poetry, etc.

On the Map: IWP Interview While at the International Writers...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:57:00 +0500

On the Map: IWP Interview

While at the International Writers Program residency in Iowa (iwp.uiowa.edu), the good folks there did a little interview with me and talked about life, writing and other good things. It’s fun.

Stories of Sarmad By Bilal Tanweer

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 18:43:00 +0500

I wrote this essay some 3 years ago when I discovered there was nothing decent on Sarmad on the web. It is nothing great (and I am tempted to edit large swathes of it as I reread it) but I hope it provokes some important conversations.

The original essay that appeared in Dawn, Books & Authors can be accessed here. Please note there was an error in the original article regarding the date of Sarmad’s death (it’s 1659-1660 CE not 1670 CE). It has been fixed in this version.

Among recurring motifs in Sadequain’s work is the image of a headless man holding his lopped head in his hand. The dislodged head, sitting on the palm of the man’s hand, is studying a beloved subject (e.g. a nude woman), while the other hand sketches the subject on canvas. In another variation of this motif, the severed head is looking back at the vacant spot, while the brush is drawing the self-portrait of the head in blood. In all these versions, the lopped head is an unmistakable symbol of ecstatic transcendence: the head is dismembered from the body but is reunited in the subject, in the act of creation, in the contemplation of the beloved.

But whose head is this?

This is Sarmad’s head. This head was lopped off on Aurangzeb Alamgir’s orders in the compound of Jama Masjid Delhi. It survived history’s amnesia by turning its owner into a fountainhead of stories and myths. But despite Sadequain’s reclamation, Sarmad remains a forgotten figure.

While it may be useful for scholarly research to separate the historical person from stories, this methodology refuses to serve us in introducing Sarmad. This is because the Sarmad who resides in our cultural consciousness is an archetype; his historical person cannot be separated from the fictitious and fantastic stories associated with him. Besides, if we separate his various images competing for primacy (including ones arising out of improbable stories), it would also run the risk of making this problematic figure simplistic.

Sarmad is problematic mainly because of the paucity of primary accounts on his life and works. He is claimed by all religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Hinduism) and each has narratives to support its claims – no matter how outlandish. One historian, Nathan Katz, has gone to the extent of counting the number of ruba’iyat in which Sarmad has expressed disdain for each religion (he finds eight ‘against’ Islam; seven against Hinduism; and only one against Judaism). But in all the accounts, there is one predominant defining feature: Sarmad’s life is portrayed as a symbol of the vibrant Indian religious syncretism at odds with the puritanical interpretations of religion. The resulting story runs something like this: Sarmad is the mystic who roamed the streets of Delhi without clothes. His mortal enemy is the bigoted king, Aurangzeb Alamgir, and his coterie of accomplices, the scholars of his court, who, for reasons of professional jealousy, crave that Sarmad be put to the sword. Almost all biographical accounts of Sarmad’s life glorify him as an example of religious tolerance while Aurangzeb symbolizes the ‘intolerant religious orthodoxy’. And while this might be useful to propagate a certain viewpoint on religion and politics, it irreparably obscures Sarmad’s life for us.

Therefore, while being mindful of the limitation of the discourse out of which these stories arise, for the purposes of this sketch, meant as an introduction to this figure, we will treat Sarmad the mystic, Sarmad the poet, Sarmad the historical person, Sarmad the mythical figure who performed miracles, Sarmad the legend, and Sarmad the scholar as one and the same.

Sarmad’s life, as it comes to us, is a collection of a few facts connected by a multiplicity of fantastic stories. Any account of his life can offer little if it does not present these stories as the story of his life.

We will start with the facts, by which is meant events common to most accounts of his life.

Almost all reports of his life agree that Sarmad was born to an Armenian Jewish family in Kashan, Persia. His date of birth is not clear; most recent scholars tentatively put it at 1590 CE, though there are claims for a range of dates between 1590 till 1618 CE. While still in Iran, Sarmad mastered the Judaic texts and moved to study with famous Muslim scholars and later converted to Islam. Abul Kalam Azad, in his essay on Sarmad, states that Sarmad’s knowledge and understanding, especially of Arabic, was at darja-e kamal – the level of excellence. According to a number of accounts, Sarmad’s adopted Muslim name was Muhammad Sa’id.

Sarmad came to India, arriving at the port city of Thatta as a merchant in 1631. There he fell in love with a Hindu boy, Abhai Chand, who became his constant companion. All accounts present his love for Abhai as the factor that made him renounce the world. Under Sarmad’s tutelage Abhai learnt Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew and eventually, under Sarmad’s supervision, translated some parts of the Torah into Persian. Sarmad’s wanderings took him from Lahore to Hyderabad Deccan until he landed finally in Delhi where he was already famous as a mystic of great powers.

In Delhi, Sarmad became a companion of the famous sheikh, Syed Hare Bhare. The other important event was his contact with the Mughal prince, Dara Shikoh, who became his devoted disciple. Sarmad famously predicted that Dara would succeed Shahjahan as the successor to the Mughal throne. This did not turn out to be true, and soon afterward, Aurangzeb claimed the throne and had Dara executed. When Sarmad’s critics pointed this to him, he remarked: Che kunam? Shitan qawi ast (“What can I do? Satan is powerful!”). In another tradition, Sarmad claimed that he had predicted the kingdom of the hereafter for Dara.

Sarmad’s is commonly portrayed as being notoriously intolerable of authority. Among those he routinely refused to show respect to was the Emperor himself. Legends have it that Aurangzeb was deeply annoyed by Sarmad’s nudity. Once as Aurangzeb’s procession was passing through the streets of Delhi, he saw Sarmad sitting by the roadside. The kind ordered the march to halt and demanded the mystic to cover himself. The saint looked at him with wrathful eyes and said, “If you think I need to cover my nudity so badly, why don’t you cover me yourself?” When the Emperor lifted the blanket lying on Sarmad’s side, he saw the bloodied heads of all the family members the emperor had had secretly murdered. Bewildered, Aurangzeb looked at Sarmad, who said, “Now tell me, what should I cover – your sins or my thighs?”

It is highly improbable that an Emperor tried to cover a naked fakir with his own hands, but such stories are good examples of the spirit and viewpoint which shape the portrayal of Sarmad and Aurangzeb’s supposed encounters.

In another such story, Emperor Aurangzeb’s daughter, Princess Zebunnisa, saw Sarmad making clay houses on the roadside. After paying her respects, she inquired: “Are these for sale?”

“Yes,” Sarmad said, “I will sell them for some tobacco.”

Upon receiving the tobacco, Sarmad wrote around the border of one of the clay houses: This clay house is sold to Princess Zebunnisa for some tobacco. That night Emperor Aurangzeb saw a dream. He was roaming around in Paradise, when he saw a beautiful palace. When he approached it, he was barred from entering it. Then he noticed that the palace had Princess Zebunnisa’s name written on it.

An age has passed since Mansur’s fame has grown ancient
I will figure forth anew the noose’s wine.

Sarmad is remembered most of all by the manner of his execution, which took place in 1659-1660 CE. The charges against him are not clear. His minor offences included his public nakedness, use of bhang (marijuana) and his homosexual affair with Abhai Chand. But these were not enough ground for execution and some accounts actually mention Aurangzeb himself pointing this out. However, Sarmad’s main offense was not reciting the full kalima and claiming that Prophet Muhammad did not ascend the heavens, but that the heavens descended to Muhammad. The religious scholars of Aurangzeb’s court pronounced him a heretic and convinced Aurangzeb to carry out the execution as a binding religious duty.

Sarmad had refused, even under duress, to recite the full kalima. Instead of reciting: There is no God but God, and Mohammad is the messenger of God, he insisted on stopping short: There is no God. When asked the reason for this, he plainly stated that this was the stage he had reached in his spiritual journey and he would be lying if he said more.

When Sarmad was beheaded, his body seized the lopped head from the ground and ran up the stairs of Jama Masjid threatening to destroy Aurangzeb’s kingdom. In another version of the same incident, the moment Sarmad’s head was severed from the body, it fell to the ground and everyone in the audience heard and saw it recite the full kalima.

A word about Sarmad the poet, and the literature available on him in Urdu. Sarmad was an accomplished Farsi ruba’i poet and while there is dispute about the number of ruba’iyat associated with him, the number ranges between 320 and 340. A critical edition of his ruba’iyat does not exist. In 2007, Muhammad Saleemur Rahman (Nigarshat Publishers, Lahore) published a collection of his ruba’iyat, Ruba’iyat-e Sarmad, which also contains his prose translations in Urdu. The translations are fairly accurate and true to Farsi originals. Another work in Urdu is by Arsh Malsiyani, Naghma-e Sarmad (Markaz-e Tasnif-o Talif, Nakodar: 1964). These are poetic renditions of Sarmad’s ruba’iyat in Urdu.

The author is a graduate student at Columbia University, New York. bilalt@gmail.com

Sadequain image reproduction acknowledgement: SADEQUAIN Foundation, San Diego

Varieties of Obligation By Bilal Tanweer

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 21:16:00 +0500

REVIEW ESSAY

Ghanti (Short Stories) by Nilofar Iqbal

Surkh Dhabbay (Short Stories) by Nilofar Iqbal

The fools in Nilofar Iqbal’s stories are mostly men. They are either cuckolds or cheaters; obsequious and considerate or uncaring and indifferent. But that’s not a complaint or weakness. These predictable, two-dimensional male characters vacate the stage to allow her women to come in full view and enact their needs and frustrations. And Nilofar Iqbal’s women are completely wonderful: they are deeply conflicted about the demands placed upon them by the world; often they are unsure and insecure, but that’s because they are intensely connected with their bodies and conscious of what they want and how—and best of all, they know how to work all them foolish men to their ends.

Reading her two collections of stories, Ghanti and Surkh Dhabbay,her standout characters are women who are go-getters: Miss Romana who is such a thorough professional when it comes to her work that Qadeer sahib, her boss, a middle-aged man with a family and oppressive wife, is left mostly confused when she starts showing up for work in gauzy kurtas that reveal the her lingerie that matches the color of her handbags. Raufa is another one—a thirty-eight year old who is living in a rented single-room but having a good time with Peji—Pervez—a freshman in college, who, in return for his love and attention, is milking Raufa for money and expensive gifts. Raufa perhaps is Nilofar Iqbal’s strongest creation—a tragic character who is so impaired by her needs that she’s blind to what’s ironically apparent to the readers all the way through. Her triumph and tragedy lies precisely in the agency and choice she exercises in a society that constrains women in all number of ways but most obviously in their choice of partners.

The real subject in Nilofar Iqbal’s fiction however is families. Her dramatic project is set around examining how people negotiate their needs and dependencies within the demands of the family. A repeated story that recurs in different permutations throughout her collections deals with a dying family member, and how the pressures and obligations of his dependency (it is a He every single time) are taken by the rest of the family. It results in some of her best work: In Ghanti, for instance,we are taken close to the loneliness of a dying father who has been shifted upstairs in the house and has been handed a bell that he must ring to call for assistance. He misses the familiarity of his old room, where he has spent fifteen years, and the fact that he needs assistance for the smallest things like using toilet and turning in his bed. Nilofar Iqbal meticulously explores the effect this man’s sickness has on each member of the family: the wife’s social life eviscerates; the children desist from going near the sick man; the son resents everybody for ignoring his father but then gradually begins to feel the tyranny of obligation of being at his father’s beck and call at all times—even at night.

Indeed, the keyword that defines Nilofar Iqbal’s families is Obligation. Her families are a nucleus of unhappy people united by obligation and who, knowingly or unknowingly, inflict harm upon each other for their own needs: a mother refuses to marry her overage daughter because she’s terrified of being left alone;a father beats up a child for refusing to give up school and take up a job at the zamindar’s who is his employer, who might fire him if his boy doesn’t turn up for work; a cuckolded husband feels obligated not to confront his cheating wife in the presence of his son-in-law; an old wife is obligated to take care of her sick husband and put up with ungrateful children—obligation in its varieties is the primary source of drama in Nilofar Iqbal’s stories.

Not all of her stories succeed. Many stories feel abandoned at the point where conflict is ripe for explosion and characters are prepared for drastic action. It happens more often in her latest collection Surkh Dhabbay, where most stories feel like rough sketches rather than fully executed stories: Fatah, Crystal House, Musalman, Mera Dost Mujahid, Dilip Kumar, Chooha, Operation Mice. These stories are exciting in setup but disappointing in their denouement and eventual realization. Chooha is the story of a man sprawling and kicking in the pits of despair, who eventually goes underground (literally, figuratively) without much consequence or drama. In Crystal House a couple who have collected valuable crystal from around the world in their house die one day and their crystal is, well, auctioned quickly and readily by their children. In Dilip Kumar a servant with a talent for mimicking Bollywood is thrown out of the house and nothing much happens thereafter. Her most ambitious story in her new collection, and perhaps her most admirable failure, is Operation Mice where she explores the War on Terror from four different perspectives: an American army general, his wife, their son on a mission in Iraq, and his fiance who is waiting for him back home. The story is predictable and ends predictably staying within the comfortable confines of the received wisdom about the human costs of war, but it also a drastic break from all her other work and for that reason, it represents a laudable risk.

Nilofar Iqbal’s finest story in these two collections is Chaabi where the protagonist, Abida—summed up in the very first line of the story rather discordantly as: abida chai ki aisee piyalee thee jo rakhay rakhay thandee ho ga’yee thee—after getting disappointed with her family and friends and becoming wholly indifferent to herself and her needs, finds a moment of transformation. It’s a story that’s deeply reminiscent of one of Chekhov’s best stories, The Kiss. It maps the changes in Abida when she hears that a good looking youth has come to reside in the house-next-door, which is connected to her room with a padlocked window beneath which there is enough space for her hands to slide into her neighbor’s territory. One day she puts her hand in the window and pulls the handkerchief of the man she has come to long for. She’s disappointed with the ordinariness of the handkerchief, its lack of any romantic clues for her, and its harsh smell of tobacco. But as she’s replacing it back in her neighbor’s window, her hands are pinned down with the rough hands of a man she’s never seen. She quickly pulls back her hand, but this physical contact sets in motion small changes that alter her relationship to herself, her body, and the world. It’s a beautiful, gem of a story—and ends on a less bleak note than Chekhov’s.

