| January 18, 2003 | Saturday | Ziqa'ad 14, 1423 |
Moot on women’s rights
He did say he’ll come. He hasn’t come yet. Shall we wait for him? Shall we wait? Wait for ever?
— Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot.
When Sarmad Sehbai, the screenwriter and poet ended his “thesis” on what he called the “Theatre of Absence” (reminded one of the well-known literary construction of the Theatre of the Absurd) one could discern the forlorn hope of an artist for a deus ex machina, as it were, to reverse the present theatre and art scenario.
Speaking to a selected lively audience at the Islamabad Cultural Forum on Friday evening, he talked of the “marketer”, who, he thought, was hand in glove with the literary hack and had, as he put it, “brought up the hybrid child of cinema, theatre, and television”.
No wonder behind a veneer of what can be called his “couldn’t careless” attitude to changing patterns in art, our dear speaker seemed to deride the “monetization” of the visual”. One could clearly see it when he talked about the “presence” deferred for the cash to take over.
Yes, the visual, as compared to the word, as he would say with a Hamlet, is the thing. And this is against the age-old background that the word is held sacred against the pagan and the free-flowing nature of the image, and since the “visual” is threatening and is feared by the “word”, a “culture of absence” is born to express itself in words and sounds; words that Taufiq Rafat (with whose line he began the speech) would describe as having a “posthumous tone”. Perhaps coming to the scene in visual arts in Pakistan — a text-oriented society — the “word” must cancel the “visual” to survive. “It must suppress and control the ‘Nowness’ of performing arts. He found this in our poetry which is primarily the description of hijer (separation). The poet dismisses visaal (union with the beloved) as he finds it banal and transitory. In this scenario, therefore, romancing the “absence” is what art is all about.
Sehbai thought that Western rationalism and scientific revolution played havoc with the “culture of absence”. He gave example from a mod TV networks (designed, one thought with a “commercial” eye on, as it were, the youth culture!) to illustrate his arguments. He talked of a famous Pakistani kathak dancer rendering Faiz; and wanted to probe why the combination of two art forms and two great artist could go wrong. The rendition, he thought, fell flat on the audience. “Was it the demonic revenge of art that had exposed the great masters? The visual and the verbal cancelled each other and we had both Apollo and Dionysus, dead on the stage”, he argued. He felt that perhaps, the performance of a kathak dancer could not out-manoeuvre it’s own textuality and the linear rendering of the poem. He gave the analogy of the classical music where the notes subvert the poetic metrics by not faithfully declaiming but by sliding the words. (one thought of khayal, for instance). He gave the example Charlie Chaplin in his silent films; the death scene of the mother in Sattyjit Ray’s Apu Sansar (done in cold silence but shakes the whole screen with emotions); Edward Munch’s painting the Shriek (where the form is silent but the whole canvass is shuddering with sound, creating a frozen scream).
So to him in art the dichotomy disappears; for art disrupts the order and subverts the hierarchy of forms.
Sehbai talked of the image preceding the word in the South Asian context. In Pakistan one looked towards the Mughal princes and the nawabs of Delhi and Lucknow. Inder saba, the poetic opera was taken as a model and was later developed into the new theatre of Agha Hashar, who made an attempt to blend colonial theatre with traditional notanky. The native “Sheikh-Pir”, also known as the Indian Shakespeare provided the model for the screenplay of Pakistani cinema. The dance and music formula with havelis was occasionally intruded upon by Western culture in the form of a villain which eventually became Aslam Pervez with his smoking pipe and felt hat.
By the early eighties, this hierarchy, so would tell our speaker, was reversed and the Punjabi folk hero, Jugga boomeranged in the personality of Mustafa Qureshi and Sultan Rahi. The birth of the Punjabi villain destroyed the cinematic culture of Urdu movies. It was no longer the hero who was fighting the establishment but the ruthless villain. The regional culture of Punjab had toppled the mainstream aesthetics linked with feudal and orthodox socio-political forces. Close to the ruthless villain stood the ‘vulgar’ comedian; the film formula had its share of comedy that took over the main plot with growing popularity of comedians such as Munawar Zarif, Rangeela and Lehri.
