‘A thousand perfumed dreams’

May 16, 2015

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Farhat Attiqur Rahman’s book of soulful poetry

The title of this collection ‘A thousand perfumed dreams’ is perhaps the best indication of the delicacy, and prescience of the poems inside. It was a pleasure to review these poems, written by my late grandmother, Farhat Attiqur Rahman, given my regard for her brilliance, and her uncommon contemporariness of manner and courage. Her happiness lay in the contemplation of things; in polemic, in analysis. She had little time for self-pity, for hollow narcissism or incessant one-upmanship. This regard for matters of the mind was perhaps developed in her by her father Sir Shafaat Ahmad Khan, a luminary who represented the best in the social hierarchy, a man who advocated the liberation of women from the tyranny of orthodox tradition. She was the new woman of her time when opposing cultures in the subcontinent were in confrontation and the turmoil and conflict between tradition and progress brought forth freedom of expression in the women, and Farhat was one of them. She married an army officer, her cousin Attiqur Rahman, destined for a splendid military career and who in his late years was for some time the Governor of West Pakistan. Her zest for life infected almost everyone who came in contact with her and she inspired many to emancipate themselves without injuring traditional and time tested values.

There is a very clear voice at work in her poetry, it is not uninhabited or free of formal constraint, but it is stoic in its dignity. I remember that she imparted the values of a very elegant feminism, to young women. She wasn’t fond of the notion of expressing one’s modernity in a strident, pompous and ultimately crass manner. She was a very evolved feminist, one who ceaselessly encouraged the talents of the young. This generosity belies a sense of self-belief, a pure confidence that didn’t exult in the weakness or misfortune of others. She knew that perhaps her intellectual concerns were not the domain of many, but was aware that intellect could perhaps be superseded by a singular aesthetic, or perhaps just the love of beauty alone. She always maintained, then, an admiration for those women who were gifted with ambition, who were not afraid to outshine their mileau and to perhaps ultimately claim their own power.

There is a very clear voice at work in her poetry, it is not uninhabited or free of formal constraint, but it is stoic in its dignity

In the poem ‘A thousand perfumed dreams’ she limns the dichotomy intrinsic to Pakistani nationhood. When she writes of the rich with their ‘palaces’ and their ‘concrete monstrosities’, she aims to show the enforced artifice, the carefully policed distance of the affluent from the other classes. She is disdainful of this bloodless and artful construction of persona. She projects the apathy of the rich as a kind of asserted cowardice where on the other side the ‘impoverished multitudes’ draw out their lives , sustaining themselves with sheer labour, mining the ‘ perennial earth’.

In ‘Flowers’ we are presented again with a stunning juxtaposition. The poet here paints a picture of lazy privilege, where the ‘heavily perfumed’ enter the ‘pillared halls’ past the portraits of those once similarly inclined to pervasive arrogance, who are now perhaps etherised as mere ‘fading lips and eyes’ on dusty canvases. The stillness of her observation, is very affecting, it presents us with an image both frangible and indecorously sombre.

In the poem ‘Certain politicians’, the poet cleverly questions the respectable veneers of the leaders of the state. The poet here betrays her raw perspective in association with the politicians of the country. She sees them as ‘men of little worth’ who have ‘no eyes to see’. She sees the barbaric equivocations, she knows the tight-lipped avarice and rancour. She sees how the ideals of the founding fathers have been hopelessly spun out into a kind of semantic and ideological chaos. She sees the politicians as hawkers of rhetoric alone, as jaded figures who lead the nation into the dark mire of hopelessness, time and time again.

In ‘Death’ we are presented with one of the most haunting poems in the collection, we see the body of the woman with her ‘unravelled hair’ where woman with ‘professional skill’ bathe her

In ‘Death’ we are presented with one of the most haunting poems in the collection, we see the body of the woman with her ‘unravelled hair’ where woman with ‘professional skill’ bathe her. We see how the privacy of the body and self, long cherished, is now seen stripped of its delusional entitlement. The figure of the woman is now in the hands of posterity. She is managed and tended to for a final ritual, a final unveiling. While, the earth in all its stubborn and changeless beauty veers on in its untarnished colour, its vividites. The poem ends on the quietude of a perfectly imprisoned image of ‘the dove’ flying ‘into a brilliant sea of light’. Perhaps her message is of an immaculate freedom beyond the self, which one can only access when mortal life ends.

One of the other standout poems in the collection is ‘Change’ where we see the ‘lineaments’ of a revolutionary movement, with the ‘surging crowds baying the orator’s acclaim’. The poet here displays a chilling instinctive perspicacity. The teeming mass is painted as unified in an anger which ultimately becomes a beast overpowering their own notion of individuality or freedom of thought. She sees them as ‘partakers of obeisance in the Badshahi mosque’, bound to the hope of the ‘eternal message’, but is also cognizant of this same potential, emerge ‘infuriated’ as a ‘surge of destruction’ with the ‘quiet sky’ watching , gravely distant, proclaiming its ‘own message of eternity’. This poem contains most of the thematic concerns of this collection at large. There is a plangent foresight that pervades each poem in the book. Each poem in its minimalist and finely tuned form has a lesson to whisper. It is an unmissable poetic text for a serious reader.