naghma-e-bulbul

the church next to my house

2008-03-10T21:14:00.000-07:00

I live next to a Greek Orthodox Church. There is a gold Christ near its roof. Everyday I walk by this church and think what that image of Christ sees everyday. I know Jigar has said that all of his desires/armaans are crosses/sooli where Christ is hung again and again. But I avoid Jigar’s morbid, liver-wrenching (excuse the pun) suggestion. For one thing, I walk by this image of Christ everyday; I do not want to think of him ascending the steps of a scaffold made of my pithy desires. Other images, other lyrics, other verses have started coming to my mind when I catch him witnessing the absurd mundanity of Henry Street West. I stare back sometimes and think, those beautiful and wet eyes (chashm-e-num) could bless those lands being occupied and tormented with its bountiful gaze (nigaah-e-karam). And yet he is here, framed with a dusting of snow, reminding me of something I forgot I ever knew.

The image makes me think of those hanging bodies whose lipsticks keep shining in Faiz’s poetry. But it also reminds me of a poem by Kaifi Azmi about a statue of Christ in a busy intersection in Bombay while Vietnam is being destroyed. I thought I would translate his poem because I have decided that seeing this glimmering gold image does not beckon to the hands whose silver was shining even while being hung (as we saw with Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s “We Who Were Hung In Half-Lit Pathways”). Instead it beckons to Kaifi Azmi’s statue of the Son of Mary who stands there witnessing again and again. But the irony, we might consider, is that he is witnessing a scene from the wrong scaffold:

Ibn-e-Maryam

Son of Mary

Tum khuda ho
Khuda ke bete ho
Ya faqat aman ke paighambar ho
Ya kis ki haseen takhayyul ho
Jo bhi ho mujhko ache lagte ho
Mujhko sachche lagte ho

Whether you are God
Or the Son of God
Or just a messenger of peace
Or someone’s beautiful imagination
Whatever you are, I like you
You look truthful to me

Is sitare mai.n jis mai.n sadio.n ke
Jhoot aur khizb ka andhera hai
Is sitare mai.n, jis ko har rukh se
Ringti sarhado.n ne ghera hai

In this fate in which centuries of
Lies and deceit have spread their darkness
In this fate in which every face
Has been made faint by these silent borders (?)

Is sitare mai.n,
Raat peeti hai noor chehro.n ka
Subha seeno.n ka khuun chaat-ti hai
Tum na hote to is sitare mai.n
Na jane kya hota
Tum na hote to
Kon charhta khooshi sai sooli par?

In this fate
The night drinks the light of faces
And the morning licks blood from chests
If you were not here in this fate
I do not know what might happen
If you were not here,
Then who would have ascended the scaffold with joy?

Tum yaha.n se hato.n khuda ke li’e
Ja’o voh vietnaam ke jungle
Us ke masloob sheher, zakhmi ga’o.n
Jin ko injeel parhne walo.n ne
Chonk dala hai
Jaane kab se pukaar te hai.n tumhe.n

Please, for God’s sake, leave this place
Go to Vietnam, its jungles
In those cities that have been hung, in those wounded villages
That have been destroyed
By those who read the Bible
Who knows for how long they have been crying out to you

Ja’o aik baar phir humare li’e
Tum ko charhna parega sooli par

Go! Once more you will have to, for us,
Climb those steps to the cross

The Etiquette of a Congregation, of a Congregation of Men

2008-03-10T21:11:00.000-07:00

My father and I used to go to the mosque every Friday until he died. We would stand next to each other and the imam would tell us,

“Brothers, shoulder to shoulder, toe to toe. Let there be no spaces between you brothers or the devil might step in.”

And we would oblige. I never really hugged my father and this was the closest we would ever get. When I was finishing high school and he died, I would still go to the same mosque and when closing my eyes to hear ornate utterances of Quranic verses like Fateha (The Key) or Al-Muzammil (The One Wrapped in a Cloth), I would feel the warmth of his shoulder next to mine. Then I would remember the man next to me is not my father at all. It is a congregant standing perfectly in line with other men, all facing the qiblah – the cubical heart of Islam which the prophet purged of false idols. And I would want to push my arm closer to his – so we can keep the devil from stepping in, so I can feel a tenderness in front of God in the very congregation he has ordained. And then we touch our foreheads to the ground in an act prostration – in union our foreheads touch the ground. And remembering that the devil can make an appearance between congregants even in prostration, I would touch his fingers that were next to mine on the carpet. But ever so slightly. This is, after all, the etiquette of a congregation – of a congregation of men.

It is odd this congregation never fails to alight certain hidden aspects of my being, of my body. Because, indeed, I have always felt more comfortable around women: With my mother, with my sisters. But in this space I would feel so right next to these bodies, taking pleasure in the subtle touches in the service of the Divine. And perhaps Divine-will can only materialize in this congregation, in the subtleties of these very touches, with our eyes closed, with our lips whispering, “Rabbi-al-aalameen” (“the Ruler of the Worlds”). And of course I could never stop myself from thinking, “Oh Ruler of the Worlds, it is you alone who has put this body next to mine, his arm on mine”. It is you alone who has made me feel his breath on my cheek when he mouths greetings of peace to the auspicious angels that materialize next to believers when we pray together. And this is, after all, the etiquette of a congregation – of a congregation of men.

And then it happened, I thought I was somehow realizing a progressive and liberated self by going to gay and lesbian clubs in Vancouver. The first time I saw them taking off their shirts, I felt such dread. I had spent a lifetime cultivating a sense of shame, of learning how to subordinate myself and my body to Divine regulations. I had cultivated a sense of modesty in front of other bodies – men or women – and of course modesty in front of the Divine. And yet they could rip off their shirts. They could go on stage. They could caress each other’s torsos. In public. On stage. In front of our gazes, in front of the gaze of the Divine. They would say I am a prude; I need to come out of my shell. To break this shell, to rip off my cloak, I had to forget these Fridays, with their subtleties of touch, with their delights of moving my body in a way God had demanded, and in a way necessarily in union with these arms next to me. But this too, after all, is the etiquette of a congregation – of a congregation of men.

What happens to those bodies who are cultivated through repeated engagements with religious rites? Specifically, what happens to the body who went to the mosque every Friday – whose being was modeled by caressing the shoulders of an adjacent believer? Are we to tell this being that his true self will be realized only when he rips his shirt off? When his cloak is stripped from him? When he can violently unlearn a type of bodily cultivation it took many years with its many Fridays to mould? When he too can caress someone’s torso in front of our gazes? We could tell him this. But it would ignore the tender modality of erotics I experienced on my Fridays. Where my self was being experienced by touching this shoulder next to mine, and by feeling his breath on my cheek. These touches were, indeed, a mode for realizing God’s immaculate plan and included types of pleasure and desire we often do not bother recognizing.

So this body has turned his back to the congregation that demands its participants to unlearn their religious and cultural embodiments in favour of its own particularist notion of self-realization. This body has opted to remain in a very different congregation of men. One where we can stand next to one another wrapped in our cloaks and still feel each other’s body pulsate with a burning desire for God’s presence. And with this pulse we can perhaps share and experience our bodies to their fullest. So do not ask me, I beg of you, to tear off my cloak. For perhaps this tearing will destroy a type of self: “O thou wrapped up in thy raiment…Remember the name of thy Lord and devote thyself with a complete devotion – Lord of the East and of the West, there is no god save God, so choose God alone for thy defender” (Quran, 73:1, 8-9).

Shariatic Habitus, the Modern Family and Talal Asad's Framework: How to make sense of Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi?

2007-09-08T11:01:00.000-07:00

Talal Asad’s idea that the moral authority of the family was one of three social changes that facilitated the conditions for secular modernity and nationhood is important. Indeed when families start being seen as the defining unit of society, an idea proposed my Islamist reformers as well, there is a sort of prvitization of sharia. It starts be spoken of as personal law. This process is central to a secular formula because the place for religion is defined and it can only make appearences into the public through state law (Asad, 2003: 231).

When considering Thanvi’s discourse on the family, and especially as outlined in the Bahishti Zewar, a similar view of the family as the necessary unit for society is also outlined. And indeed this relates to how the sharia (now “personal law”) is cited to confirm the sacrosanct nature of this obviously modern household (comprised of conjugality, love, contractual equality). And though Asad rightly notes how this idea was articulated by both secularists and Islamists, he still claims that “both secularists and Islamists have taken a strongly statist perspective in that both see sharia as “sacred law.” Of course Asad is right in discussing how deemphasizing the cultivation of a particular shariatic habitus allows for the conceptualizing of sharia as “sacred” as opposed to “profane”. But his framework cannot make sense of Thanvi’s cultivation of a particular conjugal family through Thanvi’s own shariatic citations.

This is because Thanvi’s framework has a very different relationship to the state. Clearly he is not “statist” for two reasons. Firstly, the Tablighi movement is never about seizing state power nor becoming embedded in the administrative functions of the state. Secondly, the national discourse is still dominated by Hindu cultural ethos and religious reformist sensibilities. And thus though both Islamists and secularists articulate a desire to ‘englighten’ the rural masses into civility through the family as a site for moral authority – although with different motivations in hand –, there is still something about Thanvi’s discourse and context that does not quite fit. This again has to do with the national/non-national dynamics of Muslim juristic activity in India. Indeed Thanvi was not only writing in response to secular modernist Muslim Indians (like Sir Syed) who wished to bring the Muslim masses out of superstitious customs and dominance of the Ulama, but also in a context where secularist Hindu movements wished to reform Hindu tradition but also maintain an Aryan basis of the nation with the relegation of the Muslim to a cancerous limb.

So how is Thanvi’s discourse – though clearly modern – embedded within the process of secularization Asad describes? How can we conceptualize gus awkward relationship with the state’s role in assuring sharia? (Indeed this is something illustrated by the Bahishti Zewar itself. This text is beyond simply advocating the Muslim right to ‘personal law’ and confirming the family as a site for moral authority in a privatized way. Indeed the text is actually attempting to cultivate a type of habitus that continuously cites shariatic principles. This is the type of habitus, I would argue, Asad is saying is deemphasized through secularization and the privitization of sharia). These are questions, perhaps, that can only be answered through a discussion on the complex and awkward relationships with secular nationhood within the particularities of early twentieth century Deoband jurisprudence; relationships clearly not collapsible with the notion of ‘statist’ nor the idea that Thanvi wished to deploy the powers of the state to use sharia in matters of the ‘private self’ that came along with the new modern conjugal family.

jigar mai.n khalish!

2007-06-24T13:09:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I wonder how to make sense of the shakhsiat (personhood) of Akhtari Bai Faizabadi (Begum Akhtar). She cannot be like the rest of us, her burning jigar has brought too many tears to simply be one of us. She could be that old figure of the pari – the Indo-Persian ferry who displays her adaayei.n (charms) for ephemeral moments to the crazed (joshi, majnoon) lover.

Like Akhtari Bai, the pari is associated with wine and intoxication, as well as song (naghma-e-pari) and perhaps even dance. For instance, the famed dance school in Lucknow under Nawab Wajid Shah was called the “pari-khana”. But Begum Akhtar cannot be collapsed with a pari-like presence because her ghazals are so heart wrenching that it is not the fareb (cheat) of her soon-to-be-disappeared adaayei.n (charms), but it is a sense of violent disembodiment and embodied destruction.

Yes this is all very dramatic. I want to discuss how these two aspects of listening to Akhtari Bai (disembodiment and embodied destruction) – two aspects that make it often impossible to stop listening – that make it impossible to collapse with a fairy-like presence. Indeed she is something entirely different. But first, to unpack her shakhsiat as revealed through the Brilliant Jigar Moradabadi’s words:

Qayamat kya? Ye ae husn-e-do-aalam hoti jati hai
Ke mehfil to wahi hai, dilkashi kam hoti jat hai

What apocalypse? This “o-beauty-of-both worlds” keeps happening
Well the congregation is the same, but it becomes less and less attractive

When Begum Akhtar questions, “what apocalypse” she does so in a way that taunts you. Her raspy, powerful voice is mocking a certain important tautology we cling to. But then the way she stresses mehfil and almost lets go at the dilkashi reveals a sort of tired, discouraged abandonment of will. That, well, the congregation stays the same, but something in me (here the embodied destruction) makes it impossible to enjoy it any longer.

Wahi mekhana-o-sehba, wahi saghar, wahi sheesha
Magar aawaaz-e-noshanosh, madham, hoti jati hai

The same tavern and company, the same wine-cup, the same glass,
But the noises of consumption (eating/drinking) become more and more quiet

This haunting couplet does something slightly different in revealing Akhtari Bai’s shakshiat. Having said that, it still falls into the trope of “embodied destruction” because the speaker knows the mehfil is the same. The sounds of consuming (eating, I almost picture animals pulling flesh from limbs) is dimming not because it is actually dimming but because the speaker is no longer capable of hearing these noises of activity (of the garm bazaari). But this does not mean the mehfil is less attractive because it is ‘quiter’ – this is a laughable proposition. But nor is being less able to hear the congregants’ activities necessarily a negative thing – perhaps the sounds of consuming are themselves so revolting that not being able to hear them is itself a kind of karam – grace from God.

Wahi hai shahid-o-saqi, magar dil bujhta jata hai
Wahi hai shamma, lekin roshni kam hoti jati hai

Of course this couplet largely confirms the theme of embodied destruction because, again, the self (shamma) is the same but its light (personhood) becomes more and more dim. And perhaps, again, this is not a ‘negative’ thing because the shamma’s light – when the self has been abased and disgusted by itself – could reveal the presence of an always morbid and disgusting scene. Of course the heart slowly dying even though the cup-bearer and witness are still present confirms this inability to be in one’s skin. It is also important to note how by the end of the ghazal jigar notes that the light was the same all along.

To switch lenses a bit, we see how the following two couplets reveal a violent disembodiment where the subject is being torn into bits (hisse) and also where the self frighteningly becomes more and more estranged from its appointed positioning (muqarrar). The result is heart wrenching. I have no time right now to delve into commentary, but I think these lines do their own ‘justice’. One hint: remember to focus on the power of sorrow and how becoming estranged from it is a type of impoverishment. And also, one has to notice that the little hisses (pieces) of the self do not have the same ‘amount’ of happiness as the hole but each piece has an ironically more unhappy being.

Tabiyat in dino.n begaana-e-gham hoti jati
Mere hisse ki goya har khushi kam hoti jati jati

My state these days is becoming a stranger to sorrow
The happiness present in each piece of me, though, becomes less and less

Wahi hai roshni, wahi hai zindagi, Jigar ye haal hai apna
Ke jaise zindagi se, zindagi kam hoti jati hai

It is the same light, the same life, Jigar, this is your state
As though from life, life became less and less

*just think of this ghazal’s brilliance. Each couplet revealing that the aalam, the state, is exactly the same. But then claiming that something has happened – something has happened that makes it impossible not to see the gruesome nature of our distractions. And how things are dimming, they are not disappearing. You are just becoming more and more estranged, more and more discontent (but a sort of subtle and dim discontent) so nothing can bring you piece. And you can no longer even dwell in the glories of sorrow.

The feeling in the Kidney and the lipstick clinging to the scaffold

2007-05-25T20:54:00.001-07:00

My neglected little blog…

I think one of the reasons I do not find the time to post very often is that the letter ‘m’ is broken on my keyboard. So typing certain sentences (like ones with my name) are a bit more difficult.

And a healthy dose of writer’s block.

One of the things about Faiz’s poem about the sooli is that what happens when something dead is given a sort of ‘forced life’. I am speaking of the lipstick. I know in his poem he is referring to the lipstick of the beloved not on the scaffold from the distance:

“tere honto.n ki laali lapakti rahi”

But when I first read the poem, I had been certain the lipstick was actually on the one being hung. So the image:

The qatl-gah (the field of murder)
A row of scaffolds (or crosses actually)
The pale green grass and perhaps a hill or two in the background
The body hanging
The lipstick shining bright
So bright

This is the image I had. And though texts can have polyvalent meanings, I know my reading contradicts the underlying message in the poem: how new lovers (of Resistance) will still come forth since the beloved revolution’s ornaments are still dazzling. But my ‘misreading’ (oh how Derrida must cringe!) gave me something so powerful to think about.

But Faiz’s imagery (or this misreading of his imagery) did not provide something entirely like Ghalib’s idea that springtime is just autumn with henna on. This is because for Ghalib the ornamentation is a cheat; it is simply hiding how there are only lasting sorrows in this useless world. Faiz, on the other hand, is perhaps saying that the lifeless body does not have to be useless; that there might be nothing ‘lifelike’ about most of us anyway. The common shakhs, going through the motions of existing, can wear lipstick and we do not think twice of it. But a dead body – one that was killed on the fields-of-murder for carrying for the Banner towards the eves of oppression – is seen as a morbid irony to be wearing the lifelike surkh of laali. A type of brilliant agentless agency. Perhaps we are being challenged not to think in terms of tragedy or to think in terms of some liberal notion of ‘hope’ (that is collapsible with Progress) but to actually think critically about what constitutes ‘existing’ and what constitutes ‘rot’. How can the rotting but living shakhs fit so well the surkhi of laali and yet the laali of the murda – of the dead and rotting body – be so foul or ironic to us?

