Hamlet’s emotions are like. Only then is he able to make the audience believe that he is not acting the part of Hamlet but is Hamlet.

Acting is a difficult, perhaps one of the most difficult, artistic endeavors, requiring not only arduous training in vocal and movement techniques but an ability and a facility to create believable characters. In addition, it is necessary to project physical qualities and characterisation to the audience, night after night, week after week.

When Gielgud, arguably the greatest 20th century classical actor, was asked what he thought was an actor’s greatest asset, he said, ’’the ability to have the option of making yourself better.’’

The taste of Dresden China is not easy to acquire.

(Concluded)

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Cultural invasion




By Intizar Hussain

I READ with interest Khalid Ahmad’s recent comments on a discussion on culture in a private TV channel. Those participating in the discussion were Enver Sajjad, Kamal Ahmad Rizvi, and TV artist Talat Husain. Khalid Ahmad regards them as non-intellectuals, not competent enough to define and discuss culture in an intellectual way. The kind of intellectuals competent enough to do this job are, according to him, no more around. He himself has in his column tried to do this job.

Whenever there is a discussion on culture with reference to Pakistan, somebody inevitably raises the question of cultural invasion and we soon are overtaken by a fear of invasion by some alien culture.

In this discussion Enver Sajjad talked of a cultural invasion from the West, which, backed by globalization, may wipe out our culture and our languages. In another TV discussion programme, one discussant pointed out to the cultural invasion he saw coming from India.

So we carry with us a bogey of two cultural invasions, one from the West and the other from India. But Khalid Ahmad summarily dismissed the bogey of these two cultural invasions. He pitied these people for having no awareness of the real cultural invasion coming from “the ‘hard’ Islam of the Saudi-Salafi variety with a lot of financial leverage”.

Khalid is right. But why call it invasion. There is perhaps something culturally wrong with us. Perhaps, under the influence of the clerics, we have nurtured deep down in us some doubts about ourselves, our culture, rather everything close to us. So we don’t need an outsider to come and play havoc with our culture.

Now and again an enthusiast from among us stands up and begins pointing out to what he has discovered as un-Islamic in our culture. So the real threat to our culture comes not from outside but from within us.

I wonder that Enver Sajjad is so acutely conscious of the evil cultural influences of globalization, but is oblivious to the anti-cultural influences of Talibanization, which are slowly, but steadily, creeping in our society.

When the Talibans demolished Buddha’s statue in Bamiyan, there was much hue and cry against the act. But they had to do it. Their queer version of Islam, which Khalid Ahmad will like to call Salafi variety, has no tolerance for their own cultural heritage, not even for holy relics calling it Bidat. How could they be expected to have a tolerance for relics belonging to any other culture or religion. And we can’t treat talibanization as a foreign commodity. It owes so much to our Pakistani maddarssas. It has roots in us.

Coming back to the so-called un-Islamic elements in our culture, there are a number of customs and rituals, which have a local origin. But the zealots among us will more like to brand them as Hinduana rasmain and hence will demand for their abolishment.

Those claiming to be intellectuals or writers do not like to identify themselves with these zealots, lest they may be regarded as communalists. They prefer to base their cultural isolationalism on national sentiment than on communal fanaticism. So the usage of ‘Indian’ in place of ‘Hinduana’. That gave a patriotic respectability to their isolationistic thinking. A few of them had at one time conceived some very interesting cultural defence plans.

One such plan offered a proposal to erect a cultural China wall, Siqafati Diwar-e-Cheen between Pakistan and India. The other one carried with it a ten-year plan of green curtain around Pakistan. During these ten years, with no intellectual trafficking with the outer world, we were expected to build our culture in accordance to our national aspirations and Islamic ideology.

This later plan, a brain child of my friend Haneef Ramay, reminded me of old dastans. On the occasion of the birth of a son in the royal palace, the king was instructed by the astrologers to keep the child for 12 years under closed doors.

During this period he should not have the opportunity to see the sky. But at the end of 12 years there was inevitably some confusion of dates. He came out one day prior to the last day and slept in the open under moonshine. His premature appearance landed him in trouble as he was abducted by some fairy or by some ugly dev. That is what a life in isolation leads to.

We, in our patriotic zeal, often forget the fact that cultures don’t flourish in isolation. A close door culture is doomed to decay with no chance of recovery. A culture for its development and for reaching to its heights requites an atmosphere of openness, of freedom, and of opportunities to come in contact with other cultures. Why should we always think in terms of cultural invasion?

In more cases, the meeting of two cultures, even when they are in clash with each other, gives birth to a process of acculturation. This process may well result in a new enrichment of both the rival cultures or may even lead to the birth of a new culture, rich and deep in its own way as it happened in India after the arrival of the Muslims in this land.

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Graveyards — a neglected social issue




By Faiza Ilyas

Among the jigsaw puzzle of graves lie pye-dogs and drug addicts, spoiling the sanctity of cemeteries. While there exists no authority to protect these places from unwanted elements, the graveyards are vulnerable to all sorts of illegal activities. People fear visiting these cemeteries as they are in the control of different mafia including land-grabbers and drug sellers, writes Faiza Ilyas

“Who cares about the dead in a society where human life itself has no value. Buried with profound grief, the deceased are forgotten in no time. Later on, only a few manage to take out time to visit the last resting place of their loved ones, which is one of the reasons that many graveyards, declared closed years ago, do not disappoint those looking for burial space. With government and society taking no responsibility of the dead, the mafia of undertakers exploit people and make money out of the misery of the common man who is duped even after death as he finds himself sharing his eternal abode with an uninvited guest.”

Beginning on a sad note, Hasan Ali, an office worker, laughed sarcastically when he said the last sentence. A regular visitor to the graveyard located in Shah Faisal Colony, Ali begins his day by offering prayers at his mother’s grave in a cemetery along Shahrah-i-Faisal, one of the oldest in the city, which he regards as his ancestral graveyard as many of his relatives are buried here.

“What is the government doing to alleviate the sufferings of the living? The poor are barely surviving hand-to-mouth with the persistent price-hike. Even a burial costs so much money now. The gravediggers are charging thousands of rupees for a grave already used for burial. And yet not a single penny is spent on the premises which is evident from the dilapidated conditions of cemeteries in the city.” His complaint can hardly be challenged.

Never on the list of government priorities, graveyards are a true reflection of the chaos existing in the society. Excluding the ones looked after by some associations, communities and institutions, such as the Gizri Graveyard in DHA under the Cantonment, almost all of them are devoid of proper planning and management. There is no system of registration of the dead either. And, if people avoid visiting the graves, they have strong reasons to support their action.

