April 2021

Volume IX | Issue 1

We are a trifle late. But for good reason.

Many of us rue the lack of communication with fellow poets across India’s western border. We complain about the difficulty in ordering books from Pakistan. About the few opportunities to dialogue; even, it seems, in cyber space, while othering and hate speech increases on social media platforms. Also, I find I need to do a fair amount of trawling of the digital domain to read the work of Pakistani poets who write in the English. While we in India and many around the globe are eager to discover affinities of experience, inflections of language, cadences and contours that this significant segment of subcontinental poets explore.

True, writing is often a solitary endeavour, and, in the midst of the pandemic most of our other literary activities have largely become so as well. All of us sorely miss the evening of readings and discussions, book club meetings and launches held with eye contact and quick repartee, over coffee or chai or something stronger. Now, possibly more than earlier, we need poetry to pause time, reflect on beauty, the enchantment of language and the richness of human experience

Therefore, it is with great pleasure that we invited Pakistani poet Makhdoom Ammar Aziz to curate a Special issue on contemporary Anglophone poetry across three generations from his country (though the idea of ‘home’ is as much a site of internal geographies as it is of external location). This is no mean feat; but it’s one he has carried out with flair and vision. Ammar’s own exceptional poems on ragas that draw from Ragamala painting and memories are available on our pages here. We present here his superb new poem, The Brown Man’s Ballard of the Virgin which sings , ‘webs of words sprout from/ scriptures like sacred figs /emerging from old bricks in the city’ and makes us see that ‘the moon/waning in the debris/of dark pearls/ is cradled in clouds/ like a new-born’. Ammar’s issue is, for me, an eye opener. I’m grateful to him for his bold and incisive Introduction. And for his selection of a range poems that explore the intersection of language with the world outside and those of thoughts and emotions. Some of these are in familiar shapes while others reveal more experimental urges.

In this issue we un-scroll in part a tapestry of treasures which, in truth, should be published in its entirety as an anthology. We trust you will discover poets who will exhilarate you with their imagination and play with language, raise troubling questions, offer solace and spiritual glimmerings, express your despair, your histories, your loves, yourselves.

Over to Ammar.

Priya Sarukkai Chabria
April 2021
Pune

Curatorial Note

Jaun Elia, in the preface of his first collection Shayad – the only one to have been published during his lifetime – regrets the politicization of his beloved language, Urdu, during the years leading to the 1947 Partition: ‘I wonder,’ he says, ‘if the same game could have been played with the other languages of the subcontinent.’ The iconic poet, born and raised in Amroha, in 1931, later chose Pakistan as his home and remained internally homeless all his life, unlike his language that certainly found a home in the newly founded country.

What comes to your mind when you hear ‘Pakistani poetry’? And when you hear that, is it easy for you to imagine anyone outside the twentieth century Urdu poetry canon? It’s certainly not easy for me. The country, whose foundation was justified, among other things, for seeking the freedom to speak Urdu, has mothered so many poets extraordinaire in the language, which – despite being comparatively young – is widely acknowledged for its resplendent poetics.

However, make no mistake: irrespective of Urdu being the language of the ‘nation’, most of the great Urdu poets – who chose Pakistan as home or were born here in the subsequent years – were never patronized by the state. How could the Pakistani state patronize poets who unambiguously identified as progressives and internationalists and, through their work, questioned the notions of nationalism and everything else the state stood – and still stands – for. The state, on the contrary, opposed and harassed them and also largely remained indifferent towards the social miseries of several celebrated, apolitical poets who were concerned with deeply subjective matters. In my opinion, it is not the hegemony of Urdu, but rather its literary vigor, and the métier of its poets, that it didn’t really let poets in other regional languages get their due attention. However, let’s just keep this argument for another time.

What I want to primarily communicate here is that, from the very beginning, a small minority of Pakistanis have also been writing verse in English. While the scented rivers of our indigenous languages still managed to flow alongside the vast ocean of Urdu, it is the cascade of our English language poetry that has continued to be the most unacknowledged and largely invisible. Some extraordinary Anglophone poets have lived and died here. Despite their exquisite work, they hardly managed to find any space in the literary landscape of Pakistan, where the language of the colonizers is still spoken and appreciated exclusively by bourgeois urbanites. English hasn’t been decolonized here, unlike it has in India – to a large extent. It hasn’t reached the ordinary reader who still believes that sincere expression is possible only in the ‘vernaculars’. It’s not the reader’s fault; the language’s imperialist and assimilationist legacy is still visible in our daily lives because of our classist education system. While English fiction and non-fiction writers of the country have found some appreciation at home and abroad, it is indeed a lonely affair to be an English poet in Pakistan. There’s little hope for English when even Urdu continues to face a lot of resentment by linguistic nationalists who consider it merely to be a language of power, ignoring centuries of its poetic prestige.