Her latest collection of stories, Surkh Dhabbay, does not fulfill the promise of her widely hailed debut.At least, not yet. However, the best stories in her oeuvre do hit the beat and thrum of the world we know—and wish we understood. They help us understand, and yield enormous pleasures.

Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. He was recently named an Honorary Fellow of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He teaches at LUMS.

This essay was first published in Dawn, Books & Authors – February 10, 2013

Coke Studio by Bilal Tanweer

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 12:23:00 +0500

This essay originally appeared in Critical Muslim Vol. 4 (Hurst & Co. London: 2012. eds. Ziauddin Sardar, Robin Yassin-Kassab).

There are no billboards on the streets. For the last four years, a week or so before the new season of Coke Studio is launched, most of the important billboards in major Pakistani cities are taken up by snazzy advertisements announcing the featured artists of the season. It’s the biggest annual ad campaign for any TV program and this is Season 5. It’s being touted by many to be the mother of all seasons, mainly on the basis of a wildly circulating promotional video of Episode 1 of the new season. The first artist on the promo video is a rapper: Bohemia. The video shows him in a hoodie and dark glasses, slamming out a rap number in Punjabi. ‘This is an opportunity for me to tell you what rap is—it’s poetry, it’s a message,’ he says in a close-up shot of his 3-second interview. The video cuts back to the song. By his side are the Viccaji sisters - Zoe and Rachel - who do backing vocals and harmonies but they appear to be in a more prominent role for this number.

The clip is followed by Hadiqa Kiyani, among Pakistan’s leading female vocalists, singing what sounds like the hard rock version of an AR Rahman’s composition. She is singing the Sufi poetry of Bulleh Shah. She’s followed by Atif Aslam, arguably Pakistan’s biggest rock star, also a sensation in India for the last four years. He has teamed up with ‘Qayaas’, an underground band, to do a version of a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan qawwali. The last singer on the promo is of Humayun Khan’s who is singing Larsha Pekhawar Ta, a popular Pushto folk song.

The absence of billboards is unexpected. For the last three years or so, Coke Studio is the soft drink brand’s main marketing strategy in the country. In fact, the entire marketing campaign of Coca Cola Pakistan is designed around Coke Studio: artists featured in the program are on Coke bottles, cans, television adverts, newspapers, television, radio and billboards. But there is no visual clue of it this year. Maybe it is a scaling back by the soft drink company. But the other interesting thing I notice is that on Coke Studio’s Season 5 website there is no ‘About’ tab either - meaning nothing to introduce a newcomer to Coke Studio. Taken together, these could mean a number of things, but they unmistakably do mean that no one needs to be told What Coke Studio Is and What It Does; and second, nobody needs reminding that Coke Studio will start airing on May 13. It’s common knowledge.

In other words, if there is a confirmation of Coke Studio’s status as a cultural behemoth in Pakistan, this is it.

Music Channel Charts (MCC), 1990

Coke Studio is a world apart from Music Channel Charts, the programme I grew up on, and where I first encountered rap.

The song was called Bhangra Rap, a mix of Punjabi bhangra with rap. The lyrics were a smooth and unselfconscious mix of Urdu, Punjabi and English. The song was sung by a young man, Fakhr-e Alam, who in the music video sported a huge locket with a Peace sign and danced some serious moves in his baggy, torn-knee jeans. My younger brother and I loved Fakhr-e Alam and his music and everything about him. We had memorized Bhagra Rap by heart and sung it in chorus with friends.

Growing up in the nineties, our entertainment options were limited to street cricket and two TV channels - a private one and a state-owned one. The transmission time for both channels were around eight to twelve hours a day and almost everyone we knew had memorized the entire week’s TV schedule. MCC aired on the private TV channel, NTM (later renamed STN), and featured young men (all of them men, except for a handful of female vocalists in a few scattered exceptions) who looked like creatures from another planet compared to everything else on TV: They had unsuitably long hair, wore chains around their necks, jeans that were either tight or torn and their music was loud and brash. These boys made my middle-class parents deeply uncomfortable, for, they projected an image which was perhaps my parents’ very worst nightmare. For them, these boys were of an age where they should’ve been worrying about jobs and earning a livelihood. Instead they were running after girls on their bikes and making sounds in the name of music that positively punished my parents’ sensibilities.

My brother and I, on the other hand, loved everything about this programme. It was decidedly different in its energy, sound and look from everything else we had seen on TV. It lacked polish but we hardly cared. Almost all the videos were cheaply recorded and produced at home by amateurs. The videos were all shot around predictable locations like garages and apartment rooftops and the Karachi beach makes an obligatory appearance in most of them. Not surprisingly, most of them were shot during the day too (lighting/studio services being too expensive).

My mother would sit and monitor us as we watched the show. When we got too excited (which happened often when our favourite band/number was ascending the charts), she would disapprovingly start pointing out everything that was wild and uncivilized: ‘Look at the way this boy is jumping. Baboon. Look what he’s wearing. I bet he got that from the flea market.’ The jibe that stung most: ‘Look how this boy is aping the firangis (westerners); seems like he’s smelled some white man’s knickers.’ We had little choice but to ignore her taunts and focus squarely on the music.

MCC was a ground breaker. Its competitive format drew legions of followers and encouraged hundreds of young men to make their own music videos. Despite its limited production values, MCC was an astounding success. During the four years it ran, MCC introduced many young musicians who went on to define Pakistani pop music: Ali Haider, Nadeem Jafri, Fakhr-e-Alam, Saleem Javed, Amir Zaki, Strings, Junoon, Amir Saleem, Bunny, Khalid Anum and many others. MCC also redefined the way the Pakistani urban youth imagined themselves. One of its major bands, ‘Vital Signs’, became a major force on the pop scene in Pakistan.

MCC disappeared almost as suddenly as it had appeared. As cable television penetrated Pakistani cities, local television lost viewership and the audience switched to MTV, Channel V and Bollywood music in a big way. MCC closed shop in 1994. By then, Pakistan already had a nascent but confident pop music scene, a maturing concert circuit and sponsors willing to foot the bill.

Coke Studio, 2012

A lot has changed in Pakistan since. The country has become polarized along ethnicity, religion and class. The contradictions and ideological confusions of the nation are also reflected on the pop scene. One of the country’s biggest pop star, Junaid Jamshed of ‘Vital Signs’, abandoned music, embraced the life of a religious preacher of the evangelical Tableeghi Jamat, grew an luscious long beard and established his own a fashion label. Ali Azmat, ex-vocalist of the most successful Pakistani rock band, ‘Junoon’, became a conspiracy theorist who blames ‘Western and Hindu Zionists’ for all the ills of the country, holds the US responsible for funding terrorism in Pakistan, prophesizes that Pakistan will transform in the near future into the military bastion of all the Islamic countries, and idolizes the Pakistani military as God’s gift to the Muslim world. Then there is Najam Shiraz who made his debut on MCC, and who now sings moving na’ats (religious devotion songs) alongside his standard pop output. There are a number of soft and hard, red and white revolutionary bands. One band, ‘Laal’ (literally, Red) espouses Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology and sings revolutionary poets like Habib Jalib. There are others like Shehzad Roy and Strings, who sing of economic prosperity, law and security, and education for all and wish to see a culturally liberal and economically viable Pakistan, integrated in the world economy. In other words, Pakistan’s cultural imagination is as fractured both vertically across classes and horizontally across ethnicity and ideology as the nation itself. There seem to be few instances where art could transcend these rigid boundaries.

Coke Studio emerged, as a clear attempt to bridge the cultural fragmentation of Pakistan, against this background. The first episode of the first season was aired on 8 June 2008. Broadcast on a number of television channels, with Video and MP3 files available for immediate download from its official channel on YouTube, it received instant critical and popular acclaim. The show’s accent was firmly on bringing tradition and modernity together in a new synthesis. It made a conscious and sustained effort to work out a way to engage with the traditional folk music of the Subcontinent using the vocabulary of Western music, which is more accessible and familiar to the younger audience. Through Coke Studio many folk musicians and their work has been introduced to a new generation and allowed them to access a deep and rich cultural heritage that was withering on the margins.

The young filmmaker and blogger Ahmer Naqvi was swept off his feet when he first saw Coke Studio. ‘We all grew up as Junoonis and Vital Signs fans. There was little else that was available culturally to us as young Pakistanis’, he says. He, and countless young men and women of his generation, grew up with only a vague sense of the traditional music of their region. ‘Coke Studio grabbed us because it was an amalgamation of things that were already present in our subconscious and all around us, but we never really paid attention to them,’ says Safieh Shah, who wrote a detailed comment on every Coke Studio episode in the last season in The Friday Times. ‘Coke Studio not only brought all those things together but did it in a way that was accessible to us’. Aamer Ahmad, who was the recording engineer on Season 2, the season where Coke Studio found its feet and gained popularity as the cutting-edge of Pakistani music, concurs. ‘Coke Studio provides people a platform where they can come to talk, chill, relax. It’s like when you put a dhol wala, a drummer, and a guitar player in a room and they automatically make music. Because that’s what they do’.

Rohail Hyatt

To understand Coke Studio we need to appreciate Rohail Hyatt, the producer and the driving force behind the show. Hyatt was a founding member, producer, song writer, guitarist and keyboardist of ‘Vital Signs’. The band was formed in 1986 and exploded onto the Pakistani music scene with Dil Dil Pakistan,one of the most popular songs the music history of Pakistan. It became, and continues to be, the pop national anthem of the country. In a 2003 BBC poll of the ten most famous songs of all time, Dil Dil Pakistan ranked third. Vital Signs also scored two important firsts in Pakistani pop history: they were the first local band to land a major sponsorship deal (Pepsi) and the first to tour the United States. The band also did a number of cross-country tours, a rare achievement. Vital Signs broke up in 1998. Rohail joined the advertising industry until he returned to music with Coke Studio ten years later.

Hyatt is a naturally shy person whose dislike for interviews is well-known. Not surprisingly, he did not respond to my multiple requests for an interview. However, in an interview for Dawn, he stated that when he stumbled into classical music a year before Coke Studio, ‘I was pretty blown away by the fact that here I was, a musician all my life, and I had no idea about a treasure of an art form that we had and it was so different from the western music that we had grown up with’. He felt that ‘we as a people needed to experience our heritage, so this stems from one small experience into discovery’. Hyatt, says Haniya of the singing duo Zeb & Haniya, ‘has very distinct likes and dislikes. His aesthetic met the traditional music of Pakistan—and something clicked’.

In Coke Studio, Hyatt focussed on two specifics: a. production quality, and b. freedom for the artists to experiment without commercial pressures,. ‘Right from its inception’, says Louis Jerry Pinto, who is better known as Gumby and is considered to be Pakistan’s finest drummer, we wanted to ‘have better production values and quality sound’. The high productions values are there to be seen. Indeed, television advertisements and a few music videos aside, one has not seen a television production of such visual quality and sophistication on local TV channels.

Gumby, who has been a core member of the Coke Studio house band from the first season, says that the producers decided to be flexible in both approach and outcome. ‘We said to each other to let’s keep it open-ended and let’s not give it a label’. Pakistani artists have frequently complained about commercial pressures, which have stalled their creativity. Hyatt has spoken about this himself. ‘As an artist’, he told Dawn, ‘I know during the times of Vital Signs… every time we wanted to do what we really wanted to do, there was somebody telling us that “no one is going to listen to this”. It always used to be a really weird thing to give in to – my creative expression [to corporate sponsors or record labels]’.

Music à la Coke Studio

The artists who have performed on Coke Studio wax lyrical about the creative freedom it provides. The ‘beauty’ of Coke Studio, says Tina Sani, a renowned ghazal singer who performed to great acclaim in Season 4, ‘is Rohail’s openness. Nobody was thinking of the commercial aspect or the audience. Rohail only suggests and you as the artist have the free-hand.’ Quite a contrast with the commercial TV channels that dominate the airwaves now where ratings dictate everything, Sani says. Muazzam, one half of the Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwal Group, concurs. ‘One thing we appreciated about Coke Studio is its environment,’ he says. The duo belongs to the Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s qawwal gharana (extended family), and their rendition of the traditional qawwali, Nayna de Aakhay was one of the big hits of Season 3. ‘It works because people at Coke Studio understandmusic. No matter who you are, you are dealt with on your own terms. You are not bound in any way or forced to think in a certain way. This kind of respect boosts the artist’s confidence. We have collaborated many times internationally and have also toured around the world. But this is the best collaborative experience we’ve ever had’, says Muazzam.

‘We had a lot of freedom in choosing our songs and even the arrangements,’ says Haniya. ‘It is a very collaborative process. You can be as involved or uninvolved as you like.’ The degree of involvement depends on the artist. But it seems that those who are able to harness the qualities of the Coke Studio house band flourish the most. Big bands tend not to do too well in Coke Studio. The major hits have come when individual artists have paired up to exploit the genius and the quality of the Coke Studio house band which comprises some of the best musicians in Pakistan.

The process that Coke Studio follows in making its music was outlined in a video released at the end of Season 4. It describes the production process of a qawwali which was one of the highlights of the season. It starts with the invited artists doing a raw recording of the song they wish to perform. A number of other steps follow where the percussionists work out the rhythm structure and align it with the Western rhythm structure. Once the rhythms and beats are agreed, the house band gets involved and finds ways to retain the core improvisational aspect of Eastern music and works out a structure that could allow the two to function together. Finally, everyone rehearses together to produce the finished song.

