Contents – Faiz Ahmed Faiz (Issue 14)
Contents - Faiz Ahmed Faiz (Issue 14)
Posts tagged ‘Exile’
May 15
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Guest Editorial
By Pooja Garg Singh
In this Café Dissensus issue on Faiz, we bring together essays on Faiz’s life and on his poetry of love and protest. The essays, stories, and poems in the second half of the issue are inspired by Faiz’s poetry.
This stained light, this night-bitten dawn
By Ali Madeeh Hashmi
It has been more than three decades since Faiz’s death in Lahore. “Subh-e Aazadi” remains as relevant as ever, sixty eight years after Pakistan came into being. If anything, the sorrows and agonies of Faiz’s native land have intensified and perhaps this time it is Faiz, like Waris Shah, who is being asked to ‘speak from inside his grave’.
A conversation with Salima Hashmi
By Saba Ahmad
Once Faiz accepted a Sardarji’s offer to inaugurate his shop in London, when I asked him what the shop sold, he had no idea. He just said, “He asked me with so much love, I could not say no, it would break his heart.”
A conversation with Kanwaljit Singh
By Azam & Akbar Qadri
A conversation with Kanwaljit Singh.
Faiz Ahmed Faiz—The defiance of an exile
By Zafar Anjum
I remember Faiz as a poet of love and a poet of protest. In him, I see a lover who is also a revolutionary, a big-nosed man with a hard Punjabi face and smiling eyes, surrounded by curls of cigarette smoke, worrying about the injustices of the world, injustices that come in the way of a lover – rubbish that must be cleared away from the path of love.
Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the Bangladesh Liberation War (1971)
By Mosarrap H. Khan
As an admirer of Faiz and his vision of justice, I have been asking myself: What was Faiz’s particular position on the Pakistani Army repression in East Pakistan which began on 25 March, 1971? What was his view on the East Pakistani resistance that culminated in the death of millions (this number has been contested often and no consensus exists) and rapes of thousands of women?
Faiz: Fire And Silk – Bringing Faiz alive for the contemporary reader
By Vinita Agrawal
For Faiz, separation from one’s beloved is not something that stretches only between the two people involved. Instead it encompasses the entire universe, clings to the stars, ravages the skies, and gores the moon. Faiz has the ability to make metaphors for conditions; for example, hijr or distance is not merely the non-proximity between two lovers but the homelessness of being – the final wandering, the final journey.
And in such myriad ways your memories come to me
By Bhupinder Singh
Faiz was with me as I travelled across countries. The pages of the book turned brown. It accumulated jottings of Urdu words that I did not know the meaning of. The original words became part of my vocabulary. Over the years, I am beginning to forget them again. Sometimes, their meanings come back to me. Sometimes, they don’t.
Chale bhi aao ke gulshan ka karobaar chale
By Sunayana Kachroo
My love for Faiz’s poetry rekindled quite accidently in the year 2011, when a friend sent me some audio recordings of “Gulon Main Rang Bharo” a poetic tribute to Faiz Ahmad Faiz, brilliantly conceived and orchestrated by one of the best theater directors of India, Salim Arif. The premise of this show was set on the letters that Faiz wrote to his wife Alyss during his tormenting stay at the prison.
Café Dissensus 