“In most graveyards there are no walkways. Those present in densely populated areas reached their maximum capacity years ago and were officially closed such as the ones in PECHS (along Tariq Road), Paposh Nagar, Sakhi Hassan (North Nazimabad) and Essa Nagri (Hasan Square). But, still, burial practices continue at these cemeteries due to shortage of space. Hardly any new cemetery has been set up with the mushrooming growth of new localities. Hence, in an overcrowded graveyard, one is compelled to desecrate other gaves by trampling over them to reach the resting place of his or her loved one, which is obviously not an appropriate thing to do. Besides, the graveyards do not have basic facilities such as water and electricity, according to Zia Jamshed, a retired banker residing in Gulshan-i-Iqbal.

People are also critical of the filthy conditions existing in and around the graveyard, which are sometimes used as a garbage dumping site. A case in point is the Azeempura graveyard in Shah Faisal Colony where alongside the boundary wall lie heaps of garbage and buffalo dung.

Owners of a cattle-pen in the locality as well as government refuse vans dump the waste in the open space adjacent to the cemetery. Later, when this garbage is set on fire, the smoke not only pollutes the environment but also causes hardships for people who come to visit the graveyard.

Voicing a similar opinion, Mohammad Hasan, a resident of Lyari who works in a newspaper office, said: “In contrast to western societies where graveyards are well maintained, and one would like to visit them for peaceful contemplation, here is a different story. Among the jigsaw puzzle of graves, lie pye-dogs and drug addicts, spoiling the sanctity of cemeteries. While there exists no authority to protect these places from unwanted elements, the graveyards are vulnerable to all sorts of illegal activities. In fact, some graveyards located in the under-privileged areas have turned into criminal dens. People fear visiting these cemeteries as they are in the hold of different mafia including land-grabbers and drug sellers.

For instance, he says that as the huge Mewashah graveyard, covered with wild growth falls into darkness, dacoits take refuge and operate from its vicinity. Incidents of robberies are common and there are instances when people who had come to visit the graveyard were deprived of their valuables in broad daylight.

Drugs and alcohol are openly sold in Mian Goth graveyard in Malir, according to Zarina Bibi who works as a maid in the same area. The illegal business goes on reportedly in connivance with the police which, at times, make false raids to apprehend them. She says that this is perhaps, to pressurize the drug barons to increase their weekly bhatta.

Narrating his experience with the undertakers, Mohammad Ilyas said that he had to pay Rs6,000 for his father’s burial in Mewashah graveyard a year ago.

“Notwithstanding the official records which declare Mewashah graveyard closed decades ago, it is still the preferred burial ground for many residing in the adjoining localities such as Pak Colony, Lyari, Keamari, Mohajir Camp and Pak Colony. The credit for this goes to the many undertakers working here who know which grave is seldom visited and is now ‘ready’ to take another body. Human bones found during digging are either buried in some other place or thrown in the garbage dump.

“In an under-privileged area like Lyari,” he says, “one is surprised to see that the poor pay exorbitant charges for burial. There are not one but many groups of gravediggers working here who demand money. When my father died a year ago, I had to borrow money from friends and relatives to pay Rs6,000 to the undertakers. Since that time, I have been paying Rs100 monthly to a mali to take care of the grave because otherwise it would be re-used.”

Some years ago a shocking incident was reported in the press about a naib nazim who allegedly demanded Rs25,000 from a man who had come to bury his father in a graveyard in Gulistan-i-Jauhar. The naib nazim accompanied by some police officials, said that the money was to be split between himself and the local police station. When the mourners refused to pay the amount, they were forced to take the body to another graveyard where it was finally laid to rest.

According to another report, the monthly income of some gravediggers amounts to Rs80,000. The citizens pay Rs1,500 upto Rs6000 plus (the figure varies from locality to locality) instead of the nominal charges mentioned in the bylaws approved by the city council last year. The gravediggers not only sell a grave to more than one customer, but are also involved in the sale of its parts including tombstones and sand blocks. This business has considerably improved their financial status and they own big houses and shops.

Endorsing this viewpoint, Syed Kamal Shah Ghazi, who was once the caretaker and owner of Mewashah graveyard, says that the gravediggers’ mafia has thrown him out of the premises of the graveyard, considering him a threat to their illegal activities. This land belongs to my great-grandfather who donated it to be utilized as a graveyard. The gravediggers’ mafia has taken control of the entire cemetery and are involved in all sorts of criminal activities.

However, he couldn’t verify the reports on grave robbers involved in the trade of human parts and said that he had read such stories in newspapers but he himself had never witnessed such an incident.

Besides the issue of a proper demarcation of graveyards, one practice which is prevalent in almost all graveyards is the construction of illegal structures which include mazars as well as mosques. Visit a graveyard and you can see a mazar named after a ‘spiritual’ personality, son or grandson of so and so. A glaring example in this respect is of New Karachi graveyard, where according to a report, 16 mazars have so far been established. These mazars which remain crowded throughout the day are actually dens of anti-social elements who have taken over the graveyard land in the name of mazars. Similar is the case with Mewashah graveyard.

Talking of land grabbers; there is another classic example. A major portion of the old Morraro graveyard near the Site area is now possessed by factory owners.

“Morraro graveyard is located on the other side of Sher Shah bridge. It’s more than 100 years old and the eldest daughter of Mewashah Baba was buried here. Actually, the land of Mewashah and Morraro graveyards has shrunk due to the increasing residential and commercial activities. If the premises of the houses located in the adjoining areas were dug, you would probably find human bones in them. Few people go to Morraro for burial now as it has almost been destroyed after the establishment of many factories there,” Syed says.

Though the situation is far better off in Christian cemeteries, they are still facing a host of problems. Father Joe D’Mello at St.Patrick’s Cathedral says: “Graveyards are one of the most neglected areas in our community, too. Some are not even fully protected by a boundary wall which makes them easy prey for encroachment. At times tombstones are broken or stolen, and then, there is the problem of water-logging and salinity, especially in a section of Gora Qabristan. We are running short of space. Sometimes old graves have to be dug, but for that permission is taken first. Nearly Rs800 to 1,000 are charged for a burial at Gora Qabristan which is reduced if the deceased is a member of the Christian cemetery board.”

According to supervisor Donald Pereira who has been serving there for 25 years, Gora Qabristan along Shahrah-i-Faisal, dates back to 1802. But despite being one of the oldest, it is still in a better shape as compared to other cemeteries. There are many ancient graves here and some are of the soldiers who died in World War I.

A portion at the back of the cemetery had been taken away by the army decades ago, which was also used as a graveyard. Now, it is closed for further burial. The cemetery’s land has been a target of commercial greed and attempts have been made in the past to install billboards and hoardings within the land that belongs to the graveyard.

At present, all Christian cemeteries in the city handle their affairs on their own with the help of area residents and there exists no central authority which can coordinate and oversee their work. This is a major problem which weakens their strength as a community to resolve their problems. However, work is in progress at different levels to sort out this issue.