While Coke Studio pays remuneration to artists, the immediate financial gains for appearing on the show are limited. But it does offer something that promises bigger financial rewards: exposure. Artists who do well on Coke Studio gain a global audience for their work. ‘Coke Studio has put us on the map,’ says Zeb of Zeb & Haniya. ‘We went to France and were surprised to find people singing our songs.’ Zeb & Haniya broke onto the Pakistani music scene in 2008 with their album, Chup - an instant hit. But their rise to international stardom came after they performed on Coke Studio in 2009. In India especially, where Coke Studio has a huge following, Zeb & Haniya performed extensively and went on to collaborate with Indian artists.

Global exposure is life blood for Pakistani artists. Making a viable living from local royalties has never been an option for musicians in the country. Indeed, many folk singers live in abject poverty. The celebrated Zarsanga, 65, who is considered the Queen of Pashto folk music, was forced to live in a tent on the roadside in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province after her house was washed away in the 2010 floods. Even mainstream singers such as the celebrated Mahdi Hassan, known as ‘King of Ghazals’, faces hardship to pay for his medical care. Part of the problem is the rampant piracy that undermines the royalties of the artists. According to an artist interview, in the 1980s, an estimated 30 copies were pirated for every original cassette sold in the local market. Twenty five years on, with the digitization of music and the advent of Internet, the entire business model of record labels has been comprehensively defeated in Pakistan. Even concert performances, which were the most significant source of income left for the artists, have suffered a serious setback in the deteriorating security situation. Now the few concerts that happen, happen indoors.

Coke Studio provides international exposure and serves as the flag-bearer of the enigmatic and creative side of Pakistan. ‘I see Coke Studio as a platform. A big platform for the artists, especially for those who are not in the mainstream’, says Muazzam. Coke studio also helps with engagements in the local circuits. Salman Albert, a guitarist for the rock band ‘Entity Paradigm’, says ‘exposure to the Western and Indian market is definitely there but even locally, after Coke Studio one gets many more concerts.’

But not everyone agrees that an appearance on Coke Studio would automatically lead to financial rewards. ‘Coke Studio has not enabled any artist to make money off music, and it does little other than providing fame, which helps them get more concerts’, says Fasi Zaka, broadcaster and respected long-time commentator on the Pakistani cultural scene. ‘TV has always done that for the artists. But that doesn’t mean it is bad. I think Coke Studio remains a great experiment in Pakistani music - mining folk influences and bringing a contemporary touch to it.’

The corporate side of Coke Studio

Zaka and the noted cultural critic Nadeem Farooq Paracha have been staunch critics of corporate sponsorship in music. ‘The problem with corporate money has been that it influences in directing the output of the artist’, says Zaka explaining his stance. ‘So socially conscious artists would have to water down their artistic output because of corporate money involved and because corporations do not wish to be associated with anything political. For example, Shehzad Roy after his single Laga Reh, suffered because no sponsor wanted to touch him due to the overtly political nature of his song.’ However, both Zaka and Paracha have now changed their views.

For Paracha the reason lies in the rise of militant Islam. ‘I have revised my earlier position because frankly speaking I wonder if we have the luxury now. The radicalization in our society has increased and nothing much is happening on the cultural front. It would be all right to criticize Coke Studio as a corporate brand game if we were an open society. To criticize Coke Studio in the present situation would be nihilistic.’ Zaka has other reasons. ‘For the music in Pakistan now, corporate money is an essential input. All the revenue streams for artists have dried up and the market isn’t promoting these artists or their music. Also, with the digitization of music, corporations affecting the output of socially conscious artists have become a minor issue. Artists who have something political to say can still say it’.

The artists themselves vigorously support corporate patronage. Gumby, who has been in the industry for over fifteen years, feels strongly. ‘To critics who say it is commercial, I ask: What’s your point? Everyone is commercial. If corporate sponsorship did not exist in this country there would be no music. Coke is getting brand value for this money. And over the last few years, one has seen the conservative thinking in the corporate world also change and now one sees a certain level of sincerity in their efforts too: they are genuinely interested in promoting music.’

But would Coke sponsor something that does not have the potential to be so popular, for the sake of music? ‘If some people believe that Coke is doing it for the music, that just tells you how good a spin they have managed to put on it,’ argues Zaka. ‘But ultimately, we have to judge the net effect - it’s good. If their aim is to sell their product, they could also do it by buying a lot of air time and running 30-second advertisements. But if they are doing something that also benefits culture and music, then it is good.’

Coke Studio is indeed good: it is good for Pakistani music, good for our cultural heritage, good for musicians, and ultimately good for audience – music lovers all over the world. It is something, says Aamer Ahmad, ‘that we as a culture should have done sixty years ago. We should be doing it on a much larger scale, our government should be doing it’. When Coke Studio first appeared on the scene, the music industry was in the doldrums and all the music channels were losing money. ‘It’s not like they weren’t spending: they were pouring enormous amounts of money into making jingles’, says Ahmer Naqvi, who worked on Pakistan’s first English TV Channel, Dawn TV.

Future of Coke Studio?

There is a broad consensus amongst the Pakistani musicians that Coke Studio has indeed become a benchmark of quality. Music production in the country will now be judged in relation to Coke Studio. But there is also an unmistakable feeling that it has become repetitive and predictable. ‘There was more creativity in the first two seasons’, says Salman Albert. ‘Now all songs have the same sound. Every song should have its own sound, music arrangement should be varied. New players should be introduced for each song. They have to do something radically new now to stay at the top’. Gumby agrees: ‘it has become predictable and people have started taking it for granted. But Rohail has a certain sound and sensibility and I have no problems with it. For me, the first two seasons were more open-ended and by the fourth season we did not have much creative input’. Perhaps this is why Gumby does not take part in Season 5; he has left for other projects providing a space for new producers to bring a fresh perspective. Tina Sani echoes similar sentiments. ‘Yes, it has become somewhat formulaic and a pattern seems to be followed. But there is no problem with it. We shouldn’t be too pushy. What Coke Studio should avoid doing is chasing its own tail. Focus on making newer things. We should all encourage it.’

Such self-reflection and criticism is a good sign. Perhaps the most promising development is that Coke Studio has spurred other ideas on similar lines. Because of the unprecedented success of Coke Studio corporate sponsors now are keen to support more ventures that promote quality music. One example is Uth Records (‘Uth’ is pronounced ‘Youth’) which is sponsored by Ufone, a national mobile phone company. It is a reality show where aspiring musicians, irrespective of age and background, who have not yet released an album, are paired with industry professionals to produce a single. The show, produced by Gumby, just completed Season 2 and has received over 4,000 submissions by young musicians all over the country.

Even for artists not in music, Coke Studio serves as an inspiration. ‘As a filmmaker, it has given me the belief that somebody like me can do something new and challenging,’ says Ahmer Naqvi. ‘It has also given me confidence in the audience too. If I do something that is sophisticated, the audience is going to come up to it.’

If we judge the cultural scene in Pakistan on its own terms, the distance it has travelled from 20 years ago is heartening—given that the political instability has persisted and the country has spent every year firefighting a different sort of wildfire. The experiment called Coke Studio much like Pakistan itself continues to chart an unpredictable course forward.

More stuff:

Coke Studio Seasons are available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/cokestudio

Some of the songs popular during the MCC days can be heard at: http://www.defence.pk/forums/general-images-multimedia/84235-music-channel-charts-mcc-pakistan.html

Ahmer Naqvi’s Dawn interview with Rohail Hyatt is available at:

http://dawn.com/2011/08/07/the-artist-must-shine/

and to read Safieh Shah’s The Friday Times reviews of Season 4 begin here:

http://www.thefridaytimes.com/beta/tft/article.php?issue=20110617&page=24

The Fasi Zaka and Friends Show on the Pakistan’s Radio One FM 91 is widely available on YouTube.

Pakistani pop album cover images: http://www.pakipop.com/

No Artificial Fires: The Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert By Bilal Tanweer

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 13:14:00 +0500

How to describe the poetry of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, who Seamus Heaney described as “a poet of exemplary ethical and artistic integrity in world literature in the 20^th and 21^st century… a poet whose work fulfills the classical expectation that great literature will delight and instruct,” and who Robert Hass referred to as “one of the most influential European poets of the last half-century, and perhaps—even more than his [Nobel Prize winning] contemporaries Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska—the defining Polish poet of the post-war years,” and about whom Stephen Dobyns wrote in the New York Times claiming: “In a just world Mr. Herbert would have received the Nobel Prize long ago”?

I first encountered Zbigniew Herbert in a volume called Mr. Cogito and I experienced that rare exhilaration of encountering something wise, beautiful and unlike anything I had read before. It was a detached poetic voice that was also contemplative and humorous and deeply serious and yet playful all at the same time, and its sparse and precise language moved delightfully between thought and image. By the time I went through the collection, the marginalia of my copy were all exclamatory points and Wow’s of varying lengths and slants. Many of these poems have since become my ports of refuge, and one The Envoy of Mr. Cogito has grown into an anthem. However, on that first reading I dwelled longest on a much simpler poem where Herbert leads a kind of existential meditation with much lightness:

Mr. Cogito Meditates on Suffering

All attempts to remove
the so-called cup of bitterness—
by reflection
frenzied actions on behalf of homeless cats
deep breathing
religion—
failed

one must consent
gently bend the head
not wring the hands
make use of the suffering gently moderately
like an artificial limb
without false shame
but also without unnecessary pride

do not brandish the stump
over the heads of others
don’t knock with the white cane
against the windows of the well-fed

drink the essence of bitter herbs
but not to the dregs
leave carefully
a few sips for the future

accept
but simultaneously
isolate within yourself
and if it is possible
create from the matter of suffering
a thing or a person

play
with it
of course
play
entertain it
very cautiously
like a sick child
forcing at last
with silly tricks
a faint
smile

Translated from the Polish by John and Bogdana Carpenter

Instead of confessing to suffering or fretting about its causes, the meditation concerns itself with a gentle prescription: to accept the suffering without resigning oneself to it; to respect it without making a spectacle of it; isolate it, and engage with it with humor and play.

Reading Herbert’s work for the first time felt like stepping into a new kind of earthly wisdom. Here was a very benevolent use of irony: to draw strength in hard times while at the same time not being delusional about the bleakness of the world. Here was a stoic courage: to battle a monstrous world without becoming a monster oneself, to always fight to see clearly, humanely instead of choosing between the convenient ideological blinders. On greater reflection, I realized that what enabled all these qualities in Herbert was his astonishingly brutal honesty: Go where those others went to the dark boundary/ for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize. And yet:

beware however of unnecessary pride
keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror
repeat: I was called - weren’t there better ones than I

beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring
the bird with an unknown name the winter oak
light on a wall the splendour of the sky
they don’t need your warm breath
they are there to say: no one will console you

It is well worth remembering that Herbert lived through a dramatically oppressive time. He was born in 1924 in Lvov, Poland (now in Ukraine, Lviv) and was 15 when his hometown was annexed by the Soviet Union, an occupation that was followed by the Nazi takeover in 1941. When the Nazis were eventually defeated in World War II, his hometown was seized again by the Soviet Union.

Even though Herbert started writing poetry as a student in the 1940s, he was unable to publish any of his works due to censorship until 1956—“a period of fasting,” he described later. His struggles living and writing in two totalitarian regimes were fundamental to shaping the concerns and subjects in his poetry.

Herbert’s poems are all hard at work to free themselves from being weighed down by the world. According to Robert Hass, Herbert is “an ironist and a minimalist who writes as if it were the task of the poet, in a world full of loud lies, to say what is irreducibly true in a level voice.” His poetry relentlessly searches and strategizes for the survival of what is most gentle in us without making any false promises about life or the future of the world. His poems consider the pitfalls of language, fight battles of conscience, discuss virtue, suffering, Hell, magic, upright attitudes, and report on the temptations of Spinoza—all in a manner that is unaffected and unsentimental, ironic and humorous, but categorically against despair and wary of false hope.

Perhaps the best description of Herbert’s poetry is found in his own writing, albeit in his description of his aims in studying philosophy. In a letter to his mentor, the sage and independent philosopher, Henryk Elzenberg, dated November 2, 1951, Zbigniew Herbert said of philosophy—he began as a student of philosophy, economics, law and art history—what could wonderfully describe his poetry: “What I really look for in philosophy… I look for emotion. Powerful intellectual emotion, painful tensions between reality and abstraction, yet another rending, yet another, deeper than personal, cause for sorrow… I prefer to live through philosophy to brooding on it like hen. I would rather it be a fruitless struggle, a personal cause, something going against the order of life, than a profession.”

Actually, it is no surprise that the best description of Herbert’s poems comes from his expectations of philosophy. The search in his poems is fundamentally philosophical: he is a poet who distrusts poetry; who is painfully aware of how language gets corrupted with ideology. All his poems are attempts to arrive at clarity—even if it ultimately is only “an uncertain clarity”. He wants simple and crude truth that’s washed off the smoke and haze of propaganda and neat symmetries of ideological thinking. He’s suspicious of romanticism and loftiness of metaphor. He wants to describe the world without ‘the artificial fires of poetry’. In Herbert’s world, truth exists in simple objects. A pebble was a pebble is a pebble has been a pebble:

Pebble

The pebble
is a perfect creature
equal to itself
mindful of its limits
filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning
with a scent which does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away
does not arouse desire
its ardor and coldness
are just and full of dignity
I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth
— Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye

Translated from the Polish by Peter Dale Scott and Czeslaw Milosz

This philosophical quality also explains Mr. Cogito, the principal character in his work, the filter and conduit of his meditations. The character is a clear borrowing from Descartes, whose cogito ergo sum defined the epistemological search for certainty, a base that could serve as the foundation of reliable knowledge, for something that persists. But Herbert’s Mr. Cogito is a clumsy character, an ordinary, even less than ordinary person, who is nonetheless sharp and clear-eyed and is trying to be honest about his experience in the world.