But that is garbage and simplistic. What really appeals to me in this little image is the taunt of death. Inviting me. Smiling at me. With her reddened lips. Something lies beyond that scaffold, something that has brought this mukhtasar tabassum (abridged smirk) on her lips before she is covered for evermore.

And this turns Ghalib’s autumn in a whore’s garb completely upside down. Indeed the bits of ornamentation she wears is not supposed to obscure the underlying (and more serious) sorrow. This is because Faiz implies there is no essence underlying the body being hung. Instead, the ornamentation is itself both the sorrow and the taunting invite because since this shakhs is dead, we cannot be cheated into thinking this exterior ornament is actually expressing some true(er) interiority. How can there be such an essential interior when the shakhs is dead?!

Indeed, she was slain on half-lit paths.

****

I am sitting here in the dark again. With this ghazal by Kaifi Azmi sung by Begum Akhtar on repeat. With this bloody cup again. My head hurts. Once more it repeats:

Itna to zindagi mai.n, kisi ki khalal pare
Hasne se na ho sukoon, rone se kal pare

Jis tarah hans raha huu.n mai.n pi pi ke ashk-e-gham
Yuu.n dosra hanse to kaleja nikal pare

Muddat ke baad, usne jo di lutf ki nigaah
Jee khush to ho gaya, magar aansu.n nikal pare

Oh in such a long life, to have someone to provide a distraction
No peace from laughing, but I gave up crying yesterday

The way I am laughing right now, drinking these tears of sorrow
Oh if someone else laughed such, his kidney would come right out

After ages did he offer the pleasure of his sights
This self became somewhat happy, but tears still rushed forth

I have mentioned this before in reference to not being able to translate the liver (jigar) into english. But in this situation, Begum Akhtar mentions the kidney. The kaleja. When I hear her say kidney, there is almost a part within my body I can feel tingle: Laughing and laughing in such a ridiculous way after drinking and drinking these tears of sorrow – that my KIDNEY might just pop out. It gives me goosebumps, but I can feel what she means.

But what happens when body parts cannot be translated? How are those parts experienced? We never say liver in English to mean the repository of feeling, nor do we use kidney to refer to pride or the source of virility (see what I mean now – laughing after drinking the tears of sorrow and the organ of virility just falling out if it was someone less accustomed to shame (ie. A shakhs other than Kaifi)). So would it be clichéd and simple to say that body parts are culturally experienced or even culturally produced? Oh we are too accustomed to poststructural thought to think this is any kind of new idea. But I think what this song does is something else:

Is it possible that only those privy to certain idioms of Urdu can actually experience certain words within certain parts of the body (or have a feeling one thinks is actually eminating from an actual part of the body)? Is it possible, then, that certain bodies simply cannot experience certain organs or certain feelings because there is no textual basis for those feelings? Do we even have the same human body? So when Kaifi is laughing at the irony of his virility:

That if it was a being less accustomed to shame, he would have his organ of virility (kaleja) fall right out, but since he is so accustomed to laughing uncontrollably while drinking the tears of sorrow, his organ of virility, ironically, stays in tact.

Kaifi actually triggers a horrible feeling just under my ribs. Almost like when someone scratches his or her nails on a chalkboard – but actually inside my torso. So this is beyond the cultural experiencing of the body; it is the textual life given to an actual organ of the body. These are feelings one not privy to the idiom of the kaleja simply cannot experience. My body is not merely socially produced or socially trained in this situation. Rather, my body is a site where a certain textual familiarity opens and closes the very experiencing of my inside.

Oh decorate these eyelashes with your tears! (yup, paki synthesizer pop offers its own fair share of ‘textual idioms’)

not even (translation of last week's poem)

2007-04-11T23:59:00.000-07:00

on the lips the letter of the poem (ghazal) does not even come
on the lips the prayer to God, not even

one chance for sorrow for an appointed time
that pleasure for four days, not even

ready the instrument, bring the wine forward
the pleasure of the sin of wine lasts, not even

this seems a dark night, so take off the veil
there is the moon, the darkness prevails, not even

now i am so anxious for the state of morning
but naive for the wait of the morning breeze, not even

well, usamah, what type of being are you?
no peace in the day, the night brings sleep, not even

bhi nahi

2007-04-04T22:40:00.000-07:00

lab pe harf-e-ghazal aati bhi nahi.n
lab pe khuda ki dua aati bhi nahi.n

aik fursat-e-gham chand lamhe ke li'e
voh lazzat chaar din ki bhi nahi.n

saaz chero, khum-o-subuu barha'iye.n
lutf-e-gunaah-e-saaghar rehti bhi nahi.n

yeh siya shab hai, to pardah nikaal'iye.n
shab-e-mahtaab hai, itni siya bhi nahi.n

ab aalam-e-subh pe itne mushtaaq hai.n hum
saba ke intizaar pe itne naadaan bhi nahi.n

kher, usamah, tu bhi kiya shakhs hai?
na din mai.n chen, raat mai.n neend bhi nahi.n

2007-04-02T17:00:00.000-07:00

can the diasporic interlocutor ever be non-violating. what does he desire in images? what does he get? why does he film certain things? why does he ask certain things from his subjects?

some clips and pics

2007-04-02T16:43:00.000-07:00

some clips my cousin took in allahabad, lucknow, delhi and bombay.

God this makes me so nostalgic.

Pictures:

(My parents' university)

Lucknow (with my cousin's family):

Allahabad:

My mom's house from the street (the grey and white haveli)

Matam/Juloos for Muharram in the alleyway behind the house (Roshan bagh)

Bombay mall and cousins anticipating Rhithik Roshan (seriously ignore his commentary!):

you cannot adequately translate 'jigar' into 'liver'

2007-03-29T00:21:00.000-07:00

i will not sleep then
and see what you have left for me
these images you littre my dreams with
these sighs a sleeping man can never breath
and your liver will ache

those other lines are lost

let me tell you one thing
spring is here
and i must mourn
the passing misery
and the coming grief

The New Radical Prude Manifesto!

2007-03-28T22:08:00.000-07:00

A Radical Prude Manifesto: The poetics of a shame nexus

Usamah Ansari

One of my favorite lines from any novel is in Mirza Ruswa’s classic novel Umrao Jaan Ada written in the 19^th century. Ruswa has a sort of obsession with his protagonist, a dancing girl and courtesan called Umrao Jaan. Her fame, Ruswa tells us, resonates farther than the ringing of her anklets. His story revolves around Umrao telling her life story to Ruswa while he faithfully takes down her every word. Of course the setting is a beautifully urbane Lucknow with its intricate Persianate Urdu and impeccable manners – and dancing girls. There were a lot of dancing girls. Anyway, at a key point in the novel, Umrao Jaan says to Ruswa that if she sits with him too much she will be shamed (here using the word ruswa, which both means shamed and is the nom de plume of the novelist). She is not the shame-saturated subject but is instead playfully worried that she might be its target. He rebuttals with a couplet:

Why have you come and met Ruswa (shame) with boasts of love?

Now I will leave you not until I have shamed (ruswa) you

Umrao replies:

Whether conversing (guftgu), preaching (zahid) or arguing (bahes)

No one whispers about someone without that someone doing something

The subtleties of suggestiveness, the playing with shame, the tempting and the tempted (both the poet and the whore interchanging these roles) is not a part of the sort of inciting to speak of sex that many of us feel the need to engage in. We seem to be convinced that our sexes are something ‘good’ and nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed the very idea of maintaining shame tends to signify an anachronistic backwardness because we are told that sex exists in us; we need to liberate it from the confines of prudish tradition. Though poststructuralism has helped problematize this, we still emphasize speaking about ‘it’ (where, when, how much, what position, what toys, was there food, two guys, four girls, tell me, tell me, I need to know). We still feel somehow liberated in categorizing every part of our bodily expressions and trying to compete with how shameless (besharam) we can get. We make subcultures about them (oh he is in the leather scene). Now everything is about measuring pleasure (well, does he know where your such-and-such is? Can he please it? Does she know how to? Have you shown him?).

But I long for a prudishness. Where would Ruswa (shame) and Umrao (the whore) be without shame? Their playfulness is centred around a network of propriety. Indeed Umrao’s rebuttal refers to the joys of shame, but at the same time hints Ruswa to do something if people are going to talk. This talking, though, is not going to be the kind of sex-as-project we seem to be obsessed with. No, this talking is infused with moral codes and, of course, shame. But their very poetics is based on the presence of this shame, knowing that people might hint at what they will do, but this doing will always be whispers cloaked in obscurity. When we are no longer shameful – when we are in no way prudes – then we miss this critical and fruitful play so central to the kind of desire, affection and intimacy we see between the poet and the whore.

And so we need to reconsider how we think of both shame and shamelessness; how the former we link to repression and static traditionalism and the latter we link to liberty, freedom and the erotic. But can we not conceptualize shame in any other way? I am claiming no one ‘has’ shame but that shame is a condition for relationships that are produced through the circulation of signs that have the effect of producing the ‘shamed’ surfaces of bodies.

For example, how is shame emanating from inside any particular body in the conversation between Ruswa and Umrao? Instead, What if shame as a feeling is circulated in that dynamic animating both bodies and thus subsequently entering each other into a polyvalent and rich relationship of shame. So the symbols that signify shame are not somehow inherent to the gendered bodies but when they enter into this complex nexus of shame, their affective dynamics (the way her body and utterance causes a certain reaction in his and vice versa) are actually producing the surface of the subject outlined by shame. This, I think, is powerful to consider because beyond resisting essentializing feelings/symbols like shame in particular bodies conclusively, we can also see how our subjecthood-in-the-shame-dynamic emerges from affect. And, subsequently, shame is being employed not by ‘tradition’ to control ‘the shamed’ but is instead animating that which it names, providing multiple spaces of emotive lucidity and terms for shame-ridden practice. This shame-ridden practice need not be thought of as backward and anachronistic. Indeed the subtle play and the suggestive depth of their dialogue is dependent on this practice.

So I am advocating for some prudishness, for some propriety. At the very least, let us not assume that those who wish not to speak directly about certain parts of our intimate beings do not have an eroticism. Being “wrapped in my black cloak” and covering my mouth in shame produces a whole network of feelings and pleasures I only wish more were willing to explore. So please do not attempt to ‘free’ my being from the shame that supposedly covers it. (And this is a bitter irony: you try to purge me of the shame you claim lies within me and yet you wish to do so by decloaking the exterior of this supposed interiority.) Instead, at least acknowledge this cloak of propriety has the potential of creating networks of desire and practice that speaking about ‘it’ might never produce.

shame

2007-03-24T14:22:00.000-07:00

"tabassum bhi, haya bhi, berukhi bhi!" (a slight smile also, a bit of shame he shows also, and then sudden despondency)

Besharam - to be without shame (shameless) - is the condition, we are told, of liberation. To ‘have’ shame is to be cloaked in backward mores. My bare body - subject to the elements, cold and dejected - then becomes the liberated object. Though it is easy to probelmatize this liberal conceptualization of agency and tradition, I am thinking of doing something else. I am claiming no one ‘has’ shame but that shame is a condition for relationships that are produced through the circulation of signs that have the effect of producing the ‘shamed’ surfaces of bodies. Of course this is tied to the idea of affect and affective economics popularized by the brilliant Sara Ahmed.

So when I used to bother Shabista by saying her husband is going to be handsome like the popular cricketer those days (and whose name I forget), she would cup her hand and put it straight over her face. The subtleties of laughing and smiling would obviously lie beneath this cupped hand. And when she asked “Usamah Hindustan mai.n aik bhi larki nahi pasand a’I?” I would do virtually the same thing but instead of cupping my face I would instead lower my gaze and smile ever so slightly.

So where is ‘the shamed’ subject in this dynamic? Is it housed in either of our bodies and is emanating from within? Of course the Muslim feminist notion that women are seen to embody disruption (fitnaa) seems to confirm this logic of embodiment. But what if it is something else? What if shame as a feeling is circulated in that dynamic animating both our bodies but also entering each other into a polyvalent and rich relationship of shame. So the symbols that signify shame are not somehow inherent to our gendered bodies but when we enter into this complex nexus of shame, our affective dynamics (the way her body and utterance causes a certain reaction in mine) is actually producing the surface of the subject outlined by shame. This, I think, is powerful to consider because beyond resisting essentializing feelings/symbols like shame in particular bodies conclusively, we can also see how our subjecthood-in-the-shame-dynamic emerges from affect. And, subsequently, shame is being employed not by ‘tradition’ to control ‘the shamed’ but is instead animating that which it names, providing multiple spaces of emotive lucidity and terms for practice. My lowered gaze and her cupped mouth have the type of possibilities only poets can muse on.

Mujhe choR de mere Haal par! Tera kiya bharosa hai chaaragar
Ye teri nawazeshe mukhtasar, kahi dard ko barha na de

Oh leave me at my state! What faith do I put in you my healer
These abridged favours of yours might just extend my grief

(Shakeel Badayuni)

So go ahead and strip this subject from its ‘layers of shame’
Its black cloak

For you think you will remove the shame you claim lies within
Isn’t this a bitter irony then? You claim it lies within
And yet you want to decloak that which is outside

How likely your plan will fail
For the shame is present already
And has created the very body you seek to free from it

So just leave me at my state, you perverse healer

22

2007-03-18T22:41:00.000-07:00

parda-e-saaz

2007-03-18T10:26:00.000-07:00

this is disgusting . i am problematizing a woman of colour's strategy with some stupid white man. It is true, and i cannot justify this, just dont show anyone.

i am just so annoyed with this feminst obsession with the self. at this blood-clot spoken word thing yesterday, the poetry was often bordering on prposing self-managing by illustrating to the audience the innermost secrets (raaz); once it is out there and she is consious she is out there; well isnt this a form of knowledge that can be used to control the self? I thought the movie by Dolores, however, was superb. i hope her daughter goes to jannat.

but i will say that these people have no shame. it is not that women in particular should have MORE sharm-o-haya than men - though, of course, this is usually how it works (and i am not saying that gendering shame is inherently problematic either). but telling an audience intimate details is not somehow liberating the self. it is producing the self in a manageable way. this is not to say these experiences they describe are essential and not themselves socially produced. but they are something you can put inside your pardah, something we dont need to base our politics on to have any kind of legitimacy. so this challenges the post structural notion that our interiorities are our exterior actions (performative actions) that serve to hide their very geneaology (as to posit a true interior) by claiming that my black cloak (oh black shawled one!) does not posit the inherent truth of what it conceals but nonetheless provides a space of signs and symbols that refuses to be used in a way (through bodily encantations) to conceals their geneaology and claim their essential emegence from ' the inside.' afterall, they remain behind my black cloak. This is entirely different than bodily citations that posit an inherent truth to the 'interiority' they fabricate. So i propose we do hide things sometimes. for the sake of decency, for the sake of PROTECTING OUR SOULS from the power of knowledge and the knowledge of power.

this could be like the parda-e-saaz (the hidden part of the musical instrument that produces the heavenly (instead of worldly) notes):

Rose, Nikolas. Governing the soul: The Shaping of the Private Self.

Rose reveals that contemporary forms of power/knowledge are obsessed with the “programmes, calculations, and techniques of the government of the soul” (9). Thus modern society is characterized by the translating of the human psyche into spheres of knowledge and different technologies (“human technologies”) that have made it possible to govern subjectivity through the norms that ground the authority of these knowledges and technologies. I will firstly discuss the novelty of the modern forms of engineering the human soul. Secondly, I will discuss Rose’s problematizing of socio-critique as a lead in to his discussion on government.

Rose discusses how our personalities and subjectivities are not actually private but are objects of power and intensively governed. Thoughts, feelings and actions do not simply emerge from within us but are socially organized and managed. This is not a new thing in itself. There are, however, three aspects of the management of the contemporary self that are novel. Firstly, the subjective capacities of individuals have been incorporated into the aspirations of public powers (1). Thus subjectivity has entered into the calculations about problems and policies of the state and the nation, and has thus put the soul of the citizen directly into practices of the government. This has led to the regulation of the conduct of citizens by acting on their mental capacities and tendencies. The second novel aspect is found in how subjectivity is a central task for modern organizations that mediate the space between private lives and the public concerns of ruling. Finally, there has been a birth of an expertise of subjectivity where a whole set of new professional groups have emerged to be specialists in the engineering of the human soul and have produced “relations of authority over the soul” (3). This has produced new obsessions around understanding and evaluating ourselves.

Rose questions the paradigm of socio-critique. Though he acknowledges its importance in revealing the rise of new knowledges and techniques and their role in legitimating domination, he claims that this paradigm implies that the knowledge of subjective life is false or lacking. This becomes an epistemological critique that misses how new regimes of truth are installed by the knowledge of subjectivity (4). The socio-critique paradigm also makes subjectivity an essential feature of the person where by the focus is on constraints to the freedom of the individual instead of seeing how modern knowledge and expertise stimulate subjectivity to promote self-inspection and self-consciousness, and how this maximizes intellectual capacities while producing individuals that are “free to choose.” Thus these modern knowledges/expertise actually forge alignments between the techniques of power and the values and ethic of democratic society.

