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Ah! This weighty balderdash By Mushir Anwar I would with much cheer read on my friend Sami Ahuja's remarkably stylish prose without trying to understand what he is talking about but the sheer labour that has gone into making it so unreadable coaxes me to find what the man is saying. This manufactured litany must be hiding some intangible piece of wisdom that like all good lessons I must learn with application. Ahuja has always had such oracular knots in his pronouncements that you have knitted your brows to disentangle. Who knows in years to come, in another era probably when published texts would be passed through computer machines to find their meaning, some cipher boards of experts may sit down to programme the deconstruction of Qaid der Qaid or Tilisme Dehshat, Sami Ahuja's latest fiction. He is an old buddy from the days in the golden Fifties when Major Akhtar Ahsen used to be a kind of guru in his iconoclastic circle that held its daily evening meets at Pindi's then reputed Cafi de Vogues. Akhtar Ahsen in those days was toying with some new forms of verse that transfigured ordinary sense retaining metre and rhyme. The elderly Ustads espied him with suspicion but his feats amazed the dilettantes. The rabbits and pigeons that he ferreted out dazzled their wits. But Akhtar Ahsen with his academic excellence always get away with his pranks that appeared to be saying something profound. Then his imagery was magical. Ahuja, at that time was writing a crime thriller figuring a Kola Centre beauty by the name of Shabbo. He alone in the Vogue's crowd remained unimpressed by Ahsen who, on his part, seemed not to notice him at all. In the Sixties when time had crawled to a halt and the intellectual scene had become quite foggy, it was not noticed when Shabbo carried Ahuja away. Ah! How time passes. Now Sami has sent me a poetry and a prose collection each of Iftikhar Jalib's scholarly assertions and repudiations vis-a-vis modern verse both of which tangentially escape my pre-modern intellect. Sending these with his own books of short stories has a message. I am being told to educate myself and free my mind of its old cobwebs to tune into the frequencies of our new millennium, already five years old. It is time to unlearn and learn a few things. Words are independent of objects and concepts. It is not a poet's job to communicate. In fact if he knows what he is saying he is not much of a poet. It is after a poet has written a poem that he comes to know what he has said. And that too very approximately. His real meaning can only be extracted by linguisticians. The poet and the reader will then sit side by side and both try to understand the poem with the help of commentaries. A Faiz poem which Iftikhar Jalib has thus deconstructed in one of his essays in Tashkilat has been reduced to decomposed pulp like a corpse after post mortem. True, words have a dynamics of their own and often lead one to stray into strange territory but that is always in relation to their meaning, their associations and the way the creative writer stretches their use. You may coin a new word indeed but it must relate to something in your mind. Otherwise it will merely be an arrangement of the alphabets. There's no art to know the mind's construction in the face, as Shakespeare said but mercifully we have the dictionary to find the meanings of difficult words. A dictionary of meaningless words has not so far been published and probably will never be published because the purpose of dictionaries is to make communication easy. Having words that do not relate to objects or concepts is like having eyes without the function of sight: Two inverted marble blobs that are gazing at something inside the skull. Happy and sad memories too are constructs of words in the mind. Last month when poet Hassan Abid was here in Islamabad to take his mind off his recent bereavement we read some of this post modern stuff together to mutually explore the tough terrain of the poet's mind. Defeated and quite exasperated, he said people did not want to admit they could not understand that kind of mad verse, if verse that was. He said he was greeted with a show of displeasure at a TV discussion recently when he dumped Meeraji's poetry as inane and vapid. Yet, when he read a Meeraji poem and asked the participants to explain what the poet was saying, all that followed was a long minute of awkward silence. A silence like that one finds often translating into abstruse comments like Shamsur Rahman Faruqui's who skirts the issue by saying Ahuja and Iftikhar Jalib are inventors of a unique and stunning style. The theory that is being put forward is that the poet is a subject of his verse and has no control over it. In fact he is a product of his product; layered all over, a kind of human onion. But does one have the time to unravel such dark desi mysteries. Kishwar Naheed has recounted to her unborn daughter a lengthy catalogue of her foreign readings more than half of which I know nothing about even having been born in the last century. Iftikhar Jalib is nowhere in that list. Nor, for that matter, is Sara Shagufta, reading whose poem Aadha Kamra I felt I must return to school and change the entire scheme of my perceptions, have a brain transplant: Finding me alone/ Sartre went away to Freud's room/who would fall with his theory/ the worth of his book I knew/ but after all he was Sartre/ and tomorrow we were to meet in public/when I pointed to the crowd he said/what would you do with so many Sartres! Dr Tehseen Firaqui in his article on Joseph Epstein's essay "Who killed Poetry" has quoted T.S.Eliot who argued that the complexity of modern life was bound to figure in contemporary verse. So the poet of today is more elaborate, more involved and more indirect. This may be a virtue and indeed the eminent poets of Eliot's time - Yeats, Auden, Cummings, Stevens et al - produced great poetry without being too obscure and unnecessarily complicated. The vagueness did not translate into bland language, vulgar and unsophisticated expression. And their viewpoint was as one could see through the fog of the day. That freshness of approach liberated the vision from its conventional hold but not from the discipline of art which makes the beauty of things tangible, gives shape to chaos and lends order to anarchy very much like the chef who chooses and measures his ingredients to get the exact taste and the gardener who picks and places his flowers to form a bouquet. But of course one has all the liberty to make a fool of oneself and even feel rewarded with a few nodding heads. Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)
