Preventing death by history

At a reading in Colorado sometime early in this decade, poet Meena Alexander was confronted by an eternal question: “What use is poetry?” Recalling the incident in an essay, she wrote: “I caught my breath. She might have been Plato’s daughter asking me.” The effect that this incident had on the poet can be imagined from the fact that she referred to it again in a poem as well: “Her question, a woman in a sweatshirt, / Hand raised in a crowded room — / What use is poetry? / Above us, lights flickered, / Something wrong with the wiring.”

The author of eight poetry anthologies, including Atmospheric Embroidery (2018), Birthplace with Buried Stones (2013), and Illiterate Heart (2002), which won the 2002 PEN Open Book Award, and two novels Nampally Road (1991) and Manhattan Music (1997), Alexander died in New York on Wednesday. She was 67.  Born in Allahabad, she studied in universities in Nottingham and Khartoum, and taught in English in New York. A deep-rooted commitment to feminism and a post-colonial world informed much of her work, in which she also meditated on the purpose of poetry and poets in our contemporary world.

“Question Time”, the poem quoted above, ends in a sort of self-confessed mystery: “Standing apart I looked at her and said — / We have poetry / So we do not die of history. / I had no idea what I meant.” The purpose of her essay — divided into 14 dense, short sections — is to find what she meant. “We might think of history as what is rendered up of the past in recorded memory, recorded by those who are in a position to do so,” she wrote in the second section. “But there is an important underground stream of history... secret letters, journals, inscriptions, scribblings on bits of paper smuggled out of prisons. Poetry closer in intent, it seems to me, to this buried stream takes as its purview what is deeply felt.”

Another poet who died on the same night as Alexander was Fahmida Riaz. She was 73 and had been battling illness at a Lahore hospital. Born in Meerut in 1945, her family had moved to Pakistan, where she is recognised as a pioneer of feminist and liberal writing. Her writing invited the wrath of General Zia-ul-Haq, who shut down her magazine Awaaz, which she ran with her husband Zafar Ali Ujan. Both Ujan and Riaz were charged with sedition and imprisoned. On the intervention of her friend and poet Amrita Pritam, former prime minister Indira Gandhi allowed her to live in India.

In the late 1980s, observing the rise of Hindutva in India, she wrote her most popular poem, “Tum bilkul hum jaise nikle” (“You turned out to be just like us”): “You turned out to be just like us, / where were you hiding all this while? / The same foolishness, the same fuss, / which made us waste a century/ now knocks at your door, don’t you see? / Well done sir, really. Well done. / Bogeymen of faith loom around. / Really, you’ll set up Hindu Raj? / who is Hindu, who is not, /  you too will issue fatwas. / ...Till recently I was saddened / by all this but now I find it funny / — you turned out to be just like us, / we are one people after all, honey.” 

Earlier this year, Shashi Tharoor hit a hornets' nest when he said that if the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, they would create a “Hindu Pakistan”. As the ruling party demanded an apology, Mr Tharoor explained in a Facebook post: “Pakistan was created as a state with a dominant religion that discriminates against its minorities and denies them equal rights. India never accepted the logic that had partitioned the country. But the BJP/RSS idea of a Hindu Rashtra is the mirror image of Pakistan — a state with a dominant majority religion that seeks to put its minorities in a subordinate place. That would be a Hindu Pakistan.” One may disagree with Mr Tharoor’s opinion, but it more difficult to eschew Riaz’s ridicule of the attempt by some group to convert India into a Hindu nation.

The first time I heard this poem was in Patna, during a literature festival in March 2013. I was covering the event for The Telegraph. Unfortunately, I had not done enough research, had not read this poem either. Having heard her, I could not resist the temptation of interviewing Riaz during lunch. She was not too fluent in English and I confessed to her: “Main Urdu nahi jaanta (I don’t know Urdu.)” She smiled and replied: “Main jo bol rahi hoon, aapko samajh aa raha hai? Toh fir aap Urdu jaantey hain.(Do you understand what I am saying? Then you know Urdu.)”

In her essay, Alexander describes her belligerent interlocutor as almost being Plato’s daughter. Perhaps, if the republic was able to function in a platonic manner, poets would be out of a vocation. Till then, as Riaz and Alexander both show through their verses, poets remain the chroniclers of the cracks of history. Poetry is an antidote to the juggernaut of history that crushes individual narratives, especially of those who have no access to power. It is a vessel of immortality, to prevent death by history. In our undoubtedly divided times, it is impossible to deny the utility of such a service. 

The translation of Riaz’s poem from the original Urdu is by New Delhi-based poet Akhil Katyal