The mood of the poems is described by the translator as ‘distant, watchful, wary; retaining a scathing honesty as she probes and questions modes of feeling, thinking, being’
Kicking up Dust
Author: Azra Abbas
Translated by: Samina Rahman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Karachi
Pages: 126 – Price: Rs 595/-
Kicking up Dust is an adept English translation of noted Urdu poet and fiction writer Azra Abbas’s memoirs and poems, rendered by Samina Rahman, a Cantabrigian and a famed educationist, litterateur, historiographer, and women’s rights activist.
Azra Abbas came into literary limelight in 1981 with the publication of her ‘extended prose poem’ NeeNd ki MusafataiN. She has now to her credit four verse collections, memoirs, an anthology of short stories, and a novel. The present work comprises her reminiscences and some poems translated into English by Samina Rahman.
The recollections pertain to the childhood of the author. Puerile curiosity, juvenile pranks, parental ambivalence, pubescent sensuality, eerie reveries, innocuous tomfoolery, pubertal fears and hallucinations, and last but not the least, internecine wrangling of siblings characterize the bulk of these memoirs. The narrative is frank and candid; the author has skillfully woven it into an impressionistic texture to suit the modernistic ambience of an autobiography. The narrator’s precocity lends her outpourings a quasi-adult perspective, as it were. Thus the reader is enabled to have an insight into the mind of ‘a rebellious child’ forced to grow up and survive in the adult world, ‘before her time’.
Samina Rahman’s introduction to the book is in effect an apt critique of its form and substance. She avers that ‘Azra’s experiences are similar to those of an average girl. Azra, the child, is an urban guerilla on a mission; ferreting out the unusual and magical life of a neglected underworld, restoring their stripped humanity to those living on the edges, drawing them centre stage with a child’s frank and unhypocritical gaze.’
As regards the author’s episodic style, the translator remarks that it is ‘disingenuous’ and that it may give ‘the impression of being superficial, lacking depth and resonance’. She further says that ‘The simplicity of vocabulary, the short staccato sentences, the bald and unadorned statement is as crafted as the most elaborate construction’. The language is stated to be ‘the vehicle of her level gaze’, factual and straight. However, she leaves it to the reader to ‘discover’ the unexplained and the quizzical.
As for the poems, their mood is described by the translator as ‘distant, watchful, wary; retaining a scathing honesty as she probes and questions modes of feeling, thinking, being’.
The author appears to negotiate ‘vulnerability’ in these poems with a view to obviating ‘ennui and numbness’ and making tolerable a life marked by ‘the impossibility of connection and communication’.
In the translator’s view, an important ‘aspect of the recollections and the poems is their fearless venturing into the relatively uncharted domain of female sexuality’. The following extracts will exemplify the point:
‘We all agree that we should be in love. Me and Manju. So and so with so and so…’ I am staring at them, mouth open in astonishment, getting anxious. What is love? It is not a new word for me. At one time or another, one has heard one’s mother, father, teacher use it but its meaning is not very clear. Whatever the context, it creates a muddle of meaning in my mind. Bhai will love me. He is the brother of the girl who has spoken to me.
‘I remember a particular day while I am bathing. The cake of soap is in my hand. I become aware of the pain, while rubbing the soap on my chest, from my right armpit to the left. The two tiny bumps, at equal distance from each other, hurt as I rub the soap over them. I yell out.’
I am in possession of a woman/who wakes up in the dark/waits for her man/beautifully clad/and then/collapses/in the fragrance of her own orgasm/but all this is impossible/all this/that is insufficient. (Cycle of Fate)
The poem titled Untie My Hands reads like a feministic outcry of a distressed woman in shackles – rebellious in tone but resolute in accent. The poem is reproduced here to enable the discreet reader to judge for himself as to the authenticity of this view:
If my hands were untied/I would/blacken the walls/with the scratchings of my dreams/and let pestilence rain/and crush this world/between my palms.
My lapis spread/in the dark of dreams/my dreams were crucified/my child has been seized from my womb/my house is thrown open to stable the destroyers/I have been put on a bridleless horse/set down in dark meadows.
Whose hands grasp the chain of the shackles?/Before the tumult of judgement day/let me gather my tatters around me/procure sustenance for my children for the last time/and drink from the poison cup./Let my shackles be opened/Who grasps the chain?
The painful process of creativity is likened to the pangs of child-birth in the poem titled It is difficult to write a Poem:
Only the one who has borne a child knows/or the one who has wasted one/before birth. /Both sorrows are alike/as if/ one is being branded/with a red hot iron./Or as if the body/is being dug up.
One end to the other/in darkness and silence/no door to crack/to let out the voice.
Just the self wielding a blunt knife/to sever its own neck./Savouring the masochism/you watch yourself reach the edge/moment by moment.
To push out a being/from inside another/onto the polluted heaps/slowly softly/to give it a name.
Samina Rahman has rightly averred that ‘Her (Azra Abbas’s) writing is an assertion – a record of her presence, her resistance, her resilience, her female-ness, and her person-ness. She literally kicks up dust, disrupting established ways of doing things, intruding into male preserves, marching into battle sensing injustice, asserting her views, validating her vision and dreams. Her insistence on ‘being counted’ reaffirms and strengthens her bond with the lives and struggles of all girls and women who fight each day of their lives’.
Society influences literature in a variety of ways, and the connection of literature with society is integral and pervasive. Actually the range of social influences on literature is as broad as the entire range of operative social forces like gender discrimination, class divide, political organization, and a host of other driving aspirations bearing on the spirit of the age. Azra Abbas’s ramblings, both prose and poetic, reflect this trend in abundance.
Her poem My Shadow would seem to abruptly conclude the ‘end’ of her ‘beginning’:
My shadow/does not fall on the ground/with the sun’s reflection/nobody calls me/by my name/while portioning out food/the platter with my share/is not placed before me/my voice is not heard in the din/when a crime is committed/my name is not entered/in the criminal’s list/no invitation arrives/in my name/I am not counted/among those waiting in line/my footsteps/are inaudible/but whenever someone sees one/they plunge a dagger/in me.