Poet of love and peace
by
Javed Hafiz |
Faiz was a dissident and a pacifist at the same time
Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the distinguished poet, was born in 1911. This month a number of functions were organised in Pakistan and abroad to commemorate his 100th anniversary. Faiz was no ordinary mortal. He was a poet par excellence, a trade unionist and an internationally recognised journalist.
With master’s degrees in English and Arabic, Faiz embodied the best of modern and old literary traditions. He won the Lenin Peace Prize and married a British lady and yet his roots were deep in his native soil. He hated oppression and injustice. His resistance poetry was not mere lip service to the lofty ideals. He actually went to jail more than once and paid for what he believed in.
Faiz was born to Punjabi parents in Sialkot, which had earlier produced an all time great, Iqbal. The parents had rural background but his father was educated enough to find a good job with the Afghan government in Kabul. Faiz witnessed the great economic depression and the World War II that was followed by independence soaked in blood. Faiz started writing poetry when he was a college student. He was impressed by the progressive movement of the 1930s. Anti-imperialism was a major cause with this movement. But when the Soviet Union joined the allies in war, Faiz joined the Public Relations department of the British Army along with some other progressive writers. This job gave him excellent training as a journalist.
Faiz was a dissident and a pacifist at the same time. He was on the wrong side of all Pakistani establishments, except the government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. During that government, he helped the leadership understand the importance of culture and established institutions like the Pakistan Book Foundation and the Academy of Letters. During the 1965 and 1971 wars, Faiz was requested by the governments to write patriotic songs but he refused. He sincerely wished that India and Pakistan should live peacefully like Canada and the USA. At a recent function in Lahore, Shabana Azmi called him a whistle blower who could not brook any injustice or malpractice. In his senior years, Faiz edited Lotus, a cultural magazine published from Beirut by the PLO. He visited Bangladesh, as part of PM Bhutto’s entourage and wrote those famous lines in Dhaka; how many rainy seasons would we require to wash the blood stains (of 1971)?
There is a popular perception that Faiz was a communist and that is not true. Faiz fought for the downtrodden all his life but that did not make him anti-religious. Indeed some of his poems carry strong Islamic metaphor. It is on record that many a prisoner would come to Faiz in Hyderabad jail to learn the Holy Quran. Towards his last days, Faiz went to his village in Sialkot and led prayers at the village mosque. But Faiz never wore his religion on his sleeve nor did he bother to dispel the impression of his being a communist. For him such allegations were trivial. He was a mystic in the tradition of Baba Fareed, Bhagat Kabeer and his ideal was Mansur Hallaj. Telling the truth even at the cost of one’s life like Hallaj and Socrates was the zenith of human virtues.
I have seen Faiz twice, once in Damascus and then in Ottawa. He was a short-statured person and yet a towering intellectual. He was a man of few words and yet very affable. He was full of conviction and commitment. I have enjoyed reading his poetry since my college days. Faiz was a great appreciator of beauty, like Ghalib. He hated all that was ugly in human life, including injustice and oppression. Faiz also knew Persian very well and drew inspiration from Hafez Shirazi, the dean of Persian poets. That made this great romantic poet a master of words and correct expressions. While it is always a treat to read his poems, some of them have been made immortal by artists like Noor Jehan, Iqbal Bano, Mehdi Hasan, Ghulam Ali, Nayyara Noor and Tina Sani. I keep an audio selection of Faiz poems in the car. Reading Faiz is like enjoying a sumptuous feast.
His ultimate beloved was his homeland and its people. When he watches the bright stars from the window of his prison cell he is overjoyed. He thinks that the future of his homeland is bright like the star-lit sky. But during a martial regime he laments, “Why can’t my people walk in their streets with their heads held high? I am ready to sacrifice even my life for those alleys of my country”. Faiz wrote a few Punjabi poems as well in his later years as he thought that was the ideal way to reach the masses.
Many a critic has said that Faiz was poet discussed and enjoyed in upper class drawing rooms only. However, the masses knew that he had written and fought for their causes all his life. His funeral in Lahore in 1984 was huge and full of ordinary folks. His forceful espousal of their causes would have been enough for his redemption.
(Javed Hafiz is Pakistan’s former ambassador to the Sultanate)
Oman Tribune |
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