Fahmida Riaz is a poet

I have been growing up with Pakistan, year by year. Belonging to the group of people who are naturally inclined to change their surroundings, a good part of my poems and prose is actually the narrative of our lives in and with Pakistan. It has been a long life and a long story and is difficult to sum up.

I think I was in grade five or six when the martial law of General Ayub Khan was declared. I can clearly recall that it was welcomed by the people of Hyderabad where my family lived. The streets were carefully swept and in the marketplace nets were erected around meat and vegetable stalls to fend off flies. However, what I remember most vividly is that in a matter of months, my school abandoned the teaching of Sindhi. Our Sindhi teacher, an elderly gentleman with silver grey hair, had to leave. I was good at languages, especially Sindhi, as I come from a mixed Muhajir-Sindhi background. The scrapping of Sindhi was the first shock that came my way and when a few students launched a campaign to restore the language in the school syllabus, I joined them with all my heart.

Though that campaign did not bear positive results, it did make me realise the marginal presence of Sindhis in shops, offices and educational institutions. Years later, when my best friends expressed exasperation at what they termed my “obsession” with the rights of minorities, I looked at them with amazement. Indeed, never had their favourite teacher been thrown out of school. It is amazing how much the place where you live influences and shapes your thinking.

We had a dream — to have social justice in our homeland and happiness that comes from equality of access to opportunities, a dream that received a heavy blow with the war with India. Following the 1965 war, art and culture, original thinking, the quest for truth and respect for humanism were swept away by the winds of war mongering, war songs and war mindsets. What was left behind looked like a wasteland.

India and Kashmir became the sole concern of our national life. The establishment eventually began to ride roughshod over the provinces which led to unimaginable bloodshed and carnage in East Pakistan. At that time I was living in London, studying as well as working for the BBC. I remember walking to the Charing Cross tube station from Bush House on The Strand, trembling after having read out the tragic news; it had been with great difficulty that I had found the words and was admonished for a poor, choked presentation. The news was about the army action in East Pakistan. That all this could happen in the name of Pakistan was inconceivable for me. Humans have very limited imagination and it is hard for us to conceive of genocide even in times of war. I later discovered that in Pakistan the majority either remained very ill-informed or was not overly concerned with what was transpiring in East Pakistan before it was declared Bangladesh.

In 1973, I returned to Pakistan and saw the many faces of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto who challenged the imperialist powers, who awakened the working classes to their rights, also imprisoned the entire opposition, gave the slogan of a thousand years of war with India and declared Ahmadis non-Muslim. It was because of his radical socialist stances that he was a well-loved leader and politician. One could disagree with him, but his popularity was beyond a question.

It was during his tumultuous tenure, after the dismissal of the provincial government, that the Baloch tribes rebelled and there was an army action in that province too. It was also the time when I first became acquainted with the Baloch in Karachi, soft-spoken and gentle, who wanted me to write poems for them. So these were my countrymen! I was delighted to get to know them. I later visited Balochistan, interviewing politicians, meeting political prisoners, including Mir Gul Khan Naseer, and getting a chance to read his banned book, Tareekh-i-Balochistan. I was learning about my homeland, its people and history. I began to write about them.

The execution of Bhutto led to the whole nation being gagged under a second martial law. That was when I first saw a tank, positioned at Tariq Road where I lived. It was much smaller than I had imagined. It seemed tragic, lonely, out of place, yet frightening because of its strangeness on a busy commercial street. It was also during this period that a court case was filed against me for sedition and for which I could face capital punishment or 14 years of rigorous imprisonment.

To avoid this fate, I left the country. For the next seven long, interminable years my family and I lived in exile in India. We saw Benazir Bhutto growing up and her return to Pakistan. I too returned to my country and witnessed the heart-warming courageous constancy of the people, yet damage had been done to our politics and our society. The engagement in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, the religion deprived of spirituality, weapons and arms in streets and alleys — these were sights seen even in the smallest towns. Today too, they are right there, in your own city, in your own alley, across your own street.

This is my country. Many here and abroad have begun to say unhesitatingly that it would simply implode and that it is a matter of time. Are they right? Who knows.

The most astonishing part of our tragedy is that if we look at the press, especially the popular Urdu press, or talk to Pakistanis abroad, we read and hear the most raucous cliches about Pakistan being in danger and shedding the last drop of our blood to save it. Sometimes it seems that by raising all these battle cries, we are collectively pushing our homeland to its extinction.

This is my identity. Yes, I am a Pakistani. Was my life, this precious gift, wasted here? No. Many people tried to set things right and those lives were well-spent. We had small victories on our way and also saw circumstances getting out of everybody’s control. It wasn’t just we who experienced Pakistan. Our homeland experienced us, our thoughts and deeds, our poems and our interpretation of life in our art and cultural activities. Pakistan will be telling that story one day.