Miani Sahib graveyard

Growing encroachments in the city’s largest historical graveyard — the Miani Sahib — may soon force Lahorites to find some other place outside the metropolis to lay the departed souls to rest. Buildings, houses, shops and even a marriage hall have been built on the land of the Mughal era Miani Sahib where scores of historical and religious personalities are buried.

The graveyard has a special significance for the citizens of Lahore as their ancestors are buried there. Spread over an area of 1200 kanals, it touches Lyton Road, Jain Mandar and Chauburgi. Several kanals from all the three areas have been encroached upon with the connivance of the government officials.

The encroachment reportedly started in the 1950s’ and the government filed a case against the occupants after it formed the Miani Sahib Graveyard Committee in 1962. “They have obtained a stay order from the court, therefore, the government cannot evict them from the land,” says a committee member. “We have recently demolished a marriage hall, illegally constructed on the premises,” he said.

Bibi Pak Damin Graveyard, the second largest in the city, has also been encroached upon. Other smaller graveyards in different localities like Badami Bagh, Township, Green Town, Gulberg, Begumpura, Shahdara, Shadbagh, Shalamarare also filled. The Christian graveyards in the city are, however, well maintained.

District Coordinator Officer (DCO), Khalid Sultan, says the government has selected land on Ferozpur and Baidian roads for the development of Miani Sahib II. “The Miani Sahib Graveyard Committee has been reorganized recently which is taking steps to retrieve the land from encroachers,” he explained. –– Zulqernain Tahir



Present status

There are 182 graveyards in Karachi. Of them, 163 are for Muslims and 19 for non-Muslims. Seventy fall under the control of City District Government Karachi, while 112 are looked after by associations. Seventeen including Mewashah, PECHS (Tariq Road), Paposh Nagar, Sakhi Hassan (North Nazimabad), Essa Nagri (Hasan Square), Shah Faisal Colony Gate (Colony Gate), Saudabad (Malir) graveyards have been officially declared.

Despite acquiring 579.89 acres of land and allocating funds in every budget, the last city government failed to establish any new graveyard. The encroachers’ mafia is also active on the land earmarked for this purpose in Malir and Gadap towns and once there was a report of city government officials being beaten up when they came here for demarcation. — F.I


An online graveyard
It is a fact that Information Technology and the Internet have changed the way we live our lives and carry on our day to day activities. However, this transformation is not limited to the living. Wadi-e-Hussain, a Shia graveyard, currently allows mourners to visit the graves and view the last rites of their loved ones online at www.wadi-e-hussain.com.

Founded in 1999, Wadi-e-Hussain graveyard is located off the Super Highway at a distance of 18 km from Sohrab Goth. The burial ground has a capacity of more than 50,000 graves and to date is the last resting place of almost 2,000 people. The graveyard is meticulously organized and reasonably priced. The graveyard charges 5,000 rupees per burial and when a new grave is added, as part of the graveyard services, it is photographed and the picture is uploaded along with brief personal details of the deceased. One can trace a grave online by either searching the website by entering the grave’s ID number or the name of the deceased, or one can conduct a search by the month and the year of burial.

In addition to this, for an extra Rs1,500, an online video clip of the funeral is also uploaded on the website so that friends and relatives of the deceased, who were unable to attend the funeral in person, can virtually participate in the last rites. All the graves are identical and extra construction is strictly prohibited. Although the management takes orders from overseas Pakistanis, it prohibits advance bookings or attempts to secure land for an entire family or clan. –– Reba Shahid


A practical solution
True, more land should be allocated to cemeteries, but isn’t it time that we, as a society, debate this serious issue. The problem of over-crowded graveyards can be solved if some guidance is taken from religion. Islam has forbidden erecting solid graves and the wisdom behind this order is to avoid congestion in graveyards as well as turning them into monuments, displays of wealth or places of worship. This principle is followed in many Muslim countries.

Scholars agree that a grave of a Muslim should not be disturbed if flesh, bones, or other parts of the body remain there. But if the entire corpse has disintegrated into dust, then a new grave may be dug there. — F.I



Bylaws of graveyards
The only step taken so far to improve the condition of graveyards is the approval of Bylaws of Graveyards and Cremation Grounds 2004, which clearly mention the charges for gravediggers, their registration and responsibilities of different committees for the cemeteries. Unfortunately, the bylaws approved by the city council last year still remain to be implemented. This situation forces people to pay a lot to the gravediggers on the one hand and deprive the city government of its due share on the other.

The bylaws emphasized upon a proper layout plan for new graveyards, design and size of graves, provision of essential infrastructure and arrangements for proper upkeep and maintenance.

They also state that those associations, which have been allotted graveyards by the CDGK are answerable for maintaining cleanliness in the graveyard, proper arrangement of water and ensuring that the gravedigger is not overcharging.

In such graveyards, the allottee is bound to appoint a watchman, a gardener to remove garbage, animal faeces, trimming of wild bushes and watering of plants and maintenance of trees in the premises.

The bylaws also bind the graveyard workers to inform the relatives about any decay and damage taking place at any grave and to ask the relatives to get the grave repaired within the allotted time. It also directs closure of graveyards that have become crowded. — F.I


Mewashah graveyard
Mewashah graveyard is perhaps the only graveyard in the country which has graves of Muslims belonging to all the sects, members of minority communities such as Christians and even Jews. A place is also reserved for Hindus to perform their last rituals.

Named after Mewashah Baba (real name Syed Kabir Pasha who hailed from Afghanistan), the graveyard is located between Lyari and Pak Colony and is spread over 10km. Legend has it that while Syed Kabir Pasha was being taken on a ship to an island to be punished, he was saved by a big fish which helped him reach this place. The fish died just after reaching the shore whose bones are still preserved in a glass box in the graveyard premises.

According to Syed Kamal Shah Ghazi in those days the entire land up to Mithadar, Kharadar and Lea Market was under the sea. Impressed by the spiritual powers of Syed Kabir Pasha, the British gifted him this land which Mewashah Baba decided to use as a graveyard.

There are 130 small graveyards, many properly demarcated, within the graveyard itself, which are well taken care of by different communities. Despite its closure during the 60s’, everyday 15 to 20 burials take place here. Normally a grave costs between Rs2,500 to Rs4,000. With headstones and the use of marble, the cost can go up to Rs5,000 to one hundred thousand. However, charges for a katchi grave are comparatively less. — A.H

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Last stop Karachi, 1946

Part II

Keamari, Mauripur, Korangi... and back to Somerset



By John Miller

As an MT (Motor Transport) driver I made many trips around Karachi during my nine-month stay. Regular trips were made up to the large RAF station at Mauripur, a main stopping and refuelling place for aircraft in-transit and also journeys to the RAF station at Drigh Road.

