Volume 7, No. 11, November 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
On still further examination and despite obvious sociocultural, political and linguistic differences and distant geographies, it is interesting to note that a single common thread often features powerfully in the exile’s life. If the motherland beckons like a lighthouse on a stormy night with the promise of safe harbour, the mother tongue does the same; e.g. what the earliest born of this special group of 20th century versifiers, the Turkish Nazim Hikmet Ran who spent the better part of his life either in prison or living abroad, missed most of all was the sound of his language. For Hikmet, each new destination that he travelled to, and there were many – such as Paris, Prague, Varna and Moscow, where he eventually died of a heart attack at the relatively early age of 61 – would first be sifted thoroughly to identify any Turkish speaker; just as every city he sought asylum in, would serve only as a backdrop to the overwhelming memories of home that permeated his work. That the flight from home exacts a heavy toll on the heart in particular, may be evidenced by Hikmet’s emotional reaction to an image as simple as the sight of cucumber soup in a blue bowl, or in more profound thoughts such as the sentiments experienced and recorded in his memorable lines written in Varna:
“It’s not a heart but a rawhide sandal,
made of buffalo leather
hoofs the rocky roads constantly
but does not get torn apart.”
Like many exiles, characteristically carrying nothing of any material worth, Hikmet’s manic travels saw him travelling with a valise of books by Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet and Oktay Rifat whom he called “the best poets of Turkish” and pockets bulging only with memories that appeared with time to become etched in the lines of his face, just as much as they became engraved upon his soul. With his citizenship officially withdrawn for what were seen as anti-state activities by the Turkish government, prominent among them being his poem titled 23 Sentilik Askere Dair (On the soldier worth 23 cents), written at the height of the Korean War in response to US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ Senate address. Needless to say, the revelation that Turkish soldiers were paid 23 cents per month compared to the lowest ranking US soldier’s pay of $ 70 per month created a predictable enormous stir at home and abroad! Writing only in Turkish, Hikmet’s language became the sole umbilical link with the country he called home, helping him create what can only be described as ‘a homeland of words’ since it was the most important constituent of his identity:
“The words of my language are like precious stones”,
going on to add that:
“I am a jeweler’s apprentice.
I want to crash these stones into one another
and make voices that are unheard of.”
Compared favourably with the likes of literary giants Lorca, Aragon, Faiz and Neruda, Hikmet produced a treasure trove of innovative poetry, plays and film scripts, of which The Epic of Sheikh Bedruddin and Human Landscapes from my Country rank as poetic masterpieces. The latter, a voluminous work in traditional oral epic form and written entirely while in prison from 1938 to 1950 uses elements from various genres he was familiar with, such as the novel, drama and film. Despite the fact that as an Istanbul-based intellectual Hikmet had had little or no interaction with the Anatolian peasant he wrote about, it was his imprisonment in Bursa prison that provided him with the opportunity to experience the real life of ordinary men in an ironic validation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s cry: “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!” Banned in his own country for 30 years, Hikmet’s verse-novel sprawls over half a century of tumultuous events such as the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions, with its first book opening with the lonely boarding of a train from Istanbul’s Haydarpasha station in 1941. As the train snakes across the country, capturing cinematic vignettes of a turbulent confrontation between tradition and modernity, hope and despair, Hikmet’s optimism is clearly visible in his unswerving loyalty to the idea of a world moulded by human rather than a god’s hands as in the lines:
“My books are printed in thirty or forty languages
But in my own Turkish, in my own Turkey
I am banned”,
only to optimistically declare that:
“I write poems
they don’t get published
but they will.”
And they were, but not during Hikmet’s lifetime! Opting for free verse instead of conventional syllabic meter, Hikmet’s poetry broke across traditional barriers including those of Turkish traditional poetic form while using earth, homeland and language as focal points, as he firmly believed that the freedom afforded by free verse did more justice to the vocal properties of the Turkish language, which he cherished in lines such as:
“I love Turkish language
in the way a peasant loves his land,
a carpenter loves his wood and grater.”
