Uzma Aslam Khan: It’s Urdu poetry that I love best, more than Urdu prose. (And more than poetry in English, which, with a few exceptions, lacks the immediacy with which I feel poetry in Urdu.) If I had to single out one poet, it would have to be Faiz Ahmad Faiz. There’s no other artist who’s captured the range of human emotion more beautifully and heart-wrenchingly than Faiz. I still remember my first experience of not only listening to his poetry but actually understanding it, and this was while hearing his two oft-quoted poems ‘Hum dekhainge’ (‘We will see‘) and ‘Dashte tanhai me’ (‘In the Desert of Loneliness’) sung by the amazing Iqbal Bano. The songs were playing in our home in the 1980s, during General Zia’s military rule, and many of those present who were singing with Iqbal Bano were also crying. Later, my father asked if I understood the poems, the first of which was a fiery and optimistic call to change, the second of which was a lament of loss and separation. I felt I did understand them, but I let him explain that celebration and mourning, love and despair, in Pakistan, are two things that are never separated. If that was true in the eighties, it’s no less true today, possibly, it’s even truer, which is why Faiz continues to matter, continues to be remembered, and continues to make us sing and cry.
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Manto’s short story ‘Toba Tek Singh’ was my closest glimpse of the scars of Partition that my father never shared with us. His family came to Lahore in 1947 from a tiny village near Amritsar; his grandparents were beheaded before his mother’s eyes. I think he let his children see his past through reading ‘Toba Tek Singh’, a satirical account of the inmates of a mental asylum who have nowhere to go at Partition, but are forever left in limbo, between Pakistan and India.
The story made me deeply suspicious of easy categorization, particularly along ethnic and religious lines. It also made me understand that I come from a country that wasn’t shaped by those who migrated to it, like my parents, nor by the many indigenous tribes who’d lived there long before any one presumed to scratch lines across their land. Mine is the first generation of writers to be born in Pakistan, so, like my parents, I also carry the weight of beginning. The need to look in Pakistan’s looking-glass and know the slippery ghosts of my history has been imperative for me as a writer. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped hungering to know my place in these chaotic layers. It’s the hunger to make up for what was never said. It’s the terror of being left as voiceless as the inmates of the asylum.
More here.