Another daily run was to deliver and collect mail for our office. I remember this mainly because the building was such an architecturally impressive large Victorian style house standing in its own grounds and set back at the end of a drive from the main gateway. I think it was used as a hospital for service personnel but two or three small rooms had been allocated for service mail operations.

I have since wondered what the name of the house was and what it is used for now. All I can remember of the route to get there is that I used to drive straight down the long road from our unit and the boat basin, turn right somewhere near the KPT building and close to where a poor policeman stood on his box in the blazing sun most of the day directing traffic. It was an anti-clockwise 4 or 5 kilometers from there.

The policeman who stood on his box at the crossroads was always good for a bit of entertainment. One day, coming back from Mauripur in my truck and waiting for him to give me the signal to turn right up the Keamari road, four flat bed camel carts appeared out of the dock gates loaded with packages.

The leading driver, followed by the others, ignored the policeman’s signal to stop and in ten seconds the whole crossroads was in chaos. The policeman jumped down from his box and tried to remonstrate with the drivers of the wagon-train of camels and the language between the two factions I could guess, was not the sort that would be heard in the Karachi Polo Club. Even I could sense that!

A similar thing happened a month or two later when again I was waiting for the signal by the policeman to proceed and a camel cart came out of the same dock gates piled high with boxes of Palmolive soap. The camel, frightened by a noise panicked and jumped forward and shot the load of Palmolive cases off the flatbed cart and right across the intersection. The entertainment at these crossroads could be better than a night out at the theatre.

I also made one trip round the coast eastwards to a place called Korangi Creek where the Imperial Airways and later BOAC (British Overseas Air Corporation) used to call in for refuelling on their way to Singapore and Australia. I had taken one of our RAF marine engineers with me, who normally worked at West Wharf on the RAF HSLs (High Speed Launches). The RAF kept a small boat at Korangi which was experiencing engine trouble. The engineer managed to repair the engine and he decided to bring it back himself round the coast to West Wharf by sea. I returned in the truck alone and got caught in a violent blinding sand storm, quite the worst I had experienced on the way back between Korangi and Karachi forcing me to stop for some time to allow it to blow over.

One other incident that could have had much more serious consequences happened in the yard where our mechanic did the servicing of our trucks. He had two large wooden sheds, one as a store for oils and tins of petrol etc. and the other as his workshop. An old local man was employed in the MT yard to do the odd jobs such as greasing, tyre changing, and generally to help out with anything that needed to be done. He spoke very good English and all the young lads liked and respected him and used to call him Pop as they looked on him as a sort of father figure.

He was a most conscientious worker and totally loyal to our unit. I remember once while talking to him it came up about his very red beard. As a young 21 year old I was quite ignorant of the reason for this red beard. He was very proud to tell me that it indicated he had made the journey to Mecca and had gone by dhow from Karachi on a pilgrimage.

One boiling hot day the wooden shed in which the cans of petrol were kept suddenly burst into flames due to the high temperature in the locked shed, and Pop, being the sort of man he was, tried to rescue some of the equipment when the flames were belching out. In doing so he got burned on the hands and wrists. We took him up to the medical officer to dress his burns and sent him home but the next day he turned up as usual and carried on.

By the time we got the fire extinguished the sheds were completely destroyed and the odd thing was that the English 2 gallon petrol cans that were inside had split wide open, but the petrol in the 4 gallon American Jerry cans had completely evaporated and blown up like big round balloons.

Apart from the odd argument between our boys and the local tonga walla over the price of a trip back to Keamari, during the whole nine months of my stay in Karachi I never ever got the feeling that the local population resented us British airmen being there, indeed I think the local shopkeepers in Elphinstone Street welcomed us.

Whether South African Europeans felt quite as secure I am not sure, as just near the boat basin at Keamari and on the corner of our football pitch a large notice had been erected by KMC warning them that ’South African Europeans would not be welcome to Karachi in view of the racial discrimination made in their country and the anti-Indian legislation passed by them’.

Saturday night visiting restaurants, bazaars, shops and cinemas were an enjoyable and regular part of our off-duty hours and I can still remember in some of the narrow poorly lit streets, stallholders who had only oil lamps or candles to display their goods, with the exotic sweet smell of incense issuing from small smouldering Josh Sticks in the gloom -- a truly romantic vision of the East.

On one of these Saturday night visits to the cinema, four of us had booked the best seats for the latest film ’Caesar and Cleopatra’, starring Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh. The seats we got turned out to be upholstered soft two-seater settees and proved so comfortable that I only saw 15 minutes of the show and dropped off to sleep, missing the rest of the performance.

Our boys had a very good relationship with the civilian KPT staff and we worked well together. My memories of these KPT chaps were that most of them seemed to carry a clipboard and pencil, which was understandable as they were mainly engaged in checking goods on and off the ships.

It was now early June 1947 and I would have completed my obligatory 20 month tour in India the following month. The date for the handover to self-rule was scheduled for Aug 15th and all British forces were to leave. The local population was naturally excited and looking forward to this day of Independence from British rule and the chance at last to run their own country since the days of Queen Victoria.

I was told to report to the transit camp at Worli in Bombay by 15th June where I would be boarding a troop ship home to the UK. This of course was going to involve another long train journey right up to Lahore and down.

As it happened I had an old RAF pal who was stationed at Mauripur and who worked on flying control duties there. He pulled a few strings with an officer friend of his and arranged for me to fly down on the daily Dakota flight to Bombay. The time came to say my goodbyes to all my pals and I left Keamari to go up to Mauripur the night before as take off was 7 a.m. the next morning.

I remember it so clearly, it was a gorgeous warm sunny morning as I boarded the old ’Dak’ and as we sat at the end of the runway waiting for take-off I was of course happy to be going home after 20 months away from my family but I was also sad to be leaving a city I had so much enjoyed and of course my unit at Keamari where I had made so many friends in the last 9 months.

As we climbed out of Mauripur I was able to get a last look down at Keamari and the boat basin and could actually see the roof of the living quarters I had just left, and thinking that all my mates were down there, lying on their charpoys under their mosquito nets.



Conclusion

As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, I was brought up in the simple, uncomplicated ways of life, working on our little farm in the country in England. There are times in our lives when opportunities present themselves and we have to make decisions whether to take them or not. As it happens I didn’t have any option in this, other than to follow the course I did, and it is with regret that it took World War 2 to give me this opportunity.

As any sane and normal person will agree, wars between nations are an abomination to mankind but inevitably out of all the fallout there will be some winners and some losers. I count myself as one of the winners. Had it not been for the war I would have probably spent the rest of my life in an insular and narrow existence in the village where I was born. By joining the RAF in 1944 I was catapulted into a world where I could satisfy my dreams of travel and curiosities of other cultures, and what’s more, the travel and food came free.

