I met Faiz Ahmed Faiz outside a restaurant in Islamabad

Poetry does not placate the anger of the world, Pablo Neruda once said.  Drops of verse or love are just not enough, he said. It requires rather a resolute heart, he offered. I’ve often wondered though whether an unyielding heart, steadfast purpose and such make poetry and love irrelevant. I’ve also wondered if metaphor and heart-yield are not necessary antidotes to stop such determination from bleeding into tyrannies in the process of dethroning despots.  

Many things must come together for freedom to win a few more square inches for love and poetry. One man is not a front. Poetry does not make revolutions. Poets never end oppression and consecrate liberty, equality and justice. They may hold up the occasional placard and some may even be pushed themselves towards the barricades being stormed, but in the main, they just write the life that surrounds them in ways that make their fellow creatures wonder what their lives are all about. Poets make people rethink the true conditions and dimensions of their numerous incarcerations. They open eyes to pathways that were always there and offer invitation to walk the forbidden avenue.  Just by making note of eye that is shut, gaze that’s distracted and streets undeserving of abandonment.

All kinds of things can help divest an individual of reluctance. It is hard to say that successful revolutions would have failed had they not been called for in some way by words turned in particular ways. I once asked, ‘didn’t you know that the revolution begins with poetry and that it ends with the abandonment of love?’ I am no longer sure. Today I ask, ‘is it not true that revolutions begin with love and end with the abandonment of poetry?’ I ask if love and poetry are synonyms. I ask if there isn’t something pernicious and even counter-revolutionary in treating poetry as means to an end.  Love too.

Today, I am thinking of poets. No, I am thinking of ‘poet’. Singular.

I met him a couple of days ago outside a restaurant in Islamabad. The restaurant was small and crowded. Cheap. It was located in a mini-mall by a busy street. I felt claustrophobic. I felt incarcerated. I didn’t want to break the walls. I wanted to breathe. So I stepped out. And that’s when Faiz Ahmed Faiz came to me. 

He was plastered on a windowpane.

It was a shop that had been shut down, perhaps for repair. There was no sign over it. The windows were covered with pages of newspapers, neatly pasted on the inside. He was singing yet another anthem of resistance, using the voice of someone called Beena Sarwar. I don’t know if the person who placed Faiz in the middle of news reports about terrorist attacks, political scandals and news gone stale was making a statement. I don’t know the name of the newspaper that carried the article. All I know is that I didn’t expect to meet Faiz in Islamabad that afternoon.

Beena Sarwar was writing about a panel she was moderating the ‘Left Forum’, earlier called the ‘Socialist Scholars Conference’ she tells us. The panel was titled ‘Anthems of Resistance’ and took its name from the book on progressive Urdu poetry by the same name, she said. 

I had never heard of this ‘Left Forum’. I didn’t know of a ‘Socialist Scholars Conference’. I am neither a leftist nor a scholar. Socialism as a viable proposition pertaining to social arrangement has over the years acquired many question marks. It is nevertheless an idea that inspires in many ways. I knew Faiz, like all great poets, have inspired many and many schools of thought and many ideologies as well, some that take up arms against others  -- poets never know the destinations to which their words travel. They can never tell which hearts will residence their preferred metaphors, which sword-blades are sharpened by the whetstones they can be translated into or whose blood will be shed by which minds that murmur their lines. A forum of socialists, socialist scholars, scholars of socialism and fellow travellers can be chaired by Faiz. So too a gathering of fundamentalists or do-gooding imperialists, one observes.

Beena reports of Andy McCord speaking to the political context of Faiz’s poetry and day in March 1951 when the poet was arrested. De-classified papers, McCord had said, testify to how the US authorities feared Faiz: ‘Warwick Perkins, the US Counselor, said that an intellectual group is a much greater threat to security’. I suppose one should read ‘security’ as ‘license to plunder resources, create and protect markets, exploit labour etc. Perkins had titled Faiz: ‘the most dangerous Communist of (the) time’. McCord, according to Beena, had observed that even if the Americans (of the US) had not been behind Faiz’s arrest, ‘they were certainly pleased by it’.

That arrest had heralded a massive crackdown on progressives. There were mass arrests of progressive writers, journalists, students, teachers and thinkers, including Beena’s father ‘then a medical student and leader of the Democratic Students Federation’.

Bilal Hashmi, a student of comparative literature of South Asia had apparently stated the obvious: ‘Faiz is a poet who transcended national boundaries’. Bilal had pointed on the poet’s ‘deep interest and involvement in the struggles of newly independent nations’.

