I’m quite certain that humanity, which its enemies could never defeat, will yet be victorious, and instead of war and hatred, cruelty and malice, the foundation of a commonwealth will be shown to be the same which had been preached by Persian poet Hafiz long ago:
Whatever edifice you see in this world is prone to defects and disturbance
It is only the edifice of love which is free of the taint of defects and disturbance
Poetry and Revolution
Faiz published eight volumes of poetry in his lifetime. He wrote forewords to the first four. His poetry was well-received among scholars and readers abroad, and quite early on he began to be translated into English. At home, he quickly became (and remains) a major favourite of prominent ghazal singers of the subcontinent. He was written and talked about widely—and not only among the Progressives. The Englishman Victor Kiernan’s extensive translation of his poems into English opened the door for the appreciation of Faiz in the international arena.3 It is generally regarded as the premier work on Faiz Ahmed Faiz in English. Some other important translators of Faiz after Kiernan are by Shiv K. Kumar, Naomi Lazard and Agha Shahid Ali. Among those who extended the appreciation of Faiz abroad, mention must also be made of Ralph Russell, Frances Pritchett and Lyudmila Vasilyeva. The latter’s work is available in both Russian and Urdu.
Naqsh-e Fariyaadi (The supplicant’s portrait), Faiz’s first collection of poems, was published in 1941. He published his second collection, Dast-e Saba (The touch of the breeze), in 1952. Both collections are slim; in fact, all his collections are small, and even then they contain some unfinished poems. This paucity of production may have added to the zeal and enthusiasm for his poetry. Every new poem was a cultural–literary event.
The second collection consists of poems written mostly when Faiz was active on the sociopolitical scene. The poems in Zindaan Nama (Prison chronicle), the third collection published in 1956, were mostly written during his imprisonment. It would be difficult to deny the influence of imprisonment on Faiz’s mind and, by extension, on his poetry. In the preface to Dast-e Saba, Faiz discussed the impact of imprisonment on his development as a poet. Though the richness of his poetry undoubtedly transcends the mere fact of his imprisonment or the circumstances surrounding it, the confinement nevertheless has burnished Faiz’s image as a heroic figure in the eyes of future generations of readers and listeners.
In 1956, when he was invited to attend the inaugural session of a conference of Asian writers organized in New Delhi by the Progressive Writers’ Movement, Faiz was glowingly lauded as a champion of peace and universal brotherhood, a messiah of the working class. Among those present at the conference were Mulk Raj Anand, Sajjad Zaheer, Krishan Chandar and many other great names of the Progressive pantheon. In Sajjad Zaheer’s words:
If the evolution and progress of a culture were to be defined by the way the human race has rid itself of materialistic and spiritual destitution, and made its heart soft and malleable, its vision oriented towards truth and justice, and developing strength and elevation in its character, thus making our life pure and fragrant both internally and externally and also individually and collectively, then the poetry of Faiz can be said to have made a serious effort to achieve all of these cultural objectives.
There is no doubt that Faiz’s poetry espouses the ideals of revolution, and that it talks of a life fraught with dangers. On a personal and also societal level, his poems evoke the threat of exploitation, both social and economic, the rule of a power-hungry tyranny, the elimination and destruction of the weak and innocent at the hands of the forces of tyranny/capitalism. Many poems in Zindaan Nama were written by him in response to political events taking place in the wider world. Hence, several international incidents or concerns—Iran, Israel, Africa, the arms’ race between the nations—figure in his poems again and again.