Having whetted my appetite by these experiences I have since gone on to travel to other countries whenever funds and time off work would allow, but one of my greatest regrets is that I never made it back to Karachi. Sadly the political situation there at times made it very difficult for westerners to visit in safety.

I now find I have a lot of time to just sit and think, and although I don’t have any clinical idea of the workings and complexities of the human brain, in my simple way, I have always imagined it to be a very complex organ, inside which, is a vast array of small cubicles with a small sensor light over each. Some of these lights are shining bright green, but some are now only flickering, and some have completely gone out, but one of the lights keeps flashing red, with a notice over the top saying ’memory cells under stress’. It’s a symptom of reaching 80.

(Concluded)

- Arranged by Dr. Ali Jan

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KARACHI DIARY: Fighting for survival —Irfan Husain

One of the many things I am concerned about is that despite the proliferation of televised cooking shows, many of our traditional dishes are dying out. How many of you are familiar with that minced meat delicacy known as ‘achrach’?

Another day, another strike. Karachi-wallahs take these periodic stoppages in work in their stride, having suffered years of payya-jam activities from the MQM when they were out of power. While both the government and the opposition claim victory, the fact is that most transporters kept their buses off the road to avoid any possible damage. And many shopkeepers pulled down their shutters out of similar concerns. Neither could care less about the political tug-of-war going on over their heads. Basically, they curse both. “A plague on both your houses” about sums it up.

I had to shut down my campus, which is 30 miles from town, as our transporter apologetically told me he could not risk his buses and coaches for one day’s business. If our politicians could only understand that these tactics cause a lot of unnecessary hardship and do not win them any support. On the contrary, many young people become disenchanted with politics when they observe these puerile activities. The government could not care less if classes are disrupted. So if this is the best the ARD and MMA can do, Musharraf and the Chaudhris can sleep peacefully.

If well-wishers are wondering if there has been any development over the armed robbery that took place at our house a fortnight ago, the answer is none. A couple of days ago, my mother ticked off the governor on the telephone about the state of anarchy the city had descended into. To his credit, Ibad listened patiently, and promised to improve things. I advised my mother not to hold her breath. The fact is that Karachi is now in a state of complete administrative meltdown. The police is demoralised and shambolic. In some areas, rubbish is never collected by any civic agency. Had it not been for the hordes of feathered, two-legged and four-legged scavengers that survive on garbage, the city would now be drowning in the stuff. Traffic is horrendous, made worse by the road rage and poor driving skills on constant display. Shoddy and ugly buildings line most roads downtown, their plaster peeling, their walls covered with posters and graffiti. Whenever I go into this rant, my son Shakir grins and says: “Welcome back!”

On to a more pleasant subject. During this extended visit to Karachi, I have decided to hone my desi cooking skills, so far pretty much non-existent. In my defence, I have focused on foreign cuisines as I could always be sure of very good home cooking during all my years here. Now that I spend lots of time in London, I am feeling this gap in my technique. So I was glad when I chanced upon a wonderful cookbook called 50 Great Curries of India by Camellia Punjabi. The author has dug up recipes from all over the subcontinent. One demanded immediate attention. “Elaichi Gosht” is apparently from Sindh, although my Sindhi friends have never offered me any.

Apart from the fact that this unusual recipe is based on green cardamom, it caught my eye because it calls for no onion, garlic or ginger. Also, frankly, it seemed so simple that I thought this would be a good start for my self-education in desi cooking. The only spices needed are ground black pepper (2 teaspoons), red chilli and turmeric (a teaspoon each). You grind 35 green cardamoms (for a kilo of mutton) finely and turn the powder into a paste. Fry the result in half a cup of oil together with the pepper for a couple of minutes, then throw in the meat, chilli powder and the turmeric. Constantly stir for 10 minutes. Now add a cup of yoghurt and three tomatoes, finely diced, into the meat, and continue stirring for another five minutes. Plus salt to taste. Finally, add four cups of water, and let the pot simmer over a low heat until the meat is tender. This is as simple as could be, and even Shakir, my toughest critic in the kitchen, admitted it was delicious. His wife Sheila, who was somewhat sceptical when I began cooking, was also delighted.

One of the many things I am concerned about is that despite the proliferation of televised cooking shows, many of our traditional dishes are dying out. How many of you are familiar with that minced meat delicacy known as ‘achrach’? Indeed, an entire generation is growing up without having tasted the subtle flavour of a good ‘shabdeg’. And although the elaichi gosht I have just described is reputedly from Sindh, how many Sindhis have tasted it? None of these gastronomic treasures are available in restaurants, and are cooked in very few homes. Should not our TV chefs be doing some research into traditional and regional cuisine and presenting these dishes on their shows?

And should not some restaurant owners, as conscious of our culinary heritage as they are of their profits, be offering some of these fine dishes to their clients? If anybody does, he can be sure of my custom.

The writer is a freelance columnist

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The besieged scholar




By Intizar Hussain

TWO scholars of Ghalibiyat, Dr Aftab Ahmad and Dr Moeenurrahman, have lately passed away in quick succession. However, the two scholars differed widely in their approach to Ghalib. Dr Aftab concentrated on the study of poetry, while Dr Moeen was seen preoccupied with researching in relation to Ghalib. His last researching feat was the find of a manuscript of Diwan-e-Ghalib, which bear corrections from Ghalib in his own handwriting.

Dr Moeen managed to publish it with much care in a deluxe edition. For this researching feat and its publication, he won applause from a number of scholars from India and Pakistan. The distinguished scholars Rasheed Hasan Khan, Kalidas Gupta Raza, Dr Nayyer Masood, Prof Al-e-Ahmad Suroor, Shamsurrahman Farooqi, and Ashfaq Ahmad were foremost in paying compliments to him on this find and its fine presentation.

But the local crowd, comprising some Ghalibian scholars and a number of his ex-colleagues, were not happy over it. They took pains to prove that what he has presented as a precious piece of his research is in fact a case of theft. Dr Moeen soon found himself embroiled in an unpleasant controversy, which knew no end, what at first had brought shower of praise for him had now landed him in trouble.

The controversy in its initial stage appeared to be an academic battle. Those lined up against Dr Moeen gave the impression of being researchers challenging the claims made by him. Theirs were methods usually employed by the scholars engaged in a fight. One should see no harm in this kind of controversy. But, unfortunately, the controversy soon degenerated into a personal feud. The adversaries of the scholar saw in this situation an opportunity to settle their old accounts with him. They formed a united front and launched a campaign against him.

The campaign took an ugly turn when a book, a kind of charge-sheet against Dr Moeen, was brought out and a meeting was held where he was maligned to his adversaries’ hearts’ content.