As a segue into his discussion on government, Rose mentions how the socio-critique paradigm also situates modern knowledges and techniques as originating in the state. Rose, on the other hand, argues for discussing government instead of the state. Government refers to ways of striving to reach social and political ends by acting calculatedly on the individuals that constitute a “population” (4-5). This is tied to Foucault’s idea of governmentality whereby modern forms of political rationality are organized around calculatedly supervising and maximizing the forces of society and its individuals. Central to this is the regulation of the processes of the population and the transformation of the exercise of political rule through the governmentalization of the state. This situates the history of the knowledge of subjectivity because in order to govern subjects these subjects must be known. This knowledge provided by the sciences of the psyche, and by the measuring and calculating of individuals against norms, allowing the desires of government to produce knowledgeable managements of the depths of the human soul.

descending the hill; ye ajeeb alam

2007-03-16T00:35:00.000-07:00

on the bus today, while coming down the usual fog patch on hastings street, i thought:

"where on earth did I just come from"?

well it is called a university, of course. but what was i doing there?
1) i was wired on coffee (my heart beating fast, my skin getting clammy, my legs shaking)
2) i was preparing for my tutorial
3) i was reading my self-interested readings for the day (Adorno, Nikolas Rose, more Butler)
4) i was wasting about two hours on facebook
5) i was teaching my tutorial and almost died listening to them speak of 'jihad' and 'development'

but what else was happening?

1) the cleaning lady was cleaning the stairs, she is the one who never looks up at you. it is the most powerful thing. it flies in the face of those progressive types that try to 'chat' with the janitorial staff to make themselves feel a little better vis-a-vis their positioning in the university's political economy. this woman is brilliant, she just does not look up. she doesnt give you the oppurtunity to redeem yourself. it makes me feel so disgusted/disgusting i dont know what is what.

2) people are sad all over about nassim. but it seems so far away that i cant really touch it anymore. my mother talked to sajjad aunty today. she said nassim's father was quite a wreck. i dont know what to say.

then i realized how absurd this all is. how absurd it is to be sitting on this shiny non-real looking piece of tin with an ad for a teeth bleachening system on the outside. with GIGANTIC windows that dont really offer a scene. with clouds that you actually have to drive through. and me sitting here with this little mp3 player staring out of this shiny metal can with windows-and-n0-scenes. trying to remember what i did earlier to try to maintain some grasp on 'reality'; to try to remind myself that I am here, i am here, i am here, i am not a misspelling chalked onto the universe (ghalib), i am here, i promise you, i am here. Then the rediculous cloud passes and the autoshop and marble statue store become visible once again. i have arrived.

but then i read something i liked. something i remember reading a while ago and copying down five times in different doodle-scripts on my binder. something i translated into urdu and then couldnt understand what it was originally saying.

"maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are"

oh foucault, what have you done here you little shit. yes the twin forces of totalizing and individualizing, yes the production of subjectivty, the giving of breath of subjecthood. how selfish of you to come up with such a notion. what would you know? saying to dislodge the project of 'sex-desire' from 'bodies and pleasures' is somehow going to pull this breath from my lungs? that somehow this managed, known and transversed being is somehow going to be unliberated-liberated from being engulfed by the strategies of knowledgepower hiding the genaeology of that which it posits as real - that which is posited as my real being?

but i am here, i am sure of it.

the monring breeze jolted me

2007-03-11T22:10:00.000-07:00

Nassim Mobasher passed away today. 24 years of breath and one moment without. what questions is she being asked now? how young to be asked to account for her mukhtasar deeds. and they are not even in this city, they seem an eternity away.

I know we are not to understand God's plans, but what kind of plan is this? I know she does no one zulm (oppression), but then what kind of torture is this? I know Nassim is returning to the beloved from where she came, but what kind of separation is this? I know he is the most high, the most wise, but what kind of blindness is this?

oh the morning breeze (naseem) came today
through the ajar door
ruffling my hair
pulling out my sighs
harassing the last leaves clinging to trees
turning them red
before they hit the ground
ae khuda! what is this you have done

some of her writings
http://www.muslimwakeup.com/main/archives/2004/08/writing_and_dan.php http://www.muslimwakeup.com/main/archives/2004/07/chador_and_toot.php http://www.muslimwakeup.com/main/archives/2004/05/books_and_every.php http://www.muslimwakeup.com/main/archives/2004/06/felt_up_in_tehr.php http://hotcoals.org/?p=30

faiz-o-saba

2007-03-09T23:41:00.000-08:00

I know i was supposed to finish that post on Ghalib and Surayya, but i will do it tomorrow. Indeed my reading two-books-a-week policy, plus planning the defense, plus marking has kept me quite preoccupied. But i was struck today reading this in my snazzy black shalwar-qamiz number:

daman mai.n hai musht-e-khak-e-jigar, saghar mai.n hai khoon-e-hasrat-e-mai
lo! hum ne daman jhoRdiya, lo! jaam olTa'e dete hai.n

on my skirt* is the fist of the dirt of my liver (heart); in the goblet there is wine made of the blood of my desires
fine! i will shake out my skirt; fine! i will overturn the wine cup too

*of course skirt cannot be taken so literally. It often refers to virtue (as in, i will save my skirt [I will save my virtue]). But the image of a skirt's creases collecting the dirt of the inner most cavernous sediments (from the heart) being overturned by simply standing up and shaking out the skirt is quite jarring. Though the idea of the bloodied wine of desires being over turned (because, afterall, the innermost sediments have already been lost) is a bit more cliched.

Two more lines (these are two lines from the poem "Sheher-yara.n" (my beloveds of the city). I just want to mention the two uses of the term saba (morning breeze). We all know Faiz was obsessed with the word saba (remember, "kis jaga reh ga'i saba? subha kidhar nikal ga'i!"), but I have never noticed a poem use saba in one poem with such strikingly different effects:

ae saba! shayad tere humsafar ye khoo.n-nak sham
(oh morning breeze! maybe your fellow-traveller is in fact this blood-soaked night?)

ja ke kehna, ae saba! ba'd az salaam dosti
(go and say afterward, oh morning breeze! by the greetings of friendship)

Suraiya, Ghalib and the most perfect balcony scene imaginable

2007-03-02T01:17:00.000-08:00

Azhar got back from India yesterday and brought with him various films I had requested. The 1954 film Mirza Ghalib is among these. It is one of my favorite movies and contains my favorite actress, Suraiya. The film is loosely based on the life of Mirza Ghalib, and adds the necessary figure of the whore-lover; that oft-cited trope of tragic poet, enchanted whore and self-destruction. I wish to examine one scene in particular. I think the following scene, with Ghalib’s famous “nuktacheen hai.n gham-e-dil”, is perhaps the most perfect scene in all of Bollywood ghazal scenes. Asad ullah Khan Ghalib is walking down an old Delhi laneway (the notion of which is infused with an idea of ‘Muslimness’) when he hears the whore-figure of Suraiya sing his own ghazal. Though at first he wishes to ignore the song, when his own she’r reminds him of a spell that cannot be broken and that cannot be avoided, we learn he has become entrapped in the hena-clad hands of Suraiya. Aur, andaz-e-naghma kiya hai?!

But first a few notes on the packaging of the vcd. Though the film is in black and white, the makers of the vcd jacket have added colour to a scene of Ghalib and Suraiya with the moon in the background. But what gets to me is how there is no Urdu anywhere on the jacket. Though Bollywood movies used to always have writing in both Urdu and Hindi, the Urdu has been disappeared. And yet Ghalib is the greatest (arguably) poet in Urdu’s history. Thus the hegemony of a Hindi/Hindu/Hindustan kind of discourse is so powerful and able to maintain its positional superiority that it can appropriate Mirza Ghalib’s figure while purging it of its disruptive or subversive elements (that is, Urdu). Indeed the very presence of Urdu written in the decadent nastaaliq script is a sort of disruption of dominant Hindu-based state projects that have tirelessly attempted to disappear markers of ‘Muslimness’ like Urdu. To add insult to injury, the actual vcd file has ‘Mirza Galib’ written instead of ‘Mirza Ghalib.’ I have mentioned before how the disappearing of ‘the Muslim’ in India has been tied so deeply to the erasure of the letters ghain غ , khe خ , and qaf ق . This process is particularly insidious because it can maintain words within Hindi’s lexicon that have an Urdu/Persian root while divorcing the Islamicate roots of this origin (and thus these particular sounds become markers of non-indigeny and must be removed). The vcd jacket, then, is enacting a form of textual violence that strikes at my very core.

It is laughable that Urdu’s greatest icon could have his name spelled ‘Galib’ instead of ‘Ghalib.’ But when I watch this scene and remember this as one of my favorite Ghalib ghazals, some of my sorrow-filled dread at the beleaguered position of Islamicate cultural modes in India is quelled, ephemerally, of course. And so I must translate the poem itself:

Nuktacheen Hai Gham-e-Dil Usko Suna’e Na Bane
Kya Bane Baat Jahan Baat Banaye Na Bane

Pointed is the sorrow-of-the heart that it will listen not
What kind of speech is this that where the speech is to be made it is not

Maein Bulata To Hun Usko Magar Ae Jazbaa-E-Dil
Uspe Ban Aaye Kuch Aaisi Ke Bin Aaye Na Bane

I call him, indeed, but woe these emotions-of-the-heart
If only a spell would make him compulsively come, without being asked

Ishq Par Zor Nahin Hai Yeh Woh Aatish `Ghalib'
Ke Lagaye Na Lage Aur Bujhaye Na Bane

There is not much emphasis on love, this is that flame, ‘Ghalib’
That in trying to keep it is not kept, in trying to douse it is not doused

The scene, what a scene! Like a divine sort of clockwork; the perfect angles, the sullen whore (who becomes the bulbul), the poet enthrawlled by the rendition of his own poem. And yet he knows this is a cheat, it is, afterall, only his words echoing. There is so many things going on, but what is amazing is the field of view (the nazara) is constantly following the song wafting down from the balcony to the lane below. Indeed the image of Suraiya perched atop an intricate balcony is quickly complimented with her father coming down the steps, just as the song closes. Thus the climax of the ghazal is reached when the camera finds Suraiya and the ‘decline’ is when he descends the stairs.

But I wish to focus on three particularly rich aspects of this scene. The first is Suraiya as the bulbul. Secondly, I wish to examine the idea of enactment. That is, can the poet’s words ever actually exist without them being uttered by the sullen whore? It is not enough to say that the signifiers will have deferred or unstable meanings, but I question if the very possibility of signification (the very ability for the poet’s loathsome breath) is mediated by the bulbul presence (non-presence cf. Derrida) of the whore. Finally, I wish to examine how this can be linked to my own interpretative translation of a misra in this ghazal: “What kind of speech is this that where the speech is to be made it is not.” This will provide some potentially illuminating insights into speech not as embodied action but something that is rendered through the circulation of affective relations (cf. Sara Ahmed).

…But, dear friends (mere aziz dosto.n!), I must sleep. I will finish this post tomorrow. Aik lamha khuda dete hai din main jab din-hi se ajnabi ban saku. Shab-e-intezar dhalti hai jab neend mujhe koi dusra gham se aashna kar deta hai.

[To be finished tomorrow.]

The Blood and the Message: Ali Shariati

2007-02-28T11:58:00.001-08:00

Ali Shariati

Yes, for every revolution, there are two visages:
blood and the message. Husayn and his companions
undertook the first mission, that of blood. The second
mission is to bear the message to the whole world, to
be the eloquent tongue of this flowing blood and these
resting bodies among the walking dead. The mission of
conveying the message begins today. Its responsibility
rests on the fine shoulders of Zaynab, a woman from
whom mankind is to learn virtue. The mission of Zaynab
is more difficult and heavier than that of her
brother. Those who have the courage to choose their
own death have simply made a great choice. But the
responsibility of those who survive is heavy and
difficult. Zaynab has survived. The caravan of the
captives follows behind her. The ranks of the enemy,
as far as the eye can see, are in front of her. The
responsibility of conveying her brother's message
rests solely upon her shoulders. Leaving behind a red
garden of shahadat and the perfume of roses, spreading
from her skirts, she enters the city of crime. the
capital of power, the center of oppression and
execution.

With peace and pride, she victoriously announces to
the power and cruelty of the slave-agents and
executioners, to the remnants of colonialism and
dictatorship: "Thank God for all the generosity and
glory which He has bestowed upon our family. The honor
of prophethood and the honor of shahadat." Zaynab
bears the responsibility of announcing the message of
the alive but silent shuhada. She has survived the
shuhada and it is she who must be the tongue for those
whose tongue has been cut off by the sword of the
executioner.

If blood does not have a message, it remains mute in
history. If the message of blood does not reach all
generations, it is as if the executioner has
imprisoned the shahid in the castle of one age and one
time. If Zaynab does not convey the message of Karbala
to history, Karbala remains as a mere historical
event; and thus the ones who need this message will be
deprived of it. Thus no one will be able to hear the
message of those who spoke to the generations with
their blood. It is for this reason that the mission of
Zaynab is heavy and difficult. The mission of Zaynab
is the conveying of a message to all humanity, to all
those who weep for Husayn's death, to all those who
bow down faithfully to Husayn, to all those who
believe the message of Husayn that, "Life is nothing
except belief and jihad." The message of Zaynab is as
follows:
Oh, all of you who have a covenant with this family,
who believe in the message of Muhammad, think and
choose. In every age and generation, in whatever land
you may be, you must learn to listen to the message of
the shuhada of Karbala who said, 'Those can live well
who can die well.'
Oh you who believe in the message of monotheism and in
the Qur'an, as well as in the way of Ali and his
family, and you who will follow us, the message of our
family to mankind is the art of living well and dying
well. Everyone dies just as he lives.

The message of Husayn to mankind is this:
If you are men of religion, then [live your] religion.
If you do not follow a religion, then human freedom
has placed a responsibility on your shoulders. As a
religious person or a freedom-loving person, be the
witness of your time and the shahid of truth and
falsehood in your age.

The eyes of the shuhada are upon us. They are
conscious, alive, and present. They are the paradigms,
the witnesses of truth and falsehood, and the
witnesses of the destiny of mankind.

And shahid has all these meanings.

For every revolution, there are two visages: blood and
message.

(thanks sumayya)

Barbaric Brown Men and Civilized White Ladies: Three Responses to Vic Sarin’s “Partition”

2007-02-22T10:35:00.000-08:00

By Amina Rai, Usamah Ansari and Sumayya Kassamali

As diasporic South Asians, the event of Partition has left a salient mark on how we imagine history. Vic Sarin’s “Partition”, starring Kristen Kreuk (as Naseem Khan) and Jimi Mistry (as Gian Singh), is not only offensive to this history but confirms a colonialist civilizing logic and the supposed barbarity of South Asians. Yet in discussing this film, one must begin by asking why it was made. Indeed there are many “Parition films” made in Bollywood and Pakistan. Some examples are “Veer Zara”, “Khamosh Pani”, “Gaddar”, “Hina” and “Pinjar”. It is clear to us, then, that “Partition” was made to give a western audience an essentialized vision of our inherent barbarity and present a longing for a colonial past – something these other films could not accomplish. Casting Kristen Kreuk to play a South Asian woman and of course using inconsistent Indian accents are just two examples of how the desired audience is implicated in the film.

The story revolves around the romance of Naseem (a Muslim) and Gian (a Sikh) during tumultuous times indeed. Gian finds Naseem after she escapes the massacre of her Muslim caravan traveling to Pakistan at Partition (in an obvious West Coast Canadian rainforest meant to somehow represent the Punjab). He keeps her in his house and eventually marries her. Soon after, she goes to Pakistan after a lingering signifier of colonialism – Margaret Stilwell (Neve Campbell) – tracks down her family in a village near Lahore. Naseem’s brutal Muslim brothers, however, do not let her return to India with her Sikh husband. Only by fleeing to the civility of England does Naseem find solace. Though Veena Das has revealed that many women who were left on the ‘other side’ of the border did not wish to be repatriated with their kin, Das importantly links this to the desire of the modern nation state to purge the Other – not an abhorrent and essentialist construction of religious communal identity that this film posits.

The following offers three readings of the film from three distinct diasporic positions. Our alternative readings will problematize Vic Sarin’s claim to legitimacy and authenticity through his being Indo-Canadian. We will not focus on the historical inadequacies – and there are many, for example the ridiculous scene of Muslims praying to the call to prayer and Muslims being identifiable by colourful kafiyyahs – but will instead examine how the film reproduces a racialized hierarchy and ignores the colonial roots of Partition. One of us will also reflect on being pawns to the film’s production.

Kristen Kreuk’s Fair and Lovely Face: The New Image of South Asian Women
Amina Rai

As a Pakistani woman born and raised in Canada, my connection to the India-Pakistan partition is derived from the personal stories told amongst our families. Accessing these emotional histories of hardship that our grandparents and their families faced during the critical period of Pakistan’s inception has been one of the most personal ways in which our cultural and ethnic identities are maintained in the diaspora. This is further complimented by Bollywood partition films through which our diasporic generation is provided visual imageries of the experiences of departing and relocating across the border.