According to Sehbai the vulgar comedian, the terrifying villain and the dirty dancer make the great triangle of our get- real culture. The trio rules the other Pakistan that lies subliminally under the mainstream display of art and culture. He called these the tragic flaws of Pakistani performing arts.
Dilating on the performance on the alternative theatre in Pakistan (groups inspired by Marxist revolution and the newly adopted concepts of feminism and liberalism) he said it did not have plots but manifestoes and “in their enthusiasm broke the fourth wall and turned the stage into a pulpit”. He talked of the sixties and early seventies when the post-partition generation raised heretic questions; like “the Other, Dionysus grappling with Apollo”. Poets revolted against grammarians and the custodians of conventional art. On came, as he would make us believe, what he called the revenge of art.
But can the present situation be reversed? And who will do it? Shall we wait? The monologue ended, and the audience took over asking him all sorts of questions arising out of the thesis built by him.
Now a word about Sarmad Sehbai. Ashfaq Salim Mirza told us that he was a poet and a screenwriter who has pioneered modern theatre with his very first play The Dark Room. It has been published and performed in English, Punjabi and Urdu. One finds in his poetry new forms and original imagery. He has written and directed Fankar Gali, a 90-minute video film, now being subtitled in English to enter international festivals. Most of his productions have received national and international awards. Currently he is working on Shadow of the Red Hair, a play based on the paintings of Edward Munch, which he is directing for the Nushk theatre in Oslo. He is also writing a novel in the English language.
Art is long and life is short, they say. One wished one could give a detailed narration of the excellent discussion that ensued after the speech, but if wishes were. — Mufti Jamiluddin Ahmad
LAST WEEK, an NGO arranged a meeting here to discuss the state of women in southern Punjab. The organizers had invited people of various schools of thought to hold a dialogue on the improvement of women’s rights. MPA Zaibunisa Qureshi of Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal presided, while among the speakers was the Multan task force coordinator of Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, Rashid Rahman.
He criticized the Hudood law and called for recognition of the role and rights of women in the present day realities.
This reportedly irked Ms Qureshi and one of her companions, Uzma Nisar. They took it as criticism of Islamic values. A tense situation prevailed throughout the proceedings.
The forum hit the headlines of some Urdu dailies. One of the headlines was: Criticism of Islam: woman MPA of Majlis-i-Amal comes hard on an NGO official.
The news items quoted Ms Nisar as labelling Mr Rahman an atheist who openly mocks religious norms. At this, he submitted an application to the district police officer for registration of a case against Ms Nisar and reporters of newspapers for maligning him.
He pledged that he was a Muslim and the irresponsible conduct of the lady and the newspapers had not only hurt him, but had also put his life in danger. The police told Mr Rahman that they would decide the fate of the application on merit.
THE other day, Multan DPO Hamid Mukhtar spoke at a press conference to inform that the police had tracked down a gang of carjackers. He said a Karachi-based firm which installed safety devices in vehicles to prevent theft informed the police that someone had snatched a car (LRE-482) from its client, Yasir Ishaq, a resident of Faisalabad, near Jhang and now the snatcher(s) had entered Multan via Muzaffargarh. The firm was monitoring the movement of the vehicle through satellite signals being received through the device implanted in the car.
The DPO constituted teams to intercept the vehicle. The police spotted the vehicle near Khad factory in the Seetal Marri police station area. In the meanwhile, the firm switched off the car engine through satellite link. The robbers were about to flee when the police caught them. They were four in number. One of them was injured in what the DPO claimed was a shootout between him and the law-enforcers.
Overwhelmed with success, the DPO announced that he was recommending the names of the police team, including an SP and a DSP, for reward and promotion for show of bravery.
When a newsman reminded him that the credit went to the firm rather than the police who had just fired at a sitting duck, the DPO reportedly remarked: “What could the firm had done if we had not answered its call in time?”
WOMEN councillors’ network, Multan, has opposed the allocation of development funds to MNAs and MPAs. The network thinks that members of parliament should focus on legislation, and the task of development should only be entrusted to the local bodies.
It said if the government wanted to give the legislators any role in development, it should not be more than that of a monitoring nature.