Definitely there are many poets, who we have not read or forgotten. But poetry is not only the box of the frivolous emotions of love, but it also becomes history. But for that, it is necessary for the poet to be a bit sensitive and well-acquainted with the contemporary landscape. Those who live by disregarding it, actually prepare a shell for themselves, living their whole lives in which they feel that everything is very much alright. One may unfortunately think the same about the progressive poetess and short-story writer Saeeda Gazdar who passed away in Karachi earlier this month on November 7 after living the final years of her life in a state of self-forgetfulness. Perhaps many of my friends too would be unaware with her name and work, thus the lines that follow may also serve as the best introduction to this writer, who as the suffocated scream of her time and a forgotten voice in the period afterwards, was present in Urdu literature. She was born on November 14, 1943. Her family belonged to the city of Allahabad in united India. She came to Pakistan after the Partition and married prominent filmmaker Mushtaq Gazdar. The couple of Saeeda Gazdar and Mushtaq Gazdar was numbered among the couples like Rashid Jahan and Mahmud-uz-Zafar, Sajjad Zaheer and Razia Sajjad Zaheer, Shaukat Kaifi and Kaifi Azmi, and Mazhar Ali Khan and Tahira Mazhar Ali; couples who believed in modern traditions and who played an important role in the development of progressive ideas; who believed in the struggle for completion of a humanist society. Progressive ideas always remained the centre of her creative activities. She was the author of many books which included poetry, short stories and translations. 

She was known in literary circles as a brave poet and writer. Her short story collection Aag Gulistan Na Bani (The Fire Couldn’t Become A Garden), poetic collections Zanjeer-e-Roz-o-Shab (Shackles of Day and Night) and Tauq-o-Daar Ka Mausam (The Season of the Yoke and Gallows) are books which were praised in critical literary circles. She also wrote poems with reference to children which were welcomed. 

Saeeda Gazdar was the sister of the active student leader of the 1954 movement, Dr Muhammad Sarwar. She was also the co-editor of the literary journal Pakistani Adab alongwith the renowned progressive writer Sibte Hasan. Her husband Mushtaq Gazdar is considered the first documentary filmmaker of Pakistan. With the death of Saeeda Gazdar the left-wing movement in Pakistan has been deprived of an active writer. 

Saeeda Gazdar’s aforementioned book of short stories Aag Gulistan Na Bani was published during the period of General Zia-ul-Haq, which was published a year after the hanging of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1980. She has portrayed military dictatorship in a very open manner in her short stories. Where other writers were adopting a symbolic style, there Saeeda Gazdar was openly unveiling dictatorship―for example, in her two short-stories, the eponymous Aag Gulistan Na Bani and Koel Aur General (The Cuckoo and the General). I do not remember some other short story writer directly making the office of a general a target in the title of their short story.

Saeeda Gazdar begins her short story Aag Gulistan Na Bani with the two characters of the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh has been used by Intizar Hussain too in his short story Kashti (boat) and before this Syed Sibte Hasan had discussed the story of Gilgamesh in detail in his book Maazi Ke Mazaar (Tombs of the Past). The story of Gilgamesh like Prometheus is a great masterpiece of world resistance literature. 

But here if Intizar Hussain’s short-story Kashti is compared with Saeeda Gazdar’s short story Aag Gulistan Na Bani, then Hussain makes us lost in the abundance of symbols, but Saeeda Gazdar illustrates the circumstances in very clear and candid words. She repeats the lines of the Sumerian epic. 

“Gilgamesh has polluted the city 

He wants that the bride spend the wedding night with him 

First the king then the lawful husband 

And all this is happening with the will of the gods 

Now drums are beaten to choose the bride 

Then the city groans 

Enkidu’s face whitens after hearing the wayfarer’s talk 

I will go where Gilgamesh 

Oppresses the people 

I will challenge him. 

And my voice will echo in Uruk city 

I have come to change the old systems 

So proceeded Enkidu in front and the woman behind him.” 

Since Saeeda Gazdar has very much dedicated her book to those who bore torture for the sake of democracy and human dignity and were martyred; so it is not difficult to guess that General Zia-ul-Haq is Gilgamesh here and the bride is democracy which is being crushed with the will of the gods. 

The narrator of Aag Gulistan Na Bani is a girl who is being interrogated. 

“They have come to interrogate me three times. How did they know that he was my lover, they ask me. 

Which party did he belong to? 

Tell the truth which conspiracy was he a part of? 

Which people were with him in his plans? 

I burst with sorrow and grief and cannot restrain. I begin to weep bitterly. Then they see me as if a ripe delicious fruit is kept before them. They consider my tears to be my weakness and kneel to say consolingly “We know that you are innocent, you are not to blame. Just give us the names and address of his friends. You are a simple girl.” “Licking their lips they look at my beauty and my youth with naked eyes.” 

