Themes of Faiz Ahmed Faiz' poetry

Themes of Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poetry

Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born in 1911 at Sialkot and was educated at Lahore, where he studied English literature and philosophy.  He began his career as a lecturer in English at Amritsar.  After the second World War, he turned to journalism and distinguished himself as the editor of The Pakistan Times.  He was charged with complicity in the Rawalpindi conspiracy case and was condemned to four years' imprisonment in 1951.  The jail term gave him a first-hand experience of the harsh realities of life, and provided him with the much-needed leisure and solitude to think out his thoughts and transmute them into poetry.  Two of his books, Dast-e-Saba and Zindan-Nama are the products of this period of imprisonment.

Faiz was to become a symbol of revolt and dissidence. His poetry as much as his life came to represent the longings of the people which had come their way so briefly and then cynically been taken away. Faiz became a source of great ideological power. His voice always rang high and clear and during the grave-like silence of martial law rule, his words remained a beacon of light that could not be extinguished. With him has gone the luminosity of hope. Faiz was a Marxist but what differentiated him from this often joyless and doctrinate crowd was his profound humanism steeped as it was in the rich tradition of subcontinent’s culture, literature and spiritual continuum. His poetry is a celebration of life and an affirmation of the law of change. He was a man singularly devoid of prejudice. He fought bigotry, not with bigotry, but with tolerance.

In literary terms Faiz was in the direct classical tradition of Ghalib and Iqbal and took his place in that distinguished pantheon an equal among equals with a style and presence distinctly his own. His greatness lay in his ability to have written of contemporary issues and human predicament in an idiom which always retained the high sobriety of classicism. He wrote within the great traditions of Urdu poetry. His diction, his imagery and his symbols remained unmistakably traditional, but unlike others who managed to produce the same formula, Faiz managed to produce poetry which could be directly and immediately related to the concerns of today. With Faiz the sleeping gods once again came to life. The word regained its vitality and its power. This will remain the greatest testimony to his genius.

Rejecting the art-for-art’s sake approach in his life, he identified himself with the aspirations of the common life. The miracle of his genius lay in his ability to communicate not only with them, but with the so-called “more sophisticated” sections of society as well. His verse retained its purity and lyricism and failed to move. He is among that handful of whom it can be said: they never wrote bad or indifferent poetry. His seven volumes of verse stand in witness to that.

A committed Marxist, Faiz sought the liberation of the subjugated from tyranny. His poems have been lovingly read, cried upon and enthusiastically discussed by many Pakistanis who love this country, the Pakistani language and Pakistani literature – simply because the verses brim with Faiz’s love for the state and its people.

A piece of Faiz’s poetry looks like any other poetry. Black printed script on white parchment. The staid, two-dimensionality of parchment. The mundane blackness of the script. But as the reader’s gaze sweeps upon the verses, he is conscious of a clamor therein; a raging storm extricated within the dull entrapments of font and page, pining to be let loose, to disturb the tranquil air, to prod awake the sleeping conscience, to alter the course of the clouds, the blow of raucous winds, and flow of mighty rivers.

These grandiose metaphors do complete justice to Faiz’s poetry, because the end he sought through it aimed to challenge the rude tenacity of the status-quo in Pakistan. As a common man, he was strongly disillusioned by the lack of social justice, freedom of expression and democratization which defined the political landscape in Pakistan throughout the years between 1950 and 1980. Through Faiz’s poetry, dictatorial regime was confronted with uncompromising hatred, with the common man being encouraged to decry it thus:

Speak as if you have open lips

Speak as you yourself concede your tongue

Speak as the verity is teeming yet.

Faiz is a "committed" poet who regards poetry as a vehicle of serious thought, and not a mere pleasurable pastime.  Faiz was honored by Soviet Russia with the prestigious Lenin Award for Peace and his poems have been translated into the Russian language.  His poetical collections include Naqsh-e-Faryadi (1943), Dast-e-Saba (1952), Zindan-Nama (1956) and Dast-e-Tah-e-Sang (1965). 

As a poet, Faiz began writing on the conventional themes of love and beauty, but soon these conventional themes get submerged in the larger social and political issues of the day.  The traditional grieves of love get fused with the travails of the afflicted humanity, and Faiz uses his poetry to champion the cause of socialistic humanism.  Consequently, the familiar imagery of a love-poet acquires new meanings in the hands of Faiz. This turning away from romance to realism, from Eros to Agape, is beautifully suggested in his poem (a nazm), "mujh se pehli si mohabbat meri mahboob na maang”,”Do Not Ask”.

