The English-speaking world is biased against the non-native speakers of English and there is too much racialism and these biases are enshrined in the English language. There should be a conscious effort by us to do away with these biases, says prominent Pakistani English language poet Waqas Ahmad Khwaja.

He says the British have left us with a language which should be localised through cross-cultural pollination what is commonly called hybridization and a common dialogue is required for this purpose.

Waqas has something against the Pakistani poets mimicking English poets, saying they don’t have the milieu of English language and their works won’t have any mark until they play with the local idiom of Punjabi and Urdu.

“However, there have been many good Pakistani English language poets. Taufiq Rafat brought local sensibility into his poetry. Maki Kureishi brought together two cultures in her poems. Daud Kamal had imbibed from both eastern and western cultures.” Among the living poets, he considers Moniza Alvi and Shadab Zeest Hashmi good poets.

He considers his generation transitional generation. “As the British left they left their system, including their language, for us. We will have to get true independence on our own terms.

“All languages should be given respect and local language should be developed through creation of new knowledge which won’t happen without research.”

To a question that why his poems are mostly longer ones like narrative poems, he says English poetry has more short poems and their narrative poetry is of certain kind. “Instead, we have our own oral tradition in poetry which is not abstract and there is no ornate diction. I made a conscious effort to borrow from the Punjabi Qissa tradition which is easier to understand for the public. There are Dastanisque elements in my poems. The objective is to recognise the folk art which is demeaned despite being evocative.

Waqas Khwaja migrated to the United States in 1994. When asked about the question of authenticity among the English-language poets there, he questions the issue of authenticity, asking whether a black man’s experience told by the white man can be authentic. However, adding that literature aims at not authenticity but truth, individual truth and cultural truth. “If you don’t have the cultural milieu, there will be a problem, at least in poetry, if not in fiction”.

To the question that why English fiction writers are more popular in Pakistan which is not the case with the poets writing in English, Waqas says fiction has stories and characters and everybody can understand them but poetry needs training to understand as it has allusions and symbols which are complicated and don’t easily unfold.

Talking about the domain of poetry, he says everything is the province of poetry and every kind of sensibility is the domain of poetry. He considers personal as political, saying it’s a matter of how you read a poem and reading depends on training whether one is equipped with reading the politics behind the text.

Waqas Khwaja’s book, No One Waits for the Train, has many poems on the Partition. Talking about the background of those poems, he says had he not read anything on the Partition, he would still have written about its trauma in the same manner as he has done in the poems as his generation had inherited the legacy of the Partition from the previous generations.

In 1983, Waqas had started a Writer’s Group in Lahore when he used to practice law here. He has fond memories of those times especially of the writers including of the Punjabi poets, Saeen Akhtar Lahori and Ali Arshad Mir.

“Writers of all languages used to come to the read their works there. Taufiq Rafat, Kaleem Omar, Jocelyn Ortt-Saeed, Javed Shaheen and many others used to come there and we did many translations. We also brought out a magazine, Lotus.”

Talking more on the issue of language, he says a language cut off from its people brings only alienation as is the case with Punjabi. He cites the example of recent phenomenon of literary festivals in Pakistan where a certain class shows up which represents hardly three percent of society.

“You can alienate the public in a foreign language as well as its own language. If you use a language which is understood by a few people, you become less relevant socially and politically.” However, he asserts it’s prerogative of a writer to decide what language he uses for his work.

Waqas Khwaja has published three collections of poetry so far, No One Waits for the Train, Mariam’s Lament and Six Geese from a Tomb at Medum. Fourth collection of his poems, titled “Out of Hands: New and Collected Poems” will be published in March next year. He is a professor of English at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, in the United States.

Published in Dawn, July 24th, 2016