Is Love Poetry Irrelevant?

Gilani Kamran

 

You can’t stop flowers from growing on the trees after the first spring. In the same way, you cannot stop human beings from singing of love when they feel it on their blood, says GILANI KAMRAN

Amjad Islam Amjad’s talent has been applauded for composite reasons. His television plays have a popular appeal and the same can as well be said about his poems. That’s true, but the epithet of popular appeal itself begs a question, because many learned intellectuals have under-rated the significance and relevance of popular appeal. A popular appeal, they argue, is meaningless, as it comes from those persons, who do not have a good and reliable background. In a recent book review in Danishvar, Anis Nagi has rated Amjad Islam Amjad as a decadent youthful writer who talks of love in an unbelieving world. Anis Nagi is a good critic and when he says Amjad is a youthful romantic it indeed raises a pertinent question: Is love a variable quality? And “is that poet a decadent writer who sings of love in his poems”? These questions also have their bearing on youth and old age. Thus, the question becomes: Is love only a prerogative of a single generation and when that generation grows old, no one else has the right to sing of love. Perhaps, some such expectation is unwarranted. Every generation has its right to be young and has an equal claim to sing of love. Every human generation is a season of the human climate and ‘love’ is like its flowers. You can’t stop flowers from growing on the trees after the first spring. In the same way, you cannot stop human beings from singing of love when they feel it in their blood.

But there is a difference between love, when it appears in a person, or when it finds its way in a writer’s poems. Love as a theme grows old in literary tradition. Thus, when it finds its way in poetry it appears in a new form. Probably some such thing has shaped Amjad Islam Amjad’s amoretica. In the history of poetry (in Urdu ) such a phenomenon has its own rationale behind it.

The tradition of poetry writing had almost outgrown the phase of love motif by 1947 and the poets had gone to impersonal items for intellectual pleasure. In the meantime, the generation which opened its eyes to observe a new world in post- independence scenario had been lured to love, which had become a composite figure __ an idea plus a female form. Besides, however, when a woman appears in poetry, she ceases to be a woman, she becomes a metaphor. It is this metaphor to which the poet addresses his sentiments. In Amjad Islam Amjad, it is a pointer in the figure of a woman who is frequently shown in the foreground of his poetry.

Recently Amjad Islam Amjad’s one volume collection of earlier books titled The last autumn days (Khazan ke akhari din) has been published where the last section has been given to the book named. Where shall I place these many dreams – Itne khaab kahan rakhon ga! This last work in the collection has a mature nature, both in style and the theme of poems. The sacred-poem (na’at) with which this part of the volume opens is a lovely piece of poetry. The poet is distressed by the temporal disorder and prays for a better world and life. There is an inner rhythm and a flow which adds music to the sound of words and converts the prayerful dialogue into a higher poetic utterance. He craves for a day of hope in our troublesome night. He writes:

The sectarian sword has torn apart.

In fog we all have lost ourselves.

The Ummat has turned anonymous,

No milky way is, there to show a hopeful ending-point.

Amjad Islam’s main corpus of poetry is almost untranslatable. It is merged in words and their cadence. Nevertheless, a good deal of poetry still accompanies the words when it is conveyed in the setting of another language.

What, however, resounds as a prayerful note in the na’at, forms the pathos and anguish of his ghazal. His diction has shown its poetic content in simple words and that is why it has become easier to render it in a free- translation.