Pak resisting through Faiz’s poetry

“Sab taj uchhalay jayeinge, sab takht giraye jayein gehum dekhenge” reads a Faiz couplet on a new line of “T-shirts against injustice” by “Daku”.

The black and white image has a man kicking a throne and raising a red flag.

Daku, who launched their brand of T-shirts three years ago, have learnt to play up the political turmoil on fabric. Their latest series is aimed at the people’s disenchantment with President Pervez Musharraf.

Shortly after the imposition of emergency last November, Faiz’s two poems “Hum Dekehnge” and “Bol” became virtual national anthems for protesting civil society activists, students and lawyers.

Pakistanis love to pen poetry and their leaders are no different. Slain former prime minister Benazir Bhutto wrote one on her 50th birthday while in exile in Dubai blaming her downfall on Islamic extremists.

“My enemies wish I never was born, for them it was a torture and a shame, the first woman to head a Muslim state, crumbling centuries of control, triumphantly proclaiming the equality of men and women,” she wrote.

“Our people are very fond of poetry. If you talk on any subject and start with verses, the people appreciate it and start stepping in,” one of Pakistan’s best known progressive poets Ahmed Faraz said recently.

But the going has never been easy for resistance poets. Faraz was arrested and packed off to jail during General Zia-ul-Haque’s time for writing “The Siege”.

Faraz’s verses lamented the shock and paralytic effect that Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s hanging had on the body politic. The 11 years of Zia’s rule were particularly harsh and repressive for those members of the opposition intelligentsia.

Writers and poets increasingly chose to express themselves using symbolism and allegories, thus adding new dimensions to Pakistani literature.

Despite the many odds, Pakistan’s resistance poetry, in Urdu, Punjabi and Sindhi, has kept the lamp of liberty alive for decades.

“The long spells of authoritarian rule in Pakistan have nurtured a rich dissident literary tradition. This tradition has its roots in the Progressive Writers’ movement, which originated in colonial India,” wrote Raza Rumi, who blogs at Pak Tea House.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz was the best-known torchbearer of this tradition, while some other luminaries included Sajjad Zaheer, MD Taseer, Rashid Jahan, Kaifi Azmi, Ismat Chughtai, Sahir Ludhianvi and Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi.

According to Rumi. “Those who had migrated to Pakistan faced a new reality, which, in the words of Faiz, was far from the dawn for which they had hoped. ‘This blemished light, this dawn by night half-devoured’, Faiz wrote ruefully. ‘Is surely not the dawn for which we were waiting’,” he wrote.

Interestingly, the famous lines penned decades ago seem still just as apt in Pakistan.