When I heard about the making of “Partition” and was contacted by the production team to talk to Kristen Kreuk about being a South Asian woman, I thus thought that perhaps I could play a part in bringing this important history close to home. However, my actual encounter in a focus group with Kreuk violated the lived historical experiences of our families when I realized how these experiences were used in the film to visually hijack South Asian women’s identities. As noted above, the desire to reach out to the intended target audience obviously required the ensuring of a relational connection between the actors and the audience. Through this process, the lines between colonizer and colonized become obscured as the western hegemonic popular culture asserts its power to contort and manipulate the visual history of the Indian-Pakistani partition, while all the while claiming to be ‘authentic’ because they decided to talk to a few South Asian women. The result is a sense of a malleable history where there appears to be no violation in giving the lead role to a western woman pretending to be a South Asian girl.

Being implicated in the process of legitimizing Kristen Kreuk’s credibility to play the role of a south Asian Muslim woman, through the focus groups we held with her, has been a frustrating realization of identity appropriation. I have ultimately realized that our superficial correspondence with Kreuk and her role as researcher has given her the ability to defend the legitimacy of playing the character of Naseem. Our focus groups (which consisted of two sessions) achieved no in-depth unfolding of our positional identity as young Muslim diasporic women and our relation to the India-Pakistan Partition. Never was it discussed that Kristen Kreuk is not a South Asian woman (but rather has a Chinese and Dutch heritage). Ultimately, the focus groups were only logistical formalities that Kristen went through to legitimize her role. In doing so, I was positioned as the unheard voice of humbled South Asian diasporic communities who were showered by the great privilege of having our families’ experiences of Partition shared with Kristen; how very benevolent of her.

This sense of being used, exploited and having our identities hijacked was complimented in the film itself. Our introduction to Kristen’s character emerges through a large pool of Muslims journeying to Pakistan. In a sea of brown skins the camera zooms in to the white purity of Naseem (Kristen Kreuk). Albeit trying to portray matted brown, her appearance reflects nothing less than a western woman playing a lowly role (playing the subordinate Other). Further disturbing are the images of brown skin exploited and exposed – the epitome of which is a dead South Asian woman’s naked nipple in full view as a baby tries to suckle it for milk. These images mirror typical Orientalist themes that produce knee-jerk reactions with the use of shock and awe tactics to further dehumanize the Other. And within the film’s construction of South Asian conflict, racial profiling (using racialized markers to signify a subject) was extenuated to reaffirm white vs. brown trappings. Of Naseem’s brothers, for example, the darker skinned Akbar (Arya Babbar) was the villainous character who beat Gian mercilessly while the other brother, lighter in complexion, exerted limited aggression in relation.

In watching the film, then, I was forced again to reflect on my role in the film’s production. Participating in the focus group was only one of a checklist of tasks the production team undertook to access our community. We received emails asking us to help find members of our South Asian community to play specific racial characters. We were asked, “Do you know of any woman 60 to 70 years of age that would be willing to attend the focus group? How about an old South Asian man that can play an Imam and recite the khul? What about young Sikh men adorning turbans?” This is clearly a calculated attempt to gain access to our community and exploit our knowledge to produce some sense of ‘authenticity’ that the film desperately required. This example is best illustrated by my Sikh co-worker who fulfilled the stipulations and was asked to be an extra for a scene being shot in Langley, British Columbia. He was, however, turned back because he did not have a full-grown beard. This emphasis on categorical racial markings of Sikhs and Muslims thus reveals the stereotypical and essentialist interpretation tightly maintained by the production team. What is particularly ironic is how this desire to have physical ‘authenticity’ was conveniently dismissed when determining the lead role for the movie. Indeed it was awarded to the most ‘exotic’, non-white looking western actress who could attempt to – with the stretch of our imaginations and at the expense of not knowing better – pull off a lead role as a South Asian woman without needing to be one.

I left the movie theatre feeling angry and betrayed at being duped into aiding the very process through which this ethnic-appropriated film was created and through which it gained notoriety for its ‘authenticity’. Just as Margaret had felt so at home in India, a place where her whiteness and colonial roots carried status and superiority, Kristen Kreuk’s ability to perform the role of Naseem was based on her western celebrity status that provided her the ability to access and play the racial Other. And just as Naseem was rescued and taken to a place of refuge in England (the ultimate act of white benevolence), we too are being “saved” by Kristen Kreuk’s graciousness in telling the western world our histories.

Our Barbarity and Their Burden: The Longing for Colonial Bliss
Usamah Ansari

Central to the rhetoric of “Parition” is the idea that the Partition of India and Pakistan was natural to the irrational character of South Asian communal identities. Because, after all, these are people that simply cannot get along without the civility of a colonial administration. Thus the film begins with a caption claiming that “Islamic Pakistan” and “Secular India” were partitioned to prevent bloodshed. These captions do indeed set the stage for the film by saying two important things. Firstly, they implicitly claim that the modern nation state is not produced through violence but is something that is needed to prevent the barbaric violence inherent to the backward character of South Asians. This also serves to produce India as less villainous than Pakistan, because it is named ‘secular’. As a diasporic Indian Muslim, it is clear that the violence of Hindu-hegemony on Muslim and Sikh minorities in India problematizes what this ‘secular’ actually means. The second thing the captions do is ignore the historiography of Partition. But like the rest of the film, they particularly obscure how colonialism itself produced the notion of coherent and closed communities based on religious identity and was thus deeply implicated in Partition.

After the captions, we see Margaret (the white helper) peering onto a polo field. So the framework of the film is set: the white audience can see through Margaret’s eyes at the blissful colonial orchestra on the polo ground where whites and browns are playing together, drinking together, and wearing their colourful regalia. This contrasts the chaos that comes later in the film, when the irrational browns have taken control and from which bloodshed is a necessary product. We are thus constantly reminded of the bliss and harmony colonialism once provided. For example, Margaret constantly reminisces about the legacy of her father who was a British administrator, a legacy she uses to help the two protagonists save themselves from the barbarity of their people. Another important signifier of this longing is the deceased soldier Andrew. He is Margaret’s brother and was Gian’s close friend in the colonial Indian army. Gian constantly clings to Andrew’s whistle, and there are often flashbacks to Andrew’s death in Mayanmar fighting for the British. This is produced as heroic camaraderie; nothing like the barbaric and irrational communal violence that comes with post-colonial chaos.

And indeed Gian himself represents the civility of the British. His refusal to partake in violence against Muslims and taking a Muslim bride is directly linked to his memory of serving the colonial army. Indeed when he travels to Pakistan to try and take Naseem back to India with him, and her Muslim brothers brutally beat him, he exclaims that in the British Indian army he “fought for India: for Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims – for everyone!” Thus the experience of colonial military service is premised on a deeply benevolent colonialism that serves everyone’s interests and formulates friendships across difference (between, say, Andrew and Gian) and does not use violence for imperial rule. This contrasts the irrational and brutal violence that comes when the colonial apparatus is dismantled. For, if we are left to our own devices, we just erupt into violence. The colonial army thus civilized Gian; a civility the film clings to through certain markers (Margaret’s dad’s legacy, Andrew’s whistle, Gian’s enlightenment). And indeed to make this civility more recognizable, Margaret rushes to Gian’s rescue when Naseem’s brothers are beating him. Because, after all, only through Margaret and her colonial legacy can our characters ever protect themselves against their barbaric communities.

But perhaps I am harping too much on colonialism. There are other ways that ‘our barbarity’ is signified. Indeed the way the nation state (especially India) is normalized is important in producing religious or cultural identity as irrational and violent. Thus the Indian state’s complicity in violence is never approached. Indeed the caption stating India is secular is complimented with the lack of Hindu characters, obscuring India’s underlying Hindu basis. The question, then, is why do only Muslims and Sikhs (two minorities within India) engage in brutality while the group who becomes dominant in India can walk away with bloodless hands? The only two identifiably Hindu characters, the bureaucrat Sharma and Gian’s store-keeper friend, are neutral to violence; indeed the store-keeper is one of the only enlightened people in his village who prevent the murderous Sikh community from taking Naseem from Gian. There are thus parallels between the Hindu character’s benevolence, the citation of Gandhi in the beginning of the film (as a caption), and the obscuring of India’s state violence. Pakistan, however, as the ‘Islamic state’, is far more implicated in violence, as further discussed below.

The message, ultimately, is clear: our religious and cultural identities are the origins for our brutal natures. Clinging to markers of colonial civility and depending on the ‘secular’ Indian state are our only hopes for redemption. It is no surprise, then, that the saviour white characters – Margaret and her beau Walter – share a glance when Margaret is taking Naseem on the train to escape her brothers in Pakistan (and go to England). Their glance at once lets the western audience know that their burden has not yet been lightened since the brutality of South Asian culture was not quite stamped out by their administration; there is, indeed, work to be done.

Under Those Turbans and Kafiyyahs: Contextualizing “Partition” in post-9/11 Canada
Sumayya Kassamali

Although my family is rooted many generations ago in Gujarat, I come to the South Asian diaspora via the trade routes and passages of the East African coast. Thus originally of India and yet Muslim, my relationship to Partition is unstable and distant, focusing not on attempting to reconcile cultural identity with a nation-state to call “back home”, but on co-implicability. I seek to draw out the connections: how the colonial histories of India connect to those of Canada, to the racism I see our communities subject to here, and how this film’s representations of Partition may be further implicated in these processes. Sarin’s “Partition” was created not in 1947 India but in 2007 Canada, and regardless of directorial intention, it is impossible to separate this film from the social and political context into which it was released. That “Partition” is a visual representation of Sikh-and-Muslim; brown-on-brown violence in a context where, soon after 9/11, turbaned Sikhs were attacked due to their assumed association with Muslims and thereby “terrorism”, therefore, is not of little importance. In turn, that “Partition” is catered to a western audience – already bombarded with images of violent Muslims and their patriarchal and barbaric culture – in a country responsible for detaining, imprisoning, and deporting Muslims to torture perhaps epitomizes the ironic and reductionist nature of its underlying racist tendencies.

Despite claims to “neutrality” because gory acts of bloodshed are attributed to both (and, notably, only) Muslims and Sikhs, the particular portrayals of Naseem’s family and Gian’s conversion in the film clearly reinforce an Islamophobic rhetoric that is already pervasive in the contemporary Canadian climate of racial profiling and war. A recent Georgia Straight review described Kristin Kreuk’s character as “a frequently teary Muslim woman”, referring no doubt to the many trials Naseem faces as she is subject to the external violence of Sikhs first and the internal violence of her Muslim brothers after. As mentioned above, the opening caption describing the partitioning of “secular India” and “Islamic Pakistan” to prevent bloodshed immediately identifies Pakistan and its violence with Muslimness. This is illustrated in the film by Pakistan’s corrupt officials, degrading jails, and fortress-like border. Furthermore, Naseem’s patriarchal and violent brothers – to whom both her mother and herself are subject – take centre stage as the primary representation of Muslim males within the film. Their barbarity, notably gendered in its patriarchy, is intense enough to be directed not only against Sikhs but also against their own sister, and even after Gian presents himself as a Muslim convert.

Gian’s conversion serves as another deeply disturbing and pivotal moment within the film. Two months after Naseem was meant to return to India, Gian travels to Delhi in an attempt to obtain permission to cross the border into Pakistan to find her. Told that “it is impossible, only Muslims can go into Pakistan”, Gian goes to a mosque to become (or at least appear) Muslim. While this trivialization of religious conversion may be justified given his desperation to find his wife, it still serves to reinforce a notion that the violence of Partition was simply about religio-cultural animosity and not linked to (colonial) histories, politics or economic contexts. Furthermore, it conveniently suggests that South Asian peoples would be able to get along if they could only see how they are the same in the end; under the cloth of the turbans and kafiyyahs, and with a bit less hair. Indeed apart from a brief aesthetically appealing glimpse of Gian and Naseem praying in respectively Sikh and Muslim ways, there is no mention of Naseem’s religion. Does she simply give up her Islam in order to marry Gian? does she convert to Sikhism? does she pass any of her traditions on to her son? Apparently these are all unimportant details; for if we could all see (as Gian does, thanks to his colonial civilizing) the potential for love across these trivial differences – and ignore the structural divisions within a communalism wrought by colonial practices – peace and harmony would reign supreme.

The actual scene of Gian’s conversion highlights this. The image of Gian entering a mosque, unwrapping his turban and slowly chopping off his long strands of hair is a deeply violating portrayal of the destruction of a sacred marker of his Sikhism. It recalls a notable similarity to the western fascination with unveiling the Muslim woman, an Orientalist erotic and racist fantasy that is wrought with desires for conquest, control, and making her accessible to the violent western gaze. And the tsk-tsk-ing audience, disgusted as they are by the irrational violence, are further freed from linking this violence to colonialism through the figure of Margaret. We find her being interrupted from watering her roses when a radio announcer mentions how the cities of the Punjab “are burning” and there appears to be “no semblance of law and order” therein. The sudden radio announcement again decontextualizes this violence – a context that Margaret is deeply implicated in. Indeed, it is starkly similar to the ways in which Afghanistan and Iraq continue to be described today, with a focus on warlords and inter-sectarian hatred and with no mentions of western implication in decades of war and occupation. Thus Sarin’s film and its problematic portrayal of Partition enters a world where the representations it employs are further heavily laden with connections to post 9/11 racism, Islamophobia, and the so-called “War on Terror” – connections that should make us all extremely uneasy.*

*The authors are indebted to Saadia Rai for her contributions, edits and suggestions throughout the writing process.

lab pe harf-e-ghazal bhi nahi

2007-02-19T01:11:00.000-08:00

You know changing my name is making me feel odd. Though i am trying to link myself to some idea of a geneaology, am i cutting myself off from my parents in a certain way? We will now have different last names, even though my mother is really pushing me to change my last name to Ansari.

I dont know what to do sometimes. This city is just consuming me bit by bit, killing any kind of resolve. Finding the bottom of my glass becomes as miserable as pouring the first cup of wine.

I would have laced my lips with the words of this song
I would have parched my throats singing Your praises
but instead the morning breeze (naseem) pinched me
and instead the night's embers hid forever in this dry sand

I hope she finds solace where she is looking
your coupled heart will be finally laced with content
and the heart of lonliness is an entirely different product
something, perhaps, you have never known

when her eyelids became black
from the salt in her tears
when her hair began to fall
when memories became too burdensome
then she finally sighed
then we finally knew

har Ah! bhar kar mera dil ka shajar
(jo shajar-e-tanha'i bhi kehte hai
aur jis mai.n samar-e-hijr)
seeya hone ka kashmakash mai.n
kahi kho jata hai
kahi reh jata hai

to phir mujh se kue poochti ho?
tere dar-e-khazana ka zard pardah
kab se khun-e-ashk se surkh hogaya

a'enge zaroor tere sar-talab wale
lekin mujhe dekhenge bhi nahi
pehchanenge bhi nahi

mujhe chor de mere hal par
yeh zina ke tale
aik ahl-e-khaak bhi hai

Qatrah, Qatrah, Qatrah
ye rago.n ko nichor do

A Radical Prude Manifesto: On Prudes and Other Feminists

2007-02-11T14:58:00.001-08:00

A Radical Prude Manifesto: On Prudes and Other Feminists

One of my favorite lines from any novel is in Mirza Ruswa’s classic novel Umrao Jaan Ada written in the 19^th century. Ruswa has a sort of obsession with his protagonist, a whore called Umrao Jaan. The novel revolves around him conversing with her and trying to unravel her biography. Of course the setting is a beautifully urbane Lucknow with its intricate Persianate Urdu and impeccable manners – and whores. There were a lot of whores. Anyway, at a key point in the novel, Umrao Jaan says to Ruswa that if she sits with him too much she will be shamed. (Here using the word ruswa, which both means shamed and is the nom du plume of the novelist). She is not the shame-saturated subject but instead is its target. He rebuttals with a couplet:

Why have you come and met Ruswa (shame) with boasts of love?

Now I will leave you not until I have shamed (ruswa) you

Umrao replies:

Whether conversing (guftgu), preaching (zahid) or arguing (bahes)

No one remembers or whispers about someone without that someone doing something

The subtleties of suggestiveness, the playing with shame, the tempting and the tempted (both the poet and the whore interchanging these roles) is not a part of the sort of inciting to speak of sex that many students in liberal arts engage in. These students are taught that our sexes are something ‘good’ and nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed shame is relegated to the status of anachronism and backwardness. We are told that sex exists in us; we need to liberate it from the confines of prudish tradition. Though poststructuralism has helped problematize this, we still emphasize speaking about it (where, when, how much, what position, what toys, was there food, two guys, four girls, tell me, tell me). We still feel somehow liberated in categorizing every part of our bodily expressions. We make subcultures about them (oh he is in the leather scene). Now everything is about measuring pleasure (well, does he know where your such-and-such is? Can he please it? Does she know how to? Have you shown him?).

