We remember him by listening to ‘Bahaar Aai’ in Tina Sani’s voice on national television. Sometimes we say his lineage gave Pakistan Television, well, dynamism. Sometimes the ministry of Education builds auditoriums in his name. At others, we pick up ‘Naqsh-e-Faryadi’ and gasp at how he could possibly have articulated the unfulfillable nature of his yearning by negating its possibility, even in a dream (‘Sarod-e-Shabana’).
But at all times, his poignant syncretism is pushed to the background with a heavy emphasis on his artistic mastery (sometimes, that too is not done adequately) while completely, comprehensively, dismissing his ambition. Yes, I too agree that artistic deficiencies cannot be forgiven based solely on ambition. But I am talking about Faiz Ahmed Faiz here.
He introduced free verse in Urdu. His free verse, however, is regulated by proximate and distant rhymes, a tactic unsuccessfully copied by contemporary Urdu poets. Assonance but with partial withdrawal from traditional rhyme- but that is still inadequate to describe his style. Not contending that the musicality of Faiz’s genius is subdued- it is not. What surfaces is our collective withdrawal from the purposive nature of his discourse. How does that reflect on our society as a whole?
Well, for one, many are unaware of his political achievements, his message that his prose kept resounding and well, that his genius was shunned by successive governments until after eight years of his death. In strictly governmental terms, being the president of Pakistan National Academy of Arts (PCNA) and the cultural advisor to the ministry of Education (1972-1974) was not enough for him to be wholeheartedly admired. Why not? Because we are overlooking the Lenin Peace Prize he received in 1962 and that at a young age, he led a Pakistani delegation of the Pakistan Trade Union Federation to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) at San Francisco and then at Geneva.
Indeed, I am leveling an allegation against governments preceding Behazir Bhutto’s government in 1990 (that awarded him with the highest civilian award, the Nishan-e-Pakistan) of being dim-witted enough to dismiss even his artistic genius based on his disillusionment with the establishment of democracy and social justice.
His discourse took a paradigm shift from traditional Urdu poets:
When he speaks of Ezadiyat (divinity), he remarks over it having transcended life but at the same time, he grounds life in naked reality- which springs out of nothing. His words travel from the hopelessness of hope for a morning to the serenity of a stillness that accompanies it.
But then he instructs us to speak:
For the lips have the liberty. For the words are still ours to be spoken. For we still possess our countenance and the breath by which it is stirred.
Then he speaks himself:
Tells us of bloodshed that left no trace of blood. That nowhere did a trace remain. Nothing on the assassin’s hands, nails or clothes, the dagger’s lips, the knife-point, the floor, the roof. He motions towards the absurdity of bloodshed for it did not serve the king, nor did it have a price. It did not caution salvation, did not serve vengeance, did not offer itself to faith in sacrifice.
While he enclosed irony, instruction and intensity into his artistic dominion, he laced it all with a poignant hyperawareness of the reality of his milieu. He meets all the formalist requirements to be called the greatest contemporary Urdu poet but at the same time, his progressive political character that reinforced the importance of instruction through literature obstructed him from being recognized as that.
The question transforms into whether we have been able to reconcile his ideological considerations with his stylistic mastery?
We have not been given a chance to.
I leave you with this, to think about:
‘Fikr-e-fardaa utaar de dil se
Umr-e-rafta pe ashk baar na ho
A’had-e-gham ki hikayaten mat puchh
Ho chukin sab shikayaten mat puchh
Aj ki raat saz-e-dard na chher’
Speak, for the truth is alive, even now