While reading these words written by Saeeda Gazdar today if there is an echo in your mind as to how Benazir Bhutto and Maryam Nawaz were treated, then do understand that this resistance literature is successful and everlasting, which has preserved the essence of history within itself. Henry James had said, “A great deal of history produces a little literature”, meaning little literature is created after much history passes by. 

Then in another aforementioned story Koel Aur General, she writes in this manner: “The major saw the bouquet of flowers lying on the table and said to the General, ‘Sir who knows how so much blood comes into these thin and weak lads upon whipping them. Just like these red flowers.'"

Saeeda Gazdar’s short story collection Aag Gulistan Na Bani has the distinction of being banned by the government of General Zia-ul-Haq. 

Similarly how difficult and painful it could be to write about women being whipped, the treatment of women at a social level in this dark period for the desirers of light, one can guess from Saeeda Gazdar’s aforementioned poetic collection Tauq-o-Daar Ka Mausam. The people, especially the freedom of women, purdah, chador, her rights, the authority to work and go out in public, her involvement in politics, the attempt to restrict her body and beauty, travel, reading and writing, singing and dancing, in short, the expression of every human need and feeling, a contemptuous attitude, the eternal culprit of being expelled from Paradise―the woman―remained her topic, according to her. Even in that time, the vein of the sense of honour of some people throbbed such that they kept deciding on the woman as responsible for every moral baseness and depravity spreading in society. According to Saeeda Gazdar herself, the wall of estrangement, enmity and distance between man and woman, the hell of loneliness for two people, everything an obscenity, every act a nudity, it appeared intolerable to move. 

The name of this book published in 1983 has been borrowed from Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s verse: 

‘Yahi junoon ka, yahi tauq-o-daar ka mausam 

Yahi hai jabar, yahi ikhtiyaar ka mausam’ 

(This is the season of madness, the season of the yoke and gallows. This is the season of oppression, the season of authority.) 

The book is of poetry instead of prose since, according to the author, what was happening was not in her control to describe except the compulsion of unintended expression. “I have never claimed to do poetry. It just happened that in the last few years whatever has happened, it has carried me to the limit of sometimes emotional and mental insanity that in the attempt to stop tears I cried a lot agonisingly from within and in such a condition it became difficult for me to bring myself in the discipline of prose.” 

And undoubtedly these poems do not possess finesse, but a history has definitely been compiled, the details were kept in front keeping in view the historian of the future. There is a mention of a few events too. For example, a newborn was stoned to death ‘in the shade of a mosque’, upon which Saeeda Gazdar wrote a frightening lament. 

The topics of the remaining poems of Saeeda Gazdar too are just as unpleasant, serious and complex. Five women were whipped 20 times each for the crime of adultery in Peshawar Jail; a widow too in Bahawalnagar was whipped among 5,000 bystanders after being made to wear a burqa. In the same way, in another accusation, a poor and blind girl from Sahiwal was sentenced to whipping, then the blood of all of these dripped by turns, drop by drop from Saeeda Gazdar’s pen. Their versified expression is lengthy, so is not being put here for reasons of space. 

These writings written while staying in the state of 1980 have many other topics, but in all of them, there is a single logical question. That who are the gods who are appointed over our heads and are stopping us from going near one another and understanding one another? She joined fundamental, personal relations with globalisation and well-spilled the beans of political and religious two-facedness. 

Restrictions on expression can be judged from the fact that her poem Bees Kode (Twenty Lashes) was refused publication by the editor of a newspaper, saying by way of apology, “Give me 20 lashes if you will. But this poem. How to publish, after all?” 

Despite this, there were many newspapers which fearlessly published than those who objected to the Law of Evidence are deserving of death. Very much at the beginning of the book she writes, “Moral manipulation has put the oppressed and innocent in the criminals’ dock and the criminals are sitting in the chair of justice. Human relations, all bonds and respites of mercy and sympathy are being murdered ruthlessly.” 

Due to her political training and foresight, she has reached a point that love and freedom are two reciprocal passions. Only a free person is capable of loving. How can a frightened, timid and helpless person bear this pure sentiment? Yes, the moment he begins to think against slavery, determines to change his and others’ circumstances, that same moment he assumes the form of a free and true person capable of loving. 

This very love, longing for freedom and the desire for changing everything increased the feeling of suffocation. Saeeda Gazdar asked herself, by any chance has acceptance not become a habit of hers? Then while clarifying, she incites that, 

“This thought startled me. I only have one way to resist this dangerous situation that whatever is passing should be expressed in whatever way possible. In poem, in prose, in free prose poetry. Just however, with whatever manner. I should make my basic and human right a shield for defense so that the coming generations can know that despite helplessness in what fire the women and men of my generation have burnt.” 

Adieu, Saeeda Gazdar. 

(All translations from Urdu are by the writer)