But I long for a prudishness. Where would Ruswa (shame) and Umrao (the whore) be? Their playfulness is centred around ideas of propriety and shame. Indeed Umrao’s rebuttal refers to the joys of shame, but at the same time hints Ruswa to do something if people are going to talk. This talking, though, is not going to be the kind of sex-as-project we seem to be obsessed with. No, this talking is infused with moral codes and, of course, shame. But their very poetics is based on the presence of this shame, knowing that people might hint at what they will do, but this doing will always be whispers cloaked in obscurity. When we are no longer shameful – when we are in no way prudes – then we miss this critical and fruitful play so central to the kind of desire, affection and intimacy we see between the poet and the whore.

Ultimately, I am advocating not to end sensuous expression. Indeed Ruswa and Umrao are expressing coquetry and sensuality. But I am advocating for some prudishness, for some propriety. At the very least, let us not assume that those who wish not to speak directly about certain parts of our intimate beings do not have an eroticism. Being “wrapped in my black cloak” and covering my mouth in shame produces a whole network of feelings and pleasures I only wish more were more willing to explore.

zine for helen's class last year

2007-02-11T14:55:00.000-08:00

So ‘zines are supposed to be a populist form of expression that attempts to distribute non-dominant forms of writing, drawing and so on. In this anthropological ‘zine of “Homoacademecus” (Pierre Bourdieu’s term), I think some theory is necessary. But this is only to justify how we have categorized the very different species of homacademecus beings. We argue that all humans categorize nature and society – otherwise, we wonder, how would we make sense of anything? But certain important post-Foucauldian insights into the “making up of people” illustrate that these categories are not static or simply bring subjectivities to life through labels. There is – or could be – something more interesting happening! Indeed:

Ian Hacking claims that social sciences maintain a dynamic interaction between classifications and the individuals or behaviours that are classified. This means that names or classifications of a person or of behaviours can affect and change the people who are classified. But as these classified people change, the knowledge of those individuals has to be revised, as do the descriptive classifications themselves. Hacking refers to this as the looping effect of human kinds. Thus individuals experience themselves as being variously classified, but people are also agents who are aware of these classifications. Classifications may thus lead people to alter their behaviours because of this knowledge of classification. This means, then, that people who have been classified can change in relation to how they have been interpellated because they are cognizant of their classifying tropes. This produces a looping effect whereby these changes force the classifications and knowledges about individuals to be altered. Modified (or new) classifications also can provide new ways to be or to act, and thus relate to the making up of people. Thus our classifications of academic species allow for new possibilities of being, instead of simply cataloguing or delimiting.

This is the context for Hacking’s idea of “dynamic nominalism.” This perspective does not view kinds of persons as becoming increasingly recognized by bureaucrats or scientists but instead coming into existence at the very same time that this kind of person is being invented. Thus certain classifications and the kinds of person they are to correspond to “emerge hand in hand, each egging the other on.” It is thus no surprise, then, that concepts fit so well with the personality they are meant to correspond to because, indeed, they developed together. Furthermore, as new modes of description come into existence, there is also the subsequent emergence of novel possibilities for action as consequences of these new descriptions. This reveals that the idea of making up people applies not only to special species but to all individuals because people are not made up as merely what they are but also what they might have been and the possibilities for what they could be. The homosexual serves as a life where dynamic nominalism applies because no matter what the medico-forensic experts tried to articulate in the categories they used, the homosexual became autonomous of their labeling. Thus our categories of academic species might just produce new possibilities of being in this very way.

Rediculously Racist Fido Ad

2007-02-10T14:46:00.000-08:00

I know we come across this sort of thing all the time. But after opening my
Fido bill today (in Black History Month), I was just so utterly confronted
with how pervasive, invasive and hegemonic racist imagery is today.

I just thought I would write Fido a letter to 'vent'. Since letters dont
really do anything, I thought I would at least share my rant with you. Of
course I could not get into the gendered dimensions of this racist image for
the purposes of a customer-services letter- but this aspect should be quite
obvious.





_______________________
February 9, 2007


Dear Fido Customer Relations:

My name is Usamah Ahmad. My Fido telephone number is 778-***** and my
account number is **********.  I have been with Fido for roughly 3 years.

I am writing this letter to ask why Fido has resorted to archaic racist
imagery in their advertising initiatives.  For my February invoice (#
83755****), I received in the invoice package a flyer entitled “Pick up and
hook up.”  It advertised a Lavalife dating promotion in partnership with
Fido.  There is an image of a white male looking into the eyes of a shaggy
black dog.  When you peel the image of the dog over to the right, however,
it is revealed that beneath the black dog is a black woman looking
endearingly into the white man’s face.

I was taken aback looking at this.  How could it be that a company that
sells itself as ‘urban’ and ‘hip’ would utilize such ridiculously archaic
racist imagery?  The collapsing of the image of a black dog with a black
woman is absolutely unacceptable and pointedly offensive.  It should be
obvious to anyone why such an image would be so utterly racist.  There is a
history in North America and Europe of depicting non-white people as
animals.  We cannot forget the popular signs of “no blacks or dogs” adorned
many public spaces all over North America and South Africa until quite
recently.   I am thus confident that your marketing team was aware of this
racist heritage and knowingly depicted a black woman as collapseable with
the image of a dog. This is not only offensive to people of colour, but this
is actually a form of hate speech (or at least representation), when one
links this current image to similar depictions that adorn the pages of
historic and contemporary racist violence.

There is thus a worry that your marketing team is knowingly furthering a
racist campaign – and ironically during Black History Month (February).

My question is, then, what will Fido do to address this?  It will not be
enough to simply apologize to me.  I wish to see some sort of affirmative
action taken and a public acknowledgment of a clearly racist and offensive
marketing campaign.  Until this happens, I am not only planning to cancel my
service with Fido but will actively persuade others in my community to do
the same.  I will furthermore be photocopying the offensive flyer, and along
with a written commentary, forwarding it to local and national media
outlets.

Sincerely,

Usamah Ahmad

Colour My World

2007-02-07T21:01:00.000-08:00

I woke up with this phrase from my dream still ringing in my head: "blood is red"

They say that colours are not real. They are not solids, not liquids, not gasses. They are not even energy. We are told one cannot hold colour, nor can one feel colour. We are told that colour is merely a play of lights, with certain lights absorbed by the object producing the effect of colour. And so colour is merely an effect of light? Sitting atop this gray hill, I know this cannot be true, for in my dreams I touch red; I breath red; I feel red, I bleed red.

Of course this red is not confined to the slowly seeping blood (khuun) from sundry pores and wounds (zakhme). But in my dreams the central message is that blood is nothing but red. It is not a pre-existing solid on which a play of lights occur - quite arbitrarily giving it the colour red. Nay, blood is nothing but red personified. There is no blood without red; There is no impossibility of origin (because each supposed sign is merely a trace of a series of referrals from term to term, each of which is defined by its differences (cf. Derrida) that are never anything but that which they are other from). Blood is not a deferred meaning of red always present-absent and providing nothing but a play of mirrors. But this is not my dream. This is a morbid world indeed because this is a world without colour, you see. Derrida’s little trick of mirrors, the constant referring, the unfixity of meaning, is the way we have come to conceptualize colour so that it is merely as a play of lights being absorbed in verying degrees, not actually coming from anywhere, just leaving a trace. This is the kind of disenchanted world we seem to give ourselves in this setting of proliferating (and confounding) poststructural discursive networks; networks that leave my world colourless.

To reiterate, this sense of constant referrals from term to term leaving nothing but a trace and revealing the impossibility of an origin is confounded when one considers blood in my dreams. “Blood is red” is not some haunting trace of some series of deferrals of terms as meanings of that which they are not. This is because “red is blood” (blood is red) does not imply some play of lights and some left traces (and nothing else). For blood is red. It is red with a form, it is a red constant, fixed, it is a red sticky and seeping, congealing and wild. But this is my dream, these notions of an absolute redness have no currency in this colourless world of ours; this world of haunting presences of nothing but light.

Perhaps the context of a dream and the absurdity of colour is not articulating my point very clearly. Perhaps I will turn to a different idea with a whole different set of symbols. Let us use think of deconstruction and this notion of self-contradiction whereby the exercise is not to find flaws and discrepensies in the logic and rhetoric of a piece but to instead note how the author’s intentions have a mismatch (and “underlying incompatability”) with what is actually being said by the text. This is, it would seem, a more graspable (!) concept than the light-object-light kind of dynamic present in colour. Well how do we approach a Divine text from this framework? There is no incongruence between God’s intention and what the Quran says because God is not a subject discursively constituted, nor is God a conflicting, fractured subjectivity. This would contradict the very principle of God’s self-disclosure; that is, that God is an absolute one-ness (tawhid). We can see this at work when we think of something divinely positioned, something like my dreams. Divine not in the sense of me being somehow special but because God takes our souls at night and returns it in the morning. So during these dreams, then, this whole idea of text and deferred meaning and unfixity kind of falls a part. Colours can be colours. This, I think, would be a wonderful project. To re-enchant our world with something other than masculinist statist Islamist fun.

On a completely different note: Today I was very intrigued by Talal Asad’s idea of pain being action or agency and involving a series of social relationships (or being a part of producing the conditions for action or experience). But what was really interesting is the notion of pregnancy and child-birth involves pain not merely as a negative experience but is actually that which constitutes pregnancy as a distinctive social act. And what really intrigues me is this notion that the agency that comes through the pain of childbirth and the emergent social relationships can be accidental. There are accidental pregnancies, after all. Asad brilliantly links this to the work of Saba Mahmood and the way that Islam can produce the material body as necessary for cultivating the virtuous self (through embodied virtuous actions). And this, indeed, is actually the work of ‘ensoulment’.

So trying to work with these ideas of embodiment but also of trace and defference, I think I can conceptualize the citation of communal markers that name ‘the Muslim’ actually citing things that exist beyond the sort of fixity of meaning I had perhaps been implying in my thesis (and this is not my dream so these poststructural confoundations are actually quite useful). Thus the citation-as-act is itself the attempt to grab a trace of something that is present-absent (remember the bulbul)? And so memories of ‘Muslimness’ become central to this process of naming. But even more significant, memories are perhaps somehow more removed from the present (but perhaps not) and they are surely more tenacious and more impervious to the techniques of the postcolonial nation. Again the bulbul becomes embossed on my mind’s eye (tasawwur). Indeed she serves to point the poet or the defeated ‘communal’ subject to the of prolonged existence of a trace of a series of slippery signs to be cited. And perhaps beyond simply pointing, she also seems to cling to that trace for just one moment longer.

What disgusts me is the CBC. I find “Little Mosque” quite problematic and infantalizing of Muslims as though our problems are just quirky bits of naivity. As though we do not have 1400 years of intellectual history to deal with. And then during the commercials, Peter Mansbridge wishes us to watch his later newscast about the First Nations chief who is “helping native people help themselves through their own hard work.” We then see the chief say “get off your lazy butts” to his community. The CBC names him the ‘corporate chief.’ He is, indeed, the posterboy for neoliberalism. Let these natives blame themselves for their own ‘laziness’ (quite literally) while we laud the sort of private-public partnerships (selling out) we can get their leaders to do. And the ‘corporate chief’s’ main business (oh the ironic legacies of colonialism) is trying to get the community to produce wine.

In Urdu essays, the author usually starts by degrading himself. For example, Thanvi starts the Bahishti Zewar by saying, “Lord forgive this shameless and low soul.” I like this idea; I wish we could start our writing in this fashion, to humble our worthlessness in the sight of the Sublime. This would seem to challenge secularism, though. Perhaps more of this humbling would echo the goosbumps I get when I go onto Iran’s official state website where on the very top it says Bismillah. Re-enchantment, indeed.

yeh sabz pato.n ko zara surkh bana de
yeh band zakhmo.n ko zara phir khol de

dream from hell

2007-02-06T09:55:00.000-08:00

I should be working, but:

I could not sleep. It was like the grond beneath me had opened and revealed the miseries of Hell for just a moment. His name, let us say, is Saleh. He walks into the front door and smiles at me. He takes out a gun and like a B-movie that never ends, shoots himself straight in the stomach. He looks at me on the way to the floor.

I try desperately to find any of his kin to inform them. But no one can be reached. I sigh and give up.

We are wandering in this old abandonned field. There is slime everywhere that smells of rotting flesh. My eyes cannot stay open, the fumes are burning me. I look around, it is dark now. The trees are all deformed. Like bonzais that have been let to do whatever they want all of a sudden so they respond by becoming the most disgusting of creations to curse you for the years of imprisonment. Their limbs follow no pattern. They reach not the heavens nor do they creap on the ground. They instead twist and spiral in a mangled nazara (scene) of utter anxiety. It is like each fold on their cracked trunks are desperately trying to gush forth tears - but can't. God have mercy on us all.

I have the surah Zilzila in my head. I can never actually remember the words but just the rhythm of how my dad used to recite it. I am having difficulty even reading arabic these days. Those nooqtas that used to help me so dearly now only confound me. The naskh script that used to be so easy for me to read is now disturbing me. Indeed I am now more at ease with the Urdu nastaaliq script that is known for its difficulty.

Is this some kind of message?

2007-02-03T15:24:00.000-08:00

Indeed the meticulously detailed injunctions Thanvi outlines for women, including the comportment of the body and the proper management of household tasks, can thus be seen as articulating a kind of power where women are being produced as trained, corrected and managed. For example, the Bahishti Zewar’s injunction that “when speaking, do not make excessive gestures with your hands” is training the body in a way to make it docile for the smooth functioning of the patriarchal conjugal family unit, which I have already illustrated is not ‘traditionalist’ but embedded within certain modern conjugal ideals (Abu-Lughod, 1998). And yet the biopower being articulated is not collapseable with the medico-scientific discourses of knowledge/power through which western modes of biopower produced the type of domesticated wife Armstrong (1987) discusses. The vector through which biopower is producing Thanvi’s domestic wife is in fact the Shariat where each minute injunction the Bahishti Zewar spells out is related to a divinely ordained duty to uphold a patriarchal conjugal unit.[1] But, as I have been arguing, this is neither a non-modern process because of the centrality of reason (aql) in producing a thinking subjectivity that itself articulates its own managing and of course the very modernist undertones of the conjugal unit the Bahishti Zewar echoes. To reiterate, this is a conjugal unit that is not Islamic ‘traditionalist’ because ideals of housework, and a wife’s duty to meticulously manage the household is not found in classic fiqh sources (Al-Hibri, 2000) and can in fact be tied to postcolonial processes that articulate alternative modernities (Abu-Lughod, 1998; Atasoy, 2003).

Ultimately, then, my point is that the husband’s rule in the house is not ‘repressive’ in the punishing sense but is dependent on the disciplined, trained and useful domesticated subject. Thus Thanvi’s details about bodily comportment, meticulous household managing and even hygiene serve not to punish women but to produce trained and gendered Muslim subjectivities. And furthermore, the centrality of reason (aql) that Thanvi claims is necessary for women to appreciate their ‘duties’ also produces the self-managed wife, something Foucault (1975) discusses at length in reference to producing docile bodies. These subjectivities are thus controlled and managed through a very modern type of biopower but not through the same modality exercised in Foucault or Armstrong’s (1987) European contexts. Instead, a different modality of biopower, using shariatic principles as its vector, is articulated.

[1] By focusing on how minute details are incalculated upon bodies and train a managed domestic self, I am implicitly problematizing Salvatore’s (2001: 134) idea that Islamic reform movements use a new normative discourse of Shariat to produce a dialectic relationship with the building of the modern state. This is because Thanvi is not interested in statist power, a theme common to Tablighi thinkers and writers (Sikand, 2002). And indeed Salvatore further claims that the Shariat tries to bridge divide between Divine norms and secular law, something also challenged by Thanvi’s text because this binary between Divine norms and law is not really the point. By examining the micropolitics of biopower in the production of the managed household, one sees how ideas about Divine norms are in fact not trying to be produced as compatible with secular laws but are refashioned through modernist tropes of rationality and the conjugal familial unit.

ke wisaal-e-yaar hota!

