BOOK REVIEW

Dr. TARIQ RAHMAN

Ejaz Rahim, Moonrising with Mavera Poems ( Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 2005), pp. 184. Rs. 400.00

Ejaz Rahim has produced seven volumes of English poetry and is regarded as a major English-language poet from Pakistan. He writes powerful poems and his style is characterized by a skilful use of poetic devices – foregrounded language, symbolism and laconic lines of a haunting beauty—to express the eternal themes of poetry: mortality, a sense of wonder at the drama of life, the joys and pains of living etc. The present book has 134 poems about Mavera, the poet’s little daughter, whose innocent childhood is captured in verse. Only a loving observer will not miss out the magic of the growing years of a child—so busy are we, especially the fathers, in the daily routine of existence. But it needs a sensitive human being to focus on this aspect of life and it is a touching reminder of the fact that some of us are capable of experiencing that most humanizing of all emotions—the love for a child. This volume (the eighth), therefore, creates a new world and one in which the poet lays bare his soul.

This soul is that of a loving, tender, human being who enjoys a happy family life and celebrates its joys. This is a pioneering theme in poetry because of the treatment of the emotion of love in our poetic traditions. The poetic traditions we in Pakistan are brought up in are either of Urdu (and sometimes of the indigenous languages of the country) or English. Both treat the theme of love differently from Ejaz Rahim.

In Urdu there are two ways of celebrating love in poetic works: the Ishq-e-Haqiqi and the Ishq-e-Majazi. In the former tradition there is some of the most sublime ghazal in the world. The beloved is an ethereal being of undeterminate gender (but addressed by male pronouns) and the love is of a high moral order. The whole amorous drama of unrequited love symbolizes the mystic’s quest for the immanent deity who is the Beloved. Even when the beloved is obviously, or probably, human the same lofty tone is kept us as one can see in the best poets of the Delhi school of poetry. Thus even the Ish-e-Majazi ghazals can also be interpreted as if they were about the love of God. However, in Lucknow, and earlier in Deccan, the Ishq-e-Majazi is expressed in definitely erotic and even earthy ghazals (Jurrat, Amanat, Rangin etc). The other forms of poetry expressing human love are the vasokht and masnavi which tell a love story. Then there are the rekhti and the hazal which are coarse, ribald and obscene. All of these forms of love poetry feature a lover and a beloved. They are not about family relationships; they are about sexual or romantic relationships.

The expression of love in Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto and Balochi is also along these lines. There too there is a human lover and beloved even if these are symbols of the poet’s desire for God.

In English the lover and the beloved are also people desiring to unite sexually or in some amorous, romantic or sensual bond. There are a few poems celebrating the love of friends or relatives , especially dead ones, but not enough to constitute a departure from the normal trend of expressing love. There is, of course, ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ but that too is sexual or romantic or both. The only difference from Urdu is that there is a whole sub-genre of nature poetry which celebrates the love of nature. But this is more like a quasi-mystical reverence and not human love as we understand the term. A part of this celebration of nature involves the romanticization of the child. Thus we have Wordsworth’s famous lines about children’s incomprehension of death and so on. However, even though there are some modern poems who have written about the family in fiction, there are not enough of them in poetry. Moreover, recent writings are about conflict and problems in family life and not about how nurturing they can be.

In short, when Ejaz Rahim sets out to celebrate family love, he is a pioneer in the major traditions which mould poets in our country. Moreover, there is an unwritten convention in Pakistan, especially in the NWFP, that the family is hidden away and not mentioned at all. Tender emotions are especially taboo. Thus the poet has shown great moral courage by breaking out of these conventions and writing about the thing nearest his heart—his little daughter. The poems celebrate the child’s relationship with her mother—the endearments, the disagreements and the reconciliation:

Before long, I found her

Knocking at the door

Open mama, she was saying

I love you very much

I’m missing you

With all my heart

And I am getting tired

Holding in my hands

A bouquet for you—

Do you understand? (p. 26)

And then there is the relationship with her grandmother:

On the day Dadi had to leave

I overheard a heart-to-heart

Discourse between grandma and her.

And then there are her cousins, playmates and dolls with whom the child has relationships. And this web of relationships comprises the very human, very warm, world which Ejaz Rahim has created out of his loving observations of the growing child.

But, of course, the central relationship he shows is with himself. First, every action and every word of the child reaches us through the mind of the poet. We see the child through his doting eyes and observe the significance of her uniqueness as a human being through his perception of her. Secondly, he reveals his own loving nature as a man devoted to his family, caring deeply for human relationships, by his reactions to her demands (to climb mountains, to gather blue flowers, to play, to talk). His actions reveal his deeply loving nature but he also expresses it in words. Thus he says:

I, your father who loves you dearly

Am also son to

An ageing mother

Whose graces are my blessing

And whose sickness

Is also my own (p. 170).

This kind of expression of love ranging from daughter to wife to mother makes the poems unique in the annals of love poetry among South Asian Muslims. This is the celebration of ordinary family relationships and in our literature we have tended to ignore the family altogether.

In fact, such relationships are the basis of stability in life and genuine happiness. They are normal in the sense that all families ideally aspire to them though few achieve them in real life. In the fragmenting, isolated world of individuals the West has created families are even less together, and possibly less happy, than in our male-dominating, extended families. It is power rather than love which rules most families. Yet, there are people who do have happy family relationships and many others who wish they would. Yet, this reality is ignored in our literature and the literature of English (as well as that in English translation) we come across. That Ejaz Rahim has chosen to write on this unique theme is a welcome addition to poetry.

Dr. Tariq Rahman