FAHMIDA Riaz has chosen the right moment for her counter-attack. She seems to have concluded to settle accounts with the critics and all those male chauvinists, who had vehemently censured her for her bold expression on the occasion of the publication of her first collection of verse, Badan Darida.
She has had to wait for long. Badan Darida was published during 1973-74. It rocked the then literary world. Readers were surprised to find a young girl talking about the man-woman relationship in a very uninhibited way. Soon, she was under heavy attack from different quarters. She was charged of being immodest and obscene. Critical judgment often crossed all limits and turned into a judgment on the poet’s personal behaviour. Fahmida Riaz was in trouble.
This kind of hue and cry was not new in our literary world. Ismet Chughtai may be deemed as her forerunner. She had to face the same kind of charges for her short-story Lehaf. But Ismet enjoyed a position of strength. She had the full support of a literary movement, which then dominated the literary scene. And she enjoyed the company of some male contemporaries, most of all Manto, who shared the hostility meted out to her by the conservatives of their time. But poor Fahmida was a lonely soul enjoying no such support. The rebellious spirit which informed our literature during the thirties and the forties had now cooled down. The rebels of those years had now turned moderates. Fahmida might have felt lonely and discouraged. Was it for this reason that soon after that she pushed back her sex-feminist experience and turned to politics? There she found a host of companions giving her confidence in herself. So in later years, she began writing revolutionary poetry which knew no sex. And with that the quality of her verse went down.
With the rise of feminism in our time Fahmida seems to have regained her confidence in respect of her badan darida poetry. Now she speaks from a position of strength. The feminist movement is on her side. So now while challenging her male adversaries, she is flanked on her left and right by a host of female writers, whose articles may be found reinforcing her offensive. Here is a volume titled, Khamoshi ki Awaz compiled by Fatima Hasan and Asif Farrakhi. It is a collection of feministic writings, articles by female writers and those male writers who have chosen to plead the case of females, more particularly of female writers.
More forceful among them is Fahmida as she has a personal case to fight and hence is more concrete in her attack. Fahmida has argued in a convincing way. She wonders that the mere use of two words in her poems, aag (fire) and piyas (thirst) sent a thrill in the hearts of her sex-obsessed male contemporaries. They derived far-fetched meanings from these two words and concluded that the poems were autobiographical.
In defence of her mentioning certain parts of a woman’s body she reminds us that poets for long have been doing so under the metaphorical cover of apples, pomegranates and roses. She is emphatic in reminding us that they are not vegetables, neither fruits nor flowers; they are living parts of the human body. She views her case to mention them bluntly as an attempt to strip them of their metaphorical trappings.
Fahmida insists that the poems included in Badan Darida carry with them a deep sense of sorrow and anguish. Of course, she admits, there are poems in the collection, which speak of the poet’s faith in sex as an experience full of pleasure and exultation. But why should, she asks, this feeling of the poet infuriate our critics, and why should they brand it obscene? And how innocently she asks that if a few poems speak of female sexuality, why should it be branded immodest and vulgar? She insists that if such an expression in the case of the male is regarded as the affirmation of the self, in case of women, too, it should be taken as the affirmation of the dignified female self.
I was just saying that Fahmida had chosen the right moment for her counter-attack. Is it really so? The Shariat Bill has been passed by the NWFP Assembly and all the pretty faces on the billboards in Lahore have been smeared with black paint. To top them all, the reformists in the Punjab University have taken the bold step to purge English literature’s classics of all that they regard as obscene and vulgar.
But it is precisely for this reason that Fahmida’s decision to defend what she had written thirty years ago has acquired relevance. As said before, Pakistan has witnessed during recent decades the emergence of two forces opposed to each other, the mullahs and the women. Frankly speaking, while the others including the liberals have given in, it has been left for feminism alone to take a stand against the mullahs.
FAHMIDA Riaz has chosen the right moment for her counter-attack. She seems to have concluded to settle accounts with the critics and all those male chauvinists, who had vehemently censured her for her bold expression on the occasion of the publication of her first collection of verse, Badan Darida.
