Farida’s hazy world of impressions: LITERARY ROUND-UP

FARIDA HAFEEZ’S stories in this first collection, Anchal Ki Aag, are not so much fiction per se as they may be considered to be her impressions of life in Pakistan. It is not that impressions do not make a story. They would with technique and treatment. A lot depends on movement that sustains the reader’s interest. Farida does not lack in this last ingredient. In fact her frames move a little bit too fast at times to grasp and retain the image. She ignores both necessary and unnecessary detail. And there is a laboured indirectness that covers all in a haze.

The substance of her tale swings between straight comment and, quite often, a semi-symbolic dialogue between nameless characters that she makes no effort to define in concrete terms. Events like the Ojhri Camp explosion, generic characters (mother, old man, child) and symbols (iron fence, dove, fire, morning) are braided together in a rough uneasy tangle. It appears a blob of paint on the canvas has been randomly brushed into swaths of spaces that Intezar Hussain admits he is clueless about but which makes Mansha Yaad sanguine and that Ejaz Rahi in his effusive eulogy terms as Farida’s ‘theory of art’. Only good writing can evoke such varied comment.

I found her writing more amenable to appreciation through the oblique slant expressed in her dialogue that carries the burden of her impression or which you may call the message of her story. In Crucial Lamha, the key comment on nuclear war is that there will be no witness left and therefore there will be no martyr to celebrate. In Rab Na Karey: “what if my head is bare, my belly too is empty” depicts the obtaining paradox of morality and social justice in Pakistan. In Aanchal Ki Aag, the iron fence symbolizes Partition: “you know who starts a fire? Those who need it to melt iron to make fences, more fences.” And the futility of war between neighbours is established when the antagonist rulers facing each other in the arena wonder why they were fighting when they had no personal enmity.

Her themes are varied and concern larger impersonal issues than we find in women writers who lead a more confined life. Her exposure as a journalist broadens her view. But she is not averse to more intimate gender themes women relish though she has a keener pen for social issues that plague society and the hurt caused by the way life daily slides into degradation on the human scale. Difficulties arise when the more demanding confines of structure, characterization, action and appropriate narrative fail to accommodate the writer’s urgency of purpose and urge for immediacy of communication. Art probably has a delaying function.

It transforms experience and quite evilly, I suppose, slows down honest depiction of raw truth.

Khaliq Ibrahim Khaliq, author of that magnificent story of his life and times, Manzilein gard ki Manind, was here in Islamabad on a short trip to visit his son, Harris Khalique, and meet old friends who are still around and admirers who keep growing. His writer wife, Hamra Khalique, was also with him. There seemed no love lost between them. Several private receptions were organized to meet him among them those by Iftikhar Arif and Kishwar Nahid were attended by Zia Jallandhri, Prof Fateh Mohammad Malik, Agha Nasir, their wives and friends.

Khalique Saheb is in his mid seventies, in good health except for the hearing aid he has to use to eliminate unwanted chatter. It’s a penalty that he says he must pay for the years he has enjoyed living through. He has started writing the second part of his story since 1953 when he migrated to Pakistan. Like his account of the years lived in India before and after independence, this will feature the developments in the social, cultural, intellectual and literary fields and the men and women of letters who have influenced and shaped the complex patterns of life that we see today to be emerging in our Pakistani society and how present trends are likely to shape up as time passes. Those who have read the earlier part of his multi-dimensional biography are aware of the great force and command that he can bring to his narration by piling up facts from his stupendous memory and tie all that up beautifully in a neat bunch like light combines the seven colours of the spectrum. He hopes to complete this account in less than a year. May good digestion wait on appetite, and health on both!

The war against Iraq: MEDIA REVIEW

ONE could almost be forgiven for believing that America actually has a case for attacking Iraq. After all, that stubborn Middle Eastern nation has been refusing to abide by UN resolutions for almost a decade and US President George W. Bush has said enough is enough. So, poor Washington has no choice but to attack Iraq and initiate what is quite benignly being referred to as a “regime change” in that rogue nation. And what better way to do it than by launching a “pre-emtive attack?” Mr Bush and his very able defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, reason that America has to do this since the right to defend oneself is an inherent one. If this theory of attacking a would-be enemy were to be taken at face value, then you would probably have a list of countries wanting to launch their own pre-emptive attacks on the US. And wouldn’t then the Sept. 11 attacks also qualify as pre-emptive attacks since according to many published accounts, the Taliban government had been quite bluntly told to expect a massive US strike if it did not relent.

