Conference on Mazhar ul Islam's Art

Searching for Love in the Desert of Life

Conference hold in Campidoglio, Sala del Carroccio

Rome (Italy) 9/10/2012

Mazhar ul Islam was born the 4th of August 1949 in Punjab, two years after the foundation of Pakistan. After the retirement of his father, he moved with his family to Wazirabad and later, in 1967, to Islamabad, where he spent most of his life at the service of the government, working for the State Television, the Ministry of Education and the National Institute for the Folkloristic Heritage. He has been also appointed as General Director of Literary Academy, while now is the President of National Book Foundation.

In this volume of short stories entitled The Season of Love, Bitter Almond and Delayed Rains, which is the first work of Mazhar ul Islam translated into Italian, there are 35 chosen stories written in 13 years and published in the following collections: The Man Alone in the City of Horses (1989), The Girl Drenched in the Deluge of Words (1987), Look at the City through the Doll’s Eye 1988, The Afternoon Posted in a Letter (1991).

The short stories published in this volume have in common the style and the theme. The style is that one typical of the prose of Mazhar ul Islam, i.e short stories characterized a surrealistic-realism, while the main subject are the oppressive and hallucinating reality and the unbearable anxiety, which in every story grows as in a climax until it destroys the personal identity and the integrity of the characters.

The relation between the character and the surrounding reality is always tense and ambiguous. The reality and the different life conditions are interiorized by the characters and then again exteriorized by the creative writing. This is the reason why it seems to be more opportune to speak of a false realism of Mazhar ul Islam’s prose. In fact, even when cannot be denied a realistic dimension in which the stories are framed, it doesn’t complet their background.

In an interview published in Newsline (2010) Mazhar ul Islam clearly says: “I am a surrealist writer by temperament. Life is also surreal. So my writings have a metaphorical feel”.

Every short story, in fact, is deeply rooted in the way the characters relate to the world, which becomes a kind of macroscopic image of their inner feelings and their psychological condition.

The characters of Mazhar ul Islam’s short stories are mainly anonymous, without a name, an identity of a definite age. They are trapped in an existence where they feel isolated and estranged and which they seem to be unable to understand and to interpret in the variety of its nuances. This is the reason why the characters of Mazhar ul Islam project in the reality all the uneasiness and the illness of their own souls. The daily life assumes then almost an oneiric dimension, where the characters (and the writer) desperately try to find a meaning and a sense through scattered pieces of life.

In the short story entitled A Body in Rags the realistic image of a gypsy woman who collects pieces of rags in a dump becomes the symbol of the writer’s art who, through scraps of life experiences tries to recollect the human existence in a never-ending effort. The gypsy woman at the end of the story says: “But this isn’t rubbish. It is the rubble of the broken city. I pick my memories, collect dirt, assemble voices, and I put the broken city together again by evening. But when it gets dark and I go to my hut and sleep, the whole city collapses again with a crash, and I get up in the morning and begin putting it together again”1.

The scraps of clothes, old and dirty, hide stories and became the symbols of the worn out and destroyed human existence, which the writer hardly tries to recollect in all his literary fiction: “I started looking closely at the dump. From it came the scent of the city’s loves and hates. The flames of the indignity of the load which the dead donkey couldn’t carry were rising from the dump. Sights of separation could be heard from the broken toys and torn letters. The fragrance of unmarried girls and married women was coming from the rags. And it seemed to me that the young woman who picked the rags was herself a scrap of cloth which had been cut off and thrown away by a girl who was making a shirt, surrounded by broken hopes, angry regrets and soiled memo- ries”2.

In The Doll wouldn’t let him die the man on the verge of committing suicide, while on the top of a tall building, seems to see the town for the first time understanding all its symbolical meaning: “Below him the city was flowing like a river. He was seeing everything- taxis, cars, trucks, scooters, people walking on the pavement- from such a great height for the first time in his life, as if he held the entire city in his fist. The city seemed to smell like a person grying his shoes in front of a fire after getting soaked in the rain. In that smell was also mingled the fragrance of waiting and separation....(....). Then his gaze fell on a fakir who was virtually naked and who had such dense knots in his hair that it would be quite impossible to undo them. He had seen the beggar from close on many occasions, but then he had seemed dirty. But now he seemed very clean indeed. Beside him he had the bundle in which he collected dirty old clothes, paper and useless objects. But the bundle now seemed to him to contain laments and complains instead of dirty scrap paper”3.

Mazhar ul Islam has got a very rare talent for using the metaphor which from a simple figure of speech becomes a language shaping the story and transforming it, without the reader becoming conscious of it, in the mirror of the character’s soul. The characters of his short stories are almost drown in the sorrounding reality which, even in its apparent banality, seems to be an enigma without any solution.Their main difficulty is to comprehend and understand what is around them and this is the reason why, in the end, they are completely lost in the abyss of sense hidden in the most limitated and simple reality.