Such views inevitably lead to the conclusion that just as the outbound poetic physical self journeys away from the homeland – boarding train, bus, dinghy, ship, plane or truck, a simultaneous inner journey takes the secret self on a parallel inward voyage into the murky seaweed infested depths of memory, desire, yearning and loss. Reliving snatches of life from a past that is permanently out of reach, the poetic imagination compensates by laying out vast expanses of landscape seeded with remnants of a life lived, a woman loved, a child abandoned.
Yet ironically, life in exile does not necessarily mean a physical departure since the state of exile may exist in one’s own land, within the circle of one’s own familiar life like a worm infested apple. It follows then, that the worst form of displacement is that of the heart, for the fleeing exile may succeed in taking a small memento from home – a fistful of earth, a flop eared toy, a crumbling brick broken off the house wall – but in actual fact, the fugitive heart takes away nothing but weed-like memories that sprout up everywhere. The exiled heart is, therefore, unique as it leaves no sign on the door, nor a forwarding address where a tear soaked letter may find its way, for it is a condition so forlorn and barren as to rival the vast emptiness of earth’s known deserts.
At the second Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference held in Guinea-Conakry in 1960, Frantz Fanon’s closing speech, ‘In the Name of Africa’, addressed a crowd of Asian and African writers. Rarely given as much attention as it deserves, Fanon’s speech in which he shared the objectives of the moot specially addressed his ‘Asian comrades’ as he said, “We, Africans, say that we wish to break, one after the other, all the chains of imperialism and colonialism. Your voice, like an echo, replies that this is also your target.” And that “We, Africans, say that national independence is incompatible with the persistence of more or less disguised forms of foreign oppression. You, comrades of Asia, say just the same.”
Fanon’s speech was a call for action from an African ‘us’ to an Asian ‘you’, i.e. from one wretched group of peoples to another. As a result, the 1960s saw the emergence of an extraordinary amount of Afro-Asian anti-imperialist literature being produced by writers from countries across the globe such as Turkey, Egypt, India and South Africa among others. The Pakistani Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whose poetic works have become synonymous with a cry for freedom, had already foreseen the need for solidarity among the oppressed people of the world in what became known later as a movement propagating Afro-Asian nationalism with his prescient poem ‘Come back Africa’, written and recited while imprisoned in Montgomery (now Sahiwal ) jail in Pakistan in 1955:
“I am Africa,
I have fashioned myself in your shape.
I am you, my gait, your leonine stride
Come forth, Africa!
Come, stride out like a lion.
Africa, come forth!”
Of the many translations available, Mustansir Dalvi’s use of a cryptic ‘come forth’ rather than the far more popularly used ‘come back, Africa’ phrase implies an unveiling of the self rather than a return to a previous condition. The Dalvi version reads better as it speaks for a powerful Africa merely obscured behind a curtain waiting to be lifted, rather than an Africa seeking to find its way out of a darkness it had embraced. Faiz’s Turkish counterpart is just as easily identifiable, as Nazim Hikmet Ran’s poetry commits itself along with Faiz to anticolonial politics and global solidarity across national and international borders, along with an essential element of the personal and the romantic. The unity of purpose and solidarity with all people regardless of linguistic, cultural, geographical or racial differences is the hallmark of both poets in the wake of an intensified Cold War, a period during which a French-West Indian Fanon echoing the ideas of French philosopher Maryse Choisy, asserts that remaining neutral in times of great injustice implied an unforgivable complicity.
That Hikmet and Faiz proved far from complicit and chose voluntarily to lend their voices to the people of an oppressed, colonised world is clearly visible in the former’s lines such as:
“We’ve come from the four sides of the World
We speak different languages and understand each other
We are green branches from the world tree
There’s a nation called youth, we are from it.”