Herbert’s search for clarity is so rigorous that he is even wary of imagination—that prized gift of the Romantics, what they held to be our Divine instrument. In a 1986 interview, Herbert remarks, “In the sphere projected by our imagination, we are always thinking that we are without limits, that our possibilities are inexhaustible, but the body is here… The body is wise.” So one should trust the body then, asks the interviewer, Renata Gorczynski. “Not permit it too much, not allow it everything, but at the same time listen to it.”

I Would Like To Describe

I would like to describe the simplest emotion

joy or sadness

but not as others do

reaching for shafts of rain or sun

I would like to describe a light

which is being born in me

but I know it does not resemble

any star

for it is not so bright

not so pure

and is uncertain

I would like to describe courage

without dragging behind me a dusty lion

and also anxiety

without shaking a glass full of water

to put it another way

I would give all metaphors

in return for one word

drawn out of my breast like a rib

for one word

contained within the boundaries

of my skin

but apparently this is not possible

and just to say - I love

I run around like mad

picking up handfuls of birds

and my tenderness

which after all is not made of water

asks the water for a face

and anger

different from fire

borrows from it

a loquacious tongue

so is blurred

in me

what white-haired gentlemen

separated once and for all

and said

this is the subject

and this is the object

we fall asleep

with one hand under our head

and with the other in a mound of planets

our feet abandon us

and taste the earth

with their tiny roots

which next morning

we tear out painfully

Translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott

In a poet whose most formidable quality is his deeply cultivated negative capability, Herbert’s morality stems from empathy, and an appreciation of the messiness and variedness of the human experience, and evil, from a simplification of the world. Many of Herbert’s poems feature historical villains, dictators, autocrats and despots, but they are not the crazy mad bastards we are accustomed to imagine them. Instead, they are thinkers with firm convictions on history and human nature; many of them are revolutionaries attempting to fix humanity’s maladies with ready formulas; they are people of power who consider other men’s blood a fair price for their causes, and who, inevitably, derive their power from offering their people false hope.

Herbert has been well-known through the English speaking world for many years. He was blessed with a team of two fine translators, John and Bogdana Carpenter, who translated most of his early work and championed it for many years. But for some bizarre reason, their fine original translations are all out of print now and the new translations by Alissa Valles (‘Zbigniew Herbert: Collected Poems –1956-1998’ published by Ecco Press in a beautifully produced edition) lack the lucid precision of the Bogdana translations. But even the not-so-great translations carry the gravitas of Herbert’s poetry—enough, at all events, to make the reader in English understand why Herbert is so firmly placed in the pantheon of the great poets of the twentieth century, and why his is the kind of poetry that makes for the strongest argument for literature: that without it we would not be able to know the essential truths about living in a world that constantly militates against us seeing, against us feeling, against understanding.

Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. He was recently named an Honorary Fellow of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He teaches at LUMS.

Originally published on December 2, 2012 in Dawn, Books & Authors

Mr. Cogito and the Imagination

1

Mr. Cogito never trusted
tricks of the imagination

the piano at the top of the Alps
played false concerts for him

he didn’t appreciate labyrinths
the Sphinx filled him with loathing

he lived in a house with no basement
without mirrors or dialectics

jungles of tangled images
were not his home

he would rarely soar
on the wings of a metaphor
and then he fell like Icarus
into the embrace of the Great Mother

he adored tautologies
explanations
idem per idem

that a bird is a bird
slavery means slavery
a knife is a knife
death remains death

he loved
the flat horizon
a straight line
the gravity of the earth

2

Mr. Cogito will be numbered
among the species minores

he will accept indifferently the verdict
of future scholars of the letter

he used the imagination
for entirely different purposes

he wanted to make it
an instrument of compassion

he wanted to understand to the very end

—Pascal’s night
—the nature of a diamond
—the melancholy of the prophets
—Achilles’ wrath
—the madness of those who kill
—the dreams of Mary Stuart
—Neanderthal fear
—the despair of the last Aztecs
—Nietzsche’s long death throes
—the joy of the painter of Lascaux
—the rise and fall of an oak
—the rise and fall of Rome

and so to bring the dead back to life
to preserve the covenant

Mr. Cogito’s imagination
has the motion of a pendulum

it crosses with precision
from suffering to suffering

there is no place in it
for the artificial fires of poetry

he would like to remain
faithful to uncertain clarity

Translated from the Polish by John and Bogdana Carpenter

The Portrait Artist: the poetry of Harris Khalique in retrospect by Bilal Tanweer

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 22:22:00 +0500

Harris Khalique’s new collection of poems, Melay Mein, is marked by a certain weariness. These poems lack the defiant verve of his earlier poems. The poet who wrote about boldly coveting other people’s wives, about kissing a new friend at Jehangir Kothari parade on 14^th of August, who celebrated sex and drunkenness and adultery, whose pitch and tone was revolutionary, who resolved life’s gravest dilemmas in a delightfully off-handed manner (kaun jaanay kia hai wafa/ kis ne dhoonde se paya khuda/ in jhamelo’n mein parne se kia/ aa’o jeenay ki baatein karein) and wrangled with the world about love being greater than the individual, greater than society, of love being its own time and space (Musheer Uncle, zamana ishq se barh kar nahin hai/…/ ishq to khud ik zamana hai/ yeh poora ‘ahad hai)—that poet, that voice is gone now.

This is Harris Khalique’s eighth book, and the occasion has led to a republication of new editions of his previous new and selected works: Ishq ki taqveem mein (Urdu) and Between You and Your Love (English; revised and expanded edition). Quite fittingly, it is a moment for deeper examination and evaluation of his work to allow it the place it deserves in the corpus of Pakistani literature. I hope this essay is a beginning of that conversation.

Compared to his earlier work, the voice in these newer poems appears worn out, more aware of life’s fragilities and body’s weaknesses, and more cynical, far more cynical about what can be achieved in a lifetime. This is a voice that is seeking refuge; it is in conversation with Husain, pleading in Hazrat Mueenuddin Chishty’s darbar, presenting verses to Shah Habib. It’s begging for favors and mercies, seeking solace. The tone of defiance, wherever it may be found, is one of martyrdom.

Clearly, things have changed.

The weariness in Harris Khalique’s new poems stem from the dissipated promise of life—a recurring theme in these poems—and the defeated ideals one has built a life on. The two couplets from the opening poem, khwab-e khush-numa, set the mood:

shayad woh khwab-e khush numa
hum ne kabhi dekha na tha

khud pe kia taari use
woh khwab jo apna na tha

However, the fatigue also seems to have extended into his language, which becomes by turn hackneyed, by turn clichéd, and—even more shockingly—vague and indulgent. I am pointing to the earlier poems in the collection, like Gha’o and Safar. The first one is worth reproducing at length:

mere gha’o bohat gehray hain
unn ka bharna sehal nahin
aik ik gha’o kee gehra’ee mein
basee hu’ee hain
khauf aur dehshat ki duniya’ein
aur inn duniya’o’n mein naach rahee hai’n
lambay kaalay choghay pehnay
pichal peri ka’ee bala’ein
saari bala’ein baari baari
andar andar
mera kaleja noch rahee hain
kafee deyr ke baad balaa jab thak jaati hai
phir se kaleja bhar jaata hai…

This poem is so spectacularly indulgent, so extravagant in its vagueness and so dull in its language that the kindest thing to say about it would that this is perhaps a poem’s way of doing an Indian soap opera. It lacks both the rigors of imagination and language that one would expect from a poet of Harris Khalique’s caliber and experience.

Other poems in this opening section of Melay Mein fare no better. Consider the ending of the title poem, Melay Mein—a poem written from the perspective of a mother ‘jiss ka bacha/ jahan-e baazi giraa’n ke melay mein/ kho gaya hai’:

woh mera masoom dil ka tukra

woh mera gul-goothna sa bacha

mein uss ke sadqay mein uss pe vaari

mein apna sukh, apna chen haari

khuda hee ab mujh pe rehm kha’ye

khuda hee hai jo hamein milaa’ye

While the poem aspires to universality with ‘jahan-e baazi giraa’n’, it fails to exert itself either imaginatively or emotionally to live up to that aspiration. The world of this poem remains vague, and no image, no line comes alive on the page (except maybe for a phrase: ‘woh be-niyazi ke khauf aaye’. Maybe).

In the covenant between a reader and a writer, there is no greater transgression than for a writer to do less than he is capable of and to not make his writing as good as he can. The fact that most of these poems were not shot to death by either the editor(s) or the poet himself is greatly dismaying. And look, the matter is even graver. We believe in poets because they look at the world harder, with more care and attention, with greater sensitivity and insight than the rest of us. I recall a moment in Jack Gilbert’s poem, ‘I Imagine the Gods’, where the gods offer to grant the poet everything: wisdom, fame, three wishes. The poet rebuffs it all:

…Let me fall
in love one last time, I beg them.
Teach me mortality, frighten me
into the present. Help me to find
the heft of these days. That the nights
will be full enough and my heart feral.

In the covenant, the role of readers is also clearly stated: to make good books possible and to make bad books impossible. Good readers must work as hard as writers. We must demand more life, more heart, more imagination from our writers. They must tell us what it is to be alive. Frighten us into the present. Help us find and lift the heft of these days.

What I am saying is this: the dream of literature is to be richer, fuller—even greater than life. Literature should never betray that promise. We can all live with a world that betrays us, but not literature.

But let me not get carried away in my frustrations with these early poems of Melay Mein. There are more good poems in this book than bad, and to be sure, this is a moment of celebration.

For those not familiar with his work, Harris Khalique has written poetry in three languages (Urdu, Punjabi and English) and has a distinct voice in each one of them. His verse in Punjabi is most lyrical of the three, while in English it is at its sparest and most direct. His English verse shows a range of influences—from Borges, Nazim Hikmet, Czeslaw Milosz, Amichai, Qabbani (whose poem he has translated: ijazat mil sake gee kia?) to Taufiq Rafat, and over the years he has written some truly remarkable poems in English. Consider, for instance, his poems on Karachi. Here’s one (perhaps the finest):

I was raised in Karachi

When young I always asked my mother:

“Why can’t we give names to numbers and numbers to names?”

It took her twenty-five years to come up with a reply.

“Son, we name the streets and count the people.”

Three Unknown Men Killed on M.A. Jinnah Road

read the morning’s newspaper.

Examining his oeuvre in languages, one realizes that Harris Khalique’s best poems are made not of ideas but people: Kaana Bati Koo, Ghulam Azam Musalli, Nazeer Alam Gavayya, Sabeen Ehsan Akhtar—Defense Phase II, Ali Mohsin MBA—Khalid bin Waleed Road, Razia Sultana—Korangi K-Area, Sa’adat Khan Baloch Rakshay Waala—sakana Purana Golimaar, Muzammil Ghari-saaz, Uncle Jacques and others.

Character portraits are Harris Khalique’s forte. He can pull them out of thin air and make people stand in front of you in a manner that can safely be described as shockingly vivid and exhilarating. He buses you through his characters’ work days and their domestic squabbles, and details their drawing room gossips, the thickness of their lips and their sexual interests. His portraits have both the lightness of touch and unsentimental compassion that makes for great writing, and reading them you wonder if any other contemporary writer from Pakistan—bar none and no genre—has been able to create such characters with so much clarity, conviction and above all, with such deep and abiding humanity. Those two boys who died yesterday in police firing near Sindhi Hotel, Lalu Khet, they are in these pages telling each other dirty jokes, cussing, eyeballing girls on the street and saying shit to passersby. Ghulam Azam Musalli, who serves Malik sahib, cleans and refills his hookah and beats up the opposition workers come election time, is dealing with the unbearable rash in his armpits and pubis, and trying to bear the loss of his son who died at birth. Nazir Alam Gavayya, who has been practicing his craft of singing for a lifetime, now wakes up in the middle of the night, and we get to glimpse his nightmares. They are the contours of the world we live in.

The last time you saw such terrific portraits were in the work of Majeed Amjad, that master. Think of his brilliant portrait of Manto, which opens:

mei’n ne uss ko dekha hai

ujli ujli sarko’n par aik gard bhari heraani mei’n

pheltee pheltee bheer ke andhay aundhay

katoro’n ki tughiyaani mei’n

jab woh khaali botal phei’nk ke kehta hai

“duniya! tera husn yahi bad-soorati hai”…

But Harris Khalique’s portraits are even more remarkable and stand on their own because a. they are no hagiographies; and b. his characters don’t simply have names and faces, they also have an address. Harris Khalique’s poems have an extraordinary tendency to move away from the abstract. His cast of folk have no time for existential dilemmas because they are all busy untangling themselves from the ensnaring world they inhabit. They are busy earning their share of sadnesses from the world, while he exquisitely lays bare the interstices of power on the spectrums of gender, class and space where they fall. In that sense, Harris Khalique is a good Marxist (as opposed to, you know, a Marxist) because he understands Faiz and Hikmet: meri jaan tujh ko batla’oon bauhat naazuk yeh nukta hai/ badal jaata hai insan jab makaan uss ka badalta hai.

While Harris Khalique has some gems in ghazals, nazms that also deserve a careful and detailed reading, I believe it is in his portraits where he delivers on one of the essential promises of literature: to illuminate our world and render it legible. It is this work that marks him as one of our truly original voices, a true portrait artist of our times.

Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. He teaches at LUMS.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors - September 23, 2012

Notes from the Countryside by Bilal Tanweer

Mon, 21 May 2012 15:49:31 +0500

Qa’im Din by Ali Akbar Natiq
Publisher: OUP Karachi
114 pages
Year of publication: 2011
Price: Rs.325.00

You’d think the job of a book description involves point-blank lying to fool the readers into buying the book. You know nothing obviously, because here’s a book where the book description is trying to pass a quasi-academic lecture off as a sales pitch. The description on the jacket of Ali Akbar Natiq’s collection of stories, Qa’im Din, introduces him as follows: Urdu afsane mein haqiqat nigari ne dobara apni hesiyat, balke apni afadiyat manwa li hai. Qayam-e Pakistan ke das barso’n ke andar alamati afsana haavi ho chuka tha… [Realism has reclaimed its place in Urdu fiction; in fact, it has convinced it of its value. Within ten years of Pakistan’s independence, the alamati afsana had dominated the Urdu literary scene…]

It goes on for a bit so I’ll paraphrase the rest: For too long, Urdu fiction has mucked around in abstract stories (alamati kahani is the term of choice. It means many things, but mostly it refers to deviants from conventional realist modes of writing). Urdu fiction must now come back to earth and start telling us stories about REAL people, REAL places and REAL situations. Ali Akbar Natiq has done it. He’s awesome. Buy the book. (Okay, it doesn’t say buy the book.)

One thing is clear: this book description isn’t looking for potential buyers. It is only speaking to Urdu writers and critics who love the alamati kahani. At all events, regardless of what one thinks of the larger landscape of Urdu fiction and the narrow definition of ‘realism’ so deeply cherished by the author of this description, it is a pretty accurate summation of what Ali Akbar Natiq delivers in his debut collection of short stories, which has been received enthusiastically by the Urdu literary community. Leading critics and writers including Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, Ajmal Kamal and Mohammed Hanif have hailed Natiq as a fresh new voice in Urdu literature. (Mohammed Hanif has also translated a story from this collection, Me’mar ke haath into English for Granta; it is a very fine translation and available on the Granta website as Mason’s Hands.) It wouldn’t be wrong to say that this is the giddiest the Urdu literary community has felt about a collection of stories in recent years. That in itself is not to be taken lightly.

The major distinction of Natiq’s stories, duly noted by all the critics who have commented on his work, is their ability to capture the scenes and rhythms of the Punjabi countryside. All these stories are unfailingly good in their ability to portray the lives of characters in a Punjabi rural setting. Natiq exhibits a particular flair for character with an enviable range: his stories feature characters that include Chaudhrys, gravediggers, pirs, dogfighters, thieves, scandal mongers and elopers and more and more. Yes, when it comes to profusion of characters, these stories keep giving.

It is no surprise then that the standouts of the collection are the five longer stories. These are the stories that allow Natiq’s numerous characters to find their space and express themselves. It is also in these stories where Natiq is able to chart his characters’ development over a longer course of time with fine results: the scenes in these stories are solid, the pacing is steady, and Natiq’s facility with language admirable throughout. However, most of this collection comprises relatively shorter pieces (eight pages or less). These stories lack the finish and the imaginative flourish of the longer ones and do little more than providing reportage-like snippets of village life. That works too, but the impact is necessarily very limited.

The best story in this collection by far is Mominwala ka safar. It is a comic story set in a Model Village which is battling the menace of herons that for some unknown reason have settled in the thickets of trees in the village. In order to get rid of the pest, the village folk reach the difficult consensus of cutting down the branches of the trees. But when this plan is executed, it leads to the carnage of hundreds of heron eggs and babies that fall and get injured and killed. The spectacle provides Naziran—the village tattler and scandalmonger who commands great fear and respect for her tongue—an opportunity to take the Chairman of the village council to the cleaners. The story is an account of Naziran attempting to abuse the Chairman and the latter tactfully trying to ward off the punishment that she is bent on delivering. The story, like other stories in the collection, has a surprising end but it is in the tradition of best short fiction—it not only surprises but also gratifies the reader.

As for the other longer stories here, while Natiq does a fine job dramatising character and setting, his stories end predictably. Almost all the stories have a similar end—accidents. The characters in his stories are rarely devastated by their own choices; instead, they are undone by things like bad luck and deadly floods. The result is that promising stories are often lost to what comes across as a hasty end, and at its worst, a didactic urge on the part of the author. A good example of this is the story, Me’mar ke haath—one of the strongest in the collection.

Me’mar ke haath features the mason Asghar who specialises in making minarets. Although he has an established practice in his local village, he departs for Saudi Arabia to seek greater fortune and glory against his father’s wishes. The story follows him through his travails at the Jeddah airport and city to Mecca and observes him wandering the alleys in Medina, where he is deceived, swindled, and ultimately, arrested for thievery. The story ends in a scene where he is being executed. The story contains beautiful, surreal sequences but the end is so stark, so sudden and so complete that it spectacularly reduces this intriguing story into a fable. The sense of life ends with the last line of the story.

It is pretty much the same case with the other great hero of this collection, Qa’im Din, a thief who has mastered the treacherous forest terrain on the Pakistan-India border close to his village. Every few months, he carries out heists where he slips through the forest (repelling cobras with a holy charm and cutting down the wild boars) to reach the villages that lie on the Indian side of the border where he makes off with several buffaloes at a time. Strong, smart and sensitive, Qa’im Din has all the qualities of a powerful mythic hero. But his fate is also sealed swiftly and suddenly. He is bludgeoned and executed twice over, and on both instances, it is little more than a conspiracy of the heavens.

Fatalism of this sort flattens Natiq’s narratives and sucks out whatever pathos the characters generate in the readers, replacing it with a forgettable pity of the kind we are used to reading in the daily newspapers. Such endings also show a heavy-handedness and haste on the part of the author.

But it is a testament to the strength of this work that even with its weaknesses, this collection is enough to establish Natiq as an astute storyteller and an inescapable writer for anyone interested in contemporary Urdu fiction. All critics who have commented on Natiq’s work agree that this collection of stories sets high expectations for his future as a fiction writer. There is no gainsaying the fact that Ali Akbar Natiq is the most exciting debut in Urdu fiction in recent years and this collection of stories deserves a wide readership.

Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. He teaches at LUMS.

Happy New Year: The Chapati Mystery Debut!

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 13:01:00 +0500

Happy New Year: The Chapati Mystery Debut!:

“You come right over here and explain why they’re having another year!” — Dorothy Parker

Chapati Mystery has been one of my most favorite places on the web for many years now. Now I get invited to share my Best of 2011 Reading on it. It’s a rough list constructed mainly from memory and Facebook posts, but what the heck — it’s got to be good if it’s on CM. Go read, and share your notes too!

Happy New Year, good people.

PTA—A Correction By Bilal Tanweer

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 06:58:00 +0500

Last week Pakistanis suffered some three minutes of unmitigated shock and awe. It occurred after the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) announced that it would not allow the mobile operators to carry text messages containing swear words. After registering some initial outrage, however, the nation broke into uncontrollable euphoria. It had to do with the list of swear words that the PTA issued to go with their directive. The list, in case you haven’t seen it yet, is spread over two documents (Urdu, English) and it has been researched, compiled and prepared by the PTA — May God bless them.

Going through the list of 1,695-word list, one cannot help but appreciate the admirable step taken toward standardisation, dissemination and promotion of local swear words. In the history of the country, as far as I know, this is a first, and it should be welcomed as a step in the right direction. (Rumour has it that PTA is preparing a textbook based on this list and may even start offering short diploma courses in Effective Communication Skills. It’s just a rumour though.) Since I have read the list, let me make some quick observations and dispel some common misnomers about it.

If you read this list from start to finish, one thing would be immediately clear to you: there are hardly any imaginative or well-crafted cusses. That, to my mind, is the clearest indication of the well-meaning nature of this ban: it has been designed to impact the unimaginative lot, i.e., those who have been responsible for the depletion and degradation of our nation’s rich heritage and have rendered so many of these robust words and phrases into clichés. For that reason, I feel confident that this ban would not affect most residents of Lahore, who almost never resort to the hackneyed and simple constructions that are listed in the PTA document, and instead prefer a complex formal mixture of curses. In that sense, the ban is a warning shot for the rest of the nation to up their game otherwise they will have to no option but to hold their peace and watch others have all the fun — at least over text messages.

Many quarters, including the local and the foreign media have reacted against the inclusion of (apparently) ‘innocent’ words in the ban, words like: flatulence, tongue, fairy, headlights, fingerfood, love pistol, deposit, etc. As the more perceptive readers may have guessed already, these words have been included by the PTA to illustrate, highlight and underscore the vast potentialities of ordinary objects and nouns. If you pause and look around — even if you are located in a dull spot like your writing desk slaving over a column you know nobody’s going to read — you will inevitably find at least three things that you could effectively deploy to offend somebody you wish to insult: pens, pencils, blades. If you are more imaginatively inclined, one could suggest other objects that could be used to swear, like talwar (which, quite amazingly, rhymes with shalwar), or heera (which rhymes with keera), or champoo (rhymes with bamboo), and so on. Indeed, if one is willing to put in the effort and go the length, there is nothing that’s beyond your reach — chairs, tables, cycle stands, toasters, tractors, parks, ducks, ponds, footpaths — not even words like ‘to’ or ‘and’ are off-limits.

All this brings us, via an unusual route I admit, to our fortnightly poem. Moniza Alvi is a British poet of Pakistani origin and is among the foremost voices in contemporary British poetry. Exquisite, spare, and always affecting, this is a poem from her 2008 collection, Europa. Go read.

The Sleeping Wound
By Moniza Alvi

Hush, do not waken
the sleeping wound.

It lies on its crimson pillow,
red against red.

The long wound in the afternoon.
The long wound in the evening.

Centuries later,
no longer red,

it opens its eyes
at the most tentative kiss.

Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. He teaches creative writing at LUMS.

A short, myopic and utterly biased guide to bookstores in Lahore By Bilal Tanweer

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 10:30:00 +0500

But first let me qualify: by ‘books’ I almost exclusively mean books of fiction and poetry—and my judgment of bookstores rests entirely on the said collections. So, go read some other column if you’re into politics. Just go away. (Also, I don’t discuss Urdu books here either; there will be another piece for that.)

Now let’s begin with the usual suspects, Ferozsons and Sang-e-Meel, which have traditionally provided shadier grounds for fiction lovers. Over the past few years, however, these two have fallen on hard times—and it seems to me, they have fallen quite deliberately and even happily. Most of their stock was imported from the UK two decades ago, or earlier. This particularly applies to Sang-e-Meel which seems to be engaged in some sort of hoarding game. The only real addition it has made to its stock in the last two decades is the plastic covers that now seal the books to protect against dust and must. Not that that’s an entirely bad thing, mind you, because in all that plastic I found Lawrence Durrell’s Antrobus Stories—a book that has been out of print for many years now. But here’s the catch: you must buy these plastic-wrapped books at jaw-dropping, eye-popping, soul-smarting prices of more than what they would cost you brand new in the UK itself. (Sang-e-Meel and Ferozsons convert the pounds into rupees at outrageous rates.) Therefore, the only comfort I usually draw from shopping at the said stores is the knowledge that even though I earn in Pakistani Rupees, I can still read in Pounds Sterling.

But no, seriously, if you’re interested in buying fiction in English, there are two bookstores to recommend. One is The Last Word, which is located on the top floor of the Hot Spot, Qaddafi Stadium. It houses a small, smart and remarkably current selection of books, and if there’s a new book to be had, you can trust it shall be served here. TLW specializes in contemporary fiction and nonfiction, and mostly makes up for its tiny size with the big intelligence of its selection. It is also the only place I know in Pakistan where you can find the latest issue of literary magazines, including the terrific The Paris Review. It gets my heart for that.

But the bookstore that gets my love and rocks my world and inspires all these clichés and more is Readings. It has a wonderful collection of both contemporary and classic fiction (although, shockingly, no books by David Foster Wallace!?), its prices are better than other bookstores, and above all, it has the culture of a real bookstore where you have baskets and cushions to collect and browse through your books at leisure, and where the shop boys do not hover about, eyeing you like you’re a book criminal. It is also probably the only bookstore in the country that has entire shelves dedicated to poetry in English, which include contemporary poets. That, ladies and gents, is enough to warrant it as the best bookstore in the country. I owe the discovery of many delightful poets to this bookstore. Here’s a French poet, Yves Bonnefoy, I discovered owing only to this bookstore. I present to you a poem from it, with gratitude.

A Stone
by Yves Bonnefoy
We granted each other the gift of innocence:
For years just our two bodies fed its flames.
Our steps wandered bare through trackless grass.
We were the illusion known as memory.

Since fire’s born of fire, why should we desire
To gather up its scattered ash.
On the appointed day we surrendered what we were
To a vaster blaze, the evening sky.

Translated from the French by Hoyt Rogers

Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. He teaches creative writing at LUMS.

Published in the Express Tribune, November 13, 2011

image copyright:
Savage Chickens (http://www.savagechickens.com)

Laughter Is Not Enough By Bilal Tanweer

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 14:14:00 +0500

Do you know how long it takes for kids to grow up in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan? One and a half week. If you don’t believe me, listen to this story. It involves eggs, potatoes and three boys—and it’s scary.

The three boys went to school together. They were best friends. One boy was extensively tall, one unsuitably short, and the last one was just fifteen. They were nice, proper boys who kept their hair neatly oiled and parted on the sides and their neckties on even in the sweltering Lahori heat. They were good boys in most ways—respectful of their teachers, got along okay with their parents—but they had a problem. Each day when they opened their plastic lunchboxes, they got kicked in the nostrils by the cold, greasy reek of boiled eggs and potato curry. It was disgusting. But since that’s all they had to eat, they shut up and ate it. It was painful and it went on like that for a while, but one day their inner demons got the better of them. And then they just let it rip. It all led to the Aalu Anday music video last week.

This isn’t the scary bit though.

These ex-nice boys started calling themselves the Beghairat Brigade and launched a music video that chronicles their descent from niceties. It featured, among other things, exaggerated facial expressions, inappropriate hip-movements, formula-1 flags painted on the faces, and placards and song lyrics which make fun of everybody—including those who think that the boys could be killed for making the video. The song was a hit. The world at large was in shock and it quickly united in opinion that these boys were not being funny at all but rather deadly serious, and here’s where the really scary part begins.