The poem ‘Hum Jo Taareek Raahon Mein Maare Gaye’ (We who were put to death on dark roads, Nuskha Ha-e Wafa, p. 266) was written in 1954 after Faiz read the letters of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and is particularly moving. However, such is the poem’s versatility and power that it can quite easily be severed from the cord that connects it with the immediate circumstances that triggered its writing:
Because we loved the flowers of your lips, we
Sacrificed ourselves on the dry stalk of the gibbet
Pining for the tapers of your hands, we
Were put to death on half-dark roads
Far from our lips hung on the gibbets
The ruby red of your lips kept leaping higher
The intoxication of your tresses kept falling like the rain
The silver of your hands gleamed and glistened
When your paths became saturated with the tyrannies’ evening
We began to march; we marched as far as our steps could take us
The words of a ghazal on our lips, the candle of pain burning in our hearts
This is also manifest in one of his ghazals published in Zindaan Nama (Prison chronicle, Nuskha Ha-e Wafa, p. 248), which begins: ‘Some is supplied to the secret assemblies of the censors . . .’
Faiz says:
Yes, I know, I too fear for my life
But what can one do?
Every road that leads to where I want to go
passes through the execution ground
However, while Faiz is widely hailed as a poet of the revolution, it needs to be stressed that his love poems are as good as or even better than his poems of protest against tyranny. In fact, many of his poems which can neither be classified as love poems nor poems of political activism are as good as any in all of modern Urdu poetry. Notwithstanding the shibboleth that it is criminal according to the Progressives to ever be in despair, some of Faiz’s poems do lack in hope and yet they make beautiful, if despairing, depictions of reality. One such poem ranked very high by literary critics is ‘Tanhaai’ (Solitude, Nuskha Ha-e Wafa, p. 71):
Did somebody come again, sad heart?
No, nobody
It must be a wayfarer somewhere, he’ll go away
The night is past, the stardust begins to dissipate
The still lamps in the mansions begin to falter
Weary of waiting, all the roads are now in slumber
The dusty road, unsympathetic, has clouded all traces of footprints
Put out the lamps; remove the wine, the jug and the goblet!
Lock your sleepless doors
No one, no one’s going to come here now
Faiz’s experiments with poetic forms also extend to the ghazal. It has often been said that in the field of the ghazal, Faiz’s greatest achievement was to revive the classical ghazal’s frequently used words and phrases which had lost much of their charm or meaning by the time Faiz and other modern writers came on the scene. It must, however, be borne in mind that the bulk of the imagery and vocabulary that has given meaningful resonance to the classical ghazal is part of a whole system of meanings and associations. These associations—or what may be termed as the ‘hinterland of meaning’—are what gives force and resonance to apparently trite words like shama (candle), parwaana (moth), dar (scaffold), maqtal (execution ground) and so forth. It was recognized by Samuel Taylor Coleridge long before the advent of the modernists that the meaning of a word consists not only of its dictionary definitions but also the associations that it conjures up before us. Thus, the achievement of Faiz does not consist in his giving new life to a dead body of images; actually, it consists in the power and appeal of the message that he desired to convey. The message was to make the audience or reader understand and appreciate both the hazard and the romance of revolution. He wanted, and he succeeded in great measure, to present the idea of revolution enveloped in the attractive mist of sacrifice leading to social change, if not the emancipation of the oppressed of the world.
In fact, Faiz resisted the temptation of his admirers to dub him as a poet with a revolutionary message. Quite unlike Iqbal, he desired to be known as a poet, not a torc
hbearer. In the preface to his collection Dast-e Tah-e Sang (A hand trapped under a block of stone), he says:
I don’t really like talking about myself. For example, I don’t use the first person singular in my poetry as far as possible. Instead of the pronoun ‘I’, I always prefer to use the pronoun ‘We’. Thus, when literary investigators and detectives sit down to ask me: ‘Why do you write poetry? How do you write poetry? What is the purpose for which you write poetry?’, then in order just to let the matter slide, I reply with whatever comes to my mind. For example I say, ‘Well, you should yourself look for these things in my poetry and seek the answers to how I write and for what purpose I write.’
