Faiz Ahmad Faiz's Poems of Resistance and Revolution

Chapter Two “Your Lips are Free”: Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s Poems of Resistance and Revolution Because every day they chop heads off I’m silent. In each person’s head they chopped off was a tongue, for each tongue they silence a word in my mouth unsays itself. (Levertov 33) An entry in The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest says: Faiz Ahmed Faiz is to Pakistan what Pablo Neruda is to Chile. Considered one of the greatest Urdu-language poets, Faiz Ahmed Faiz was an avowed Marxist, trade unionist, journalist, and thinker. He never held formal membership in the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP), yet he played an active role in the Progressive Writers Movement, the Progressive Papers Limited, and the Pakistan Trade Union Federation, and was incarcerated for his alleged role in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case. (Ness 1160) The poet was born as Faiz Ahmad Khan on 13th of February 1911 in Sialkot. At the age of five, he started learning the Quran but was interrupted because of ailment in his eyes. Even though he had already started studying Persian and Urdu in his home, he began his voyage of formal education and learnt from famous teachers of that time. He had his Masters degree in English Literature from Government College Lahore and Masters in Arabic Literature from Oriental College Lahore. In 1935, Faiz had his first job as a lecturer in English at MAO College in Amritsar where he stayed for next seven years. In early 1947 Faiz became the first editor of Pakistan Times, the English daily and also headed the editorial boards of Imroze and Lail-o-Nahar. During Liaquat Ali Khan’s time, Faiz was arrested in Rawalpindi conspiracy case in 1951 and spent four years in different prisons. The period of incarceration was productive as far as his poetic creation was concerned. He produced Dast-e-Saba and Zindan Nama in these years. Faiz received Lenin Peace Prize in 1962, an award no Pakistani had ever received before. He was given this award for his poetry, his politics and his international struggle against imperialist/oppressive powers. In 1971, during the time of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Faiz organized and became the head of National Council of Arts and later became the consultant on Culture to the Government. After the military 47 overthrow by General Zia-ul-Haq in 1977, Faiz resigned and had to opt for exile in Beirut. He stayed in Beirut till 1982 providing his service as the chief editor of Afro- Asian Writers’ magazine Lotus. Faiz died in Lahore on 20 November 1984. The ideological matrix of Faiz’s poetry is set by an increasingly corrupt status of Pakistan and its political apparatus. After the independence, violence and communal riots continued to wreck both India and Pakistan. The majorities in India and Pakistan began to attack their minorities which finally led to the mass migration, in which, more than 14 million migrated; more than a million were killed and countless other miseries were seen. Pakistan had to go through various problems regarding the governance. Many wanted Pakistan to be a modern state with democratic system while others strived for it to become an epitome of Islamic state. After the untimely death of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, his Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan came forward as a supreme leader. In 1951, Major General Akbar Khan was in total opposition to the measures of Liaquat’s government and decided to overthrow it but the plan did not materialize. Instead he was tried with many other officers and civil members. Liaquat Ali Khan is believed to be shot dead by a follower of Jamaat- e-Islami for advocating the Western form of government. The military in Pakistan overthrew the governments several times. And the first of its kind was “led by General Ayub Khan (1907–1974), the military coup in Pakistan on October 28, 1958 proved to be a turning point in the country’s history and also a new threshold in the civil-military relationship. Given wider acclaim as a revolution by Ayub Khan himself and projected as a protest against politicians accused of incompetence and corruption. .” (Malik, History 143). During his era, Ayub Khan emphasized that the nation of Pakistan is not yet ready to run on the system of democracy based on the western style and hence its prosperity lies in the hands of a disciplined army. Although he incarcerated many politicians but he never punished them physically as “National solidarity was his objective, and he sought the cooperation of those whom he believed had the country’s preservation as their primary interest” (Ziring 83). In 1962, General Ayub came up with his “Constitution of ‘basic democracies.’ The government that emerged after this Constitution was aptly described by a Pakistani politician as the ‘Government of the President, by the President, for the President’” (Farooqi 26). However, history is evident that coups d’état, whether they were in Pakistan or in other places like Latin America and Africa, have never been successful in 48 delivering the desired service. In 1976, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto made Zia- ul-Haq the chief of army but the former was overthrown by the latter in a military coup. The deposition of the Bhutto government by martial law and his own tragic end through a criminal case not only added to political instability and disillusionment within the country, but allowed the Pakistani army to gain power over all other institutions. Policies inducted by General Zia were not only authoritarian; they also led to further sectarian and ethnic fragmentation of the society, with democracy, women, and minorities being the major losers. (Malik, History 169) For Zia-ul-Haq, it was the secular stance of the parties that led to the instability of Pakistan. His “desire to recreate Pakistan as an Islamic state was not only more in keeping with the genius of the Pakistani nation, it also elevated the formation of Pakistan to a moral plane not experienced in the years since independence” (Ziring 165). Zia rejected the political parties on the basis of their incongruity with Islamic teachings. Faiz’s progressive political critique is in the fashion of protest and rebellion against the political chaos. His poetry is radical in its essence and makes its way as an ideological resolution for political incongruity as poetry is the better witness of a society in calamitous ideological crisis. As one of the important poets of the 21st century, Carolyn Forché supports the task of poetry to bear witness; she also claims that all language is political. Forché says, “All language, then, is political; vision is always ideologically charged; perceptions are shaped a priori by our assumptions and sensibility formed by consciousness at once social, historical, and esthetic. There is no such thing as non-political poetry” (DeShazer 16). In her anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-century Poetry of Witness, Forché demands poetry of the social space, which exists in between the state and the “safe havens of the personal.” Using her term, ‘poetry of witness’ in context of Faiz, Ted Genoways writes that “in poetry of this kind, the poet of witness enters into dialogue, overt or covert, with this oppressor, and thus the language (the style, the form, even the imagery) of the poem is partly dictated by the condition under which the work is written” (Genoways 96). It is important to note that the poetic style of Faiz makes use of a unifying model in which politics and aesthetics portray the communal issues at one place. In his surroundings, the facts include the plight of general populace afflicted by 49 unemployment, violent strategies of powerful, separation, wrong governance, and uncertainty among others. Depicting an ideology via radical poetry, in connection with left-wing politics, Faiz’s poetry adds to other existing critical perspectives of common evils and acts as a definite agent to speak for oppressed individuals. Firaq Gorakhpuri i and Ali Sardar Jafari ii were the two poets writing in the same era as Faiz. While discussing the modern trends in Urdu poetry they came to the same conclusion that with Faiz a new brand of poetry came forth. To Firaq, the poetry of Faiz was full of intense emotions and radical thought which at the same time portrayed the social milieu as well as feelings of a lover for his beloved. This juxtaposition of thought and love was new in Urdu poetry started by Faiz. Arguably, Faiz was the first major political poet writing in Urdu. He belonged to that group of poets who were born in the beginning of 20th century around the time of First World War and grew up under domination of corrupt governments. It was the time when a middle-class individual was not only politically and socially aware but was eager to speak out for the poor and the oppressed. Around this time, the progressive movements had already started their course in Europe. The civil war in Spain was in full swing. The opposition to General Franco had become an international issue. The international progressive writers had put themselves as vanguard against the oppression. Meanwhile, many well known writers like Mohammed Din Taseer, Mulk Raj Anand, and Syed Sajjad Zaheer who were studying in London gathered under one banner and laid the foundation of Progressive Writers’ Movement in the year 1935. Progressive Writers’ Association became, “in Aijaz Ahmad’s words the ‘strongest and proximate shaping force’ in Urdu literature from its very inception and very soon became ideologically hegemonic ‘to the extent that it defined the parameters of the broad social agenda and cultural consensus among the generality of Urdu writers .

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