June 22, 2003

On May 29, the poet, Hima Raza, died, after struggling for her life for several days, following a tragic car accident in London. The daughter of Raza and Naseem Kazim, she was born in Lahore in 1975 into a distinguished family with a strong intellectual and literary tradition. She started writing poetry as an undergraduate at Kinnaird College and in 1997, she graduated from the University of New South Wales in Australia. She went on to do her MPhil at the University of Sussex and was due to join the faculty of Beaconhouse University in Lahore, after teaching creative writing at LUMS over the past few years.

Earlier this year, the British Council had selected Hima and Uzma Aslam Khan to represent Pakistan at the UK-South Asian Women Writers Conference in Delhi this April. Sadly the Indians denied the two Pakistani delegates, a visa.

I only knew her through the fine analytical quality of her reviews and her two, innovative collections of experimental poetry Memory Stains (Minerva 2000) and Left-Hand-Speak (Alhamra, 2002) which had been received with critical acclaim. She had already forged new directions in Pakistani English poetry with her sparse poems cascading across the pages, using space and structure to endow each word with its own imagery and resonance.

Through her verse, she explored issues of language, culture and identity. She wrote about the colonial encounter, past history and present conflict, including the imposition of an alien language — English — at the cost of her mother tongue. She addressed East-West duality, racial and cultural stereotypes, narratives of empire and today’s neo-colonialism. Some of her poems revealed rich sensuous images layered with metaphors.

Her second collection Left-Hand-Speak was particularly striking. She broke new ground with her two poems “Us in two tones” and “In translation” which employ two different languages and scripts — English and Urdu — to meld together the two cultures, in which she was immersed. These poems will surely open out infinite possibilities to other bilingual Pakistani English language poets in the future. I am glad that my daughter, Kamila, had a chance to meet Hima, even if I didn’t. Kamila spoke of her with warmth and thought her recent work a huge leap, in particular “the intertwining of English and Urdu verse”. Kamila felt “that here was a writer who would be writing really interesting and original verse in the years to come.”

In a tribute to Hima, the expatriate writer and critic Aamer Hussein says, “Hima was a fine and innovative poet who showed a range and skill which were growing and deepening with each successive poem. Particularly impressive was her bilingual poetry in which she wove alternating verses of Urdu and English, each language expressing various nuances of a sensibility at ease in both traditions but, in her own phrase, the product of a languageless generation.

“More recently, in her hard hitting and fearless poems about the state of the world in the new millennium, Hima was moving in yet another direction, following her models Faiz and Neruda on the route to a lyricism, heightened by political ire. Her academic work in the post-colonial field on Rushdie in comparison with Faiz and other Urdu progressives was gaining her growing respect in the notoriously closed world of British academia.

“Hima’s sensibility was rare in her generation in that it was marked by an understanding of the humanist strand of the Islamic intellectual. She was a dear, loyal and supportive friend whose opinion I valued greatly in spite of an age difference. I lament the passing of the poet, the intellectual, and most of all the human being she was — full of moral courage, integrity, and loyal love for the world she made her own.”

At B & A we mourn her untimely death and reprint her poems, as a tribute.

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