A journey wasted in the wasteland

In a just society where things are evenly balanced and one can work and look forward to change and betterment, the number of poets is small. We will have more accountants, company managers, scientists and technocrats, carpenters, plumbers, hairdressers and such other professionals whom people need to do something useful for them. Poets in large number indicate a dysfunctional society that has many unfulfilled wants and where there is dearth of hope and the system is so perverse it only yields a harvest of gloom and despair. It should be a safe law to state that the number of poets in a society is inversely proportional to its level of general well being.

If there were no other measure but this law we would still be able to have some notion of the state of our well-being. In a matter of a week friends and the postman have brought me half a dozen books of poetry. There must be many more that were delivered elsewhere, many more that are under print, and even more than all these, those that would not see the light of the day because the poet had no means to publish. However, though we are plotting poets in this odd graph to measure what we may symbolically call poverty, it should be gratifying to note we have this noble indicator too beside other more honest ones like doctor to patient or thieves to GNP ratios. For is it not a blessing that in exchange for our dismal condition we are getting to read some good poetry too.

Shabnam Shakeel has written less but often better than other women poets of her time. She is among the few who understand the nature and true spirit of the ghazal and has employed this with effect. Laboured experimentation fabricated mannerisms or attempted profundities and symbolisms that have been used to manufacture shock and awe have never been the constituents of her verse. A spontaneous wit informs and rivets her couplets that a fine masonry of emotion or thought holds together like bricks on a good wall.

Her third collection Musafat Raeygan Thi and the earlier two books -- Shab Zaad and Izteraab -- have been very comprehensively and insightfully reviewed by Khalida Hassan in the foreword to this book. In the arid world of Urdu ghazal she likens it to a pleasant breeze. Being the favoured of forms in Urdu poetry ghazal is also the most ill-treated. Foot in hand every Tom is busy measuring lines to size to claim his place among poets, but that is nothing new. The real victim is language. Unfamiliar with the classic diction and the tradition of ghazal quite a few manage to extract some words of evasive praise from reluctant reviewers to adorn the flaps of their clumsy books of verse. Atrocious usage that media is popularising into even educated talk is not the least to blame in this corruption of language. In a time like this to come across ghazal that is both apt in word and conveys sense is something to celebrate.

Shabnam was not prodded into poetry by Syed Abid Ali Abid, her father, but she grew up in a literary ambience, in the company of personalities like Sufi Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Dr Syed Abdullah, Dr Taseer and other luminaries of the day. Abid regarded correct usage and pronunciation of words as essential in poetry which Shabnam takes great care about. The other distinction of her work is its sheer feminine sensibility that she is able to impart without harping on feminist themes. Khalida Hassan also notices the restraint that we find in her ghazal with respect to the passion of love. The intensity and openness that her contemporaries Zehra Nigah, Fehmida Riaz and Parveen Shakir bring to their poetic expression of love are subdued to subtle hints in Shabnam’s hands. The walls are never jumped over. Shabnam emerges in her verse as a conscious and responsible woman who is capable of disciplining her instincts:

darogh-i-maslehat amaiz per rahi qaem

yoon apni baat abhi tak hoon mein bana-ai huai

( I stuck to the prudent lie/ thus have I guarded my dignity). She is the personification of the modern Pakistani woman, a combination of the contemporary and the traditional: aadhi rait se bahar hoon mein

aadhi rait mein garri hui hoon; aadhi maan chuki hoon uski

aadhi baat pe arri hui hoon; mujhko

girana sehel nahin hai

apne saharai khari hui hoon

(half of me is outside the sand/ half of me is buried beneath; to half of what he says I agree /but on the remaining half I won’t relent; it is not easy to make me fall/ I am standing on my own feet).In Musafat Shabnam seems to have collected herself and the tussle now is not with the self or the man-woman conflict but it is with an unjust, cruel and crude society in which there is no hope of betterment: yeh safar ab tak to raas aaya nahin yoon hi chalte jaain ya thehrain zara (this journey has so far been unfavourable/shall we continue or stop for a while?).