Pakistan Here and Now: The Language of the Heart – III

At the crossroads of poetry and politics

Navid Shahzad

The term ‘culture’, which is commonly used as a synonym for western civilisation, was popularised by the British anthropologist Sir Edward B Tylor, who propagated the 19th century idea that societies pass through a linear development process commencing with the most primitive stage of ‘savagery’, leading to a middle stage termed ‘barbarism’, and culminating in what is known as ‘western civilisation’. Such a definition, which assumes that western cultures are superior to others, not only highlights the presence of an active hubris but also serves as a facile raison d’etre for the conscious exploitation and systematic rape of resources that western countries carried out in their colonies. It is this history of exploitation and subjugation that unite both Hikmet and Faiz in making common cause against internal as well as external sociocultural, political and economic oppression.

In actual fact, both poets appear to have so much in common that their differences pale in comparison to their similarities. Hikmet’s life was anything but sedate. A decidedly colourful youth saw him smuggling guns to Mustafa Kemal and working as a school teacher in Bolu to show his active support of Ataturk during Turkey’s War of Independence, and then studying Sociology and Economics in Moscow (1921-28) and joining the Turkish Communist party in the 1920s. Though Faiz did no gun running, he did stop teaching in the face of an alarming rise in global fascism to join the British Indian Army as a Second Lieutenant in 1942 during WWII. Rapid promotions saw him work his way up to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel while working as Assistant Director of Public Relations on the staff of the North-Western Army. For his services, Faiz was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire Military Division in 1945, but resigned from the army in 1947 when he opted for Pakistan.

In matters of the heart however, the handsome Hikmet proved quite the romantic as he contracted a short-lived marriage while in Moscow and subsequently lived with a dentist before his return to Turkey in 1928 without a visa, since his passport had been cancelled. On his return, Hikmet continued to contribute to newspapers and periodicals and write plays while his forays into writing scripts and directing films at the Ipek Film Studios were done under the pseudonym Mümtaz Osman. Pardoned in 1935 in a general amnesty, Hikmet was sentenced by a military court in 1938 to 28 years in prison for his incendiary writings against the state, which parallel Faiz’s imprisonment for sedition in the now (in)famous Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case – an alleged Soviet-backed coup attempt at overthrowing Pakistani Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan’s government in 1951. In 1935, Hikmet married Piraye Altinogly, a woman with striking red hair, whose father was editor of the newspaper Tercuman-i Ahval, with whom he had two children. Some of the most romantic poems that Hikmet wrote were to his woman with red hair as in:

“My memory will vanish like black smoke in the wind.

Of course you’ll live, red-haired lady of my heart.”

And then on a whimsical note adds:

“In the twentieth century

grief lasts at most a year.”

Subsequent romantic adventures led Hikmet to marry and divorce again until he met and married Vera, who was to be the love of his life. In this respect, Hikmet is unlike Faiz whose life is marked by his quiet steadfast loyalty to his beloved English wife Alys, despite his penchant for the company of beautiful women and enjoyment of the regular evening cup. Though Faiz wrote no poems in Urdu for Alys, his letters to the woman who stood by him through prison terms, years in exile and even longer years of despair while bringing up his daughters singlehandedly, are as much poetry as they are prose. Completely at home in both languages, while working on the script of Jaago Hua Savera (The Day Shall Dawn), a film about the life of fishermen in what was then East Pakistan, Faiz writes from a hotel in Dacca:

“In the last three days, there has been no sun, the trees are dark with rain and the wind feels heavy with nostalgic regrets. My window brings memories of Simla and Kashmir and in the midst of work and discussions there are sudden stabs of homesickness and thoughts of you and the urge to drop everything and return. I could work so much better if you were here, but it can’t be helped so I’m trying to rush through it as speedily as I can.”

