June 30, 2002

NEW YORK: A gathering of poets and writers, euphemistically posted as a ‘Dialogue among civilizations’ drew a packed conference room at the Mid-Manhattan Library on Fifth Avenue recently. There was no dialogue, instead a fair dose of poetry and prose recital, some good, and some pedestrian.

The organizers, the UN Society of Writers, should have taken pity on the caged crowd as a largish segment of the recitation was in French (mercifully we were spared Latin!). The Francophone dominance became so obvious that the moderator, George Dickerson, asked the audience how many understood French. Four or five tentative hands went up. Still, the audience, comprising different nationalities, stoically sat through the two-hour event. Only two went off to sleep, sparing the organizers the humiliation of hearing them snore!

Isabelle Balot, a petite Frenchwoman stylishly turned out and working with the UN in Manhattan, courted assiduously the audience with her riveting recital in French. Swinging softly her arms, swaying gently her head, inflecting frenetically her voice and emitting high emotion with her expressive eyes and chiselled face, Balot was a study in Gaelic charm, albeit a trifle tantalizing.

Her piece de resistance was a poem called ‘Kabul in which she described (in French, later translated into English) the majesty, grandeur and the physical and spiritual dimension of the place and its people. She captured the beauteous sunrise and the sunsets in a war-torn city and coloured it with blood, sand and tears, moving us enough to sit still and barely breathe. We joined in her sincerity and marvelled at her empathy. For, indeed, Balot’s eyes must have borne some testimony to these verisimilitudes she had penned.

The audience’s suspension of disbelief was short-lived. When a questioner innocently asked when she had visited Kabul, it turned out Balot had never set foot there! Blushing a little, she defended her “poetic license” by mentioning the work of another Frenchman who had written about Venice, never having visited the city. Do two poetic goops make one right?

In sharp contrast was Talat Abbasi. Understated, soft-spoken and fully focused on her reading of an extract from her collection of short stories Bitter gourd and other stories, her emphasis being on her work not the histrionics.

“When I write, I am just myself, I am totally free,” states Abbasi decorously. She is a Pakistani working with the UN and has been living in New York for many years. She is too serious to trifle with florid sentiment or rush into superlatives about her work and her Muse. “ I would never write if I did not feel strongly about something,” she answers me in one liners. “I have no agenda, no role play or a mandate to follow.”

Indian storytellers like Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri have already wrested a literary niche in the US, weaving a web of immigration tales that have a certain haunting panache. Followed closely as New York Times calls them ‘India’s post-Rushdie generation’ are Raj Kamal Jha, Arundhati Roy and Pankaj Mishra. They too are making a noisy splash with their slew of new fiction on the American literary landscape.

Where is the literary oomph among Pakistanis? Dare one suggest that Abbasi get a pushy literary agent? “Don’t forget, Indians have a much larger base out here...they have their publishing houses...and if you were to look at the issue proportionately, I think Pakistanis are doing equally well on the literary scene,” Abbasi tells me. Still, we as Pakistanis are not aggressive enough in marketing ourselves the way the Indians have penetrated the intellectual scene.

Bitter gourd and other stories have at least put Abbasi on an international circuit (if not right at the top) and won her well-earned recognition: “...the vividness and immediacy of the writing made them ideal for radio, especially for an international audience,” says Elisabeth Edwards. A producer of BBC World Service; Robert Shapard, editor Sudden Fiction International pays his homage: “Talat Abbasi is one of the best story writers in English today — many of these stories are contemporary classics.”

A fellow Pakistani writer, Sara Suleri, whose Meatless days hooked the reader until one read the book through, praises Bitter gourd: “...beautifully written and choreographed...will certainly have a lasting impact on contemporary South Asian literature”. Sara teaches English literature at Yale and her admirers — count me in - await her next stem-winder.

Another Pakistani, even softer and more retiring is Amtul Husain. When she began to read her poems, the microphone required repeated adjustment, barely making her audible to the audience at the rear. Husain is a Pakistani-American, who has lived in New York for 25 years and started writing poetry as a child. She read her poem titled “Walls”:

We build walls,/ We build halls,/ Around our calls.../ And then we sob/ Then we pray/ Then we cry/ For someone to come break our walls,/ For someone to enter our halls.../ We cling to the silence and stillness that prevails,/ As we sit there empty handed,/ In lonely halls.

“I write when something touches me. Like my poem on Death (below) or when walking down a street I see a scene...I come home and write about it,” is Husain’s simple answer to my query about the source of her inspiration.

Sometimes as I go about, the skeleton emerges,/ My skin and flesh vanish in a trice,/ The skeleton lurches eerily around./ I hold my breath,/ Terror fills me.../ But it is only me/ Another face of mine./ Let me look at it,/ Let me befriend it,/ One day it too will be gone.

Anis Mirza, who was with Dawn for decades and now lives in New York, can’t help asking Husain during the question and answer session: “There’s deep sadness in the way you look at the world...is that your own outlook or a period of life when you wrote these poems?”

Husain’s reply is convoluted: “basically, I’m a happy person, but when I write, this is what comes out!”

George Dickerson wears another more exotic cap than that of the moderator. He is a member of the Academy of Arts & Sciences that decides who get the Oscars every year! He has written for The New Yorker and Mademoiselle. The only male among six females, Dickerson’s voice sounded good - at least one didn’t have to strain one’s ears - as he began reading from his works that centre around his stay in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war years.

With creative aplomb, he yanked the audience away from the misery of humanity which he underscored effortlessly to a more mundane misery: the time when he was at the mercy of his dentist Hashim for a root canal: (Hashim says)

Screw your pain/ What matters is my artistry/ The nerve must die/ Without anaesthetic

Or his love poem set in France:

Tell me you’ve not forgotten the rain/ Promise a mist of white horse again.../ Tell me you’ve not forgotten the rain.

Dickerson is familiar as an actor in films like “Blue velvet” and the TV series “Hill Street Blues”. The audience wanted more of him, but he gave himself time out because Isabelle Balot had cribbed a chunk for herself in the beginning.

The remaining three women: Patricia Duffy, Sindiwe Magona and Bhikshuni Weisbrot gave the audience their repertoire of creativity. Duffy spoke about her childhood craze for colours and how she learnt that “when you mix all the rainbow colours” as she and her father did, all that they got “was black”!

Weisbrot, who is the secretary of the UN Society of Writers, recited verses from her poems about different places she had visited. “Like the French woman, her poems lack authenticity as they were written from her hotel rooms with a view,” said one woman afterwards.

Magona from South Africa brought the room down with her self regarding quips and pronouncing in Xhosa the longest word in the Guinness Book of Records accompanied with the familiar Bantu clip sound. She has written movingly about AIDS in Africa and like other ills, blames it on apartheid: “When the men were forced to spend 11 months in mines, sexual promiscuity was the result.”

She also talked about the caste system among the blacks where the regulations warranted gradation of rights to qualify to live in urban areas and “created division among Africans triggering black on black violence”. The blacks happily told white journalists how they hated their fellow blacks for being ‘outsiders’, ‘intruders’ even precipitating familial alienation: “husband and wife became strangers, fathers and sons had zero relationships, fathers and daughters sharing the same bed.”

“The African nation was broken, dwarfed beyond repair, where neither, men’s law ruled nor God’s decree prevailed” says Magona, a bestselling author.

Writer’s email: ANJUMNIAZI@cs.com

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