Hikmet talks to ordinary people, farmers and peasants knee deep in mud and poverty, hailing them in his poetry with:
“Brothers and sisters, let our poems,
paired with a feeble ox, plough the land;
let them walk into a swampy rice field up to their knees;
let them ask all the questions;
let them harvest all the lights.”
Hikmet further identifies himself with the people of Africa and Asia as much as he speaks to his own with:
“Never mind my blond hair, I am an Asian;
never mind my blue eyes, I am an African.”
Unlike the Biblical Tower of Babel and its cacophony of sounds, neither poet confesses to facing any difficulty ‘talking’ to people who speak a language unfamiliar to him, since communication takes place on a fundamentally spiritual rather than linguistic wavelength. There is a perfectly heartwarming instance of the Urdu writing Faiz and the Spanish writing Neruda spending an entire evening in Paris, reciting poetry in their own languages to each other without the need for an intrusive translator or explanations!
As poets who spent substantial periods of their lives in exile, versifiers find a great deal in common since the transnational nature of their writing and life in general, forges strong relationships rooted in the struggle for sociocultural and political egalitarianism. Happily, the world has benefited widely from excellent translations of both Hikmet and Faiz in a number of languages, which has helped enhance their reputations beyond the borders of their own countries and linguistic borders. Hikmet has been translated into more than 50 languages and was awarded the Soviet International Peace Prize, which he shared with Pablo Neruda in 1950, while Faiz’s writings translated into English, German and Russian in particular, won him the International Peace Prize in 1961. Also having been a recipient of the Lotus Prize for Literature in 1976, Faiz died in 1984 in Lahore two months after he was nominated for a Nobel Prize after a brief illness that required hospitalisation.
Despite being separated geographically by vast land masses, Faiz and Hikmet have much more than their Marxist political and romantic beliefs in common. The lives of both celebrated and much loved poets mirror each writer’s untiring efforts to speak to and for the common man, demand justice for the voiceless people who inhabit the lands of their birth and elsewhere, court imprisonment and risk their lives even as they suffer the soul destroying agony of exile. Writing in their own languages – one in Urdu, the other in Turkish – both pack hope, sorrow, nostalgia and home sickness in poetry that is as romantic as it is political. In using their own languages, the Pakistani and the Turk not only vocalise a full throated roar of universal protest against exploitation and oppression of the poor by capitalistic, authoritarian regimes, but more importantly, speak to the masses in a language that they recognise.
Though Faiz and Hikmet view history as narratives of dominance in which the ‘coloniser’ is identified as the oppressor and the ‘colonised’ as the wretched of the earth, which is amply illustrated by even the most rudimentary reading of their works, their poetry also bears the stamp of each poet’s distinct nascent romanticism visible in the aching nostalgia for the people and places they have been forced to leave behind. So marked is their commitment to a universal cause that in a talk on ‘Problems of Cultural Planning in Asia’, Faiz clearly identified the horrific impact that colonisation had had on occupied countries:
“What was handed back to the newly liberated countries, therefore, was not the original social structure taken over at the point of their subjugation but the perverted and emasculated remnants of the structure. Superimposed on these remnants were cheap, spurious and second-hand imitations of Western cultural patterns by way of language, customs, manners, art forms, and ideological values.”
The writer is a Pakistani academic, Film/TV actor, writer and director. Her book Aslan’s Roar: Turkish Television and the Rise of the Muslim Hero (2019) is an extensive study of Turkish popular culture and its rise in the modern world. She is the recipient of one of Pakistan’s highest civil awards, the Pride of Performance for Literature and the Fatima Jinnah Award for Artistic Excellence. As Associate Professor she taught English Literature at the University of Punjab before helping to establish Beaconhouse National University where she set up the Department of Theatre, Film and TV and is designated Distinguished Professor of Performing Arts. She is currently the Academic Advisor at Lahore Grammar School system.
(To be continued)