The Classical and the Modern
The early modern poet and freedom fighter Hasrat Mohani (1875–1951), whom Faiz greatly admired, wrote thus about the nature of poetry:
True poems, O Hasrat, are only those
Which should affect the heart the moment they are heard
Hasrat’s verse recalls a point often made in the pre-modern (or ‘classical’) literary discourse. As we know, the poetics of the classical or the pre-modern ghazal recognizes a quality of poetry which was described as kaifiyat (loosely, mood). Kaifiyat implies that quality of the poem which causes the reader or the hearer to pay greater attention to that emotional affect which immediately arises in the mind or the heart and which has no direct connection to the actual meaning of the poem. Perhaps it is something similar to what T.S. Eliot described when he said that poetry may often communicate itself before it is understood. But it should be obvious that the creation of kaifiyat could not come to pass without giving due stress to the fundamental technical requirements of the verse. For example, the two lines of the verse should be fully connected and there should be a bedrock of meaning; there should be no wasteful use of words, and it would be even more desirable if the words have affinities with each other. Thus the condition of kaifiyat was not satisfied by just creating an emotional affect.
Early modern critics like Hasrat Mohani and Masud Hasan Rizvi Adeeb, who professed to belong to this tradition, have, however, not made any mention of kaifiyat (which, as we can see, is a complicated concept). The reason for their silence on the matter of kaifiyat perhaps was that in the eyes of these critics—as is evident from the words of Hasrat Mohani quoted above—the purpose of poetry was to cause an immediate emotional response. The content of the poem should be to move the heart; that was enough. They tried to express this idea in many ways, invoking phrases like ‘authenticity of emotion’ or ‘recreating the poet’s own feelings in the heart of the reader’; they also advocated that ‘autobiographical’ or ‘interior’ events ought to be described in such a way that ‘they should seem universal’, and so forth.
The poetry of Faiz draws much of its power from its imagery. It is also full of kaifiyat-like atmosphere, though it’s not true according to the Progressives. By way of example, here are the opening lines of his celebrated poem ‘A Morning in the Prison House’ from Dast-e Saba (The touch of the breeze, Nuskha Ha-e Wafa, p. 181)
A bit of the night still remained when the moon came to my bedside
And said, ‘Awake, morning is here
Awake, for the wine of sleep that was your share is shrunk
to the bottom of the wine cup.’
Bidding farewell to the beloved’s image, I opened my eyes
And looked at the sheet of the night’s dark, still water
The imagery of Faiz, which has its share of metaphor, adds to the power and effect of these lines. The following three lines, which have an almost magical effect, follow the first four lines of the poem under discussion:
Whirlpools of silver began to dance everywhere
And star lamps falling from the hands of the moon
Drowning, floating, wilting and blooming
Night and morning clung in a long embrace
These lines have no role to play in establishing the character of the poem. Even a brief reflection will show that these lines are in fact devoid of meaning but succeed as lines of verse because of the power and brilliance of the imagery. The beauty of the imagery, its immediate effect, its novelty, these are the jewels that adorn the crown of Faiz’s perfection. This is something like kaifiyat here, but not quite kaifiyat because the bedrock of meaning and the coherence between the lines are not quite there. Still, the poem succeeds because of its emotional affect, not because of what it says in actual words.
Very few people have understood the fact that the flowing, limpid musicality of Faiz’s poetry has played an important role in extending his reach among ordinary as well as sophisticated readers. Khusrau has very subtle and delectable discussions on this limpid musicality or ‘flowingness’ in his prefaces. In Arabic too, much before Persian, rawaani, or the ability to flow smoothly, has been described as an important felicity in poetry. That no definition had ever been attempted of rawaani is perhaps beside the point. The reason could be that rawaani or flowingness can only be felt—it cannot be described or defined. Like the metricality of the poem, this ability to flow smoothly is also something that defies proof of its existence. Just as metricality is universally recognized and accepted as a basic quality of poetry (Coleridge has even gone to the extent of saying that the very nature of poetry is such that it demands metricality), so also the rawaani of a poem is a universally acknowledged fact. The Arab philosopher Al Farabi made the point in a different way when he said that the musicality of a metrical utterance is its natural attribute.