The besieged scholar, who had till now stubbornly defended his position, betrayed no reaction this time. No reply came from him. However, after a few weeks came the sad news of his death. The controversy came to an abrupt end.

The sad end of Dr Moeen has suddenly brought a wave of sympathy for him. He, after dying, has won a number of defenders. A number of columns have been written in sympathy and defence of him. Asghar Nadeem Syed, who had compiled a complimentary volume for him, was awakened to grim situation and came out with a fiery column in his defence. How ironic that the poor scholar had to lay down his life to win a few defenders ready to speak in his favour.

While alive, he with his Nuskha-i-Khwaja stood undefended. Now the deceased soul has his defenders, who question the validity of the argument proving it to be a case of theft. They are right. After all, thefts are not uncommon in the world of researchers and academicians. In case of Ghalib too we have instances of this kind. The publication of a manuscript, now known as Ghalib’s Nuskha-i-Lahore, had brought in its wake a scandal of theft. Much hue and cry was raised on that occasion. But it was short-lived. Soon the dust settled down. Who now cares to remember that Naqoosh Publications’ Nuskha-i-Lahore carries with it a scandal of theft. The controversy about the procurement of a manuscript as to whether through fair or unfair means remains limited to the academic circles. The common reader rarely bothers about it. He believes in the saying Hamain aam khanai sai matlab hai na kai pair ginnai sai.

This saying is applicable in case of Nuskha-i-Khwaja too. Even if it is proved that the manuscript had been stolen from the Punjab University Library, who after a period, say 20 years, will care to remember it. Even now a Ghalib lover will not like to part with it even when convinced that it is a stolen property.

On the other hand, the adventurers have an argument of their own in justification of their act of so-called theft. If a manuscript has really any value, why then it should be left in the shelf of a library to be eaten by moths. Why should, they argue, it not be procured by hook or by crook and published for the benefit of the knowledge seekers.

To cut it short, Dr Moeenurrahman least deserved the treatment meted out to him. With all the shortcomings pointed out by his ill-disposed rivals he has much work to his credit.

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Defence of Poetry 2005:
Lars Gustafsson
A Defence of Poetry


Lars Gustafsson

It is clearly a very great honour to be asked to deliver the traditional defence of poetry this year. For me this invitation has a special significance as I actually took part in the very first Rotterdam Festival and have seen this important European cultural event grow from a rather humble beginning to its present importance. A defence of poetry is what you are expecting. The task doesn’t seem however quite so simple.


What shall be defended against what?

The two questions which pose themselves are:
1. What is it which should be defended?
2. And against what?
Here we have an equation with two open – yes, indeed, wide open – variables.
I shall do my best to give them definition.

There are many sorts of poetry and I’m not at all certain that I want to defend them all. Poems can have very different contents. Some of them, if not actually the majority, are much too bad to be of interest to us. One might even be able to claim that such a thing as a half-good or a rather good poem, doesn’t exist. Poems, and I shall return to this point, seem to me to be a sort of intellectual operation which only can succeed or fail. It is not only that there are bad poems, there are also unpleasant poems which we would rather see erased from the surface of the earth. Of course I am primarily thinking of political agitation. But he who searches will of course find more than that. All religious poetry is not innocent, and he who lifts one stone or another in European modernism will find that some pretty remarkable insects can live under it. What do we do with Marinetti?

Obviously the concept ‘poetry’ is much too general for anyone to be able to defend it. So let us try to clarify the concept!

It is not in all its appearances that poetry is worth defending, but only in a core sense. It is the hard core that interests us. The vague periphery which surrounds this hard core – in Swedish we sometimes use to call it ‘centrallyrik’ – is something which I shall not go into.

Does poetry, understood in this sense, as that which is central in poetry, the successful poetic operation, really need to be defended? And if so, against whom? Where are the fiendish forces which might threaten poetry?

And, assuming that they really existed, would they not have been successful long ago? Isn’t the fact that we have gathered for the thirty-sixth time to open a new Poetry International in Rotterdam a proof as good as any that poetry hardly needs defending? Similar to mathematics, poetry seems to me quite able to take care of itself.

A comparison would not be uninteresting. Similar to poetry, mathematics is a very old, exclusive and obviously indispensable part of human culture. Mathematics can be used for almost any task, from completing tax returns to measuring the age of the universe, and everything in between. It is not always popular, because it is exclusive and not quite easy to learn. It is admired for its beauty, and insofar as it is mathematics, it does not express any opinions of its own. It is difficult to tell where it actually takes place, in the physical world, in our minds, or in a world beyond time and space. Its obviously infinite ability to expand exerts an enormous attraction. Mathematics, in all but its most primitive forms, is not part of popular culture. Mathematical papers are published in journals which would always operate at a loss if they were not supported by various sources; and exponential success for a mathematical result does not mean reaching a broad public, but recognition from those who read mathematical publications. Of course sometimes there is a general public for mathematics: the logorhythmic tables might be a good example, before minicalculators conquered the market. But a broad audience has nothing to do with success in mathematics.

Poetry seen as a fundamental part of human existence seems to have interesting similarities with mathematics, but also differences.

From my childhood I remember the almost palpable dislike which surrounded poetry. A trace of that stigma which surrounded poetry, and especially the idea of writing poetry, is something I can still feel. When friendly and talkative taxi drivers ask me about my profession, I always prefer to tell them that I have spent the last twenty years teaching philosophy at an American university.

Mathematicians have told me that they have a similar experience. They have a strong feeling that presenting yourself as a mathematician is a conversation stopper. People don’t quite know what to do with such a piece of information. The poet can often experience similar situations. The poetic and the poet works as an obstacle to communication rather than as a means to it.

Are the reasons the same? Maybe partially. To say “I am a mathematician” or “I am a poet” are pretentious claims. How are they pretentious? In a sort of claim to quality.

But somewhere here the comparison ends. A mathematical result cannot be in principle difficult to judge. Either it is valid or it is not valid. To present something as a poem is pretentious. But not quite in the same way. There is no generally accepted procedure for deciding whether a poem really is a poem or only pretends to be a poem. There are of course acts of recognition. What is more frequent than to realize that a poem is a great poem without quite being able to explain why? Sometimes the greatness of a poem can even seem mysterious. As is the case with Goethe’s “Über allen Gipfeln”.

Similar to some other words, such as ‘natural,’ ‘animal’, ‘European’, the word ‘poem’ has a double meaning. All the words I have mentioned can be understood in two different ways: normatively or descriptively. Man is an animal but is not permitted to behave in an animal way. Everything he does belongs to nature, but still some acts of man are described as unnatural. Nomads from the Turne Valley and seal hunters from Greenland are, from a neutral descriptive perspective, European. But normally they are not invited to prestigious colloquia dealing with the political and cultural unity of Europe. In such a context ‘European’ becomes a value statement, connected with cathedrals, decoratively folded napkins and the fables of La Fontaine.