2007-02-01T00:49:00.000-08:00

> parda-e-duniya ke kamkhwab ke tale
> khak-e-deher ke fasane ke tale
> haqiqat-e-jajal-o-jamal ki wasl chale
>
> under the brocade-silk parda of this world
> under the fable of the dirt of this world
> runs the perfect union of majesty and beauty

Forsaking Nights of Sorrow for Mornings of Regret

2007-01-29T15:34:00.000-08:00

Three vignettes

1) Faiz Ahmad Faiz

Ye jafa’e gham ka charah, voh najat-e-dil ka ‘alam
Tera husn dast-e-isa, teri yaad rooh-e-mariam
Wohi gosha-e-qafs hai, wohi fasl-e-gul ka matam

This pain of the solution to sorrow, that state of the freedom of the heart
Your beauty like the hand of Christ, your memory like the spirit of Mary
That is the corner of the jail-cell, it is the grief of the harvest of roses

2) The Cure

show me how you do it
and I will promise you I will run away with you
why are you so far away
your of the strangest angels
your just like a dream

3) Forsaking Nights of Sorrow for Morning of Regret
(by this pasheman shakhs, this ‘usamah’)

These pages stained with the cheapest of wines
These sighs filling the heavens
Incurring not His wrath
Bringing not Her mercy

Ye dagh-e-mai, ye varaq-e-sukhanwar
Ye Ah ! asmaan tak pohnch kar
Khuda ka Qadr na laya
Khuda ki Rehem na laya

Oh usamah you have forsaken the heavens
For this piece of ground
Now even your companion, the bulbul, is beyond the reach of your cries
Around these chains come the darkest of wounds

Ae usamah tu ne asmaan luT liya
Is bekaar khaak ke waste
Ab tera aik humsafar, bulbul, teri fariyaad ke oonchi hai
Ye zanjir se hai tareek zakhme

Wounds blossoming forth roses
Bursting forth scents of the morning breeze
But so dry is this throat
So cracked are these lips

Zakhm se bahar-e-gul
Zakhm se bu-e-naseem
Lekin kiya piyas hai
Kiya chhala lab pe hai

That even His praises cannot wet these lips
Even Her remembrance sooths this parched vassal not
Oh you have forsaken the nights of sorrow once again
For the bastard (unlucky) mornings of regret

Ke uska hamd na bhigwata hai
Na zikr qarar dilwata hai
Ae tu ne shab-e-gham phir ghaflat mai.n kho diya
Is kambakht pasheman subh ke waste

The cab ride home

2007-01-28T15:58:00.000-08:00

Doing: trying not barf. Opening the window, so I can barf.

Thinking: I miss being in India. I hate it here. But this is all I have ever known. The wind is cold. My brain cells are obviously being killed. I am a sinner. I dropped wine on my dad’s book. Now I need to get that book back too. Why do I always lose Faiz Ahmad Faiz books. What will I read tomorrow. Why does he keep looking at me from the rearview mirror.

Saying: taxi driver man: are you a gay? Me: ummmm what the fuck?

Thinking: taxi drivers sure love me

Doing: trying not to barf again. Stepping out of car. Getting wiper from gas station to clean side of cab. Laughing at the absurdity of this.

Thinking: this is hilarious. Everyone is staring at me. Why is it so cold tonight. Why is it always so damp. I hate teaching. My students are stupid. I am getting water on my pants. Dear god my bag is soaked with wine. Where will I put it. I stink.

Saying: me: is this good enough? Taxi driver man: there is still barf in the cracks, there and there and there.

Thinking: fuck this is no longer funny. I want to go home. I want to sleep. Why do I do this to myself every weekend? Would I be so lucky to think the secret-of-companionship is hidden in the bottom of this glass? We have dis-enchanted the world, remember. The goblet of Jamshed is nothing but some uncovered electrical wires and computer chips that is reacting to the acidity in the drink.

Doing: getting out of the cab walking inside quickly knowing there is an odd gaze on me. Taking off my jacket. Taking off my pants. In my boxers. Under the covers. How sweet is sleep. May it never end.

Biopower, Heavenly Ornaments and Surayya

2007-01-24T23:11:00.000-08:00

I love Surayya. Only she can play the bulbul (nightingale) of Ghalib in the 1956 Mirza Ghalib. Indeed she is the tawa’if who embodies Ghalib’s poetry, who brings it to life. But, alas, she can only repeat his defeated words over and over again. Becoming markers for his desolation, sorrow and emptiness.

Kahu kis se mai.n ke kiya hai? Shab-e-gham buri bala hai
Mujhe kiya bura tha marna, agar aik bar hota

Who do i bother telling? that the nights of sorrow are a curse
Oh why would I have worried about dieing If it only happened once

As will become clear below, however, the embodiment of poetry is quite distinct from the modern project of producing a rational woman imbued with shariat principals, as Thanvi does. But there were two main things that stroke my mind today. Things always ‘strike’ my mind, playing with my intellect (‘aql) and never with the intuitive part of my being, with the heart, with the childish lower-self (naadaan nafs). I wish, sometimes, that I could lose myself a little bit but then some idea ‘strikes’ and I hit the notepad- making sure I keep it down. After all everything is so fleeting, why would moments of intellectual clarity be any different? In fact they are even more susceptible to the ravages of time. Not just forgetting, but because this world constantly changes, trying to erase my every trace.

The two ideas:

1) But the decadent (but refined) and public (but veiled) existence of Surayya as Ghalib's prostitute are no where present in what I have been reading today. Indeed Surayya's outward ornaments are quite distinct from the type of ornament Thanvi crafts. He produced a woman whose intricate beadwork infuses her very core with a 'rationalist religious' purpose. Baheshti Zewar (Heavenly Ornaments) is a deeply modernist text. As such, Foucault’s concept of bio-power can be applied. Clearly ‘power over life’ was being articulated in creating the proper (modern) Muslim woman. With the finest details of what to write, what to say, what to feel, this woman was produced as not ‘less’ than a man but was deeply self-regulating and regulated. But my interest is looking at how Thanvi’s articulations actually operated as a knowledge-power discourse to produce women. Indeed there is NO ‘epicentre’ to this power in the sense that the Deoband the Tablighis do not believe in statist power. And of course patriarchy becomes disorganized because the husband is not the focus of the house but it is the proper (scientific) management of the household by the educated (and domestic) woman. Why are Muslim texts denied coavelescence (Cf. Johannes Fabian)? Why is it not possible to imagine that these types of texts are actually modernist texts utilizing these modernist modalities of power (and scientific organizations of power through the specified contortions of the body and of course producing the subjectivity and soul). And indeed the idea of rationality (aql) is central to Baheshti Zewar because Thanvi insists that women need to be ration in order to perform their necessary (meticulous) duties in this world (the household/manzil/khana/ghar) but also to reach their full spiritual condition (which, all his misogyny aside, is never less than a mans).

And yet it is never more than a mans either, as was the idea in a Victorian era that saw women as somehow more spiritually pure. Yet I am not claiming that this text can be collapsed with the Victorian modality of modernity being articulated in Europe (or by the British administration) at the same time. Here modernity is not being guaranteed through secularism and the through banishing God (Astaghfurallah, and an impossibility, of course), but is guaranteed through the Shariat (or Thanvi’s selective androcentric reading of Fiqh, Sunnah and the Qur’an). This is the crux of my argument. That though women are being produced through the discursive networks and linkages of knowledge power and a regime of de-centralized biopower and that this is a modern modality of control at work, this modern modality is being manifested not through a secularist framework but through the shariat itself. Thus the shariat becomes an agent, here, of modernity. I think this is a good starting point.

2) My second idea is also related to bio-power. I was watching this documentary called Oprah’s Roots. It was quite interesting actually. It traced her lineage into the slave era and even into Africa somehow. But to do so, researchers had to dig and dig through these obscure archives to find minute almanac and census data that confirmed these people existed. These records were hard to find because no one really cared about poor Black subjects in the south. They were numbers merely for almanac and agricultural data. They were denied subjectivity, even though they were catalogued. This is why there had to be so much digging to find any record of them. Since Foucault discusses how being recorded in an archive and then becoming a part of registry means you are deeply implicated in knowledge power dynamics that produce your subjectivity as an individual and in doing so produce your soul becomes problematized here. This is not because Oprah’s relatives were not subject to knowledge/power. Clearly they were. But Foucault’s idea that the subject (the knowable individual) was given life at this very moment becomes complicated because no one cared about these produced individuals. They were irrelevant. They were denied the subjectivity, they were denied the soul. Only through the piecing together of their existence through registries was their subjectivity given life.

This opens up a lot of questions. First it asks Foucault how to make sense of those social positionings that are denied subjectivity (and the regimes of control that come with this) but still subject to knowledge/power? It also asks what happens with time. Are subjects only subjects at the moment of their scientifized recording in a registry? Or, like the ‘irrelevant’ Black southerner, can subjectivity be given life for an ephemeral moment? For a fleeting moment? Can the breath that breathed life into newly produced individualized subjects be deflated? Are we merely exhuming the remains of these once-were-subjects? I would claim, instead, that subjectivity and soul-making revolves a more prolonged and cited presence in a registry than evident here. Thus the giving of subjectivity, the breathing in of the modern soul, again has to be reevaluated through these forgotten subaltern positions.

Amina gone wild

2007-01-24T21:15:00.001-08:00

"amina gone wild"

trying to justify Lucknow as a nexus

2007-01-23T12:18:00.000-08:00

It has been important in my project to tenaciously reiterate how Lucknow is not a storehouse, terminus or point-of-origin for markers that name 'the Muslim'. Instead I have conceptualized Lucknow as a nexus - as a sort of concentrated nodal point among a series of chains of markers/marked.

My hostility to linking markers of ‘Muslimness’ to particular bodies or even claiming that Lucknow is a store-house for them is indebted to Sara Ahmed (2004). She claims that emotions do not “inhabit any-body as well as any-thing” (121) but that they instead circulate between bodies and signs and in doing so have the very effect of producing the surfaces or boundaries of particular bodies and of particular worlds. Of course Ahmed (2004) is discussing emotions while I am discussing the idea of communalized markers. But the framework that Sara Ahmed outlines is valuable because of its resistance to essentializing symbols to particular subjects or places, especially when we usually conceptualize these symbols as being housed by particular subjects or places. Thus my hostility to essentialize markers as being inherent to the Muslim body or housed in Lucknow finds a parallel in Ahmed’s resistance to saying fear is housed by the ‘Muslim Stranger’ as subject. Instead she claims that this fear circulates, while being involved in creating the surface and boundaries of bodies and worlds themselves. I cling to the idea of Lucknow as a nexus instead of a store-house precisely because of this notion of circulation.

2007-01-23T00:46:00.001-08:00

usamah - اپنی شکست کی آواز says:
ITS MUHARRAM
sumayya says:
that is why i stay!
usamah - اپنی شکست کی آواز says:
go to the mosque!!!
usamah - اپنی شکست کی آواز says:
everyone is gonna start talking
sumayya says:
i will listen to a lecture at home instead
usamah - اپنی شکست کی آواز says:
you have to keep up appearences
sumayya says:
no its okay, i pretend i have evening classes i cant avoid
sumayya says:
and im there on weekends and i will skip school on ashura, it is fine
sumayya says:
anyways the place is full of people wearing black no one knows who is mising

Qandeel ka gham, an uncle's death and the 'modern' city's impossibility of sorrow

2007-01-21T19:16:00.000-08:00

Susan is spectacular. I just got off the phone with her. She was telling me how horrible her B.Ed program is. All of the girls in her class are hardcore racists. They went to this Muslim school in Surrey to observe. And some of the white girls asked ‘are men and women equal in your religion’ and ‘what do you think about all the terrorists in the media’ and ‘do you get hot wearing that’ (to a woman in hijab). I am like, these are the twats who will go and teach my fucking nephews?! Musa is already so depressed and alienated at school. I remember feeling the same way when I was younger too. But Susan is just so funny in describing her ‘keen-ass’ and ‘lame-ass’ colleagues. She also said she likes ‘living on the edge’ and thus not curtailing her illegal activities.

My uncle died last night. Hanif Ansari. He was big involved in Congress politics and so apparently the whole neighborhood was full of people. I had a dream the night before he died about Sena being in distress and specifically some crazy dentist trying to remove her teeth. What is so weird is when I told Sumayya about this, she was like, teeth in dreams usually mean death. And then he died the very next day! But the strangest thing is that in the dream the floors of the dentist’s office were the same type of tile that is in my uncle’s house in Allahabad. It seems my dreams always hint at people’s deaths. Like when my cousin Salma died I remember dreaming the night before that my sister had a giant tumor. When my dad died I dreamt that a family friend’s daughter died. And when I was in India this last time I told everyone how I knew my uncle would die in about a year in Muharram. My mom thought I was being crazy and rude. I think the weirdest one was when I dreamt Naela’s dad was crying and really upset. I called Naela the next day and she said he had been up all night that night worried about something and they were all worried about him. I mean I am not very close to Naela – why would I be dreaming of her dad anyway?

I am not really very sad. I mean it is an underlying sorrow but I know he was really out of it and had alzheimers. Indeed I would want someone to kill me if I was at that kind of state. I dont know, i dont get phased by death any more. it just kind of rolls of my back. well I hope he is granted janat with rivers flowing.

It will be an awkward transition from above, but we went to a party last night. I think we over stayed our welcome but we just wouldn’t leave. I brought my lesbian entourage, even though the people who were hosting it aren’t even my friends. I feel so awkward around white men, especially white gay men. Heck a lot of men. Maybe because I had three sisters and was always around girls growing up I just do not know how to communicate with men. With women I feel so much more at ease! I think I should just come to terms with being a raging lesbian and get on with it. But darn I think I had induldged too much again last night. My insides are beginning to really hurt.

The clouds are so overpowering today, I love it. I pray that this year spring doesn’t come and so I can wallow in the ironic pleasures of a mute gray decay; in the ‘cold-hearted pleasure of autumn’ (khizaa.n ka sang-dil lazzat).

But I think I finally get at the meat (heart/jigar/kidney/kaleja) of this nazm (“yahaa.n se sheher”)

Jo saye door chiragho.n ke gird larza.n hai.n
Yaha sai kuch nahi khulta
Na jaanay mehfil-e-gham hai ke bazm-e-jaam-o-suboo

Agha Shahid Ali’s Translation of parts of the poem:

There are flames dancing in the farthest corners,
throwing their shadows on a group of mourners.
Or are they lighting up a feast of poetry and wine?
From here you cannot tell, as you cannot tell
whether the colour clinging to those distant doors and walls
is that of roses or of blood

The obvious interpretation would be the kind of emptiness and underlying grief that surrounds indulgence in our empty cities of modernity. Only by being a far from the city can one actually reveal this emptiness, and the realization of being cheated. From afar the city is truly spectacular with its little lights dancing constantly. If this was not written within a certain ‘standard-of-sorrow’ in Urdu poetry, then one could assume the congregations of sorrow are to be thought of in the negative; that it is these that underly the congregations of joy. But when understanding Faiz’s standard of induldgin in the pleasures of sorrow, then one sees how the poet dreams that the lanterns are actually qandeels (lanterns) that mourners light in order to prolong their sorrow for one night more; to languish in the most satisfying of griefs. But in the vulgar modernities of our contemporary cities these qandeels of congregations of grief are questionable. But also perhaps how the modern city is always doing fareb (treachery). That what seems like those bright colours of joy that mesmerize are actually potentially markers of a whole network of oppression, pain and exploitation. So the very idea of indulging in those congregations of celebration (jashn) with wine and poetry is revealed as necessarily empty and akin to a congregation for expressing sorrow. And thus both congregations are a fantasy or worse yet a fake. After all, from here, who can tell what is what?

But perhaps the pain in this nazm that comes from this impossibility of either the congregation of sorrow or the congregation of celebration stem from them being encased in this city of tempting treachery (fareb). But after all, from here, who can tell what is what? The city – the beast – is the only presence one can grudgingly be certain of. But this image of the city and of being outside of it is usually not taken very seriously when interpreting this nazm. I would disagree. I think I need to reference another of his poems to properly express what I am saying:

Rah-e-khiza.n mai.n talash-e-bahar karte rahe
Shab-e-seeya se talib husn-e-yaar karte rahe

I used to look for springtime in the lanes of autumn
From the night of darkness I would search for the beauty of my beloved

So what the poet wants to see in the city is a misplaced longing. Because, afterall, it is the treacherous empty city that can provide neither true sorrow nor congregations of celebration. This misplaced longing is akin to the futility of searching for springtime in fall or searching blind (the darkest of nights) for the beauty of some supposed beloved. And this last aspect is even more interesting because you are searching blindly for the one thing you need more than anything else, and you will never be able to see it if it comes in front of you (rubaru). What I am trying to say is that the gaudy modern city is in fact the same kind of thing. You can search its tired lanes for all sorts of things because the city is always lit up (‘the city from here’ is very much about the lights in the distance of a city) but the impossibility of the indulgence in actual sorrow (as in the stuff for poetry) is impossible in these hollowed lanes. So the brightly lit city is like the decaying autumn. There is no springtime to be found in either.

Ae Usamah! Tu bhi aaj kya khayal se rawa hu’e
Socha kya? Ke jaam mai.n raaz-e-yaar pinha hu’e?

( I need to edit this post so it makes sense! )

out on the town

2007-01-21T15:44:00.000-08:00

mehboos hai

2007-01-20T02:53:00.000-08:00

nishaan-e-shab-e-hijr khaak ka ghaflat ghubaar
aik mai.n kya? jab bahaar-e-alam se na khumaar

teri yaade.n se chaman mai.n hai muntazir shaakho.n
na samar-e-fariyad na to mehboos bulbul

aik hum hai.n
jo khak mai.n miTte nahi

some recent movies I have uploaded!

2007-01-18T22:41:00.000-08:00

This is just funny! I love how she says "DANCE! Dance like the Vind!"

I am using this for the thesis project. Clearly the physicality of Awadh and its association with laments (soz) is so obvious.