If you observe the first interview the Beghairat boys gave, which was aired, quite incredibly, the very day after the launch of their video, you’ll notice what their emphasis was: nothing. There is no agenda, no teaching point; they are just having fun, and in many cases saying things they don’t even believe in (it’s there for the rhymes). They are clear in stating that Aalu Anday does not mean anything, it was a phrase they liked, it went with the tune, and so they bummed it. It’s a catchy ploy, in other words. But then, a week and a half later, watch their foray on NDTV and you’ll see the change: all of a sudden the boys are talking about the deep messages in their work. When the NDTV presenter pushed them they even agreed that ‘Aalu Anday’ signified/symbolized Pakistan’s present reality while ‘chicken di boti’ was what they wanted Pakistan to be.

It took us precisely one and a half week to help the boys lose their funny and start parroting the talk of the town.

Let me just say this more plainly: what is not being said about the Aalu Anday video is precisely what makes it tick. Here are a bunch of kids who are having fun with the world that gives them constant grief. The subversiveness of their video lies precisely in generating laughter and dance and inappropriate hip-movements from something we all have consigned to the status of Mighty and Holy. These boys are our heroes because they have chosen to laugh in the face of a world that wants them to be all-serious all the time. But of course we are serious people, and laughter is never enough. We want messages and nice worked out solutions to all our political problems. And we want all of it in music videos. So help us God.

There is much to be said about laughter and its subversive role in arts, but I am not going to say it because I have hit the word ceiling, so make do with a poem instead. Meanwhile, I recommend more Aalu Anday for the constipated. Cheers.

The Sea and the Man
by Anna Swir

You will not tame this sea
either by humility or rapture.
But you can laugh
in its face.

Laughter
was invented by those
who lived briefly
as a burst of laughter.

The eternal sea
will never learn to laugh.

Translated from Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Natham

Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. He teaches creative writing at LUMS.

Published in the Express Tribune, October 30, 2011

So Very Nobel! By Bilal Tanweer

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 06:02:00 +0500

In case you didn’t notice, it was the annual literary maelstrom last week. The Nobel Prize in Literature was handed to somebody Tomas Tranströmer of Sweden. The announcement immediately evoked a global response which entailed synchronised hair pulling, angry tweeting and cynical literary opining in the millions. On the whole, it turned out to be an entirely predictable show of hostility from a world of outraged readers. The ruling sentiments went something like this: “Oh right! So Roth/Murakami/Pynchon/Nadas/Adonis is going to lose out AGAIN to somebody I’ve not even heard of?” “Wait, are you saying, like, this guy Transformer-whatever, haha, his work is better, GREATER than Philip Roth’s?” “Poet? What’s that they write? Poetry?”

These objections (boasts? personal indignations?) that surface every year sound strange to me, and I have never been sure of them. Consider.

(1) Shouldn’t literary awards be an opportunity for the world to look for equally deserving but under-celebrated/under-read writers? (2) Shouldn’t this be an opportunity for us, the readers, to go beyond what we are accustomed to reading and discover writers we have not heard of? (3) Shouldn’t this spur the perennially urgent cultural discussion about what makes good literature, good books, and what must we do as a literary community to make good books possible? Also, what kind of parameters must we use to judge global literature, where much is at stake especially for languages from relatively ‘less powerful’ countries? (4) Shouldn’t the awards give the publishers in the English speaking world a chance to question their growing tendency toward the mega-sellers (à la Twilight) at the cost of translations and works of high literary merit that sell in average numbers? (5) And let me add a personal declamation to this laundry list: I am bloody thrilled that it was a poet. If memory serves right, the last poet to be honoured on the Nobel awards night was the marvellous Wislawa Szymborska in 1996. That’s right. 15 years ago.

To be sure, I am no fan of the Nobel Prize. So often it has been awarded for political correctness of the contenders rather than their literary merit that I find the whole idea of defending it quite laughable. Many deserving writers have been shunned for being on the wrong side of the political divide, while some indisputable winners were omitted for reasons unbeknown to anyone but the Nobel jury itself—and let’s not even mention all the writers who have been rewarded because their heavy politics weighed in favorably on their literary contributions. So I see little point in decrying the “Eurocentricty, anti-Americanism, or flawed judging process” of the Prize. However, one should welcome the exceptions, and this time around it was an exception for many right reasons (see 1-3 above). And to celebrate the occasion, here’s a poem by the new laureate which swept me off my feet in my brief initial survey of his luminous and deeply meditative work

April and Silence
by Tomas Tranströmer

Spring lies abandoned.
A ditch the colour of dark violet
moves alongside me
giving no images back.

The only thing that shines
are some yellow flowers.

I am carried inside
my own shadow like a violin
in its black case.

The only thing I want to say
hovers just out of reach
like the family silver
at the pawnbroker’s.

Translation from the Swedish by Robert Bly

Like some other of Tranströmer’s work, this poem is a lovely meditation on the limits of language. The final stanza most clearly identifies where language fails experience: the narrator understands the value of the silver he sees but it is out of his reach. The beautiful implication of this metaphor is its being his family silver: therefore, it will never mean much to anyone else anyway. Truth, in that sense, has no extrinsic basis. It is arrived at individually.

Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. He teaches creative writing at LUMS.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 16, 2011

Dimple and Alexander By Bilal Tanweer

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 07:27:00 +0500

The movie Mere Brother ki Dulhan is full of twists and turns. In fact, it is so twisty that I am tempted to use the old chestnut that appears in about ninety-eight percent movie reviews in our papers: ‘a rollercoaster ride’—except, this movie is really a donkey cart where the donkey routinely mistakes his own backside for his face.

In the movie Katrina Kaif plays Dimple. But she’s not just any Dimple, she’s Dimple urf D, which means she’s free-spirited and spontaneous too. Someone who was born in London and bred there for 18 years before showing up in Delhi with short-shorts, long legs, zero acting skills and some silly dialog to boot. In these initial scenes that last for about ten minutes she’s a rockstar. Why just in these scenes, you may ask? Because the movie wants you to mistake her for a certain type of girl—you know, one born and raised abroad, plays the guitar and hobnobs with suspicious looking boys? That sort.

But that’s a mistake. And D will have you know very soon.

Immediately after her rock concert which is attended by hundreds if not thousands, D is found in a small closed tent kicking and yelling at her boyfriend for trying to do with her what boyfriends have been notorious for doing in small closed tents for nearly all of human history. She’s outraged. How narrow-minded can Indian boys be? How did such a shockingly offensive idea get into his head anyway? For her, personally speaking, this was inconceivable. So after kicking her boyfriend in the gut and nuts, she clarifies her stance in no uncertain terms—in case you in the audience still didn’t get it— “Mein andar se tau aik Hindustani larki hoon.” And as if taking a cue from this amazing insight into her character, the movie also shuns her legs for the rest of the one hundred and sixty minutes, and respectfully shifts its gaze to her midriff and bosom. (No, no cleavage. Hasn’t she just told you that she’s a good Indian girl? And what’s up with you anyway?)

That’s a fine example of the twisty things this movie does. It fights stereotypes with even worse stereotypes. It repeatedly leads you to believe it is about to break out of formulaic situations, characters, etc—but then lunges right back to hug their deep, comfy grooves. Its ultimate message seems to be: Just relax, okay? Nothing’s changed in Bollywood.

That sums up the movie, thank you. Let’s move on to poetry.

The Leap
By Daud Kamal

Alexander on horseback
leapt over the Indus here,
or so the storytellers say,

and on the other side
of that hill in a grove
of mango trees he listened

in rapt attention
to a naked sadhu
talking of immortality.

This poem doesn’t seem like much at first but read a bit carefully and you will see Alexander’s leap over the breadth of the Indus is an invitation for the reader to make a leap of imagination. The other part of the story is only accessible to the one who lands safely on the other side. Once there, you walk down to the grove of mango trees and find Alexander listening to a naked sadhu. The poem ends leaving you at the bank of another river: Is Alexander making a leap of faith over the abyss of death into the promised land of immortality? Or, like the story in the poem itself, is his too a leap of imagination? Perhaps, he stands there lost to himself with the spectacle of the naked sadhu. You must make the leap with Alexander on your horseback.

And while you are out taking leaps: pray that Bollywood also takes a leap, for God’s sake.

Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. He teaches creative writing at LUMS.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 2, 2011

The City of Prose By Bilal Tanweer

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 06:12:00 +0500

Madiha Sattar, a writer based in Karachi, in her recent comment on the Karachi violence complained about ‘the mythology of the city’s not-so-distant golden past’ that is evoked whenever the times are dark and roads bloody. Those of us not old enough to have worn hipster saris to nightclubs here in the 60s and 70s, are frequently subjected to misty-eyed reminiscing about a city that was once apparently safe, cosmopolitan and liberal, a magical place where one could drive around late without racing home to avoid a hold-up and people were far too polite and open-minded to be too fussed about each other’s religions, sects and ethnicities.

In my very personal and spotty survey of post-1947 literature on Karachi, it has always struck me that this poetic construction of Karachi’s alleged liberal past exists more in prose than in poetry. In fiction, one thinks of the charming passages in Muhammad Khalid Akhtar’s works where the author captures the din and bustle of the city in the ‘50s and ‘60s through his impish characters. Elphinstone Street, for instance, repeatedly surfaces in MKA’s works as the preferred destination for his flâneurs who seek delight in city lights and life. Then there are the wildly popular Ibn-e Safi’s Imran Series novels that are set in an unnamed city, but it is widely believed that the place they draw on — marked most notably by an alluring night life complete with nightclubs, alcohol, and vixens on the hunt — is in the image of the Karachi of yore.

But for whatever reason, the poets never seemed to be enamoured of Karachi and its ways. The gentle poet from Lahore, Taufiq Rafat, whose work shows remarkable restraint and control, wrote two uncharacteristically tart poems on Karachi. The first one, Karachi, 1955, describes the city in strong grey images: The screaming wind transplants the soil/ particle by particle […/] All the forces of nature crowding man off his perch/ so that the land can return to its ways.// In this city of scarce sweet water and little rain/ each man protects his rood of greenery/ with panicked care. His other poem similarly entitled rather unimaginatively, Karachi, 1968, is even sourer. The second-last stanza reads:

There is no weather here as we northerners
understand weather. The season telescopes
a sort of summer into a sort of winter,
topped by a mini-monsoon. Each new morning
brings no hope of change. Generally the clouds
are sexless, mute, and above our affairs.
A splitting sky announces a jet not rain.

Even in Urdu poetry, one would be hard pressed to find a loving ode to the city. Zia Jalandhari, writing in his book of poems khwāb sarāb published in 1985, writes movingly about Karachi as a hard, wretched place.

karāchī kisī dev qad kekṛe kī tarah
samandar ke sāhil pe pa’ooṅ pisāre paṛā hai
naseṅ uskī faulād-o āhan
badan ret cement patthar
buseṅ, taxiyaṅ, careiṅ, rikshā, ragoṅ meiṅ lahū ke bajā’ye rawāṅ
jism par jā bajā dāgh daldal-numā
jahāṅ ʻankabūt apne tāroṅ se bunte haiṅ baṅkoṅ ke jāl
…
yeh woh shehr-e mutma’in hai
jo apne hī dil kī shaqāwat pe shīda rahā

Karachi’s story is usually told as that of a utopia that suddenly took an about turn during the Zia era and went horribly wrong. But there is enough poetry to warrant against such a narrow view of things. We desperately need narratives of Karachi that do justice to its complex past and help us grapple with its bewildering present.

Where are the historians?

Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. He teaches creative writing at LUMS.

Published in the Express Tribune, September 18, 2011

P.S. For all looking for a bout of nostalgia, here’s a video of Karachi in 1942 apparently shot by a visiting British soldier: Karachi at the End of the Raj. (I don’t attest the date/veracity of this film; but it’s nice. Do watch.)

Because Love Is a Runaway Charya By Bilal Tanweer

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 07:20:00 +0500

Link to the original piece, here

Our Lady of Alice Bhatti
by Mohammed Hanif
Random House India, 230 pp., Rs. 595

You know what they say about the best kind of stories: that they are busy plotting their next moves while you are still ensnared by their more immediate charms. Mohammed Hanif’s new novel is that sort of a book—the busy sort. But this novel doesn’t ensnare as much as it detains: you find yourself cooped up inside its terribly messy, horribly disjunct and even farcical reality: it’s bloody, it’s violent, and it’s very, very entertaining.

A few snippets—just to give you an idea.

“Should we let an attacker go just because he hasn’t attacked us yet?” asks Teddy Butt early on in the novel. Teddy is the loony hero of this book, a body builder (Junior Mr. Faisalabad), who works as a tout for the police and, more broadly, as their “crime-scene cleaner, cheer leader, gun-cleaner, doorstopper, replacement court witness, proxy prisoner, fourth card player” and well, much more. He has fallen in love with Sister Alice Bhatti of the Sacred Heart hospital. They meet in unlikely circumstances in the Charya Ward—shorthand for The Center of Mental and Psychological Diseases—where he finds her surrounded by the dozen mental patients she was supposed to inject with lithium sulphate. Teddy rescues her and carries her out of the ward in his arms, loudly whistling iss parcham ke saaye talay, hum aik hain hum aik hain (We are one under this flag. We are one. We are one.)—and convinced that he has found the love of his life.Teddy’s other notions of romantic love involve a story about the moon, his Mauser pistol and wildlife documentaries (he loves NatGeo)—and when he goes to declare his love to Alice Bhatti, he’s thinking of how Komodo dragons hypnotize before attacking their prey.