The film won a Gold Medal at the First Moscow International Film Festival and was selected for screening as part of the Cannes Classics section in 2016 after a hectic search for lost prints. The language crossover, which also incorporates a marvellous switch from one genre to another as evidenced by the letter written, showcases Faiz’s linguistic versatility as much as it speaks for his conscious choice to write his poetry in Urdu. Similarly, Hikmet’s forays into theatre evidence his use of Brechtian techniques as major themes of loneliness, betrayal and the evils of capitalism are examined in plays such as Unutulan Adam (The Forgotten Man, 1935) helping to consolidate his reputation as a playwright of some reckoning in addition to his established reputation as a poet.

As for their work, the enormous compendiums of writings that Hikmet and Faiz produced are easier to grasp if one divides their works roughly into phases, each with its distinct flavour and tone. Of the three phases identifiable in Hikmet’s case, it is the middle period of his 13-year imprisonment that produced one of his most famous works, Simavne Kadısı Oğlu Şeyh Bedreddin Destani (The Epic of Sheikh Bedreddin). Proving yet again that literature and the written word are powerful weapons, Hikmet was imprisoned when military cadets were found reading the poem about a 15th century revolutionary religious leader in Anatolia. Among his later major works is the five-volume Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları (Human Landscapes from My Country, 1966-67), the 20,000 line epic in which one can see his optimism struggling with ground realities as the police state prevailing in Moscow of the 1950s bore little resemblance to the romantic visions of his youth. Yet, for all his disappointments, Hikmet’s poetry continued to celebrate modernisation and its promise of economic and sociopolitical possibilities:

“The destiny of iron coal and sugar

and red copper and textiles

and love and cruelty and life

and the branches of industry and the sky

and the desert and the blue ocean,

of sad riverbeds and plowed earth and cities

will be changed one morning,

one sunrise when,

at the edge of darkness,

pushing against the earth with their heavy hands,

they rise up.”

In fusing the intimacy of the individual voice into an address to the millions he wanted to be heard by, Hikmet became immortalised in Neruda’s words as “the voice of the world”. Though the last and perhaps saddest phase is the poetry he wrote after his release from prison during his long exile from Turkey, it was during his seemingly unending incarceration that his poetry reached the apogee of poetic prowess. During this phase, the tonal quality of his poetic voice began changing subtly to incorporate a poignant vulnerability that urged him “to write poems that speak only about me, addressing just one other person, and at the same time call out to millions.” The result was a marvelous innovation with the intimate romantic ‘I’ being replaced by a collective, inclusive ‘we’, which is also dramatically visible in Faiz’ poetry as he writes:

“We shall see

It is certain that we, too,

will see the day that has been promised us.”

Nine years younger than Hikmet, Faiz as a colonial subject, was a member of the Communist Party in an undivided India as well as an active member of the Progressive Writers Movement that dominated the pre- and post-independence literary scenes in India and Pakistan until the 1950s. Receiving the standard education of the day, which included essential instruction in the Quran, Urdu, Arabic and Persian, he later pursued degrees in Arabic and English Literature – which he taught for some time in Amritsar and Lahore of an undivided India. As a young man, Faiz witnessed firsthand the movement for Indian Independence just as Hikmet had earlier witnessed Turkey’s Kurtuluş Savaşı (War of Liberty), which resulted in the formation of the Republic of Turkey (1923). Needless to say, the events of their respective charged political climates had a profound effect on Hikmet and Faiz’s persons and poetry. Faiz in particular, while attempting to erase the divide between the spoken word and content, visibly shifted from the classical lyrical emotional world of the ghazal in Urdu to incorporate elements of almost Gadamerian aesthetics as he sought to position art in man’s experience of the world he inhabits. Simultaneously deconstructive and constructive, such an approach to aesthetic theory remains a rare achievement that very few of Faiz’s contemporaries concerned themselves with, barring a few notable exceptions such as Noon Meem Rashid, Miraji, Majeed Amjed and Sahir Ludhianvi.

Similarly, in Hikmet’s case, language and its usage become of paramount importance and are fundamental to his sensitivity, as whispers of Yunus Emre and Fuzuli can be heard clearly in his work. On the face of it, the poem Kerem Gibi (As Kerem) with its reference to a Turkish folk hero who turned to ash for love, reads simply enough. However, when read against the backdrop of a deeply embedded Turkish tradition of melting lead to ward off nazar (the evil eye) and in conjunction with the practice of melting lead to cast bullets, the poem becomes nothing short of a call to arms and action. Published in 1930, the poem serves not only as a turning point in his own poetry as much as it revolutionised the entire canon of Turkish poetry.