Faiz didn’t belong to anyone and therefore he belonged to everyone, to read, adore, embrace, find inspiration in, to be empowered by, to cherish, find succor in, to love and to abuse. Then, now and perhaps in tomorrows we cannot yet envision as well.

Faiz raised questions as much about what was happening around him as about who he was. His words make us ask ourselves who we are. I haven’t mapped out the entanglement of love, poetry and revolution and I doubt I ever will. In fact I tend to think that certain intricacies are best left entangled. I saw Faiz in Islamabad and I was reminded of a question I asked a long time ago: ‘Did you know that pavement stones are agitating to become drops of poetry to be flung at the oppressor?’

Today, having reflected on the incomparable words of Siddhartha Gauthama upon seeing a depiction of the vanquishing of Mara crafted on rock in the Taxila Museum, I ask myself whether we derail change (‘revolution’ if you wish), by throwing poetry in all directions except at ourselves.

I ran into Faiz Ahmed Faiz in Islamabad. Someone called Beena Sarwal and an unknown show-owner (perhaps) facilitated the meeting. I am not planning to toss poetry around. I will spend some time with a poet, let his poetry caress me and perhaps raise a cheer to hope in these days that are no different from those of his incarceration and empowerment.

Love drops are good. Poetry too.  

Read more

‘Assification’ and de-assing of David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner

In April 2011, writing to ‘The Nation’ (The Ki-moon panel’s report and the strippers it spawned), I expressed surprise that David Miliband hadn’t yet joined the anti Sri Lanka, pro-LTTE, blind-to-own-crimes bandwagon: ‘I am perturbed, though, that David Miliband hasn’t joined the clown-wagon yet.  He has all the credentials to outstrip Saravanamuttu, Ganguly and Weiss.’  It took him just two months.  He’s just co-authored a letter to the New York times with (Surprise! Surprise!) his former counterpart in France, Bernard Kouchner.  Both were the Foreign Ministers of their respective countries from 2007 to 2010, during which time neither spared any pains to bail out Velupillai Prabhakaran in what can only be read as a determined effort to make Sri Lanka and Sri Lankan suffer indefinitely the horrors of terrorism.

They’ve called it ‘Silence of Sri Lanka’. They’ve confessed they wanted the fighting to stop.  That would have meant, given the long history of fight-stopping and fight-resuming by the LTTE, that we in Sri Lanka would not be enjoying the peace and the freedom from fear we have right now. Neither Miliband nor Kouchner ever expressed any need to draw attention to the human suffering, to call for humanitarian aid and workers to be allowed in, and to call for the fighting to stop,’ in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya (where NATO forces are killing civilians by the dozens in order to stop the killing of civilians; go figure THAT logic!).

Interestingly, B&D, even while claiming that those in refugee camps had related brutal and shocking stories, have not uttered a word in this communiqué about who was responsible for the brutality and shock or that Tamil life while held hostage by the LTTE was not treated as ‘fourth or fifth class’ but worse!  Nothing about Britain’s contribution to generating this kind of humanity and their own considerable efforts to perpetuate the same by giving a new lease of life to the world’s more ruthless terrorist organization.  Typical.

It was never a ‘war without witnesses’ as B&D claim, for the ICRC was present right to the very end. They applaud Ban Ki-moon for having ‘wrenched from President Rajapaksa a commitment to independent investigation of alleged human rights abuses’. No such ‘commitment’ was obtained, with or without wrenching. This is the relevant paragraph in the joined statement issued at the time: ‘objectives (of the Joint Statement) include the further fostering of reconciliation and related issues as well as reflecting the commitment by Sri Lanka to the promotion and protection of human rights and the importance of accountability in order to continue the strengthening of peace and development in that country.’

D&B then talk about a report compiled by a panel appointed by the UNSG.  They call it ‘damning’. All that the report ‘damns’ is truth, academic honesty and intellectual rigor. It is marked by slothfulness, blatant lies, unreliability of sources, unacceptable levels of myopia and mal-intent, leaving aside the neutrality-compromised composition of the panel itself.

D&B are being extremely irresponsible when they deftly treat conjecture as fact.  The panel report, compromised though it is, only makes allegations.  D&B are not quoting the report, they are taking an unsubstantiated claim, treating it as fact and writing it as such as though they actually saw what was happening. 

