Begum Sufia Kamal in 1971; The Poet at War In our adolescence we had not taken Begum Sufia Kamals poetry very seriously. After all, we were the children of the sixties. Our literary sensibilities were framed by Pound and Eliot, Plath and Pasternak, Ginsberg and Neruda, Bishnu Dey and Jibanananda Das, Subhas Mukhopadhay and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Shamsur Rahman and Al Mahmud. We had little patience for the orderly meters, the lilting cadences, and the over-wrought rhymes that marked the poetry of our earlier generations. Farrookh Ahmed, Ahsan Habib, Golam Mostafa, Jasimuddin, and others essentially followed the same poetic concerns and conventions, though Ahmed was more overtly Islamic, and Jasimuddin had carved out his niche in folkish pastoralism. We would often dismiss them as versifiers rather than as poets. Like many of them, Begum Sufia Kamal (BSK) was also a poet of pastel shades, of blurry edges, of soft touches, of coy (if not cloying) sentiments, of elegant artifice rather than shrewd or unsettling insight. Unfortunately, this did not resonate with us. What we craved for was a more heroic (or anti-heroic) posture, a keener engagement with the existential angst we faced, a sharper response to the absurdity of bourgeois affectations and indulgences we saw around us, and a deeper understanding of the yawning insecurities that consumed us. BSK did not subscribe to those imperatives. She upheld a poetic stance and authorial authenticity that was more delicate, nuanced, and mannered. But, it was not part of our scene and, hence, alienating. It was much later that we began to appreciate the richness of her imagination, and the textual integrity imposed by her muse. This was aided by our realisation that she demonstrated significant shifts in thematic and rhetorical directions. If her earlier Sanjher Maya (the Spell of the Eventide), published in 1938, was suffused with sweet melancholia -- a dreamy, gauzily ardent exercise in poetic whimsy (though it was charming and emotionally seductive in its own way) -- her later poetry (e.g. in Mrittikar Ghran -- the Fragrance of the Earth, published in 1970) began to reflect some of her concerns relating to human rights, economic justice and cultural autonomy, even though she did not stray far from her familiar literary moorings. If her persona as a public intellectual was defined by progressive and populist convictions, her poetry, for the most part, remained a bit discreet and tender. She appeared more saddened than appalled by what she encountered, more reproachful than rebellious, more a raised finger than a clenched fist. But the poems written in 1971, and immediately after, were dissonant, grim, intense. This clearly demonstrated a radical break with the past in stylistic mannerisms and substantive focus. In these poems one could feel a quickening of her pulse, of being dislocated from her urbane and genteel constants, of grappling with a barely contained fury. In her passionate cri de coeur against the cruelties and humiliations unleashed by the Pakistani military, one could hear a mothers anguish, a humanists anxieties and a patriots anger. BSKs voice had finally become our own. Some of these poems were published in English in 1975 through the efforts of her son Sajed Kamal, while most of the translations were undertaken by the poets husband, the beloved and venerable, Mr. Kamaluddin Ahmed. The title of the book itself (Where my Darlings Lie Buried), is suggestive. It echoes the memorable response of the Sioux warrior chief when he was mockingly asked by the white colonialists, where is your land? and he stretched out his hand in a famous gesture towards the endless horizon and said: Wherever my braves are buried is my land. This notion of a land being consecrated by blood runs through the entire set of poems as a subtext that gives the English selection of her poems both coherence and vitality. Even in her nature poems ( Chaitra, Baisakh, Jaistha, Sraban and others), or those marking cultural events important to Bangalees (Falgun 8, Baisakh 25, Jaistha 11), the sight and smell of blood pervades the air, and overwhelms the senses. The rains cannot erase the stains, nor the memory of a cultural moment distract from this one over-riding, omnipresent reality. When the flowers blossom, it is not the shy ketaki , the fragile bokul , the dainty jui that would grasp her attention, but the crimson rokto korobi , the flaming krishnachura , the flushed polash that would appeal with new meanings and messages. When she addresses the yearning bride, or the distressed mother, waiting for those who may not return, it is not to console but to inspire them to put their shoulder to the stone and endure (as Hemingway would have it), and also to push forward towards freedom and victory. Repeatedly, perhaps a bit impatiently, she reminds her audience that there is no time to fear death, no need for personal preening (to braid their hair in patterns or put kajal in their eyes), no more cause for tears. For her the battle for life is on and she exhorts the others to join. This is not poetry dressed in a mourning sari with a black border, it is decked out in battle fatigues. When this blood-dimmed tide was let loose upon the world (as Yeats would say), it was more than a human tragedy that had to be overcome, it was a travesty that had to be challenged. And, BSK gathered up her wrath and contempt into a huge ball of spit, and hurled it against the perpetrators. There is a directness of expression that is quite unprecedented for her. When she mentions the Pakistani military, there are no elliptical references or subtle allusions. The language is brazen. Thus they become the devils plunderous disciples/ covetous of money, mercenary, hated slaves/ malicious, mean and low, worst of beasts/ devoid of conscience/ like the hordes of Yazid/ who holding back the succor of Gods Euphrates/ had massacred the fighters for truth and liberty … (Chaitra 31, 1377). Or in Cave Dwellers Are We she calls them tricky hyenas (who) pounce upon humans/ to suck their blood in vengeance!/ These ugly, covetous, treacherous beasts of prey/ have burned to ashes our green habitations/ and turned them into deserts dead. One can almost hear her cry out after Eliots Gerontion: After this knowledge, what forgiveness? But, one must also point out that, even as she condemns the savage criminality of the military, and even as she encourages the brave men and women to defiance and inevitable triumph, she does not demand crude reprisal against the enemy. While her descriptions of what the military had done, and the consequences that followed from its actions, were specific and often heart-rending, the response she wanted to arouse was driven by her pursuit of moral redemption but not the need for physical exaction. The idea was to defeat the Pakistani military in order to end this long nightmare, but not to humiliate the military personnel as people. In her mind this retaliation in kind (doing to them what they had done to us) would entail an ethical and spiritual failure. Even in her rage, BSK could not bring herself to abandon her essential humanity. In this regard a further clarification is in order. Obviously, these poems were not anti-war in the sense of decrying the banality of evil, the idiocy of human conflict, or the immorality of the death of innocents. But, they were not pro- war either. She never extols the virtues of war, but only upholds the nobility of resistance. Since she had always been unafraid to protest injustice and oppression, and both had been unleashed on her people, she felt that the right to self-defense was both justifiable and necessary. Her position was not an exercise in convenient moral improvisation. It was firmly grounded in just war doctrine, and was entirely consistent with the example of the prophet Muhammad (pbuh) and the teachings of the Quran. The choices were fairly clear. Either one fights, or one faces extinction in terms of identity, culture and being. And, no people deserve to die. The poems are remarkable for several other reasons. A historical continuity informs the entire narrative. There is a mindfulness of an evolutionary progression from the Language Movement in 1951, through other struggles, into the inevitability of this conflict. For a generation that had believed in Pakistan, had been complicit in its formation, and had genuinely hoped for its success, this realisation could not have come easily. The argument is not that Pakistan was a wonderful idea that was handled in a clumsy manner, or that everything would have been fine had it not been for the power- hungry narcissism of Zulfi Bhutto and the callous blunderings of Yahya Khan, but that the entire project had been problematic from the start. To acknowledge that some of them had misread the historical forces that led to the creation of a tenuously based and awkwardly constructed Pakistan must have admitt
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 08:57:58 +0000