In his review of The Season of Love, Bitter Almond and Delayed Rains Sarwat Ali writes: “The small, insubstantial things have attracted him more. These small, everyday things and seemingly trivial incidents have formed the main crux of his experience, which overshadow the looming and bigger issues that confront him and his age”.

In the short story entitled Twelvemonth the main character falls in a cup of tea and remain trapped there without any chance to get out. The paradoxical and unrealistic situation is described by the skilled art of

Mazhar ul Islam writings in such a fashinating way that the reader also, like the character in the cup of tea, becomes trapped in the story which from a musical point of view resembles very closely a ballada.

“This is the start of my story, which begins in the month of Chetar. The colours of the flowers are growing deeper. The moist winds have spread their green mantles over the hills. Not just the main river but even the small streams and brooks have their mouth filled with sudden foam. The paper boats are sailing and the doves with oars in their wings are busy cleaving the waters. The pious Hafiz is stuck in the mud of halwa, and it is a delightful evening in the month of Chetar. He is sitting drinking tea in his room when he falls into the cup of tea. Perhaps you won’t believe it. He himself still doesn’t believe he has fallen into the cup of tea. And it is in his coming to believe it that the whole month of Chetar passed and the first morning of Wisakh stroked the frozen houses with its half warm fingers. For the whole of Wisakh his family went round looking for him in the streets and markets, in the villages and the mountains. For the whole of Wisakh he kept trying to get out of the cup of tea, but there was so much sugar in it that it was sticky and his foot kept on slipping”4.

For Mazhar ul Islam writing is not only an art but a deep existential experience accompaning the writer in his whole life: “I would have been miserable if I had not started writing my writings. My writings are metaphorical, magical, allegorical and filled with emotions. If, for some reason I have to stop writing, I will not be alive afterwards for a long time. Writing is my oxygen”.

What I personally find extremely fashinating in the literary fiction of Mazhar ul Islam is the continuous research of sense and the need to follow every trace of meaning even in the humblest and apparently unuseful scrap of life. The research and the trace, two important elements of sufi literature, obsessively came back in every short stories of Mazhar ul Islam, who looks at the inanimate objects, even the most insignificant and unworthy of attention, as symbols of deep and unexplicable spiritual truths. In The Dead Girl in the Camera a black photograph becomes the centretre and the symbol of a work of a whole life: “He is now sixty and he considers his life’s entire capital to be in that picture. “It contains all my pictures” he says. “All the others I have taken are doors in which everyone can enter, but this picture is a door which only I can enter”. What he says is absolutely correct, for the picture is just a piece of black photographic paper. But he says that for him it is a picture which lives and moves”5.

The themes of death and suicide are recurrent in Mazhar ul Islam’s prose. In an other interview the writer explains his obsession with death and suicide: “Death is sheer purity. No one has been able to pollute death. You can sullied your life, your society and the whole world. But you cannot sully death”.

The obsession for death seems to be connected with another central theme in the prose of Mazhar ul Islam: the searching for the self. “I am trying to find myself in every piece that I write. I look for myself in the sweeper sweeping the road. Once I looked for myself among the pigeons pecking at the grain in the courtyard of a Sufi saint’s tomb. I look for myself in the bells hanging round the necks of the cattle in the desert. I try to listen to myself in every sob. I call out to myself in the emptiness. I search for myself in brown, in black and in white. I try to read myself on every gravestone. I look for myself in the village of love on the map of beauty. I count myself on my fingers in immeasurable loneliness. I knock on the door of my soul and ask my name. I smell myself in the fragrance coming from the mouth of a breastfed child. I look for myself in the sheep which has gone ahead of the flock and is being driven back by the sheepdog. I look for myself in the dates of March and April and search for myself in the cold of December and January. But it those who are in one piece who get found. I am already broken and scattered”6.

The strength of the art of this writer is in the capacity of going beyond space and time towards a more universal experience, which is not limitated to the geographical borders of Pakistan or urdu language. The drama lived by the characthers has got a universal value, which doesn’t belong to a determinate people but to a wider sphere of human experience.

The relation between Sufism and folklore in Pakistan is very strong as witness the graves and shrines of pirs and fakirs scattered all over the country. The great sufis very often used elements from the local folklore in order to express their spiritual message. The verses of their poems, which are orally handed down from generation to generation, constitute a vital cultural element deeply rooted in the life of people of Pakistan.