I am also using this for my thesis project because this scene is an amazing nexus of classedmarkers associated with Muslim communal subjectivity to be cited. Indeed I love how the poem becomes the link between them, challenging Hindutva's problematizing of Urdu's legitimacy in the postcolonial nation. And indeed the translation obviously does not do it justice. It is so clear that "He is sad" and "He has shed tears of blood over this poem" are not quite the same!

And well this one is simply stunning. but it still fits into producing a sense of Muslim decay in that the british are on the shores (literally camped out of the city about to invade) but the fat lazy Muslim gentry is seen as induldging in other activities. I think the tawa'if is produced as herself kind of taunting them. Of course this image of a licentious opulence misses how the same gentry was involved in the great ghadar (mutiny) and thus this idea of decadent, lazy, effiminate fatness serves important purposes in hindutva hegemony.

oh faiz i would marry you if you were not dead

2007-01-17T22:37:00.000-08:00

oh faiz, if only you were not six feet under. I would have stalked you until you could rest not.

my innocent murderer! these prayers still make love to you!

na jane kis liye umeed-waar betha huu.n
aik aisi rah pe jo teri rahguzar bhi nahi

nigah-e-shoq sar-e-bazm hijab na ho
wo be-khabar-hi sahi, itne be khabar nahi

I do not know why i am sitting here with all these hopes
when I am sitting on the path you never even walk

my sights of desire i hope are not de-veiled in this congregation
its better if he is not aware; but not so un-aware either

Jaise kafir ka namaz ho ja’e

2007-01-17T19:34:00.000-08:00

Jaise hone wala gham rok ja’e

Jaise kafir ka namaz ho ja’e

Like the coming sorrow was somehow stopped

Like the infidel touched his head on the ground in prayer

Of course, Faiz, you would not understand the mute misery of this place. The grayness of it all. Where even the anticipation of sorrow is not offered. Faiz, you thought for a moment that a kafir touching his head on the hard rock could be the greatest compliment creation could ever offer the Creator. The willful submission of the unbeliever. Perhaps an ontological impossibility. Surely these gray fiza’e (atmosphere) will never permit that kind of compliment.

I had such an awkward meeting with my supervisors. I think they think I am stupid. I came off fumbling and of course moving my hands everywhere. The thesis project can, we hope, be pulled off. But the question is, can they offer any real help? Or am I too stubborn to actually take any of it. It seems I am impossibly positioned in the academy. Like the parasite Derrida talks about, I am eating the institution from inside out by breaking those silly disciplinary boundaries. Oh wait, perhaps it is eating me from the inside.

Some contradictions emergent from my proposed project:

1) Applying poststructural social theory to a text: Am I justify approaching text as social ‘reality’? Will I need a long postmodernist sermon to allow this?

2) The cinema as a medium: what is it about film – as in its visual politics – that set it a part from other analysis. What is it, in other words, about film that breathes a particular kind of life into the blackened walls of Lucknow?

3) Do I have space to be reflexive in terms of being a particularly positioned spectator of film? Can I do this without challenging my rhetorical strategy?

I think Dr. Farhat (an obvious pseudonym) has some weird hostility to me. I simply cannot figure it out what this is. But I think it has to do with an akward relationship I maintain to sex radicals and feminism. Perhaps it is my hostility to give up a certain type of theoretical lens that bugs her? I do not know. But after she offered some analytical advice, she looked at me and said, “Usamah! You look so anxious”. Well I am always anxious but I think I simply did not understand the kinds of things she was saying. Film theory is obviously not my strong area, but I suddenly felt the size of an ant. And not the good kind of feeling small when you are humbled, but the put-on-the-spot-gotta-prove-yourself kind of small. I am such a fraud, at these moments I think they have figured it out. Now it will merely be pity.

These interactions always lead to a feeling of empty hollowness. Like those redwood Toni Morrison is talking about. Strong, wild, powerful, falling over with the most spectacular of glory. And yet one feels like those awe-inspiring, shade-giving testaments to – or signs of – the Sublime have lost their innards. They stand with such purpose but are empty as a vulnerable bamboo. Oh these postures in front of these figures, oh these elaborate gowns you wear! Sometimes the gown (libaas) is no longer a shell but the only thing you are left with.

So the gharara that was burnt to get the gold thread from its brocade (kamkhwaab) becomes more of a tragedy. For under this hem (daman) is indeed nothing.

Jaise mo’min ka gunah ho ja’e

Like the believer sinning

Indeed the kafir praying and the believer sinning are completely different things. The latter is merely hurting his own soul, for what? A couple of fleeting moments and for a couple of tired joys? To hide the underlying sorrow? To mask the mundanity of faith without knowing herPresence? Yet the kafir! When his forehead touches the ground the Throne itself must shake.

every atom in my being will submit

2007-01-16T01:44:00.000-08:00

Maintaining a journal makes me feel like dougie houser.

Today was that Muslim feminisms course. It is so weird having such a good friend teach you. It makes you feel more worried about the dynamics of the class – that your friend is being treated properly and everything is running smoothly. There is this one woman whose racism seeps out of the pores of her oily and pudgy face. She questions everything the professor says, rolling her eyes and of course snickering when my friend is not watching. But I sort of expected this kind of reaction.

I just think it is so awkward to sit there and try to have our deepest beliefs examined through a secularist and positivist methodology so intrinsic to western academia. Sure we espouse poststructural insights into the positioned and partisan nature of knowledge, we beg our instructors to interrogate and reflect upon their positionalities. These have become our credo in a way. And yet when it comes to the Divine, the professor expressing not just an orientalist or ‘ethnic based’ connection to Islam but a deep and profound belief, her authority in the class room is questioned and challenged. Indeed if she was to say she is not a Muslim and hide her belief in class, things would clearly run more smooth. I even caught her utter ‘peace be upon him’ after she mentioned the Prophet’s name. Though not many people noticed this, it felt so out of place in these hollowed halls. And indeed this is what we should interrogate, why this seems so out of place. Why we can never invest our souls into our inquiries but can only have our souls invested by relations of knowledge-power; to control and subject our cores to and through modernist principles – or violences.

Well I think it is a farce, this notion that Islam can just be taught as a knowledge system or worse yet a semiotic system. Have I become this hostile to secularism? Well I will not claim that study and critical insight are to be ignored, nor do I devalue the role of Aql – reason – in analyzing disclosures of the Sublime. But this Aql – reason – is entirely different than the form of reason espoused in positivist, western Enlightenment thinking precisely because God, and with her morality, is not abandoned. This abandonment has led to such virulent and effective networks of violence. It is because the type of Aql I think are suited to studying Islam must start from belief. It is not enough to espouse a reformed orientalism or think that by interrogating one’s positionality in the knowledge dynamics of Islamic studies you can legitimately enter discourse on Islam.

For example we saw this corny documentary about Islam. One of those one’s ‘where everything is invented by Muslims’ (cf. Sumayya). But I have this tendency where I start crying whenever there is discussion about the first verses, or about the final conquest of Mecca and the amnesty declared on almost all of the citizens. So when people were just watching these clips I had to try and hide tears. How can we sit in the same class and discuss something that will be graded? What was I doing there? But why shouldn’t I be there when we are discoursing on something central to my being. It is these contentions that make this space so awkward and yet so analytically powerful. But it confirms something about me, that every atom in my body and every thought in my mind and every beat in my heart believes with a belief so profound nothing can ever take this away. And especially not some pudgy, greasy racist girl.

a huge pimple - and the present/absenteeism of the bulbul

2007-01-14T23:43:00.000-08:00

This internet space is such a lonely, windy place. I have done nothing today; feel like quite the sack of wasted skin. I think i had a little too much last night. but i have said it before,

"ruswa'i sirf bheer mai.n hoti hai" (shame only happens in a congregation)

People say this is our prime or something. Usually I am critical of things people say, but now i am thinking i am wasting away the time of my life where I can probably do a lot of things I will never be able to again. Indeed the catalyst for the current wave of this sentiment came from realizing a gigantic pimple on my forehead. It reminded me that I am still a kiddo and get these stupid pimples and yet, who cares? I am not doing anything in life where having a blemish would even make any sort of difference. Ultimately, it forced me to re-examine the luxuries I indulge in: laying around, british comedies, making fun of nasty looking people, being out all night and able to "function" the next day, eating biryani 17 times a day, and so on. I should soak it all up.

But I have become obsessed with the figure of the bulbul. I kept talking to Karen and Amina about it last night - which is quite odd because we were in a club. It amazes me, it dazzles me. Here is the nightengale that mockingly follows around the poet. Wherever I go, there she is. So you are never 'lonely' - but - the bloody bird only repeats whatever I said! so my defeated poetry is simply echoed back to me over and over again. so this company actually becomes a marker of my own woes and pithy expressions. And so it rings in your year for eternity, this echoe of your own song of sorrow; your own cry for release. Entrappment in such a beatifully elaborate prison is the mark of an uncontrollable intrigue. I would love to indulge in studying this more. But where will studying these kinds of idiocyncracies take me?

But I think it was shaqeel badauni who brilliantly twisted the bulbul for a second. He said,

mere humsafeer bulbul tujhe mera saath dena hai
mai.n zameer-e-dasht-o-darya, tu aseer-e-ashiana

my fellow traveller, bulbul, you will have accompany me
my consciousness is captive in the abandonned wilderness while you are captive in the nest

Simply brilliant. I might be misquoating it. I remember the poem from a ghazal sung by Begum Akhtar many moons ago. But in my reading of these lines (which may be different from the original poem), the bulbul becomes the target of a sort of mocking responce. Usually the bulbul mocks the poet by simply repeating whatever she said back to him. It is just a mocking presence knowing the only company the loaner poet has is this bloody bird that just repeats his words back to him. Here Shaqeel is amazingly making fun of the bulbul! Saying that, well, actually the curse is on you because you will have to accompany me through my pointless travels in this 'veeran' (abandoned, sparse) world. There is really no difference in our positions, bulbul, sure you are high up and in a position to repeat my words, but you are actually held captive in your nest; just as I am captive on this uncharming ground.

If i may, be so bold, I think this ghazal sung by begum akhtar reminds me of another written by him and sung by her. This one ends:

voh uthe hai le ke khum-o-subuu, are o shaqeel kaha hai tu?
tera jaam lene ko bazm mai.n koi aur haath barha na de

they have risen with wine in hand, o shaqeel where are you?
what if someone extends their hand with your wine-glass in hand

The link I am imagining here is this kind of absence-presence of the mocker. But here it becomes wine. though the subject is excited at the sight of wine, his wits have already left him and therefore he can no long enjoy it. Even though his wine glass will be filled with it, it is someone else's hand afterall. And so like the bulbul the mocker here is wine itself because the tamana or desire to get drunk is always present one can never actually because after a while wits leave you and one is left sitting with just the skelaton.

And what is so brilliant about the bulbul-as-signifier is that she is much like the figure of the naghmasara - the female singer. I have claimed elsewhere that the poet's words are not really manifest until sung by the singing whore (tawa'if). Indeed her presence is needed. Not to get into the specific dynamics of how this complex figure relates to the poet's self-destruction and manifestation, I will say how she is similar to the bulbul and occupying this present-absent positioning. Indeed though she gives the poet company and breaths life into his sorry words, she can do no more than repeat his defeated poetry. And thus the mocking comes from hearing your pithy words repeated back to you in the most bejeweled and silken voices.

Perhaps the little bulbul is responsible for more fitna (disruption) then we ever though. Think of the presence-absence in Kaifi Azmi's famous last poem and the one my dear Saydia loves so much:

woh tegh mil gaya jis se hua qatl mera
kisi ka hath ka nishaan nahi milta

the dagger that caused my murder was found
but there is no mark left from the murderer's hand

Thus the present-absenteeism of the bulbul becomes so suspicious. If it is an instance of self-distruction that destroyed/murdered the poet-shakhs, or if it was the luminous tortures (sitam) of the beloved that killed him, who knows? There is no way to know because like the bulbul who only repeats what you said, there is never any concrete manifestation of the defeated poet. because how is a bulbul's utterance actually a recording of your state (hal) for all time? no it is a mocking utterance that leaves no mark (nishaan). Like the pimple that will forever be forgotten, not even marking its ephemeral manifestation.

ae usamah, ja ke so ja'o, shab ke ashke pee kar subh ka matam ka intezaar karo

tarjuma-e-matam (the translation of mourning)

2007-01-14T17:14:00.000-08:00

I am translating this for my favorite fiery shia!

"Matam" (the ritual expression of mourning)

fikr-e-duniya se dar-e-mekhana nikle, magar hua matam
aik justju ki tabeer leke nikle the, magar hua matam

in the worries of this world I passed through the door of the tavern, but instead came mourning
i walked out with a plan sketched of all my purposes, but instead came mourning

jub bu-e-gul se na sukoon, na khayalat mai.n qarar
to naghma-e-bulbul pe bharosa keeya, magar hua matam

when there was no peace from the smell of the rose and no rest in my thoughts
i put my faith into the song of the nightengale, but instead came mourning

har ah bhar kar khasta hue ye naadaan shakhs
samjhe the ke khazana-e-chaman hai pinha, magar hua matam

with every gasp this naive personhood became tired
i had thought that the treasure of the garden is still hidden, but instead came mourningl

jub ye bahar khila, jub yeh duniya hai rubaru, usamah
to tu aik gul ke khilne ke mushtaq nikle, magar hua matam

when springtime blossomed, when this world became manifest, usamah
i was anxious for the blossoming of a particular rose, but instead came mourning

2007-01-14T14:46:00.000-08:00

Saturday, January 13, 2007

drunken poetry MATAM

"Matam"

fikr-e-duniya se dar-e-mekhana nikle, magar hua matam
aik justju ki tabeer leke nikle the, magar hua matam

jub bu-e-gul se na sukoon, na khayalat mai.n qarar
to naghma-e-bulbul pe bhaRosa keeya, magar hua matam

har ah bhar kar khasta hue ye naadaan shakhs
samjhe the ke khazana-e-chaman hai pinha, magar hua matam

jub ye bahar khila, jub yeh duniya hai rubaru, usamah
to tu aik gul ke khilne ke muztar nikle, magar hua matam

----------------------------

it says everywhere you turn is his face. but why is it not enough? god sumayya life is like a wine barrel almost empty of wine. you try to take
the last drops into your wine glass, but you know it will not be enough to
get drunk. but you slavishly take those precious last drops, knowing it will
be not enough. Khuda gives me enough only of her presence to want more.

har qatra pe mai.n marta huu.n!
har nigaah saqi ki diwana banedata hai
har muztar khayaal pe haath baRhata huu.n

lekin sharaab kam hai

na masti mai.n fana
na suroor mai.n qarar
sirf mai.n huu.n
sirf mera hath baRha-hua

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Thursday, January 11, 2007

agar urdu pe bhi hai ilzam bahar ane ka

Sometimes why i am in the social sciences and not in the humanities. I always thought it was about changing the world. how childish i was. but i guess i am trapped in it. I can only look over the 'border' at literary studies and ask WHY NOT ME.

This is by Rashid Banarsi and is a poem about Urdu's problematization by Indian secularism and nationalism (coupled with, of course, hindutva-ism). I wish i could be analyzing this poem like the gora Christofer Lee gets to.

koi bhi shama se kue ho bezar koi parvana?
ye kya is daur ka diwana-pan hai nahee samjhe

agar urdu pe bhi hai ilzam bahar ane ka
to hindustan kis ka vatan hai hum nahee samjhe

chaman ka husn to har rang ka phool se hai, Rashid
koi bhi phul ruswa-e-chaman hai hum nahee samjhe

why would the moth be uninterested in any flame?
what is the madness of this age? i do not understand!

if they say urdu is foreign to this land
then whose land is india? I do not understand!

a garden is beautiful from all sorts of flowers, Rashid
why would any one flower be disgraced in the garden? I do not understand!

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Saturday, January 13, 2007

they built the bridge with bricks from the masjid

They built the bridge accross the ganges in allahabad with bricks of the destroyed Jama Masjid after the mutiny of 1857 (the ghadar). I always wondered why there was no central masjid in this 'city of god'. There is the Khusrau Bagh - the lofty persian four-garden with three moseleums, two for women and one for some man. But there is no central mosque anywhere. That is when i learned about this nasty little secret. I guess if we share something it is this nasty little history of the British.

