September 22, 2002

Fehmida Riaz writes with prowess and deliberation. Be it poetry or prose, her virile pen has sinews many of her male contemporaries expend much ink to develop. It is a little belittling to glue her to the female scene. Her campaign for women’s rights does not reduce her to the confines of gender as a writer and a poet. It is a human effort she has joined to raise the felled from the dust. I say felled because I cannot call half of God’s creation as fallen. Fehmida Riaz belongs to neither. We find a measured release of aggression in her dignified writings of protest.

Khat-i-Marmooz is a first collection of stories she has written and published over the years. More known for her poetry, she writes a strong prose, often without effeminate sentimentality. Her stories place characters in combative situations, conflicts that change as the narrative again and again uncovers spots of tension in the tale.

Sex is treated without inhibition and emphasis, as it ought to be if it is meant for a mature readership. Prudes would warn the morally enfeebled but her treatment of sex is delicate and discrete, not evasive, like the description of orgasm in “Personal account”. She can allow total strangers, a Muslim woman and a Jewish man, to copulate on the office floor within an hour’s acquaintanceship. This is how they decipher the “Khat-i-Marmooz”.

Men are ever curious to know the kind of man women fall for. In “Aik muhabbat ki kahani”, Fehmida Riaz gives you her universal model: tall, broad and stupid. One could not agree more with her. This longish love story has been told with taste and rare restraint. It shows the writer’s command over expression that she is able to use with dexterity to capture vicissitudes of emotion and nuances of thought. This is something one finds lacking in most writers of fiction today. It is quite possible to aver that those whose expression is weak are also those who lack perceptive insight into the complexities of human behaviour. One wonders if the reverse is also true, that is, that knowledge of words opens windows of perception. Would there still be perception if there were no words?

I would recommend young writers to read Fehmida Riaz for her language, its inventive turn of the phrase and quite deliberate avoidance of rhetoric. Khat-i-Marmooz has ten stories that offer a varied range of experience — from Emperor Babur in battle to an old man awaiting death, to a woman in labour — and introduce you to Fehmida Riaz’s bold world of human interaction.

Khat-i-Marmooz (Stories)
By Fehmida Riaz
Aaj Ki Kitabein, City Press, 316 Madina City Mall, Abdullah Haroon Road, Karachi-74400
Tel: 021-5650623, 5213916
Email: cp@citypress.cc 
Website: www.citypress.cc
ISBN 969-8379-42-8
132pp. Rs100

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