Let the poets speak

Less than two weeks after he had promulgated an ordinance to amend the Pakistan Electronic Crimes Act (2016) that was widely acknowledged as ‘draconian’, President Arif Alvi graced the inaugural session of the Karachi Literature Festival on Friday.

Not only that, earlier in the day, he had appeared before an anti-terrorism court in Islamabad, refusing to avail the immunity that he had according to law. “I appeared before the court today as a common citizen and not as the president of Pakistan”, he said.

Ah, but he came to the KLF at the Beach Luxury Hotel with the pomp and circumstance that the president enjoys, disrupting the entire proceedings with the punitive protocol. This was the first time in the thirteen years of the festival that a VVIP had interrupted the inaugural session that is traditionally open to the public. Why couldn’t he do this as a common citizen?

Besides, his participation in a literature festival that essentially celebrates freedom of thought and of imagination certainly seemed out of place, against the backdrop of the nation-wide protest against the oppressive nature of the PECA ordinance. But this was one of the many contradictions that we have to put up with in this country. It does not really matter that President Alvi made some nice remarks in his speech.

Incidentally, high officials do need to interact with writers, poets, artists and thinkers to enhance their capacity to deal with the human and spiritual aspects of society’s fundamental problems. For that, an event of the stature and reach of the KLF provides a good opportunity.

After Friday’s initial hiccup, I should admit that the KLF has regained its glory and we must be thankful for this enlightening congregation of so many prominent creative writers and intellectuals of Pakistan, with an impressive presence of foreign guests, in person or online. This, then, is a weekend that raises our spirits. Overlapping the KLF, we have the Faiz Mela in Lahore. There is this feeling that the dark days of the pandemic are beginning to fade out.

But we know the times are out of joint. Under the receding shadows of a pandemic that has changed the world, we are stumbling into new difficulties – nationally and globally. Like Covid-19, the Ukraine war also threatens to redesign the world order. Whether we are able to grasp its meaning or not, we are also affected by this disaster, particularly in the domain of our foreign policy.

Meanwhile, Pakistan is confronted with its own political moment of truth. Our political combatants, as the poet said, are “swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight”. An additional shock to our senses was delivered by the suicide bombing in a Shia mosque in Peshawar during Friday prayers. It is one of the most devastating acts of terror in recent years and is bound to have its consequences.

So, if this weekend is so charged with dread and uncertainties then it is also a good time for writers, poets and scholars to sit together and try to make some sense of what is happening.

This KLF, thus, has a sense of urgency about it. And, providentially, its theme is: ‘Separation, Belonging and Beyond: 75 Years of Pakistan’. The intention is to deliberate on questions of Pakistan’s history and on what we have made of our freedom since that cataclysm of 1947. To do that at this time is bound to be a daunting task, intellectually and emotionally.

One reason why I resent the show of authority that the president’s presence at the KLF embodied is that writers and poets, as the voice of the nation’s conscience, have a role that is similar to that of the journalists. They must tell truth to power. In addition, they shape the dreams and aspirations of the people, in a collective sense. They define the moral choices that the realities of life represent. They teach us to love and to live.

It can be demonstrated that poets and writers of fiction, in addition to being the “unacknowledged legislators of the world”, are better interpreters of social and political developments. That is how we need a Ghalib to apprehend the upheaval of 1857 and a Manto to grasp the madness of 1947.

Given the theme of this year’s KLF, consider the eloquence, for instance, of Faiz’s ‘dagh, dagh ujala’ or Jalib’s ‘dastoor’ or Faraz’s ‘mohasra’. Coming to the present time, there is Iftikhar Arif’s ‘kab tamasha khatm hoga’. In fact, Pakistan’s history is better articulated in the stories and verse of our creative writers who need to be respected for their spirited endeavours in very adverse circumstances.

As I said, many different crises seem to have coalesced at this time. Ukraine’s war may be far away, on another continent, but it touches us in many different ways. The tempo of political confrontation is rising at an alarming pace. Will Imran Khan’s government survive the opposition’s no-confidence assault? And if it does happen, what will it change for the people of Pakistan? Then, the spectre of terrorism has become more menacing with Friday’s deadly blast in Peshawar.

In the midst of all this, cultural and literary activities highlighted by the KLF and Faiz Mela should provide some welcome distraction for literate citizens, though deliberations on some disruptive matters may still cause some emotional or intellectual discomfort.

And in two days, on Tuesday, we will have Aurat March. It is a measure of how confused we are about the national sense of direction that opposition to the March from some orthodox, religious factions appears to have become more strident. So much so that the federal minister of religious affairs, technically a spokesman of the government in these matters, has labelled it as unIslamic and there are some threats of violence against it.

This is what can happen when the liberating influences of literature and art are not allowed to flourish and when there is little freedom to think and to speak. But Aurat March is increasingly becoming an idea whose time has come.

The writer is a senior journalist. He can be reached at: ghazi_salahuddin@ hotmail.com