In Arab literary culture, composing poems and then reciting them aloud were both held in equal importance. One was also taught how to recite shers (or poetry) there. Khalil Ibn Ahmad has described a poem to be essentially a collection of sounds. A little later, the Arab poet and theorist Jahiz makes a discussion on rawaani which he concludes by saying that an utterance could be regarded as rawaani when an entire line sounds like a word and a word sounds like just one tone. The poetry of Faiz is perhaps the best flowing among all the modern poets.
Another thing that strikes me as important about Faiz is that he makes us participate in the act of his poem but does not burden us with any responsibility to act. Far less trying to persuade us to action or struggle or march on the path of revolution, he doesn’t even give a message to us. His revolution, or the struggle for the revolution, includes us as partner but makes no demands on us. Faiz does not ever force or compel or persuade us; he never preaches to us. The protagonist in his poems, both nazms and ghazals, may occasionally strike us as sad or melancholy but he’s mainly a witness or messenger. He places no burden on us that we too side with the protagonist or with the forces engaged in the struggle for the revolution. Thus, we become participants in the revolution or the struggle for it without actually taking part in it.
Friedrich Nietzsche put forth a very important point when he said that if you gaze for too long into the abyss, the abyss will start to gaze back at you. What he really meant was that the act of seeing or hearing is not one-sided. Faiz’s poetry does not preach or try to persuade us to act. Rather, it makes us take part in the act anyway. Look at these closing lines of ‘Ay Raushniyon Ke Shahr’ (O city of lights!, Nuskha Ha-e Wafa, p. 262) from Zindaan Nama:
May the beloveds, the Lailahs that dwell there be ever safe!
Let someone go tell them:
Tonight, when you light up the lamps,
Turn the wicks up as far as they can go
The last line flows so smoothly and is so dramatic that our critical sense is blunted when we confront its magic. But when we read closely we realize that the word ‘Lailahs’, though extremely beautiful and heart-affecting—conjuring as it does the image of beautiful young women active in support of the revolution—has no real content. It is never made clear that there are indeed Lailahs in the city. Perhaps there are nothing but witches there because the City of Lights is hidden behind the dark surrounding wall of disunion. Even so, we accept that there are Lailahs there. Their faces are bright and their garments a
re bright and they light lamps in the city, perhaps on its surrounding walls. In the poem, somebody is being asked to tell the Lailahs that they should keep the lamps burning brightly. It is clear that we have no role to play here. The messenger to the Lailahs is someone unknown and we have no responsibility for him. Is it that the hands of the Lailahs are now paralysed? We don’t know. Nor does the protagonist know anything about it. Is there any danger to the girls who are being asked to burn the lamps brightly? We don’t know and neither does the protagonist of the poem.
All this is very well. Yet, we still share the anxiety of the protagonist that ‘the flood of desire’ (a rather filmi expression, to be sure) may not be repulsed by the invasion of the attackers by night. We are sincerely and ardently sure that there are Lailahs behind the dark surrounding wall and it is their job and function to keep the lamps burning brightly. We have to do nothing. The protagonist also has to do nothing but to state what is to be done. Even then, having read the poem or having heard it recited before us, we too become fighters in the battle against the attackers by night.
Conclusion
I have no qualms in saying that had Faiz not been so diligently mindful of the poetics of the Progressive movement, his poetic universe would have been even more diverse and colourful. But I would also say that by giving primacy to metaphor and imagery, Faiz was able to give the kind of power to his poetry which has otherwise been out of bounds for much Progressive poetry in Urdu. The reason for this could also be that he had an acute sense of compassion for the individual, the solitary and lonely being whose fears and anxieties we all share but who remains unknown to the world. Faiz is not a poet of the teeming crowd, the so-called ‘people’. Rather, he’s a poet who speaks for the lonely, the single human being. Had this not been so, the sense of the individual’s centrality and the truth of individual experiences would not have been so evident in his poetry. We become more aware of our own relevance and importance when we read Faiz.
The Colours of My Heart Page 2