In our literary world flooded with kitsch, it’s not an everyday experience that you chance upon verses that are both evocative and provocative making you stop in your tracks.

Tauqeer Raza’s book “Chunn di Mitti (Moon Dust)” published by Sanjh Publications, Lahore, has some such verses. He is a first-generation expatriate, now settled in France. His short biographic sketch says that he was born in the district of Chakwal, in the region of Dhunn in the north of Punjab. Remember Pilu, the poet, who first composed the thrilling tale of defiant young lovers known as the tale of Sahiban Mirza? He was from Dhunn.

After completing his studies, Raza migrated first to England and later moved to France. He began his literary career in 2006. He is a multi-lingual poet and translator. He seems to be comfortable with several poetic genres such as poems, prose poems. The mood of his poetry is serious and sombre, even dark at times but free of any cynical or pessimistic streak. The human predicament that we see painted in his poetry exposes us to prevalent distortion, misery, deprivation, helplessness and confusion of the contemporary world gone topsy-turvy. But what saves his poetry from being a sentimental outpouring and from being a saccharine song of despair is his underlying but palpably defiant tone that challenges what is generally accepted as normal.

“Sky, your rains can wash the blood spilled on the earth / But do not think that these drops have doused the fire in our insides / Fear the moment when the red fire from the life’s green vein would erupt/ Water from the smoke-filled eyes would smolder, and a crimson cloud of boiling blood hovering over your head would thunder,” says one of his poems.

Raza seems to be connected with both the worlds; his original homeland and his adopted one. He lives in both. He is oblivious of neither Sara Shagufta nor of Stephen Hawking.

“(Sara, one should learn from you how to paint a great pain on a small canvass)—Here, there are crevices in the crooked social wall, all over it /And from the crevices the swines’ eyes peep at the covered nakedness of everyone / The nakedness is the same this side of the wall or the other side / The hands that cover nakedness are also naked/ The eye that sees is naked too; the eye that refuses to accept this nakedness/ And while closing the shutters of its lashes the eye thinks it has covered its nakedness/Like her if every eye had the courage to say ‘good that I am naked’, the nakedness of the swines’ eyes hiding behind the crevices would have been exposed to the world”, he says in his poem on poetess Sara who fought male chauvinism, social hypocrisy, suffered and eventually committed suicide like Sylvia Plath in young age.

And now let’s hear ‘Stephan Hawking’s Dream’: “The tree has nothing of its own / What it has belongs to the soil sucking whose sap it gave birth to the shade / Soil has nothing of its own / Whatever it has belongs to the sky sucking whose sunshine and rains the soil gave birth to trees / The sky has nothing of its own/ Whatever it has belongs to time which is born of a bang / Even it has nothing of its own / If the bang had happened a moment later (the order of matter would have been quite the opposite ) / The sky would have been under my shoes and earth over my head / Then what would have been there,would have been mine alone; Adam’s alone”. Let’s welcome this fresh, robust, and challenging poetic voice.

Baldev Singh Grewal is a senior New York-based author who has a number of novels to his credit. His novella “Twaaaf”, transliterated from Gurmukhi into Arabic-based Shahmukhi script by Ziaullah Zaheer Sara, has been published by Sanjh Publications, Lahore.

The original title “Parikarma” meaning circumambulation has been changed into Twaaf which has the same meaning but is more familiar with the readers on this side of the border. It’s a story of a village, of an extended family, to be exact, narrated in the first person singular. Old debate whether first person singular is more suitable or third person singular for fiction is still inconclusive. Both have successfully been employed by writers. In the novel in question, the first person singular is the narrator through and through and doesn’t seem jarring. His tone and tenor engage you and create a sense of intimacy with the non-judgmental account of his life. The author’s use of flashback as a literary technique seems effective. The entire story is told in flashback, rather in a series of flashbacks. Reverie, visitation from the past, imaginings and actual happenings intermingle but in no way interrupt the smooth flow of the narrative. The major characters in the story are a father and his son, a mother and a young woman and her husband. Son, the main protagonist, falls in love with a girl in the village. The son’s father in cahoots with the girl’s father bribes the area police who pick him and severely torture him as a dangerous Naxalite in a fake case. The girl is married off against her will to the father’s nephew who is impotent but violent in his sexual behaviour. The husband in what one should call his impotent rage commits suicide. The father holds his son responsible for the tragic event and banishes him from the home. The son goes to the USA and now after forty years has come back to his home which is no more than a ruin guarded by a locked gate. What remains of the past is an old weather-beaten mango tree. The story is remarkable for some unremarkable reasons; a ruthless patriarch in connivance with the girl’s father deprives his son of happy future life and ends up unjustly supporting his sister’s family which leads to the destruction of his own nuclear family.

Baldev Singh perhaps subtly tries to debunk the myth of moribund patriarchy by showing what it is; odious and repressive. The narrative is simply gripping as it’s familiarly unfamiliar and unfamiliarly familiar. Don’t miss it. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, February 7th, 2022