Faiz is a poet of humanity so there is not a single theme in his poetry but his poetry encompasses all the human emotions, he shares it with all classes of readers. There we find love with all its ecstasies, the elations of blood besides this he doesn’t miss the suffering, disintegration, pain, injustice , cruelties that he witnessed in his life. There is also the major theme of Revolution abundantly found in Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poetry.

Love theme:

Faiz’s poetry is profusely rich with love. In other words, we can say that love is the hallmark of Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poetry but it is important to mention here that love depicted in Faiz’s poetry is of two sorts: his love for his beloved and his love for his country. Before having the yawning glance of it, we need to have a look on his statement:

“The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved.”

This statement can be taken as a Sufi tenet, a teaching of Sufism. ‘The beloved’ in the phrase may “refer to a person, a home, a country — anything that is beloved, whose meaning is love”. To Faiz the Sufi teachings came to have many meanings and “loss encompasses many losses — loss of home, family, livelihood, country”, because for Faiz, his country and his people were, of course, among the beloved ones and he suffered a lot while in exile.

There we find unique expression of feelings, sentiments and sensations in Faiz’s poetry.

Of the long days when I knew you could not come,

Don’t ask if I thought of you or missed you very much.

Your memory alone fills the wellspring of my mind

But it is not the same as your lips, your arms, and your touch.

Even here, the imprisoned lover instructs his beloved not to ask of his longing, because—he implies—he refuses to long for her on the days when he knows that she is impossibly separated from him, and thinking of her only reminds him of his forced isolation. Thus, even in the love poems of this period, Faiz’s righteous defiance pervades.

Patriotism:

This conflation of the belovèd with the belovèd country—through the conventional theme of hijr—allowed Faiz to take his familiar imagery to new heights. If the true country of Pakistan, “the dawn we awaited with longing sighs,” has not yet arrived, then he may address his nation with the same sense of longing he feels for his absent wife. This union of the personal and political is most manifest in the poem “Two Loves,” which begins with the extremely conventional gesture of addressing Saqi, the wine-bearing muse of Persian poetry, in exclamatory declarations of love, before revealing midway the poem’s central conceit:

I

Oh rose-like Saqi, fresh yet in my memory

are those days whose bright mirror still vibrates with her;

those moments we met, like an opening flower,

the moments, like fluttering heartbeats, I waited for her—

II

In this same way I have loved my darling country;

In this same way my heart has pounded with devotion to her;

In this same way my passion has sought the respite of a resting-place,

In the curve of her cheek, in the curls of her hair.

In this same way, to that sweetheart world, my heart and eyes.

The promise of these stylistic advances in the last poems of Dast-e-saba is fulfilled in the poem, “Bury Me Under Your Streets.” Shuttling brilliantly from rhetoric to image, from argumentation to emotional evocation, it moves, as Bly says the best difficult poems do, “from the anguished emotions to the intellect and back”:

Bury me under your streets, O my beloved country,

Where today men dare not pass with heads held high,

Or where lovers of you who wish to pay tribute,

Must fear for their lives and come around on the sly.

Faiz was a great nationalistic poet, sometimes also called chauvinistic. He witnessed the partition circumstances of Pakistan, the sacrifices of the people to gain a separate homeland, scuffles of Quaid, Hindu-Muslim tussles, thrashes of all the Pakistanis to establish it, so there we find unfathomable comprehension of all these things in his poetry. All these things come together in writing his poetry.

He writes that silent love and tears do not suffice one’s duty to the country. Strife and struggle are necessary in the face of tyranny and exploitation. In his poem “Aaj Bazaar Mein”, which he wrote during his captivity in Lahore Jail, he calls out for those with “exposed palms”, “muddy hair” and “blood on the chest” to move forward. The closing verses may be rendered in English thus:

Come, gather your possessions,

O people with injured hearts.

Come, O Friends,

Let us go and get killed.

Faiz’s love for his country, his people is beautifully expressed in his poem Do Not Ask where he ranks second to his beloved in face of the miseries and infirmities of life.

Your beauty is still a river of gems but now I know

There are afflictions which have nothing to do with desire,

Raptures which have nothing to do with love.

My love, do not ask me………….

Solitude:

There is the lamentation, mourning, suffering in Faiz’s poetry over the issues of seclusion from his beloved. There he describes the afflictions of solitude that he suffers, he no longer finds the moments of coming across with his beloved so he is grieved. This theme is evident in his poem “Tanhai” translated as “Solitude”.

Someone is coming at last, sad heart! No. I am wrong.

It is a stranger passing on the way to another place.

Night falters; stars are scattered like clouds.

The lamps in the hallway droop; they want to go out

………         ……….        …………..

