POETRY

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BY: NASSER YOUSAF

RE-READING GHANI KHAN IN THE PRESENT TIMES

The poetry of our Pashtun poet Ghani Khan (1914-1996) has captured the imagination of his clansmen for the last many years. Like his father and a younger sibling, Ghani Khan spent may years in jail as a prisoner of conscience. Here is a poem that he wrote in the Hyderabad Jail in Sindh.

We need to understand that not all that Ghani Khan wrote in verse was of a class that he would have called as inspirational. His soliloquies are a class apart, profound and deeply touching.

But Ghani Khan's monologues are lacking in poetical strength. Among those are the monologues where the poet could be seen taking issues with the mullah. Incidentally, all such monologues are very popular and have been rendered as songs by several singers to great popular acclaim.

In my opinion, such monologues could be called as doggerel. A doggerel is a roughly written humourous poem, though not intentionally. Ghani Khan himself has titled most of such poems as 'mumbo jumbo.'

Since our intellect appears to have frozen in time, we find ourselves being fascinated by little more than wine, women and mullah in our poetry. I consider Ghani Khan at his best in his metaphysical poetry.

Mullah comes within the ambit of what ought to be called as pedestrian poetry. The below given translation is one of those that Ghani Khan has titled as 'mumbo jumbo,' and is ostensibly directed against the narrow-minded mullah.

I have replaced mullah with our common present mindset which is as retrogressive and outdated as that of a mullah. Hence, the mullah in the second line is a 'naysayer.' There were more powerful adjectives or nouns, but a naysayer also connotes cynicism and rhymes best.

Our country recently saw a controversy of sorts surrounding reforms in the religious seminaries. The discussion took a convuluted political turn when even those in three-piece suits, skirts and tight jeans took sides to settle petty commercial scores with the government of the day. 

The mullah or the vested interest won the day but that reminded me of a beautiful retort in a very early 20th century novel titled 'THE PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN,' by James Joyce. It says:

'I will pay your dues, father (priest), when you cease turning the house of God into a polling booth.'

Our brains need no better diet than the stale and trite talk shows brought to our households every evening by the business concerns and their salespersons masquerading as erudite anchors. We are quite content with that. People quote these anchors as if they were the ancient Greek philosophers. Whereas these anchors simply paddle the business interests of their respective TV- channel owners.

I am not an apologist for my Pashtun clansmen. I tended to empathize with the younger lot in the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM). Though not very learned, these youngsters somehow looked to be capable of raising the level of political and intellectual discourse. But in the post-Taliban takeover of Kabul, PTM appears to have thrown its gains to the winds.

It would now appear that the PTM youth were plain rabble-rousers. Ralph Waldo Emerson summed up the fate of such people or a group of people in these words: A nation never falls but by suicide. 

In view of the foregoing, I feel constrained to take recourse to one of Ghani Khan's popular poems and reread and apply it to our present lackluster and unproductive times. I see it directed against the society as a whole. I see Ghani Khan taking refuge in the company of his wine-bearer from the balderdash thrown up at him by the society.

MUMBO JUMBO 

Come, come here, O wine-bearer

Away, away with you, O naysayer 

How much do I detest you and 

Your stale and banal address

May you fall from the high pedestal 

By looks you are a queer animal 

Little do you know what love entails

A senseless denier of beauty as well 

Here, this gathering is of revelers 

So away with you, farther away

Wine is not meant to be tasted 

By lips hewn so rough as you have 

Go there where food is doled out

To sate on tripe all for you left

Just as a vulture would swoop, so

Spread your wings around the dung

A mosque compound is your reserve

For profaning women ad nauseam

 

Wretched eyes wretched stomach 

So luckless and all to no purpose 

Come, come here see the madman

Raise your glass and be a faithful 

Follow the creed of the really blessed 

Find your paradise in the living world