Hamza Asad’s poetry is about a brazen and unapologetic honesty. —Photo credit: The Student Diaries Facebook page

To be a poet is an act of faith. In Pakistan – a country that has fallen ever deeper and harder into the abyss of extremism – even that seems like paltry little.

And yet, there are poets, growing in nooks and crannies where hate has forgotten to look, and where despair has not yet made a permanent home. It must be just such an overlooked corner of Peshawar that begot Hamza Asad.

A medical student turned poet, Asad begins his collection of poems The Student Diaries with a quote from Ameer Hamza Shinwari:

Taking Sides with rivals does not suit the brave
Learn from Hamza_ the art of love.

To relinquish conflict in a land that is so riven with it, is an act of the truly brave.

I wrote about Hamza Shinwari, not long ago, lamenting the condition of his mausoleum in Peshawar and of the disrepair and dereliction of the literary centre in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that bears his name. That first Hamza is gone now, but this young Hamza lives.

The turbulence of a youth spent amid the contrasting worlds of the past and the present is everywhere in the short volume of collected poems he has published himself to share with the world.

In the essay that precedes the poems, Hamza speaks of the “iOS/Apple” generation to which he belongs and from which he feels alienated.

Technology, of course, is a somewhat novel condition for the poet; isolation a perpetual one. His dearest memory recounted in the preface is an evocation of just that; the funeral of a much-loved grandmother in Toru, Mardan.

The lost are never lost to poets, even when they are taken by death.

Written mostly in free verse, Hamza Asad’s poetry is raw and jagged and like youth itself, often contradictory. The themes are not new, unrequited love, a sense of being different, a longing for childhood, a confusion with adulthood, all threading their way through the volume.

In the poem titled Solitude, he poignantly describes the self-absorption of love as:

When the stars would disappear, for all the lovers in the town,
My heart would cease to beat, to see the bliss all around.

In another poem, entitled The Mullah and The Prostitute, he takes aim at the contrasts of a society simultaneously obsessed with the beauty of women and with controlling them as completely as possible. In the The Teacher, he gathers words for a homage to a deceased teacher, a Sir Aftab who taught his students much and inspired at least this one to turn to verse.

Hamza Asad’s poetry is not about finesse or form; it is about a brazen and unapologetic honesty.

In verse, sometimes deft and sometimes crudely constructed, he lays out his deepest self, sometimes legible and sometimes not, for the consumption of the reader.

It is a fervent glimpse into the world on the cusp of what is and what will be; a small town in Khyber where the poet is a student, a world where social media insures that all is constantly connected and yet whose pain is invisible to even those in the rest of Pakistan.

Perhaps if it reaches readers, a volume like Student Diaries will point to the possibility of some small reprieve from the bleak depravity of now; maybe if poetry lives on, hope can too.