Lock up your sleepless doors, my heart.

No one, no one will ever come here now.

This poem depicts an unfortunate lover who can’t get the sight of his beloved and consoling his heart, also advising it not to wait for any beloved.

Revolution :

Faiz said to be a revolutionary poet. His poems are best known for their revolutionary cry. He shook the foundations of the oppression through using his words sensibly by realizing his duty. Unsympathetic authoritarianism was shown the naked dagger through the spine-chilling imagery of a poem titled “Hum dekhain ge” or “We shall overcome” , in which the tyrants were conveyed the horrible tidings of the “rattling ground”, “fearsome lightening in the skies”, the “tossing of their crowns” and the “seizing of their thrones”, all of which were to lead to their doom and the salvation of the oppressed.

The message of gearing into action for the country’s sake is a recurring theme in Faiz’s work. He writes:

The day when the mountains of oppressions of oppression,

Will blow away like whips of cotton

When the earth will dance beneath the feet of once enslaved:

And heavens will shake with thunder

Over the heads of tyrants

…….                    …………….

We, the rejects of the earth,,

Will be raised to a place of honor.

All crowns’ll be tossed in air,

All thrones’ll be smashed.

Personal grieves:

Faiz’s poetry aromas with the the most personal feelings as well. Though there we find the most personal grieves of to be in love with some, but there is a poem by Faiz Ahmad Faiz which is the most personal/subjective in fashion .He wrote this poem in the memory of his dead brother, and there is the beautiful expression of the filial affection among siblings.

I have the accusation my brother ,you carried away
My book of past life with you                                                                                                       Containing my precious memories
Having my childhood and also comprising my youth

Revolt:

Faiz was also imprisoned for some time of his life. He was accused of conspiracy against Liaqat Ali Khan. For the first three months of his imprisonment, while he awaited trial; Faiz was held in solitary confinement at Sargodha then later at Lyallpur. No visitors were allowed, and he was denied all reading and writing materials. The only poems he composed during this period were qit‘tas a form he could memorize or (according to his fellow inmates) scrawl with chunks of coal on the walls of his cell. Not surprisingly, these brief poems fluctuate between pure defiance and extreme loneliness. The best known of these is also the poem that Faiz claimed as his first prison composition:

Why should I mourn if my tablet and pen are forbidden?

When I have dipped my fingers in my own blood until they stain?

My lips have been silenced, but what of it?

For I have hidden

A tongue in every round-mouthed link of my chain.

It whiffs distinctly in his poem “Supplication” or “Rabba Sachiya”.it sniffs and presents the rebellious attitude of Faiz againast All Almighty,he adopts this attitude in face of the difficulties of life.

If you accept our plea

We’ll do

Whatever you say.

If not

We’ll look for another God.

Optimism:

There we also find the aroma of optimism in Faiz’s poetry. As in his following poem it smells:

These days of spring can’t be made prisoner by a snare.

No matter that I can’t see it myself. Others will see

these days of the brilliant garden and the singing nightingale.

As well as there is a famous line by Faiz comprising all the tenets of optimism:

Dawn is breaking—tell your heart not to doubt.

the unexpected effect of focusing and concentrating his talents—an experience he later likened to being in love: The first thing is that, like the dawn of love, all the sensations are again aroused and the mistiness of the early morning and evening, the blue of the sky, the gentleness of the breeze return with the same sense of wonder. And the second thing that happens is that the time and distances of the outside world are negated; the sense of distance and nearness is obliterated in such a way that a single moment weighs on the mind like the Day of Judgment and sometime [sic] the occurrences of a century seem to be like the happenings of yesterday. The third thing is that in the vastness of separation, one gets more time for reading and thinking and for decorating the bride of creativity.

These sessions may have begun with great humor, but the seriousness of Faiz’s verses soon shifted the tone. Poem’s like “The Execution Yard (A Song)” were clearly intended to stoke the political fires of his fellow inmates:

There is exquisite manifestation of buoyancy and hopefulness in his following poem: 

Where the road of longing leads us, we will see tomorrow.

This night will pass, and this too we will see tomorrow.

Don’t fear my heart; we will see day’s shining face tomorrow.

Let the drinker’s thirst for wine slowly sharpen:

We will see how long they deny the fierce grapevine tomorrow;

We will see how long they refuse the cup and flask tomorrow

Let the summons come to the assembly from the Street of Scorn:

After unfolding these themes and probing through all the aspects of Faiz’s poetry, we deduce that it is wrong to label Faiz with any tags of prejudice or any particular kind of poetry as he is a universal poet, much loved by all the classes of readers and even read years after his death.