There is of course the by now to-be-expected tokenism of alluding to the LTTE’s (comparatively) ‘mild’ transgressions. They slip in the word ‘systematically’ to imply ‘strategy’ and that’s a nice thick layer of lie to top of a lie-heavy cake, friends.

When anyone stands on a pile of rubbish such as the above ‘panel report’, they get their feet all covered in gooey stuff. D&B are no exception. If they realize as they claim that there is error in ‘brushing wrongdoing under the carpet’, they’d be writing to all the newspapers in the world asking why Britiain and the USA have not been asked to allow ‘independent’ investigation of the war crimes perpetrated in Iraq and Afghanistan and likewise Israel not being pressured regarding Gaza, especially since Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister confessed that the invasion of Iraq was illegal, never mind the fact that Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction was not just a laughable claim but one which almost a decade of ransacking that country has not helped substantiate.

They talk of R2P, the responsibility to protect, so-called. That’s a nice term and one which many countries would love to allude to in the matter of being insulated by the nauseating and repulsive moral posturing of rubbish-dealers such as B&D and their respective governments, not to mention the horrible crimes against humanity they have and continue to perpetrate all over the globe. 

They talk of Navi Pillay calling for UN interference in Sri Lanka, but don’t mention that the lady fell on her preposterous behind when she tried that lark in 2010. They talk of ‘criminal liability’ but don’t have a shred of credible evidence of any wrongdoing warranting any multilateral action; strange, since ‘liability’ for such transgressions make the bread and butter of British, French and US foreign policy. HAVE THEY NOT HEARD OF LIBYA, I WONDER.  (That’s a whisper, by the way).

David and Bernard are correct when they say, ‘The integrity of the international system in addressing human rights abuses is rightly under scrutiny as never before’. Such integrity has been severely compromised by double-standards, selective application, gross exaggeration, bullying, lying, corruption, wrecking of procedural norms and a manifest cowardice when it comes to calling a spade a spade. David and Bernard are, sad to say, accomplices in all this.

They are right when they warn that ‘the arguments of those who want to take the law into their own hands’ should not be fuelled. B&D obviously have enough fuel, even after losing their jobs.

This is the richest part of their piece: ‘Kofi Annan has said that the international community cannot be selective in its approach to upholding the rule of law.’ Right on!  Are we to assume that the two of them are busy writing letters about the USA, Britain, France, Israel and India (among other countries not selected for regular abuse by jobless politicians and others) and demanding that the international community stop giving them the green light to butcher people?

They are absolutely right when they say ‘Reports like the one compiled for the secretary general must not stand on the shelf.’ This report should be made compulsory reading to all politicians, diplomats and academics and everyone associated with the United Nations because it has of immense educational value. It contains enough material for entire semester’s worth of discussion on the topic ‘How not to write a report’ or, ‘The pitfalls of mal-intent in report-compilation’.

They are dead wrong when they say ‘They (such reports) must be the basis of action’ for reasons stated above and elsewhere. They warn that if this (the called-for action) does not happen, ‘the law becomes an ass’. The ‘assification’ or ‘assing’ of the law happened a long time ago. It is the national pastime of Britain and the USA. These countries have a long way to go before they can de-ass.

When I wrote the article referred to at the beginning, my friend Fazli wrote to me saying her had written to Al Jazeera in response to a programme aired by that media organization. This is what he had said: "I believe it is very important for the international media to try and focus more on the misguided western democratic nations who supported the LTTE in their campaign of terror over the past 30 years in Sri Lanka and thus prevented this evil from being eliminated very early in its life cycle. If not for 911, after which these western nations woke up from their slumber, there would never have been an end to this madness. You cannot simply charge the Government of deliberate human massacre when casualties will always be an outcome of any war. One must understand that the LTTE planned and executed bombings and suicide attacks where civilian casualties were deliberately targeted. The Government never committed such atrocities deliberately and with planning. They were only after the terrorists to end the crisis. The media may claim that the international community think and believe that the LTTE have won the media war. However, every Sri Lankan national knows the truth of this horror and who the real culprits are."

It is not only about being blind to the LTTE, of course. Fazli was responding to a particular clip.  He has written to me on many aspects of the kinds of political myopia which the likes of Miliband and Kouchner have cultivated over the years are which their governments and many Western countries consider a virtue and not flaw. There’s a lot of ‘ass’ around and it’s been around for a long time, folks.

It would help if people like David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner went about acquiring the minimum levels of integrity necessary to see what kind of asses they themselves are. They need to de-ass and fast. 

Read more