In the same way the word poem can be used for anything which looks like a poem: for chants, national anthems, and the more or less witty verses which are found in advertising, but also exclusively reserved for a successful speech act which has done or does something to our experience.

An interesting property of poems is that great popularity or great usefulness has nothing to do with poetic value. Are there any more pointless poetical texts than our most frequently heard national anthems? They make even third-class ‘hit songs’ appear to be new and interesting.

Just as hamburger joints and favourite swimming holes, these acquire an affective value as the years pass – a sentimental, or in extreme cases, intoxicating brilliance which hardly has anything to do with their propositional content. These texts become as impossible to understand as the emblematics on old national flags. Still they live, functioning in approximately the same way as does cheering at a national sporting event. And thereby I dare say I have also addressed the question of the ‘politically engaged’ poetry, so highly esteemed for the moment. I regard them as poetically as uninteresting as advertising slogans, however intoxicating they can be for the moment.

On the descriptive level it is hard to define what is a poem. ‘Text with uneven right margin’ definitely does not help. Especially because poetry can take on so many disguises. Prose that we know from Baudelaire, Ekelöf and Cioran, can work as poetic disguise as well as the sonnet form. It is hard to find to find a recurrent quality which characterizes all poems – and perhaps we shall have to be content with something like ‘family similarity’.

If we leave that general descriptive talk where everything which looks like a poem can be called a poem and turn instead to normative talk, we will of course not recognize as a poem everything that looks like a poem. A real poem has to be a successful poem, a successful speech act. In approximately the same way that only a mathematical proof which really proves something can be called a mathematical proof. It is not enough that it looks like a proof. The proof has to prove. For the poem it is not enough to look like a poem. It has to achieve something.


What is it that the poem has to achieve in order to become a poem?

I think we must start looking for that answer in the medium of the poem, language. This apparently infinite, continuously changing sea which like an endless melody fills our consciousness. In this sea we swim whether we want to or not. Everything we can know or say about the world, we are fishing out of this mighty stream.

Human consciousness is in an interesting way elastic. It does not permit any empty spaces. The stockbroker hectically preoccupied on two telephones at the same time and with his eyes on the computer screen, and the prisoner incarcerated for two years, ambitiously preoccupied with training a fly to come when he whistles for it – the mental spaces of both are filled to the same extent.

Out of this mighty river which always fills itself to capacity comes poetry. As an art. As an instrument to embrace the world. Because most of this river consists of language.

Through language, the poet approaches the world and the world the poet. But the poetical use of language differs in many interesting ways from other types of speech acts. And there are many from which to choose. For example, a romantic understanding is that poetry in some way is threatened by rationality, by logical and empirical thinking. That seems to me as unrealistic as to claim that the art of baking in some subtle way should be threatened by oil painting.

Rational discourse always intends to take us from the subjective space where we live to a neutral one where we can meet. In the scientific contexts the personal pronouns always strive to become the third person. The phenomena are supposed to be observable to anybody, the experiment is supposed to give the same result no matter who carries it out. The rational language from science and technology create a neutral linguistic space at the price of a lost subjectivity.

The poet fishes out of the same stream, but without trying to generalize the original experience into something universal and of equal validity for all. Whereas physics abstracts an experience in such a way that it holds for anybody, poetry can never have any other ambition than that it can hold for somebody. If the poet tries something else he becomes a rhetorician. In real poetry there are no universal generalities.

The result of the successful poetic operation is a captured experience. Not a third-person experience, but a first-person experience: it is the subjective in the experience which must achieve a sort of objectivity.


Poetry and experience

How is this transition achieved? How does experience turn into poetry? What does the poem keep and what does the poem reject?

The use of the first person in poetry can serve as an example. In a narrative prose the word ‘I’ can in principle refer to anybody, a real or fictitious person, in other words, to whomever is supposed to be speaking. ‘I’ in prose is nothing but an agreement among other agreements. In poetry this word can only have one meaning or means nothing at all.

RAMSBERG’S THUMB


There was something odd
about one of Ramsberg’s thumbs.
I think a circular saw had taken
half of it.

He had built our stove in ’39
and it’s still whole.

The remaining joint
had something childishly round
and defenceless about it.

Nature and unnature
at one and the same time.
Or nature’s strange ability
to seem unnatural.

Even today
I often think of
Ramsberg’s thumb.

I remember him, a short and broad, almost bald little man who actually was a clever mason. I must have seen him for the last time around 1943 or ’44, thus approximately 60 years ago. He always went around dressed in a waistcoat and he had a pocket watch in his vest pocket, clearly his most prized possession. His glasses, which were taken off and on in an unpredictable rhythm, had frames of nickel and lenses which seemed quite thick.

After he built the stove, he often came to visit. He drank coffee and played cards with my father. He stayed – I don’t know how far into the autumns – in a minimal summer house further along the village road. It did not belong to him but to a nephew. Everything was very tenuous. The nephew, who was an alcoholic and given to strange fits of rage, might throw him out at any moment.

Where he would go in that instance he had no idea.

And then there was this with the thumb.

If I look back at my own, in these days rather large, literary production, I observe a certain paucity of metaphors. Nothing like a dogmatic reaction, nothing programmatic. Some Swedish poets in my lifetime, for example, Erik Lindegren and Tomas Tranströmer, have excelled with a virtuosity of metaphoric technic. Have I perhaps been unwilling to compete with some highly esteemed contemporaries who obviously do this so well that one could hardly do it better? Or is the reason something different, something more internal?

The metaphors in my poems are few. Many of my poems are completely devoid of metaphors. The poem about Ramberg’s thumb is such a poem. The thumb does not stand for anything else. Except perhaps ‘nature,’ for which Ramsberg as a whole could also symbolize.

Yet it is obvious that this thumb demands to mean something more than itself. It creates a sort of tension. I am very fond of provoking such tensions in my poems. They maintain a sort of openness, they remain an enigma. The poem goes in search of whatever it wants.

If this is done in a programmatic way it soon becomes boring. Like when a painter puts a nail into his canvas and then, encouraged by an enthusiastic review, continues to put nails in all his canvases.

The poem which I have presented for your scrutiny here of course has a lot of references beyond that one to the old mason. Who, in his loneliness, trolling from his boat in the twilight, even today reminds me of the harsh ferryman Charon such as he is depicted in Dante’s Inferno. This mutilated thumb, with its round, somewhat helpless surface, can of course be given a phallic interpretation. And then there is the business with ‘Nature’. Sometimes I think (honni soit qui mal y pense) of the Marquis de Sade and his stubborn insistence that everything which is found in nature is therefore natural. While Rousseau, and to some extent Diderot, have complicated things quite thoroughly by making nature into something positive, to a norm.

