F for Faiz
An Untimely Silence for Faiz
Naeem Mohaiemen
Beware of me. My body is a river of poison.
Stay away from me. My body is a parched log in the desert.
If you burn it, you won't see the cypress or the jasmine,
but my bones blossoming like thorns in the cactus…
Stay Away From Me (Bangladesh I)
Rounaq Jahan’s thesis, published before the war, was titled Failure in National Integration. That polite formulation projects the rupture of the stillborn Muslim homeland as an act of policy failure. The silence during the decades after the war point to a larger canvas of failure– of imagination itself. An inability to imagine Pakistan as a whole. Rushdie’s formulation still apropos: Two wings without a body
the bitterness now so clear that
I had to listen when my friends
told me to wash my eyes with blood…
(Bangladesh II)
Three poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz are cited by Bengali author Azfar Hussain as evidence of a commitment to national liberation. At a distance they feel untimely, late. Hussain recounts a letter Faiz wrote from Algeria to Marxist thinker Badruddin Umar. Of the warnings given in the pages of the magazine Lail-O-Nahar. These fragments reassure, but the timeline pulls in the opposite. Two of the three poems were written after the war– a melancholia that cannot let go, the inertia of the shell shocked soldier.
The time of the end of our love was so cruel
After nights of intimacy the mornings so unkind..
Upon Returning From Dhaka (Bangladesh III)