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Pushto poetry's holy sinner By Mushir Anwar Unlike much old school Pushto poetry, Hasham Baber's verse is not a hill torrent; it's more like a serpentine rivulet that works its way through thickets of thought and tangles of emotion worrying all the while where its undetermined course would take it. Away and away it seems to go from its source. The limpid yearning fails to lighten the darkening mood, the over-riding sense of erosion and of straying in pathless woods. Prefacing his first collection Ghani Khan impatiently dumps him as an existentialist that to be one was still very much a fad in the sixties. But the grand old Tagorian does not fail to admire the young poet's modern sensibility and effusively calls him 'the best poet of his generation, the true and faithful interpreter of his age.' Now, Hasham's fourth collection is under print which contains his work of the last 20 years. His spurts of creativity oscillate between long periods of hibernation or total barrenness, which he finds to be quite natural. The sources of inspiration lie in deep slumber. One has no way knowing when and how they will wake up. And if they didn't, that too was no problem. What is indeed unique and rare is the creative vigil of some of our prolific poets whose unceasing gush of productivity remains operational the year round on a nine to five basis. They need no fallow acre of time to refurbish the sap. It is a great gift indeed but ultimately the poet ends up with a too unwieldy volume of Kulliyat (complete works) that he or she must carry as part of his or her's mortal remains on the last voyage. Fat dictionaries make sense, not obese tomes of verse. Hasham Baber is very companionable in this sense. He gives time to get familiar with his work, ample time. Being a man of the world also, Hasham Baber is not a poet in totality should that mean someone who does not do anything else. He is a progressive farmer who plans to grow exotic herbs and vegetables on his land and who has recently become active in politics on the intellectual side of his party, ANP, and divides his time between his village Mathura, near Peshawar, and Islamabad where his elegant wife manages a hotelling business. So he is not altogether an all time devotee of the Muses. Having been a civil servant for well over thirty years he has known and exercised authority. To such men inspiration comes with caution, without its seizures. So in Hasham Baber's verse there is a constant self-examination that seeks intimations of authenticity and permanence in things. Time mystifies him no end. He measures it in terms of his beloved's patience, a scale he then calibrates in degrees of his persistence to know its expanse. It would stop if he didn't wind his watch in the misty morning I wake up Winding my watch To somehow fix time somewhere Love, the abiding theme of our poetry, is framed as a mad cat in a supernatural scene. Night, necromancy, the old hag and myself Are all together, but the plaintive cat Claws the night in mad isolation What you are is what I am, he tells his love. This is the secret of my being, the wisdom in my madness. But how can mad people know about each other's agony, he asks questioning the worth of this wisdom. So unless love is totally incomprehensible it would not be love, for on the brink of perfection/ the soul gives birth to a madness. This perfection is a moment of startling clarity, upon encountering death or union with love. Thus Hashem Baber connects love, madness and death in a triangular relationship. This triangle lies in a circle of mystic overtures: You, the master, boundless in abundance I, a seed too tiny a clasp too mean to hold you in embrace. He asks the Ocean if its depth ever feels the thirst. When you make me, unmake me you do indeed undo yourself and your garden of Eden, and your Hell are but rooms of your household. In another poem he argues: It is good I don't know your mind, nor your mood, so I seek no pardon, nor expiate for my sins. For man's expulsion from the place of eternal bliss he wonders who is to be blamed? Satan, Eve, himself or the Event Manager. Hasham Baber faces the savagery of his passion with equanimity, tempering his verse with a humanism that is averse to traditional ideals of valour, vendetta and vanity which ostensibly garb the Pakhtun machism. From his love all he wants is peace: Leave these protracted plaints awhile Your tender grudges. After love This highland brute Should have an hour of peace His treatment of despair, loss and futility that our age dooms us all to contend with, is another area which makes his verse rather unique in Pashtu tradition. But being a Pakhtun he has the advantage of being closer to fellow human beings. His culture is more democratic. Men chat easily regardless of class; domestics do not hold their heads down and keep their mouths shut in servility. There is no silence in the Khan's hujra or wherever two are within hearing range of each other. This is reflected in Hasham Baber's easy access to the depths of the human heart: Not chains but secrets of the heart bind the slave. The way society is falling apart and the change that is occurring in human relations appears in the anguish that pervades his verse: Does this city stand on its own roots or is it sunk in the decomposed mire of its dead? The sorrows of mankind are all old, so new pains and new pleasures remain unknown to me. Hasham Baber's piquantly post-heroic verse reveals a droll epicurean who relishes a medium leg of lamb as much as a cob of corn smoked in bush fire; and a holy sinner - half a drunkard, half a priest-who hastens his isha prayers to fly to the fount of inspiration, to be at one with all / to be all encompassing. Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)