A waterfall in Lapland and an old rusty oil refinery in Bitterfeld (the former East Germany) indeed represent very different aesthetic values but both are doubtless produced by nature. A poet who in the seventies wanted to dissuade the Swedes from building nuclear power plants claimed with great emphasis that all nuclear reactions are unnatural. She was also in Rousseau’s tradition. This thinking is insidious, because it is attractive and at the same time profoundly misleading.

A poem can carry so many ambiguities!

At the end of the Ramsberg poem there is also an ‘I.’ An interesting word. “I am not here.” It might seem an absurd claim. If I am not here, I am obviously not even in the position to draw attention to the fact that that is the case. The affinity to “Cogito ergo sum” is striking and certainly not accidental. In an answering machine “I am not here” is a completely rational concept. But not in the poem.

The ‘I’ of the telephone answerer is fictional – the ‘I’ of natural address is not. The prose ‘I’ that we meet in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger or in Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull can be fictive. The fictive ‘I’ can be exchanged for a proper name. The authentic ‘I’ cannot be exchanged.

The ‘I’ of poetry has a claim to authenticity. And who is this ‘I’ who often thinks of Ramsberg’s thumb? Is it the ‘I’ who writes the poem? Or is it an ‘I’ which the poem brings into play? If the latter is the case, I think we are dealing with a sort of infinite regress.

One ‘I’ produces the next in an endless series. And the poem – not different from a lady who must walk faster all the time in order not to fall because her heels are too high – will move forward towards an end which always has to be outside the poem.

FLICKAN


All at once life stands
smiling softly like a girl
on the other side of the stream
and asks
(in its provocative way)
but how did you end up over there?

Here there really is a metaphor. The whole poem is metaphor. On the other hand there is no ‘I’ here. Because the ‘I’ which is lacking in the poem is the very one through the eyes of whom everything is seen.

One might distinguish between two sorts of ‘I’ as they appear in poems. Explicitly as the word ‘I’ which is supposed to refer (in the semantic sense) to the writer. And an implicit ‘I’ which does not appear at all as a word, but as a perspective. That is the case with this poem. It has a hidden ‘I’. That of the observer.


‘The Poem must communicate before it can be understood’ (T.S. Eliot)

There is an old dream which recurs in rather equal intervals in the history of ideas. We find it in some renaissance philosophers in the context of the search for the original language of mankind. We find it in Leibnitz, as a formalized universal language, which is supposed to make it impossible for us to misunderstand each other. And we find it under the influence of modern computer science as the dream of an ideographic superlanguage.

What all these – of course, unrealistic – language utopias try to accomplish is a language which carries its meaning immediately accessible in the same way in which a face carries its expression. The sign should be identical with its meaning and immediately accessible to everybody. But this is of course not possible.

Alphabets are very attractive objects for mathematicians. They can be used to make interesting transformations, they can be folded into themselves in elaborate mappings, thereby creating the most complicated codes. All of this is very interesting and gives results from which we can learn something, especially if we treat the empty space between the letters as a really existing sign which really exists in addition to the other ones.

But however much we fold, permute and transform a phonetic alphabet we will never find a means by which the syntactic dimension will bring us into the semantic one. There is a decisive difference between them.

‘My books standing here on the shelf do not know that I have written them,’ says Jorge Luís Borges in a remarkable poem. No sentence has ever expressed a thought. Phonetical signs and phonemes have no intrinsic meaning of their own. It is we who use them to communicate meaning to ourselves and to other people. Meaning results through speech acts which are carried out by the users of language. The meaning a sign might obtain is something that it acquires exclusively through our handling of it. Or, perhaps better expressed, through the history of its handling.

There is a sort of poetic utopia which is similar to the utopia of the universal language, a hope that the poem might work with the directness of an image. But that is not possible. Not even images work directly. Also images are read through conventions, even when we are not aware of it.

So what can Eliot mean when he says that the poem has already to establish a connection to the reader before it is understood? Is there such a thing as poetic address? A sort of harmonic key, which places the poem with the reader or listener?

Baudelaire often starts his poems as stories: “Autour de moi le rue hurlait” (“A une passante”. There is, as has often been observed, a very modern trend here, an influence from journalism, even from yellow journalism. We make acquaintance with a subject, who lets us share a part of its world and nothing else. Here no attempt is made to establish some sort of pseudo-third-person perspective. There is this poet and he is who he is. It is maybe this attitude which makes Baudelaire’s poems so immediately captivating. They don’t simulate an objectivity which they don’t have. We get to borrow the eyes and ears of an observer and we know that it is just this one person and nobody else. The street noise in the background and the buzzing sound of flies inside a swelling body of a dead cow surround us with its obtrusive, assonant, and still enchanting music.

This is one possible poetical solution. There are, thank God, other ones. Tomas Tranströmer’s quick, exact metaphors which like the flash of a camera, for a very short instance, illuminate a darkness. And then there are Rilke’s strange constructions, where quite often concepts which no human would think could have anything at all to do with one another all of a sudden produce startling connections: God becomes a tower and the angels become staircases, the lion mask of the antique fountain becomes a mouth which talks.

This brings us back to our main theme: What is supposed to be defended? And against what? What has to be defended is a way of communicating which is unique because it preserves the subjectivity of an experience in its subjectivity and still makes it accessible. In a world where almost all communication strives towards a third-person perspective this first-person perspective obviously becomes important simply because it is rare.

Sometimes one sees poetry represented as if it were in some sort of adverse position to rationality, technology, indeed, to all acts governed by reason. In a mixture of romantic and psychoanalytic inspiration, poetry is presented as representative of feeling, passion, subconscious impulses, as a sort of defensive bulwark against what is supposed to be sterile rationality. But this is of course nonsense. There are, as for example Hans Larsson showed already in his The Logic of Poetry very strong rational and logical elements in successful poetry. And when it comes to emotions, we find them everywhere, where there are human beings. The idea that emotions should have some special sort of sanctuary inside poetry is the consequence of an aesthetic which I used to call ‘toothpaste aesthetics’. The poet is perceived of as existing inside a tube containing passions and unstable emotional life. When you press on this tube, feelings are expressed and turn into poetical expression.

Whatever you might think about this model, whatever it leads to, it doesn’t lead to poetry.

In the arts, ambiguity always plays a very important role. The musical chord tells us where it belongs only when it appears in a series of chords; a green patch of colour on the canvas radically changes its appearance if it is placed close to a red patch. A seemingly unimportant utterance in the beginning of a novel might prove to contain the key for everything that follows. The hovering element, that which is still undecided, that which only afterwards can tell you where it wants to go, is the secret centre of the poem.

The truth about the world is not an end station. It is a process.


Translated by Susan W. Howard http://www.poetryinternational.org/cwolk/view/26094