The situation with the heroine, Alice Bhatti, a Christian nurse, is not a whole lot better either. The novel opens with her waiting in an office in the Sacred Heart hospital. It’s her interview day for the position of Replacement Junior Nurse, Grade 4 and she is being asked to explain all sorts of wrong things—such as her name: Why has she not mentioned her father’s first name—Joseph—as her middle name on the application? Is she ashamed of her family background? (Turns out that there was no slot for the Middle Name on the application form.) The leading interviewer on the panel is a Muslim Orthopedic surgeon, who prefers to be addressed as Ortho-Sir, and cares about flagging his piety and worldly success. He also has a migration to Toronto sorted out.

This is the kind of mess we have on our hands. And I haven’t even told you about the Karachi of this book—the paradoxical police state that runs high on entropy, violence and dysfunction, and governs the lives and loves of Teddy and Alice and others. It’s a lot of fun, as I said.

Reading the initial third of the novel is like watching a scamp running wild, and it unleashes all sorts of unexpected digressions. Such deviations might be disorienting—they break off from the storyline, introduce potentially promising pathways that are not developed (at one point, for instance, Alice Bhatti claims that when she looks at people, she foresees their faces at their moments of death; but this is never brought up again in the book), situations that don’t further the drama or characters—but these apparently random and sometimes downright unhinged sequences also result in some of the most inspired writing in the novel. In one particularly exhilarating tangent, Teddy Butt runs out into the street and with a swimming head and anxious hand, unknowingly presses the trigger of his Mauser. The novel hits the brakes, makes a crazy swerve and dashes off after the rogue bullet to pursue it to its riotous consequences as they pan out in the city over the next two pages or so—beginning with a truck driver’s bloodied arm to a gruesome accident involving school children to ethnic violence to a three day strike in the city. This sequence is strongly reminiscent of many Marquez moments, like the trickle of blood in One Hundred Years of Solitude that journeys across town from Jose Arcadio’s dead body to alert his mother, who at the time is in the kitchen getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.

In these early pages, characters exist as little more than hardboiled entertainers whom you watch from a distance for their amusing antics. They do not admit sympathy despite being marooned in pitiable circumstances. This lack of an emotional center of gravity would be a weakness in almost any other novel, but Hanif’s book is an exception because his characters are among the funniest and most cynical bunch to have emerged out of South Asian fiction ever. And irrespective the fact that the novel does not admit emotion in these early parts, it also does not allow a single boring page. And that’s the other special thing about this book: it is consistently funny, often hilariously so.

What sets Hanif’s wit apart from his South Asian peers is its utter lack of sentimentality—often to a degree that is downright ruthless. On the night of the Garden East attacks, which leave many victims dead in their wake, including eight gunny sacks filled with body parts that cannot be identified with any of the deceased, the medico-legal officer of the Sacred Heart hospital has his gloved hands drenched in blood but his coat pockets are overflowing with 500 rupee notes. That’s the money he has received from the families of the dead for not performing post-mortems on the bodies. “Look, we live in a city where you can get someone cut up for a thousand rupees. What is wrong with charging them half that money for not cutting them up? Do they want a post-mortem? No. Are they interesting in the cause of death? No. Does it really matter to them if their lungs gave up first or their heart went pachuk? For them the cause of death is death. For them they died because death arrived in Garden East and they happened to be buying vegetables there. So buying vegetables is as valid a cause of death as any.” This is brilliant and heartrending, as well as hilariously illuminating of so many aspects of life in Karachi: the warped relationship to violence, to death, and more importantly, to justice itself. In such a setting as Karachi’s, legal justice is not an entitlement. It is something you pursue only if you can afford it—and post-mortems can lead to unaffordable situations.

Before sending Sister Alice Bhatti off to the Charya Ward for the first time, Sister Hina Alvi, briefs her about what afflicts men there: “These boys in Charya Ward are suffering from what everyone suffers from: life. They just take it a bit more seriously, sensitive types who think too much, care too much, who refuse to laugh at bad jokes.”

It takes about a good eighty pages or so for this book’s characters to get afflicted with life too; for them to develop a soft underside and get their blood circulations going. Things change. Teddy and Alice fall in love. Get married. At sea. On a boat. (Well, not exactly, but sort of.) But since marriages made at sea lack a firm ground, theirs too runs into early troubles. And that is good news for the novel, because from here onward, the book develops a strong emotional current, a narrative gravity, and yes, a strong forward thrust.

As Alice and Teddy break out of their hardened shells to runaway with the charya called love, they begin to feel exposed to the hazards of the perilous world that they have been navigating relatively effortlessly so far. But more than that: they become creatures of desires and feelings they did not know existed in them before. When Teddy Butt announces to Alice that he has a surprise for her, “she wants a surprise so big and so heavy it could flatten her in the middle of the road. She wants tied-to-a-rocket-and-launched-into-space kind of surprise. She wonders why she isn’t thinking of flowers and candy and why she yearns for large, heavy, speedy objects. It’s futile to predict what love will make of you, but sometimes it brings you things you never knew you wanted.”

Noor, the ward boy, who has been observing the evolution of love between Alice and Teddy, concludes: “This whole business of love is a protection racket, like paying your weekly bhatta to your local hoodlum so that you are not mugged on your own street.”

Noor is right: characters here desire a bit of both from love—madness and security.

Hanif’s characters are all sovereign states of one. They blend history, politics and personal experiences into the narratives of their lives, and they improvise strategies to sustain and safeguard themselves. In other words, they are survivors, and like all survivors, creatures of necessity. They are not moved to action by guilt or morality and they do not evaluate the world in right or wrong, or ought or ought not, but in terms of what needs to be done to survive, and survive best.

Sister Hina Alvi has married thrice (twice to the same man, with the same result); she now carries a gun in her handbag and imagines love to be like your first heart attack: you do survive it, but you don’t outlive it; it catches up with you eventually. Noor, the ward boy, after his stint at the Borstal has trained himself to be a paramedic without attending any medical school; he has made himself an indispensible hand in the Sacred Heart hospital; he also has made important friends in important places to get through rougher situations. Alice Bhatti usually takes care of herself with a ferocious kind of courage that often spills into physical violence, but more importantly, she attends to her image through subtle calibrations to her mannerisms: “She avoids eye contact, she looks slightly over people’s heads as if looking out for somebody who might come into view any moment. She doesn’t want to think that she is alone and nobody is coming for her. She sidesteps even when she sees a boy half her age walking toward her, she walks around little puddles when she can easily leap over them, she thinks any act that involves stretching her legs might send the wrong signal. After all, this is not the kind of thing where you can leave your actions to subjective interpretations. She never eats in public. Putting something in your mouth is surely an invitation for someone to shove something horrible down your throat. If you show your hunger, you are obviously asking for something.”

This passage is also a splendid illustration of the kind of oppressiveness that these characters must contend. There is very little room for other ways of seeing and being, especially if you are a woman in public. And there is even less freedom for you to go out and explore the world: the world comes out and finds you. Your task is to be ready at all times.

Nabokov once made a remark on the relationship between writing and places: “It had taken me some 40 years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced with the task of inventing America.” In other words, one job of great fiction is to invent places that render their actual places legible and comprehensible. Karachi is among the world’s greatest insufficiently imagined cities, and in large part it is still waiting to be invented.

The foremost challenge that Karachi presents to most—whether its residents or visitors—is to their understanding. The city has outgrown the comprehension of most. In many ways, it has turned into a set of ghettos connected via road network, with each part of the city largely disconnected from others and each with its own subculture. Therefore at one level, any act of creating a narrative about the city is really an attempt to understand the city. And this novel, among other things, is a bold and brave attempt to leap over the cavernous void of Karachi as an insufficiently imagined place.

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved there is a little passage that deals with the mess the world is: ‘She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.’ In this novel, Mohammed Hanif gathers our pieces. He puts them in order and gives them back to us. It may not be the best or an ideal order—and the book may not be the Great Karachi Novel—but at the end of it you are left holding something that is much greater than the pieces. That is the task of a writer. And I tell you: Mohammed Hanif is a real writer.

Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator.

Published in DAWN’s Books & Authors on September 4, 2011.

The Amazing Messages of Ali Azmat by Bilal Tanweer

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 05:12:00 +0500

I once saw a sign in an ice cream parlor:

NO SUGAR FREE, NO FAT FREE—ONLY REAL ICE CREAM.
IF YOU WANT NUTRITION, EAT CARROTS.

This pretty much sums up how I feel about music videos/movies/poetry/novels/et cetera meant to convey messages. They are useless in terms of providing pleasure, which is what they are meant to do, and utterly rubbish for nutrition, which is what they are purporting to do.

When I first heard that Ali Azmat has released a video called Bum Patta, and knowing what we all know about him, I laughed for about a week. Then I took the risk and heard the audio, mainly because I have been a Junoon fan going back to circa 1991 (it all ended when Salman Ahmed took up vocals). Although the song runs out of steam at the two minute mark and starts to look more like an animal chasing its own tail, it wasn’t even half as bad as I imagined; in fact, it is a nice fun number which makes bombs going off sound like something you could tap your feet to. That gave me the courage to go for the video.

The video opens in a circus with Uncle Sam entertaining an eager audience. Uncle’s brandishing a stuffed, cuddly missile and the audience is loving it. Then pour in a slew of other stars which include a Chaudhry sahib (wink-wink), a madcap dandy in a light-blue suit (IMF/Bilderberg Group/Free Masons), a gangster swinging a pistol (now, who could this be?!), a man in black (hint: kala pani), a Che Guevara smoking a cigar (that’s our sifarishi, I mean sazishi boy, Zion Hamid), a fatso with a long thick beard who vaguely resembles the stereotype of a terrorist mullah (impossible to guess), and then some more.

The evil men in the video dangle various essential food/household items in front of their fervent audiences. These include a roti, a boti (to go with the lyrics: sari boti kha, bura na mana), a sack of flour (labeled ‘muft aata,’ in case you still didn’t get it), and oh, a bulb (lest load shedding got left out). Just as some desperate hapless fellow from the audience reaches out for these enticing goodies and botis, they are duly pulled away. This goes on for a bit and finally, the performers manage to piss everybody off and then lo, ho: riots, mayhem, revolution: people sack the stage, shoot Uncle Sam, snatch his cuddly missile, smash heads, spill blood and accomplish the mission.

Gentle readers, I hope you’ve got the deep, amazing messages here: a) There are lots of important evil men here in this Land of the Pure and they are all out to get all of us; and b) We need a goddamn revolution, baby!

I am absolutely sure that you have never heard of this sort of thing before.

However, I want to tell you this: this video is a success. Not because of the message, but in spite of it—for the enticing, visually evocative characters, imaginative direction and editing, and the cracker of a performance by Ali Azmat in those fifteen characters he dons in less than three minutes. Here one finally sees Ali Azmat the performer—he’s a natural when it comes to delivering whacked out, over the top characters.

I’ll go a step further and say this: if Ali Azmat believes that it is his message that convinces us, then so be it. If it takes a proselytising spirit to bring out the best in our badass vocalist, then I am willing to tolerate him on the talk shows too (umm, wait… I need to think over that). And besides, I don’t really blame him. In a country where one can make claims like Iqbal was the greatest thinker of the 20^th century and get roundly applauded for it, he’s really small fish. We really have a much deeper crisis at our hands.

And dear Ali Azmat, for future reference: if you must have messages, it helps to remember that subtlety is the name of the game. We get it.

Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. He teaches creative writing at LUMS.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 21, 2011

Wilderness, Wilderness by Bilal Tanweer

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 06:29:00 +0500

This review appeared on June 12, 2011 in Dawn’s Books & Authors. It can also be found here.

The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmad
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Published: April 2011

“There is nothing left of us in the wilderness save what the wilderness kept for itself.”

—Mahmoud Darwish

Here are some facts: Jamil Ahmad is a Pakistani writer and a former civil servant. He has written a book of fiction set in the tribal areas. His age is 78. This is his first book.

Now stretch these over one thousand words and you have a fairly good idea what is being said in about The Wandering Falcon the South Asian literary community. I have yet to come across a review that treats it as a work of fiction and raises questions that are usually asked of fiction: plot, narrative techniques, characters, voice, etc. Most reviews seem to be reveling in the apparently astonishing fact that somebody has written something at age 78, while the rest make you think that this book is trying to wrestle with questions like: why are tribal people going over to the Taliban, why are they this way, and well, how are they anyway, and why don’t we know anything about them in the first place—and like, why aren’t they on TV?

You know it’s that old tosh, looking to fiction for factual information. But the scale on which it is happening in this case is alarming. One interviewer at CNN-IBN asks Jamil Ahmad a total of eight questions and only one references the word ‘literature.’ It’s the last question of the interview: You’ve made this fabulous literary debut at 78! Was it a difficult process? Among her other, more ‘normal’ questions, was this one: Your reaction to the killing of Osama bin Laden?

Umm… how about your reaction to the word ‘fiction’?

But there you have it. Fiction from Pakistan is not supposed to have artistic engagements—it’s required to provide information not an experience. In other words, it must be a reliable Dispatch from the Terrorists Lair and haveclear policy implications for all the experts on Pakistan to evaluate—and who isn’t an Af-Pak guru these days?

If you trust the description on the book jacket, this is a ‘novel’ about the character, Tor Baz—the wandering falcon, the roving figure whose story we must pursue. As it turns out, he’s only a marginal presence in what are nine distinct short stories, and he serves as little more than a device to bring a sense of unity to the stories. The device does not fail but it doesn’t succeed spectacularly either, since Tor Baz remains a minor character in the stories and his reappearance in various stories is rarely a significant event. For this reason, it would be much more accurate to call this work a collection of interconnected stories (i.e. standalone stories with recurring actors, settings, motifs, etc) rather than a novel, which usually requires much greater narrative coherence and thrust.

The subdued-starring role in this collection of nine stories is played by the physical setting itself: the wildernesses and the inaccessible hills and mountains of Baluchistan and the Pak-Afghan tribal belt. This harsh and ruthless landscape recurs throughout the stories and serves as one of the more effective ways to link them. It is also the second strongest character in the book.