You know whenever i am in a congregation with my mom's friends, the conversation always kind of alludes to a sense of 'national trauma' - that the borders that separate us nationally have to be constantly referred to so that we can reaffirm some sense of cultural affinity. We must constantly assure one another we dont actually believe in national borders because otherwise - honestly - we would not be such close and dear friends. we surely would not have the same food (with slight local twists), same names, same accents. For example at lunch the make up was interesting. It was us Indian Muslims from Allahabad; Nahid aunty as people from UP who moved to Karachi in Pakistan following partition; and Saba who is from 'proper' kashmir still in india. Constant references were made to how the three families have such close ties. the same language. the same food (pretty much), the same clothes, etc. The irony is that we all occupy three very different historical positionalities in reference to muslim situatedness and nationalism in south asia

one is 'muhajir' or Urdu-speaking migrant positioning for people who left India to come to pakistan (mostly karachi) who who are distinct from the punjabi and sindhi speaking majority of the nation

one is 'indian muslim' who i will not say are 'remnants' to a shared persianate north indian muslim cultural millieu but are instead positioned as awkward sorts of disruptions to the hindu-based nation-state's attempt to erase us from the map. ironically, though, the muhajir are so surprised that so much of what they are used to in Karachi originates in this 'other' place.

one is of course 'kashmiri' whose provincial affiliation embroils her in a network of conflict between the two other nationals; even though the two other nationals are themselves Others to the hegemonic national subject - one is MUSLIM in Hindu India and the other is urdu-speaking-indian-muslim in Pakistan. (one is in pakistan but somehow from india and thus problematized. the other is in india but problematized for NOT being in pakistan by the hegemonic hindu national narrative.)

the irony kills my head, but beautifully problematizes the reification of national borders. clearly certain markers that unite these three families transcend a legacy of colonial, postcolonial and nationalist borders. but we cannot deny them either - thus the constant reassuring that these borders do not ACTUALLY define our differences.

~~~~~~

ae seeya-wala! tera kali kamli mai.n dagh laga hai
jis se sare rah me noor ati hai
jis se sare zulmat me dhoom macha deta hai

zara saghar utha do
khastagi ki kya chubhan hai
ke na Ah! nikalta hai
na rago.n mai.n chain

O Usamah, tu bhi kaha agaya
jaha tera seeya ruup mai.n pinha...
siva roshan ka ghubaar
kuch nahi
aur kuch nahi

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Monday, January 01, 2007

But...then again

But if it is correct, as i have said, that the year is merely a brief and fleeting encounter that obscures an everlasting, eternal grief that lurks beneath, then isnt the inevitable coming of the next year revealing that grief - in its eternal glory, in its absolute darkness - can never be met. Indeed after one encounter comes the next obscurance, and so on.

So this seems to be a very twist from god. That, in fact, even sorrow cannot be induldged in because this constant chain of year after year. What do we have then, these children of eve? Where there can be no eternal peace (of course) but not even any induldgent sorrow?

gharq-e-dariya hu'e, zaroor hue
marne kya koi imtehaan hai?
aik neem-tareek jahaa.n
aik beshoq-o-bezoq fanaa
se dusre be-sukoon alam

ae usamah tu to adm-bezaar kya?
ghaflat-e-duniya-o-akhirat hai
aik dozakh yaha
aik jahanum vaha
thori neend ati hai
voh bhee chand lamhe ki

drowned in a river he did indeed*
but is dying the last experiment?
from one half-darkened world
from one uninteresting and uninviting reality
to a second restless place

oh usamah, what of being uninterested in adam**
you have become dispondent to this world and the next
one hell here
one fiery abode there
there comes a slight tiredness
but that too, for only a few minutes

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*alluding to Ghalib's famous couplet:
"hue hum jo marke ruswa, hue kue na gharq-e-dariya?
na kabhi janaza uTta na kahi mazaar hota"

the shame that met my death, why didnt i just drown in a river?
there would have been no funeral, nor a grave to mark the ground

**as in the children of adam - as in - humanity

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Saturday, December 30, 2006

like all years, it is merely a slight distraction – or a brief and fleeting encounter

Phir nikal gaya, ye tanha'i ka shajar
It has sprung forth once again, this bush of loneliness

Or does it sound better as dasht-e-tanha'i (the scruffy wilderness of loneliness)?

It does not really matter how I choose to put it. You know weddings always make me want to die. I was expecting the bride to wear some sort of crown because she used to dress up in the most gaudy of attire when we were young. Literally she would come to dawats wearing tiaras and velvet gloves. Unfortunately for my love of specactle, she was not over-dressed. Sure her outfit was not very attractive, but the only over-the-top aspect of it was the gazillions of diamonds in her set.

But you know at these things everyone is all done up in their fineries. It is annoying seeing white people wearing our lovely gawdy brocade clothes, but in this setting it is not so bad because they probably felt like clowns. I have come up with a scheme to not have to sit and talk with every old person my parents were acquainted with. I just offer them adaab from a distance and usually that is good enough. I do miss my dad when I see all of his friends sitting together and he not there. There seems to be all sorts of pressure on me not to screw up.

What makes me sad, however, is meeting people my age and realizing I have nothing to say to them. I mean I go through the motions of making small talk, but I am left with a sense of utter separation. Indeed the older people are those with whom I can make more of a connection – which is kind of odd. These young people seem so comfortable and content in the spaces they occupy. Not really worrying about the world dying, not fucking themselves up with various forms of inebriation, not giving a shit about Faiz Ahmad Faiz (but still speaking more flowy Urdu than me) and certainly not obsessing over the dynamics of class, colour, nationality and language that saturates the space of the Grand Taj Banquet Hall and all of its neon glory.

So I leave these places feeling a bit defeated. Indeed I have long posited that creating spaces for subaltern, non-secular, non-western expression should not be in the hollow and white spaces of activism in this city but at the points where brown people engage in their activities amongst themselves (like at weddings). Of course this keeps in mind their connectedness to sundry other relations and positions but still provides a space for spontenaity. My sense of defeat thus does not stem from an inability to be critical of problematic aspects of these types of congregations but instead from a sense that I still feel so wholeheartedly awkward and other. Perhaps, then, these feelings that emerge after leaving these spaces are simply fleeting encounters with a more prolonged and profound loneliness.

I think of Faiz Ahmad Faiz; indeed I have read these lines on many, many nights:

"tanha'i" (loneliness)

Someone has come you weak heart – no, there is no one
He is probably just passing on this road and will leave me
The night has passed, the dust-storm of stars has dissipated
In the shadows the lamp has started to waver and shake
The road itself has fallen asleep after hearing a processions of nocks
The odd dirt has covered and obscured the mark of each footprint
Turn out the lamps! Put forward the wine and wineglasses
Lock away these dreams that mockingly nock at your door
Now no one will come here, no one will come

And so this is how I imagine this past year. One year in a string of tired sighs, of noises of tempting, but always cheating, nocks at my door. Nocks that I convince myself offer something other than what this world has offered thus far. But then you realize that these petty distractions – these nocks that ring – are merely warnings for an even greater and more pugnant sorrow that lies behind those very doors.

And thus…
And thus…

This year has passed indeed. Indeed it has passed. Like all years, it is merely a slight distraction – or a brief and fleeting encounter – that obscures the more profound and eternal grief that lurks beyond these constructs of time.

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Tuesday, December 26, 2006

the christmas tree

Vancouver is beginning to choke me. The greyness is nice though, it helps hide all my sins, sorrows and bitterness. It is so comforting going outside and being confronted not by the gaudy and shamelessness of bright foliage or blue skies. No, I much prefer the drear, the subtle laziness of Vancouver's December.

But this choking is coming from a sense that something is unsettled. that another year has been wasted in this small, small place. And i think i need out. Actually, ths isn't entirely correct. I got back to vancouver in April from India. But the point remains - I am slowly dying here. Slowly. there is no pomp and pageantry. Its not like going down like one of 'dem big red woods (cf. Toni Morrison). Instead, i am slowly withering.

I have a story. when she got married, her jewellry was sent in the kilos of gold. The only child of such a famous family. Then her husband lost his job. Then she got TB. Then they became poor for a while. But this image strikes me: they were so poor that after selling her jewellry they burnt her clothing to take out the gold thread used in the brocade silk. The beauty of kamkhwaab, i guess, was the use of real gold. but the image of lighting a fire so you can burn your ghararas, your qamizes, your pyjamas to buy medicine is quite intense.

But then i look out the window and realize this grey 'wonderland' doesnt even have spectacular sorrows. just a mute decay.

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Saturday, December 23, 2006

It has come, autumn’s cold-hearted pleasure

I think in this piece the beloved/mashooq, is discovered to be a cheat; a fraud; a lier. Ghalib's famous couplet that Springtime is nothing but autumn with her hand's redenned (like a whore) finds some ironic twists here. Indeed sprintime with its gaudy display is a fraud for ghalib because deep within she is actually cold, dark and bitter. Indeed induldging in the fleeting moments of springtime's pleasure reveals a lasting sorrow underneath. But my autumn is as much of a cheat as the gaudy springtime. But this is a bitter-sweet "cold-hearted" pleasure that is so fleeting. And though spring's pleasure is fleeting as well, it is ripe with scents and colours. Autumn's somber embrace is adorned merely by the reddened leaves. And these two fall quite quickly.

What i have done is tried to trace the trechery of this cold-hearted pleasure this beloved offers. Her reddened hands are different than the whore's reddening in spring. It is subtle, refined, almost rustic. But we learn she only adorns her hands with surkhi to ward off the storm. To keep the storm at bay a couple more days. Her collusion with death, with winter, is thus established. The lover/aashiq, though, is not totally unaware with the motivations of the beloved/mashooq. Indeed she knows very well she is being tricked; she is not oblivious to the teasing of her soul. but this is the 'heart' of cold hearted pleasure. the fleeting moments of pleasure are not unsatisfying because they will end. They are also unsatisfying because we know we (and perhaps willingly so) are being tricked. But perhaps at the end the lover/beloved, aashiq/maashoq, dynamics twist a bit. so that her hands are no longer decorated as a coquettish trick, but something slightly (or entirely) different.

Agaya khiza.n ka sang-dil lazzat
It has come, autumn's cold-hearted pleasure

Which was hidden somewhere by the holding of tiny flames
That turned pale yellow leaves into shameless crimsons
That slowly dripped

Falling in your hair
Making a bloodied crown of burnt yearnings

Mukhtasar sholo.n se zard pato.n jo khud aatish ban jate hai
Jo baland darakhto.n-o-khushk shaakho.n pe se gir jate hai

Tere zulfo.n pe phir laalee lapaTti jati
Jo aik sar-taj-e-khuun-o-soz-e-tamanna lapaTti jati

Being rendered fully by these dark tresses
That hair that could knit a covering for these branches
Couldn't even stitch the smouldering hole it made

But here comes sorrows ringing from afar
And with cries of injustice raising
Above the smoke
Clinging to bloodied leaves

Lekin aamad hai sur-e-gham
Saath fariyad-e-zulm le atee hai
Zameen-o-asmaan hilati hu'i
Lahoo-lahaan patte le kar bhi

Something teases this soul,
After all
She only decorates her hands with paisleys
And narcissus
To mock off the coming storm

And so we try to count the birds of paradise
That come to us aflame
We try to calculate the very geometry of sorrow
The very principle of oppression

Kuch fareb-e-dil, kuch satane ke khayaal ate hai
Aakhir dast-e-hena-i botah-o-nargis lagatee
Sirf toofan tanz karne kiliye

But like the pale leaves before
That now litre these lofty streets with innumerable griefs
You cup your hands
And they redden
And they redden with an entirely different sorrow
With the mark of an entirely different signature

Kisi aur gham ka surkhi-e-dast
Kisi aur dastkhat ka nishaan

Agaya Khiza.n ka sang-dil lazzat

Usamah Allahabadi
No One Is Illegal Fundraiser
December 9th, 2006

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Saqi, tu kaha/ cup bearer, what are you?

Ae saqi, tu kaha? Ye jahaa.n kaha?
Ye lazzat-e-lamha phir ayega kaha?

Ay cup-bearer, where are you? where is this world?
this pleasure of the moment will come again where?

Aalam-e-gham hai aik or aik hai tilism-e-sharab
Mekhana ki dilkashee-o-fariyad kaha?

the world of sorrow is one thing, the magic of wine another
the attraction and plea of the tavern is where?

Aik zakhm-e-ishq khula badan pe phir
Tere siya zulfo.n ka neem-sukoon kaha?

one wound of love opened on my body
the half-comfort of your dark tresses is where?

Ab aye ho yaha in be-taal saaz.on ke saath
Tujhe yaad hai, Usamah, sur hai kaha?

now you have come here with these noteless instruments
do you remember, Usamah, the note is where?

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Friday, November 17, 2006

An Intro

Intro To:

"A City Disjointed in Time":

Oriental Longings, Postcolonial Politics of Remembering and William Dalrymple's City of Djinns

My father had written a poem the first time he returned to his native city of Allahabad after living in a boarding school for two years in 1967. Apparently these she'rs (two line couplets) had expressed his sorrow at what was happening in his city. His friends and many relatives had moved to Pakistan after the first instances of communal violence since Partition. Muslims, he told me, were also losing their jobs and being denied enrollment in educational institutions or social service schemes. The area within Allahabad's old Muslim ghetto where he lived was called Roshanbagh ("garden of light"). Like Dalrymple's introductory pages on the decay of old Delhi, my father indeed claimed that the houses here were falling apart, the Muslims were fleeing and the pigeons – which men would keep on their rooftops – were let to fly away. He amusingly exclaimed, "those bastards probably flew to Pakistan too." His poem was simple and yet shaking:

hasrat-o-yaas ka aik tasht sar pe liye

apnee fariyaad kuch khwaab kee ta'abeer liye

[With a platter of sorrow and hopelessness placed on my head

With a plea reading the destiny of my dreams]

meree fariyaad hazee lab pe aayee thee abhee

dil ko khaTkaa hua, saba ne chutkee lee

[A lingering cry laced my lips

My heart felt a knock; the morning breeze (saba) pinched me]

mai.n ne dekha ke tere dil pe asar tak na hua

rehem ka teree nigaho.n mai.n guzar tak na hua

[I saw that there was no effect on your heart

The glitter of kindness did not even pass your sights]

ab jo aa'e ho, liye saaz-o-saazanda sabhee

taar taar TooT ga'e, baaree baaree chooTe sabhee

[Now you have come to narrate with all these musical instruments in hand

Well the strings have broken, one after the other they have broken]

Thus many of the themes present in Dalrymple's City of Djinns (2005) are not foreign to me nor are they necessarily fabricated – I cannot simply say Dalrymple is an outsider who has no idea what is going on, because clearly my father's words have parallels in his writing. While reading Dalrymple's travel novel, indeed, I kept asking myself, "How does he know that?" There are certain idiosyncrasies of urban Muslim Indian positioning that, I had assumed, would never be known to Western eyes. Of course my memories of Indian cities and their Muslim ghettos – especially in Lucknow, Faizabad, Allahabad, Delhi and Hyderabad – include white faces gazing at certain architectural artifacts that are often in the old Muslim ghettos of key Indian cities. But these gazes, I always assumed, stopped at the stone, brick and mosaic designs that interest tourists. When I went to my mother's now decrepit haveli (old styled house) in Allahabad I was sure its high walls would protect from those gazes. Partly I was ashamed of how this house, that was obviously once a beautiful testament to upper-class Muslim urbanity, was now in ruin. The walls had yellowed, the mosaics fractured, the garden overgrown, and my now rather poor relatives had divided the house into smaller apartments. Beyond this shame I simply was sure that the discussions that went on within those walls – including beautifully crafted poems of sorrow in Urdu about the fear and tension they felt being one of the last Muslim houses left in a once entirely Muslim neighborhood – would never be known to the Hindu majority, let alone White tourists. And here is Dalrymple, spending only one year in India but revealing certain intimate discussions about Muslim urban memory I never thought a Briton would be able to identify. Thus my sense of violation is conflicted with the thought that some of the stories Dalrymple tells need to be told. Of course these stories are framed within his overarching Orientalism but intertwined with this is still a kernel of – and I grudgingly concede this – the fariyad (plea) so fluidly uttered in my father's poem.

This fariyad cannot, however, be collapsed with Darlymple's longing for a more 'pure', 'sophisticated' and 'authentic' Delhi. In what follows I argue that Darlymple's Orientalist viewings reveal an analytical conundrum: though the essentializing of communal identity, imperial nostalgia and the search for authenticity is obviously problematic, his work does provide a way of seeing how the memories of certain places are varied, conflictual, politicized and continuingly relevant. The conundrum is thus how to consolidate underlying Orientalism with the important postcolonial critiques implicit in stories that Darlymple extracts from Delhi-wallahs. The following will be articulated in four parts. Firstly, I will look at how Darlymple's work is situated within Orientalist travel writing and how City of Djinns is organized around a search for authenticity. Secondly, I will examine the trope of "Muslim Decay" that is implicit in Darlymple's constructions. Though it is easy to claim this is simply a classic Orientalist theme, I will question how my own Indian Muslim (and urban) position replicates this idea of decay and longing. My third theme will be organized around an idea of "layers of memory." Darlymple's excursions into various communities – both through interviews, (paternalistic) camaraderie with locals and texts – reveal the layered and politically significant memories of Delhi. Or to put it differently, the strings that have broken on the instruments mentioned in my father's poem. My final theme will link the discussions thus far within the historiographies of Partha Chatterjee (1993), Sara Ahmad's (2004) affective economies, and Saba Mahmood's (2006) use of Butler (1997).

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Friday, October 13, 2006

phir tanhaee ka shajar

again the bush of tanha'ee

oh blogs - how many of you have a begun? But you all lie somewhere half alive, half dead, in the cold heartless chambres of virtualika. Well this one will be different I promise.

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