The Americans have already decided to attack Iraq, to teach Saddam Hussein a lesson that defying the world’s most powerful country has a price. Some would say that there are many other reasons for this. This could easily be judged from the testimony that Mr Rumsfeld gave to members of the US Congress on Wednesday (relayed live on Fox News). The gist of the US defence secretary’s remarks was that Iraq’s leadership could not be trusted and that Baghdad’s unconditional acceptance of weapons inspectors was not enough to prevent America from taking military action to dislodge Saddam Hussein’s government. He also said that any attack on Iraq would be part of the so-called ‘war against terror’ and would hence be justified.

In any case, most of the foreign news networks have already switched over to the ‘when and how to attack’ mode rather than of ‘if at all’. Fox News, the most reviled of all news sources in Pakistan and much of the Muslim world, probably would take the lead in all of this and should be given a special award for becoming the mouthpiece of the Bush administration. Fox lost no time in thoroughly discrediting Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector who told journalists in Baghdad that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Instead, it almost defied Richard Butler, the controversial former head of UN inspectors who said just the opposite and advocated a military strike to bring Baghdad to heel. However, the channel failed to mention any of the several documented reports that Mr Butler had worked for American intelligence.

In all this rhetoric of war, what seems to have been ignored by the mainstream media is that the war against Iraq has already begun. A look at www.debka.com, a very interesting though not always believable website which some say is a front for Israeli intelligence, revealed this in reference to the massive air strike by American and British bombers on August 6: “In the past week... the United States carried out two military operations. On Tuesday August 6, at 0800 hours Middle East time, US and British air bombers went into action and destroyed the Iraqi air command and control centre at Al Nukhaib in the desert between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. For the first time, the US air force used new precision-guided bombs capable of locating and destroying fibre optic systems.

“Two days later, on Wednesday night, August 8, Turkey executed its first major military assault inside Iraq. Military sources learn from Turkish and Kurdish informants that helicopters under US, British and Turkish warplane escort flew Turkish commandos to an operation for seizing the critical Bamerni airport in northern Iraq.... Bamerni airport was captured after a brief battle in which a unit of Iraqi armoured defenders was destroyed, opening the airport for giant American and Turkish transports to deliver engineering units, heavy machinery and electronic support equipment, which were put to work at once on enlarging field and widening its landing strips. The American unit, reinforced, went on to capture two small Iraqi military airfields nearby.... The battle over this airfield was in fact the first important face-to-face engagement between a US-led invasion force and Iraqi troops.” And now something almost a decade back, from the respected British newspapers, The Observer. According to a story by Helga Graham on Oct 21, 1990, then President George Bush (the current president’s father) sent a secret envoy to meet one of Saddam’s top officials. The envoy told the Bush confidant that Iraq should engineer higher oil prices to get it out of its bad economic situation. Saddam took the envoy’s advice and began moving his troops to the border with Kuwait. At that point, the then US ambassador to Baghdad told Saddam: “We don’t have an opinion on inter-Arab border dispute such as your border dispute with Kuwait”.

The evidence, according to the Observer reporter, suggested US complicity with Saddam in an effort to coax him to attack and capture Kuwait’s oil fields. As expected the mainstream US newspapers never picked this report up and it only showed up in America a year-and-a-half later in alternative papers like The Village Voice and then finally in the Los Angles Times when Murray Waas and Douglas Frantz wrote that in “the fall of 1989, at a time when Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was only nine months away and Saddam Hussein was desperate for money to buy arms wrote, President Bush signed a top-secret National Security Decision Directive ordering closer ties with Baghdad and opening the way for $1 billion in new aid.... As late as July 1990, one month before Iraqi troops stormed into Kuwait city, officials at the National Security Council and the State Department were pushing to deliver the second instalment of the $1 billion in loan guarantee.” Bush Sr.’s efforts to try and influence oil prices —- Bush family has always had an abiding interest in oil —- was later catalogued by Peter Dale Scott who wrote for Pacific News Service. As it turns out, this story was named one of that year’s ten best “Censored” stories by “Project Censored”, an annual competition to recognize important stories that the mainstream US media ignore or suppress.—OMAR R. QURAISHI

(E-mail: omarq@cyber.net.pk)