Several characters of Mazhar ul Islam’s short stories use the language of Sufism as in the The Sand Edge, I Dance, and The Night. In I Dance, for example, we can read:

“It was the middle of the night. It hadn’t stopped raining for two or three days. The bazaar was as desolate and sad as a sick heart. All the shops were shut. Only one shop was open. The shop of the heart. And someone who had come to shop for love was sitting bundled up on the platform outside with his head wrapped in his blanked humming this verse of Baba Farid Ganj-e-Shakar: “The streets are full of mud, Farid, but my beloved house is far, to go will soak my blanked though to stay will surely break our love”. He had not idea where he was sitting. At the tomb of Baba Farid, at the gate of Lai Shahbaz Qalandar, or on the floor of the shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh. The rain of the Way kept falling. The begging bowl of hope was hung on the door of his heart and the dye of awareness was oozing from his whole body. The whole universe was drowning in the ocean of Allah Hu, Allah Hu. And his being was dancing on the point of “I Dance. I Dance”7.

The Edge Sand, one of the most fascinating short stories of the collection starts with the main character who, not very far from his own house, is blocked by an heap of sand, evocative sign of the desert of Cholistan in the South Punjab: “I’ve been standing for the last five minutes plucking up the courage to cross a small heap of sand on the ground in front of me. The heap wasn’t there in the morning when I left home for the office but on my return it blocked my path about twenty or thirty paces from the house. At every sound my wife must be telling her that Daddy’s here. And my mother must have put the food in the oven to cook. But what can I do about a heap of sand? Anyone looking would laugh and say: even a child could cross such a small heap in one stride, but I can’t set foot on it because, I am afraid it will take me many years to cross. And old age will have made its home within me by the time I get home. But how can I tell you what a problem even a handful of sand is for me? Sand is a boundary on which she is always standing”8.

In this short story there are metaphorical images of great impact as, for example, the description of the desert which merges in that one of the beauty of the young woman living there: “Suddenly something started violently beating its head inside me: I was filled wth an uneasy restlessness. I quickly raised my foot and stepped on the heap of sand. Now I am travelling on the sand. I am back in the air which I had been afraid of. The journey shows no sign of ending. The desert streches far into the far distance. The sand dunes are dozing with theirheads resting in each other’s laps. The camel bend down to the stunted bushes. The sounds of the bell round the sheeps’neck link their hands together to dance in a ring at the threshold of my ears. “You’re very late”, she says patting my shoulder. “I have been hearing the sound of your footsteps for years”. The twirl of the skirt as she quickly turned to pick up the water jar made me feel as if the whole universe was twirling. I smiled and I looked at her. “But the footsteps make no sound on sand”, I said. She let out a peal of laughter and went away still laughing. Her soft bosom started shaking violently. Her jewellery jumped about this way and that. When she had her laughter under controll, she said: “What do you understand about it? Won’t a person know if someone walks on her body?” and putting a second pot on her hip she slowly started walking”9.

The female characters of Mazhar ul Islam prose are strongly characterized by an aura of mystery and seem to be different emanation of the same idea of femininity, which has been identified mainly with Hir and Sohni, both heroines of the romantic legends of Punjab.

The work of Mazhar ul Islam can be described with the words referred to Hir in Meeting Lady Hir with Sir Ranjha There too: “I told Larissa that Hir had no nationality. This was a separate matter from her having been born in Pakistan and it having been here that she started a story which has no end. (.....) Hir does still live on in some girls. But who are they and where do they live? The girl I met in the Cholistan desert? Or the beautiful nomad girl who I met in the Kaghan valley? Larissa, or some other Hir? Where does she live? It is said that Hir is the soul and Ranjha is the expression of that thought. And it is in order to find its expression that the thought keeps enduring its pain. So Hir’s tombcould be anywhere or in any country in the world. But Hir isn’t in any of these tombs. She is still restlessly awaiting her expression. And Hir still seems to be somewhere here or else in some other country, watching for the coming of her expression”10.

The search for Hir seems to be identified with the search for the meaning of life. Searching for Hir or meditating on the place where she could be mean to follow the traces and the signs of her presence or passage. However, the search for the meaning of life doesn’t end up in any of the Mazhar ul Islam short stories, which don’t have a real conclusion or end, but most of the time are abruptly interrupted and remain almost pending on an open question.

The symbolical value of every story is repeated in the other. Every symbol hides an other one and every door is an access leading to an other one. The eye of the artist penetrates in the daily life and in its frame build the story which in the prose of Mazhar ul Islam is born out of a continuous process of generation with his own time and expressive form.

Notes:

1-Mazhar ul Islam, The Season of Love, Bitter Almonds and Delayed Rains, Lahore 2010, 86-87.

2-Idem, 85.

3-Idem, 189.

4-Idem, 88-89.

5-Idem, 118.

6-Idem, 241.

7-Idem, 128-129.

8-Idem, 9.

9-Idem, 10.

10-Idem, 209-210.