However, poets have continued to compose even in the absence of significant number of readers. The foremost Pakistani English poet, Taufiq Rafat – who is to Pakistani English poetry what Nissim Ezekiel is to Anglophone Indian poetry – was born in 1927, in Sialkot, and passed away in 1998, in Lahore. He is thought to have crafted what is referred to as a ‘Pakistani idiom’ by some literary academics. His words in the ‘foreign’ language nest in the trees of this land, finding a home in the valleys and villages of the country:

The ducks, bent like a boomerang,
Hurtle across the sky
To a swampy exile in Pakistan

(Excerpted from Ducks by Taufiq Rafat)

In this special issue of Poetry at Sangam, which has come into being over the last several months, I’m very glad to present 10 contemporary Pakistani English poets, including a couple of Rafat’s younger contemporaries, to some of whom he was also a mentor. With the exception of Yasmeen Hameed – a noted Urdu poet and translator – who has rendered some of her own poems into English on my special request, all other poets write originally in the English. The issue features poets from three generations: it has Adrian Husain, a poet and Shakespearian scholar, who is among the first generation of Pakistani English poets. Born in 1942 in Kanpur, the ever-young Adrian now lives in Karachi and has graced the issue with a few of his new poems. And then we have Muzaffar Ghaffaar, also from the same generation – albeit lesser known outside the literary circles of Lahore – who has been producing excellent verse for over 50 years. Born in 1940 in Nagpur, he has also translated the works of several Punjabi Sufi poets and is continuing with his ambitious creative projects, while living quietly in Lahore.

The issue also features Athar Tahir and Waqas Khwaja – born in the 1950s – who are both widely published and anthologized. Recipient of numerous international and national awards, Athar Tahir has published several collections with the Oxford University Press. This, in my opinion, itself is a rare accomplishment in the country, where there’s no market for English poetry and publishers are generally not interested and highly cynical about bringing out poetry collections. Athar Tahir’s verse evokes modern metaphors, while he remains rooted in tradition, painting imagery of our times in an accessible diction, devoted to the form but not immersed in its nostalgic fin de siècle twilight.

Waqas Khwaja, originally from Lahore, is based in the United States since the 1990s, where he teaches creative writing. Widely published in several countries, he’s perhaps better known in the American poetry circles than the country of his origin. Equally at home in both cultures, his verse negotiates the gulf between them. While sending me his suite of poems, some of which are included here, he wrote about them: ‘For me, all poems are persona poems, the subjective “I” only a linguistic construct to channel another voice, another consciousness, with its ironies, contradictions, and paradoxes, its tentative reaching out towards reassurance, a probable resting place, that itself is only temporary and contingent.’

The issue also features Shadab Zeest Hashmi and Raza Ali Hasan, who can be regarded as the second generation of Pakistani English poets – the most underrepresented generation in this issue, and not without a reason. In my opinion, there has been a long gap of decades during which comparatively younger poets in the country have not created significant English verse. Both Hashmi and Hasan are (coincidentally) also based in the United States, and have published a few volumes, each. Both the diasporic poets are individually known for their unique diction.

And from my generation, the third generation, we have Afshan Shafi, Adeeba Shahid Talukder and my close friend, the late Umer Ismail, a prodigious poet, whom we lost at a very young age.

At the end of the day, these are all just poets who happen to be from Pakistan. Their concerns don’t necessarily always reflect the cities and towns they grew up in – their voices are not necessarily always ‘Pakistani’. They are certainly not an exotic representation of a country that happens to share ‘geopolitically important’ borders with Iran, Afghanistan and India. They’re as immersed in matters of existence and oblivion, and of soul and emptiness, as any other poet in the world.

I would like to thank Ayesha Nadir Ali for helping me find Muzaffar Ghaffaar’s landline number during these tough times – he doesn’t use the internet or a cell phone. I would also like to thank Umer Ismail’s sister, Nimra Amjad Chohan, for sending me some of his work and Sophia Naz, for helping me with a line in one of his poems.
I am also deeply thankful to Kim Dorman, for his precious mentorship. My special thanks to Sehyr Mirza, for her continued care and creative advice.

Above all, I would like to extend my deepest and warmest gratitude to Priya Sarukkai Chabria, for giving space to these poets and for inviting me to guest-edit this very special issue. All her advice during this journey has been rewarding. When I discussed my idea of editing a Pakistani English poetry anthology with her, she encouraged me to share some glimpses from the anthology-in-progress here. This issue wouldn’t have been possible without her support.

Here’s to more poetry, more issues of Poetry at Sangam and more cultural collaborations between the two countries!

Ammar Aziz
April 2021
Lahore