The strongest character however is the dreadful Mullah Barrerai—the charismatic preacher, wheeler dealer, a man-eater (yes, that’s for real), conflict resolver, a devoted agent of dancing girls, a loyal friend to strangers, but ultimately, he’s a chameleon and a wanderer. He’s a surprisingly refreshing character who derives much of his appeal through his seemingly motiveless malice and kindness. He hovers large in the readers’ imaginations because there is so little to either explain his actions or predict his behavior—yet he’s a compelling presence on the page. Here he is describing the houris of paradise delivering a sermon to a rapt audience: “Wondrous, fair, and who possess breasts which are beyond your imagination. Breasts so large that it would take a crow a full day and night to fly from one nipple to another.” He is later asked by an officer of the Scouts if he believed this tall tale himself; he replies without blinking: “No—”and goes on to argue that these stories are like “ointment, meant for healing, or like a piece of ice in the summer with which water in a glass is cooled. Would you call that piece of ice a lie?” The account of his life results in the most affecting and disturbing story of the collection.

But the real star of the stories is The Sins of the Mother, which was also one of the highlights of Granta’s Pakistan issue. It is a love and survival story of an eloped couple that’s trying to evade killing/capture by their tribe. They find refuge in a government fort that houses soldiers where they find cautious solace for a few years but their sins gradually catch up with them. This story is by far the finest story in the collection for its narrative control, patient descriptions, and the gradual building of tension and emotion. It climaxes in a coldly executed scene of brutal killing which is remarkable for its unsentimental rendering and shows the deft hand of a real storyteller.

Another shocking and finely executed scene occurs in The Death of Camels, where the caravans of nomads, the Pawindahs, are shot down by the government soldiers for trying to cross over to the Pakistani side of the border. In this story we get close to the travails of this nomadic tribe and their mode of living. Among the many highlights of this story are surprising moments of sharp humor—when a Pawindah woman, for instance, insults a soldier for staring at her: “You there! Do you not know that you are smaller than my husband’s organ?” The story ends with us being witnesses to the massacre of the Pawindah caravans—‘mowed’ is the cold, precise verb that the author uses. But the story of the massacre doesn’t end there: once killed, the corpses then begin to stink following which, we get this inspired moment: “The soldiers from the forts had to move out two days after the Pawindahs departed. The stench from the dead animals was so terrible that was driving the soldiers mad. They also say that while camel bones and skulls have been bleached white with time, the shale gorge still reeks of death.”

These final lines also reflect overarching conflict of this book: the state vs. everybody else. And the state always wins—even when it loses sometimes.

Having said this, this book is also a catalog of missed opportunities. However, its shortcomings are not so much in its writing as in its editing. The running cracks in the stories stem from a steady presence of needless adverbs and adjectives (the travelers talk ‘brightly’; the old woman retorts ‘savagely’; the beard ‘ripples’; the trickle of water is ‘thin’), the tired unimaginative similes and metaphors (an old man’s voice is “clear and sharp like the sound of plucked strings from a musical instrument”; the movement of the camel “swayed smoothly like the ears of wild grass sway smoothly with a light breeze”), or the plain dead commentary on the stories which is present in abundance and is the main distraction from the stories. There are digressions here on writ of the state, citizenship, civilization, and ways of life of the nomads, on the geography of Lower Chitral, on the Pakistani media for not faithfully reporting the plight of the Baluchis, and then some.

It’s not just the quality of prose that suffers as the collection wears on but also the quality of narration. Scenes are replaced with long expositions that deal summarily with potentially rich material. In the last story, for instance, a girl Shah Zarina is married off to a man who owns a bear and earns his living by its performances. Shah Zarina envies the bear for earning much greater fraction of her husband’s affections, time and care, and so, finally, one day she questions his reasons for allowing the bear to have a room of its own when they must sleep outside. He tells her flatly: “I can get another wife but not another bear.” Zarina schemes to hurt the animal—she spices up its food and spikes the staff with nails which is used by her husband to smack the bear. She’s found out soon enough for this. As retribution, her husband gives her the exact number of blows with the spiked staff as he had given the bear earlier. He also ensures thereon that she receives the exact same food as the bear, the same bedding and much the same treatment otherwise.

Here is material of terrific possibilities, but all it receives is a hasty exposition of about three pages. The story then hastily skips over to other things. The patient and meticulous hand we see in the first story is entirely absent here, and in other later stories.

To be sure, there is a better book buried somewhere beneath this present book. Nonetheless, there is much here to recommend itself to a reader who is willing to read it as fiction and not as a Manual of Tribal Ways of Life.

In the pantheon of the new writers from Pakistan, Jamil Ahmad is a welcome new addition.

Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. He teaches creative writing at LUMS.

Postcard from Dubai by Bilal Tanweer

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 07:00:00 +0500

You know, I really wouldn’t say another nasty thing about Dubai if I didn’t know a secret. Yes, it’s true. Dubai and other Gulf States that sear their bottoms on the desert sands have a dirty secret which doesn’t get publicised. And I am going to tell you what it is.

To be fair, however, let me just say that there are really no points for you as a critic if you single out Dubai for criticism. Because a. it is an easy target; and b. it doesn’t make a difference. And I agree. In fact, I think it is unfair to diss Dubai. Consider.

Never perhaps in human history has a people and a place combined so much financial wealth with such destitution of imagination and culture. The place has been variously summed up by the brilliant AA Gill of Vanity Fair as “a holiday resort with the worst climate in the world; a financial Disneyland without the fun; Las Vegas without the showgirls, the gambling, or Elvis.” It is a blanched sandscape dotted with air-conditioned sky scrapers and is a place utterly bereft of any activity that can be qualified under the broad rubric of ‘culture’—although to give credit where it’s due, lately they have been trying to import some culture by paying artists and writers abroad to come and visit, though I suspect they still can’t figure out how this fits in with the annual shopping fest. Also, since there are few takers for books and book talk in that town, there is also some talk of importing universities from the US, including their students.

Given all these constraints, it really isn’t fair to talk down to Dubai. At least I wouldn’t do so and you shouldn’t either—except when you have a secret to leak, of course.

So despite having the world’s tallest building, highest restaurant, the world’s most expensive racetrack, etc., the denizens of Dubai have to make do with waters at desert temperatures. That is their secret. The water in Dubai’s taps, showers and toilets boils and blisters. It is a constant and rude interruption in the air-conditioned pipe-dream that is the city. And that, sirs and ladies, is simply troubling.

The other thing about Dubai is you’re always a temporary there. No matter how people adore it, it is a piece of earth not amenable to setting one’s roots. And that brings us to our poem this week.

Postcard from Kashmir
by Agha Shahid Ali

Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,
my home a neat four by six inches.

I always loved neatness. Now I hold
the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.

This is home. And this the closest
I’ll ever be to home. When I return,
the colors won’t be so brilliant,
the Jhelum’s waters so clean,
so ultramarine. My love
so overexposed.

And my memory will be a little
out of focus, it in
a giant negative, black
and white, still undeveloped.

The narrator feels closest to home in a four inch postcard image. When he returns to his native geography, he will be in another place—his memory out of focus with the reality it encounters, the pain of feeling his love ‘overexposed.’ That is the tragic claim of the poem: the immigrants memory is forever in disjunction with the space he occupies, even when he is in the place he calls ‘home’. His memory has ceased links with the place and is now an island within him. The memories do not reconcile with the space.

That is also the tragedy of the laborers who move to Dubai and elsewhere.

Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. He teaches creative writing at LUMS.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 7, 2011

Poetry for Monkeys by Bilal Tanweer

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 12:06:00 +0500

Do you know Mr. Javed Chaudhry? You should if you don’t. He’s amazing.

Recently, he was invited to speak to some students on ‘Relationships’ (?). He kicked off the discussion with the claim that he is smarter than Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, et al. simply because they lived 5,000 or 3,000 years ago (both dates are wrong, actually). He said, “If we are not wearing 5,000 year old pants or using nail-cutters from so long ago, then why are we bothering with what those people thought or wrote?” After this hatchet job on Aristotle&Co’s longstanding reputation, Mr. Chaudhry laid it into Darwin and his theory. He made a devastating observation: “agar insan waqa’i bandar se aaya hai to yeh baaqi bandaro’n ka kia qusoor hai? yeh kyun bach gaye?” He further observed that if evolutionary theory is indeed correct then why haven’t we seen monkeys in zoos exhibiting human traits? Like, why haven’t the monkeys started wearing pants (he’s big on pants, for some reason), or sipping coffee or smoking cigs? (Full video and discussion here.*)

While it is true that Mr. Chaudhry has systematically disproved any possibility for monkeys acting as humans do—like donning pants, as I mentioned—he has, let me submit humbly, overlooked the opposite scenario, i.e. humans behaving like monkeys. And there, if I may say, lies the rub. You see monkeys have a tendency of hurling things back at you without really understanding what they are. A monkey in a funny mood (or in any mood, really) cannot tell a DeBeers diamond from a turnip, or a volume of Plato’s Republic, for that matter. Also, monkeys take jeering at their opponents as definitive proof that they’re right. Humans often exhibit similar tendencies, especially when arguing against things they have no blasted clue about. And that’s just for starters. To tell you the truth, my view is that monkey-human kinship runs even deeper. Take poetry for instance.

Curfew Summer
By Maki Kureishi

Summer clocks in at eight. By now
Most plants have dried to a rasping brown
And the grass burns to its roots.

Only the bougainvillea flags
its violent colours – dissident
in a brutal summer.

No one may walk next door.
Yet from house to house the grapevine runs:
Arrested! Bombed!

Two hundred shot! Long used
to a seasonal withering, each summer
we die nearer the root.

Envy the sparrows! They forage
without a Pass, shrieking all over the city
reckless, uncensored opinions.

This is a wonderful poem, you’ll agree, for how well the metaphor of summer is alloyed with the imagery of the plants (grass burned ‘to its roots’; bougainvillea’s ‘violent colors’; plants ‘dried to a rasping brown’). These images convey the atmosphere of the ‘curfew summer’ the poem takes for its title. (Interestingly, the images here are also strongly reminiscent of Faiz’s ‘roshniyo’n ke shehr’; recall: sabza sabza sookh rahi hai pheeki zard dopehr/ deewaro’n ko chaat raha hai tanha’ee ka zehr.)The weight of this metaphor falls most vividly on the word ‘grapevine,’ which sits perfectly well in the poem’s imagery of plants, while playing on the figurative meaning of the word to convey the atmosphere. In the final stanza, the poem introduces sparrows with an exclamation—a moment of surprise, of discovery, a break from the bleak setting of the poem. It’s also a moment of epiphany in the poem: of the freedom in flying: birds shall fly without a Pass and shriek their opinions uncensored—even when the most violent form of dissent in the world is of bougainvillea’s colors.

As far as commonalities between men and monkeys are concerned, consider the fact that the above poem or its explication would be utterly meaningless for all monkeys and most humans. And there, I rest my case.

Bilal Tanweer is a writer and translator. He teaches creative writing at LUMS.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 24, 2011.

*Tip of the hat to Shahid Saeed for pointing me to this video. More about him:
t: @shahidsaeed
w: http://www.shahid-saeed.com

Faiz for Dummies by Bilal Tanweer

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 00:54:00 +0500

Friends, sharing an excerpt from and the link to my essay on Faiz, Faiz for Dummies, which was featured in the Indian magazine The Caravan last month. The original title was Faiz for Dummies, Idiots and Imbeciles: A Self-Help Manual. I hope you enjoy it.

THE CORE STEPS: HOW TO DISCOVER FAIZ

STEP 1: Get yourself born into a middle-class family in Karachi where books are considered the least useful of all forms of pulped wood—including pulped wood itself. Ensure that your father, who used to read Jasoosi Digest until a few years ago, now reads only Aurad-o Waza’if (Book of Daily Devotions and Prayers). Ideally, your mother should be an expert on all kinds ofwaza’if, big and small.

STEP 2: To really get going, however, you need even more discouragement. Pick an inauspicious moment, such as right after your parents’ shouting match over your mother’s shopping habits. Ask your father with great trepidation if he has a book of Faiz’s verse. Hear him tell you flatly: “Beta yeh sha’iri to bhand, mirasiyo’n aur kanjaro’n ka kaam hai; tumhara iss se kya lena dena?” (“Son, poetry is for wags and pimps—what do you have to do with it?”) Please note that while saying this, he will have his gaze fixed on a handsome saas on TV conniving against her sexy bahu.

STEP 3: Now go to the nearest bookstore (which also sells cheap plastic toys and boardgames to keep the business on lubricated tracks) and ask the bookstore owner—a man most accurately described as a talking heap of flab piled on a chair, reeking of paan—if he has Faiz’s book of verse.

“Poetry?” he will ask, scowling (ignore this). He will then wipe the paan dribbling from the corner of his lips, cock up his chin to balance the red saliva floating inside his mouth and say, “Only schoolbooks here. And Islamic books. Oh, and cassettes too. What do you want?” Say uncomfortably, awkwardly: “Err… I’m looking for poetry.”

“This has nice poetry too.” He will try to sell you Junaid Jamshed’s new Naat album.

STEP 4: Go all the way to Urdu Bazaar and locate the book. Now you have it resting calmly in your hands. To be perfectly honest, you don’t feel good about this. The title reads something in difficult Urdu: Nuskha -baa’ye… Bye? Your Urdu is exhausted already. Perhaps it’s some Persian phrase. Or Arabic? Who knows. And how will you ever know? Feel desperate. Think about what made you like Faiz in the first place. And what does faiz even mean? Does it mean anything at all? Why are we all here? When is the next Big Bang? Help.

Feel stupid. Pause. Breathe. Listen to the car stereo outside playing ‘Jhalak Dikhlaja’ at full blast. You understand everything in the song. Your Urdu is not so bad after all. Feel better.

More here.

Published in The Caravan, June 2011 issue.