The tendency to interpret both poets therefore in simplistic revolutionary terms alone, as is often done, is to do both a great disservice as their contribution to the form and content of their respective literature and language is equally important. Faiz’s much admired predecessor and Pakistan’s renowned national poet Allama Mohammed Iqbal had already wrought a paradigm shift in the idiom of Urdu poetry from its familiar and popular ornate diction towards one that was as direct as it was infused with modern philosophy and rational thought. Faiz went a step further in moving from a traditional use of image and metaphor to couch his strong political views in metaphors and similes associated with the beloved. The new diction, strongly reminiscent of the sensual metaphysical poetry of John Donne, proved effective in eliminating the stamp of a particular sociocultural entity by universalising longing, sorrow and loss. While using the body of the beloved as a metaphor for the homeland, Faiz may have incurred the wrath of feminist enthusiasts in recent years, but no one can dispute the fact that the content and diction employed by Faiz has helped change Urdu poetry forever.

Nonetheless, to view Faiz and Hikmet only as Marxist/communist poets or revolutionaries is to reduce each poet’s work to a single dimension. However much Faiz’s poetry may be seen as revolutionary in spirit, there are aesthetic and clearly Islamic dimensions to his poetry that have not received the attention that they deserve. While the myopia may be attributed to the effects of applying only western modes of postcolonial literary analysis, such a view distorts and reduces his poetry to a single fragmented dimension. Placing Faiz exclusively among the pantheon of postcolonial imaginations struggling with knotty issues surrounding nationhood and class divisions is to ignore the specific cultural historicity that informs the poet’s work. Similarly, in Hikmet’s case, revolutionary fervour apart, there is an intense preoccupation with life and death in whimsical musings such as when he ponders over how his coffin can be transported from the fourth floor of his apartment building to the ground:

“I mean you must take living so seriously

that even at seventy, for example,

you will plant olives and not so

they’ll be left for your children either,

but because even though you fear death

you don’t believe it,

because living, I mean, weighs heavier.”

In many cases, the diminishing of the multidimensional work of a poet may be due to the personal interpretations that translators lend to the original work, e.g. Kiernan, the first to translate Faiz into English, rendered largely literal translations as opposed to Agha Shahid Ali’s lyrical translations that prompt such facile labelling. The best example of ‘reducing’ poetry to a single dimension may be seen in the popular interpretation of his popular anthem-like poem Ham Dekhain Gay (We shall see). Seen largely in terms of a revolutionary movement, the poem loses its far greater layered significance as its original Arabic title Va Yabqā Vajhu Rabbika suggests. With the change of title, an obvious interpretation of the poem highlights only the political tone, confining it to an earthly motivational experience, whereas, if read as it should be, with reference to the specific surah and ayat of the Quran, it takes on a whole new meaning altogether as can be seen in the apocalyptic references to:

“That has been written on the eternal tablet”

which is a clear reference to the heavenly record of men and their (mis)deeds on earth, followed by the lines:

“the heavy mountains of injustice and oppression

will blow away like (fluffed) cotton wool”

and:

“When from the Kaa’ba of God’s world

All the idols will be taken away.”

With its obvious references to the Quranic description of the Day of Judgement and the Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) action of removing all pagan idols from the Kaa’ba’s interior after his victorious entry into Mecca, the poem is far more than merely a 20th century Marxist call to ‘watch and wait’ or an example of a despairing, secular modernity waiting for a revolutionary turn of events. Given Faiz’s educational background and his literary interests, it should come as no surprise that his poetry, however ‘modern’ in tone, remains rooted in a classical Indo-Persian tradition lent additional complexity by echoes of Sufi and Islamic practice. The result is that Faiz’s poetry gains dimensions beyond that of mere postcolonial revolutionary fervour, which parallel Hikmet’s verse in its identifiable undertones of Sufi influence such as that of Yunus Emre and folk poetry.

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)