KARACHI: The one thing that stood out in Dr Fatema Hassan’s talk on Parveen Shakir while introducing a collection of her poems titled Intikhab-i-Kalam: Parveen Shakir at Oxford University Press’s Khalid bin Waleed Road outlet on Wednesday evening was her unadulterated fondness for the late poet.

Dr Hassan showed snippets from two television shows; one was to do with the basic information on Shakir’s life and work, and the other a clip from a mushaira in the ‘80s in which the poet took part with her contemporaries (poets who were born after independence). It was so nice to hear Shakir recite her ghazal and also the fact that among the participants there were the likes of Jamal Ehsani, Ayub Khawar, Salim Kausar, Hasan Rizvi and Shahida Hassan. The television clips turned the atmosphere of the OUP store a tad nostalgic. One of the couplets that the audience heard Shakir recite was:

Jhoot bolun to koi haath pakad laita hai

Lafz mein rooh samooney nahin deta mujh ko

(Someone stops me from telling a lie

Not allowing me to breathe life into my words)

Dr Hassan said she had known the poet since 1974 when she (Hassan) shifted to Karachi from Dhaka. Both lived in the same locality. Shakir would always be found reading books or writing ghazals and nazms. There was a takht in her home and there would be books on and around that takht all the time. Despite the fact that in the early 1970s women poets (Ada Jaffery, Fahmida Riaz, Kishwar Naheed, etc) had already made their presence felt representing important strands of thought, including feminism, Shakir developed her own distinct voice in Urdu poetry.

Dr Hassan claimed that Shakir was inspired by Fahmida Riaz and when she was compiling her first collection Khushbu she requested Riaz to pen an essay (mazmoon) on the book.

Shakir’s diction was the diction of a young girl. Now times had changed. Girls were facing a different set of issues. The issue of double-standards or duplicitous attitude to life, for example, had taken root in society. So Shakir’s ghazals and nazms epitomised a young woman’s emotions and sentiments. She did not rebel (uss ne baghawat nahin ki) but wrote everything that she felt needed to be written. She wrote on ‘love’ without beating about the bush.

Dr Hassan said Shakir had obtained a master’s degree in English literature which was why she could understand the literary and philosophical trends taking shape in the west. Understanding feminism was a result of that.

At that point Dr Hassan told the audience an interesting incident. Once a student asked her why Shakir penned lines like ‘Wo kahin bhi gaya loata to merey paas aya’ (he always returned to me after betraying me), to which she replied that while she didn’t approve of such an approach, one needed to understand the era the poet lived in and her personal life. Shakir did not marry the person she loved.

Dr Hassan said Shakir’s poems from the latter part of her career had a political touch to them. She had begun to experiment with technique too. Hence readers got to read some prose poems in her collection Inkaar. She termed it mature poetry and lamented that Shakir died at a young age (40). Had she lived longer, she would not have been known as a romantic poet because she put pen to paper on many subjects.

The talk was followed by a question and answer session. Answering a question, Dr Hassan said Shakir was influenced by Ahmed Nadim Qasmi.

Published in Dawn, May 22nd, 2014