The Rococo of Afzal Ahmed Syed

Rococo and Other Worlds: The Poems of Afzal Ahmed Syed, translated from the Urdu by Musharraf Ali Farooqi, Yoda Press, 264 pages, Rs 295

Her love
for haute couture
Her embroidered bolero
Her Egyptian amulet for eternal life
Her partiality for Islam and chocolate chip ice cream
Her bridal gown, and for swearing in ceremonies
Her green and blue dresses
People ordered stripped at her behest
That could never be

–That Could Never Be

Speaking through more than a 100 poems, contemporary Urdu poet Afzal Ahmed Syed gives us a stylish collection of the best of his three works, in Rococo and Other Worlds: The Poems of Afzal Ahmed Syed. These worlds are occupied by prose which is dense and ornamental at times, but anything but rococo ultimately, though they certainly mine the rich traditions Syed has inherited.

Afzal Ahmed Syed has published three collections in Urdu of the modern nazm genre—titled Chheni Hoi Tareekh (An Arrogated Past, 1984), Do Zubanon Mein Saza-e Maut (Death Sentence in Two Languages, 1990), and Rococo Aur Doosri Duniyaen (Rococo and Other Worlds, 2000) —as well as a ghazal collection, Khaima-e Siyah (The Dark Pavilion, 1988). His latest work was the first Urdu translation of Mir Taqi Mir’s Persian divan, and its legacy is apparent. Yet, his vision is utterly cosmopolitan and wide-ranging; rangers proselytise with icecream trucks, speaking ‘the language of strawberry and vanilla’ (The Campaign to Introduce an Ice Cream) and an acacia is not classified as a tree because ‘it does not support hanging’ (‘Our National Tree’); there are light jokes on Helen of Sparta and around Caesar’s murder (‘A free trip/ to Rome/ for one who solves the riddle.’ – A Difficult Question), and memorials to Marie Antoinette, bank tellers and those who have been given death sentences. Even a daring retelling of the creation myth, wherein Adam and Eve fail to inform anyone they are in love, quoting from Melville: ‘One day I shall tell you/ The sea begins/ Where the land disappears’ (We Live Without Sanction).

‘He lives in Karachi, but it could as well have been Cracow. He is very much of his time and place, but the poetic traditions he taps into could be from anywhere, which is perhaps why he is not better known in the subcontinent,’ says poet Arvind Krishna Mehtrotra in the blurb, among several from Western readers who have become familiar with the work of Syed, commenting in journals like The Brooklyn Rail and Poetry Salzburg Review. Indeed, Syed traverses different worlds fluently; he has translated Eastern European poets such as Dunya Mikhail, Wislawa Szymborska, Marin Sorescu and Orhan Veli into Urdu.

Prolific translator Musharraf Ali Farooqi, who gave us Urdu classics like the epics Dastan-e Amir Hamza and Tilism-e Hoshruba, has delivered this selection of verse to us. In his introduction, he tells us how Syed, an entomologist, witnessed the birth of Bangladesh in 1971, escaped the Lebanese Civil War as a student at the American University of Beirut and has lived in Karachi since 1976, bearing witness to the ravages of terrorism, ethnic divisions and daily violence in this part of the subcontinent. ‘While the Urdu language is equipped to handle the most sublime poetic expression in the traditional structure of the she’r, the same attempt could become very tricky in prose, where the poet must produce a delicately balanced expression,’ says Farooqi. ‘In performing this balancing act Syed has created an expression never before seen in Urdu… detached, cerebral, and simultaneously heart-rending prose, and a classicism all its own.’

The poet’s big themes are love and war, and love in war; ultimately, the war in love. In Sobia, the narrator and Sobia perform ‘the dance of curses’; among them that of ‘the heart that falls to one/ like a vagrant ship/ that berths itself to some port/ where it is pillaged’. The ancient is wedded to the mundane, so that the same heart that tells us, ‘Whom one loves/ must be conducted out/ of a fading city/ on the last boat’, dictates: ‘With the beloved/ one must type/ A memorandum/ against all inequities in the world/ whose pages/ one must fling/ out the hotel window/ towards the swimming pool/ come morning’ (Whom One Loves). Syed levels time with that kind of cheeky, capable aptness.

He defends love valiantly—‘You did not consider love/ a startling fortune’ (The Ultimate Proof), admitting it to the dinner table and welcoming it, warily: ‘For a long while/ I felt your presence in the adjacent seat/ Is my heart an empty seat whose ticket you have mislaid?/ Has love been mislaid?’ (Has Love Been Mislaid). In the latter poem, the appeal to our own hearts is simple, ending with a barren flower show, the object of the narrator’s affections walking away without a kiss: ‘It was raining outside’, he tells us. ‘An umbrella remained furled up in my heart’. Ultimately, that heart ‘is as the bridge/ whose walk was inundated’ (Love), a beautiful, useless thing we value all the more; it gives us moments of pleasurable discomfort in ‘the kiss/ caught in our throats like a fishbone’ (We Must Forget).

The long prose poems are more challenging, coming at the reader thick and fast, dense with words and full of mirages and thickets. Epic ballads like the sombre prose poem Sobia and the equally dream-like Naujabna (at 23 pages, the longest in this collection) successfully speak of the hopelessness of love, just as Down from Tel Za-ter, a grim six-pager, beats you down—if beautifully, with its cows giving black milk and wounds marked with sulphur.

The publication of this volume is an event in modern poetry from the subcontinent from a poet who deserves more recognition. Syed, it is clear, has something of importance to tell this generation of Indians, Pakistanis, citizens of the world. His sense of the humorous is acute, though he speaks mostly in a serious vein. It is clear how natural this is to the life many lead, at moments like this, a culmination of a litany of bayonets and benisons: ‘The cover of four sandbags/ and an arrogated past/ were insufficient/ to keep us alive’ (An Arrogated Past). Read and savour.

Musharraf Ali FarooqipoetryRococo and Other Worldsthe Poems of Afzal Ahmed SyedUrdu