Powerful presence

May 16, 2015

137

Mohsan Saleem

Afshan Shafi acclimatises Pakistan with a new style of poetry

Poetry no longer occupies the place it did in our society. Newer generations find fewer people attracted to it. They don’t understand it. And hardly anybody, especially from the younger lot, indulges in it.

That is especially true of English. Urdu still has its share of adherents, though it is declining. And local languages still manage to sprout some talent here and there.

Afshan Shafi’s Odd Circles is a powerful deviation from this trend. This is her first collection of poems to be published, though she has written for a number of literary journals and magazines, including ditch, Inkwell and Quill, Full of Crow, and the Toucan Magazine.

This is her first collection of poems to be published, though she has written for a number of literary journals and magazines, including ditch, Inkwell and Quill, Full of Crow, and the Toucan Magazine

She brings a style that is new to Pakistan, at least. Often conservative with words, though also quite generous on occasion, her titles are also strange and mysterious. The beginning of the first poem in the collection, This, is affine example:

She doesn’t enter rooms,

They way other slender women do.

She digresses each time

From the brashly hatched,

Each time more coolly evolved, more mulled over

Though striated with the rush of the beginnings.

It was, in ways, natural for her to gravitate towards poetry. Her grandmother Farhat Attiqur Rahman, wife of a former governor, was also a poetess. But she was a forced introvert of sorts. Her husband’s position, among other things, led her to keep her writings secret during her life.

Afshan is more forthcoming, more direct. Everything about her poetry suggests that. She got serious about writing after post-grad, and attended poetry school in London. Her interest grew from there, of course, after interacting with British poets. She wrote creatively for the next six years or so, but started contributing to UK, US and Canadian magazines three years later. Her biggest inspirations are names like Sylvia Plath, Frank o hara, Fredrick Seidel, Wallace Stevens, Stevie Smith,and Sharon Olds.

Pakistan is a difficult place for poetry, and she agrees. “There is a void in our culture”, she says. “There is emptiness where there should be poetry”. But that is partly because there are no incentives or rewards for poets here, unlike other, more refined places. That is strange, considering how Iqbal, who came up with the idea of Pakistan, was a poet.

Other than poetry, she edits a literary journal, Abbreviate Journal, which she just started. And for her day job she reports, edits and copywrites for an NGO.

It will be interesting to see though how successfully her poetry is able to penetrate Pakistan’s literary society. Her writing style is definitely very ‘different’, and not easily understood

It will be interesting to see though how successfully her poetry is able to penetrate Pakistan’s literary society. Her writing style is definitely very ‘different’, and not easily understood. Here’s an example from a poem, Still crest:

The water in the pond,

Is winter, distilled, into terra finite.

Or is it January’s binary skull,

Enclosed in the cleft grey

Sodden moss

It is not just eddy and scum

However that create

The risked perturbation

That renders the wave mortal

And titles like Star lark, I will be only,

Her book, without a doubt, is a welcome addition to Pakistan’s drying literary scene. And the best compliment it could generate would be a similar effort by another, perhaps another unique and provocative style.