O’ Dwellers!
Come and weep with me in chorus…
When your eyes meet the macabre scenes of blood and gore day in and day out, when you are witness to the slaughter of your kith and kin almost every other day, when air you breathe in suffocates you, chokes you as the same is adulterated with pepper and PAVA gas, some people vent their despair and pain on streets and some like Wani Nazir exorcises the ghost of all this trauma on paper through the medium of words.
Wani Nazir’s poetry is the outcome of life one lives in a conflict zone and what it brings along. “…And the Silence Whispered” is Nazir’s debut collection of 103 poems. In this collection, there is not only protest but spirituality, love, hope, anger, spring, blood, chaos, confusion and clarity also.
The verses in the book are a result of what happens to a poet when a divine rain sweeps away the phantom of drought.
Infertile was the womb of my creativity,
The drought had inflicted upon my thoughts
A plague of palsy-like malady;
……………………………………..
Then, one fine dawn, rains came
Plunked heavily on the parched land
And kicked the grains of seared dust;
…………………………………….
The seeds of ideas germinated,
In the soil of my imaginative land
And it transformed my barren womb
Into a gushing pool of treasure trove,
(Resurrection)
It’s important to realise that poetry isn’t something alien which needs to be appropriated; it’s innate. As long as you feel, there is poetry inside you. And if you have a message of protest, poetry can be a powerful way to get it out there.
In his poem ‘Good Mo[u]rning’, Nazir demystifies that when in the morning one’s innocent child returns from the gate of his home with a newspaper, he just does not carry the newspaper in his little hands but also:
… a heap of dead bodies,
A volley of doleful shrieks,
And a few bits of broken vows.
(Good Mo[u]rning)
In ‘A Lament’ he expresses an unending lamentation of a widow whose husband has been murdered in a fake encounter.
No more is she full of life.
She has lost her dear hubby
In some fake orchestrated encounter
Leaving behind his wife and a kid;
Ferried to some unknown realm
From whose bourn none returns!
But it is again a fact that Wani Nazir does not get himself swayed too far by the buffets of conflict-ridden feelings. There is also a spiritual thirst in the poet that is reflected again and again in his poems.
All the sinews of my soul
run riot and rabid whole,
snap at their oozing wounds,
Crave earnestly for the dawn
that will soothe my raging pain.
(Vexation)
And the frenzied souls all;
All will sing with the bard:
“God is in His heaven
And all’s right with the world”
(My Muse)
Poetry is the perfect venue for social protest no matter the subject. Poetry is how we name the nameless. It is to seep deep down the nuances of the life, human as well as non-human; it is to get yourself identified with such niceties. Wani Nazir seems to touch the hem of this affair in some of his poems. Take for example the following lines:
And I know the names of
All the bumble bees and grasshoppers
Visiting me every day,
The names you all have forgotten long before!
(Soulful Entanglement)
Poetry forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.
“Hasn’t the garden we irrigated with our blood
Bloomed into flowers yet?”
(Tragic Denouement)
Percy Bysshe Shelley said, in his ‘Defense of Poetry’, that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” In the years since, many poets have taken that role to heart, right up to the present day.
Here are a few examples of Nazir’s Protest Poetry;
My waste land breeds
Harvest of blood-drenched phantoms
Out of the dead soil;
And haunt the fretful bosom
Of the bleak ambience whole.
(Tanka XIV)
There is no smack of doubting the poet’s passion. His anger is felt in every line of his protest poetry and it is clear that he is tormented by the oppression he sees. He himself says: “Being a poet at heart, I feel my bosom heavy watching oppression and suppression being unleashed terribly on the conflict-ridden piece of land and its people. I drive out the ghost haunting my being to make aware the rest of the world of the suffocating lives we live.”(Kashmir Newsline: Vol. 1, Issue.1, August 2017). This is what he versifies in the lines:
Once again, the soil of my land
Has been drenched in spates of blood,
Once again, the tender flowers
Have been denied their right to bloom,
Once again, a Pharaoh incarnate,
With all the slings and arrows in his armoury,
Let loose a reign of terror against the unarmed,
Once again, the chameleon might
Trampled upon the victims meek,
Once again, the war waged
Between the vice and the virtue,
Once again, the tyrant brute
Scaffolded the candid truth…
(Elegiac Wish)
In another hard-hitting poem, ‘A widow and Her Coaxing Tale’ one realise a toy seller can become a cause of deep grief if one’s husband is murdered and her child cries for a toy.
The poet seems to be deeply concerned with the question of fleeting time, its ravages and devouring nature. In ‘The Time Bound’ a haunting realization of time is portrayed. After reading it, every tick of the clock seems a knock of death at the door.
Another poem ‘Buffet of Time’ renders how fast time passes and what once was a heart throb becomes a blurry image.
Poems like Despondency, Saqi e Kawthar, In Search of Light, Divine Realization portray beautiful images of poet’s love for his religion.
According to Nazir, Social Networking Sites like Facebook and WhatsApp provided him a platform where inspiration poured in profusely.
I, myself read Nazir’s poems on an online literary group, KashurQalm for the first time. And I met a lot of other amazing poets bracketed with the group like UbairFayaz, BadeeUzZaman, Parvaiz Ali, Shabir Ahmad Mir, Khan Ansur, KhawajaMusadiq and many awesome poets of potential.
All said and done, let me aver that Wani Nazir’s debut poetic collection, “…And the Silence Whispered” is a bouquet of verses effervescent with all the hues of life. The book has a potential to rivet the readers to its content and invite him to read it again and again.
REVIEWER
Mohammad Nadeem can be reached at 313biblio@gmail.com
