October 31, 2004

TORTURE has often been considered as the ultimate form of denying human dignity, ruthlessly shattering a victim’s concept of self to cause, in effect, a cognitive death. The shameful fact remains that throughout the history of human ‘civilizations’ regimes have inflicted deliberate physical and mental damage on dissenters to control them as well as mutilate and terrorize society into submission. Yet, time and again, the torturers have been unable to obliterate the victim’s resolve. The defiant power of the human spirit prevailed.

Be it Vanunu enduring 18 years’ imprisonment with 11 years of solitary imprisonment, the Holocaust victims or the Abu Ghraib prisoners. The question is ‘how’? Is there something like the ‘Will to meaning’, the uniquely human quest to find the meaning of life and hold on to this meaning, allowing a person to survive unimaginable horrors? Is Nietzsche right when he articulated, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Or is survival possible through the creation of “counter realities”, as Henry James put it?

Maniza Naqvi, in her fictional book, Stay With Me, focuses on the trauma of torture and the triumph of the human spirit over tyranny, occupation and repression. The protagonist, a journalist, is tortured and ordered to renounce the articles that she wrote denouncing the policies of a military regime. As she moves in and out of consciousness, the reader gets glimpses of her past life and her identity as a woman is reconstructed. The character manages to find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, facing a fate that is out of her control — epitomizing the uniquely human potential, an ability to transform personal tragedy into a triumph.

While tortured by her interrogators, the protagonist survives by searching her previous memories: “Think past this. It was not always dark. She had memory of the light. She had memory of light.” The powerlessness of the main character in confinement is coupled with her determination to survive and the redemptive power of love. “Don’t think so much you had said, don’t look for so much meaning. There is only this, there is only love. It is simple, it is clear.”

Interrogators’ ugliness juxtaposed against the beauty of love. As Viktor E. Frankl, well-known psychiatrist, father of logotherapy and a holocaust victim, wrote about how he psychologically survived Auschwitz, “A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

One has to give credit to Naqvi for dealing with a difficult and extremely relevant topic of subjugation torture by the state, balancing the aesthetic content of the book with the political topics. Pablo Neruda thought that those who wanted to separate his political poetry from the rest were enemies of poetry for separating ethics from aesthetics meant distancing the man from his work. Maniza Naqvi’s novel is an aesthetic outburst that celebrates the spirit of survival.

 

Stay With Me

By Maniza Naqvi

Sama Editorial & Publishing Services, 4th Floor, Imperial Court, Dr Ziauddin Ahmed Road, P.O. Box 12447, Karachi-75530

Website: www.samabooks.com

Available with Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi

Tel: 021-5683026

Email: libooks@cyber.net.pk Website: www.libertybooks.com

ISBN 969-8784-00-4

176pp. Rs375

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