Finding Faiz at Berkeley: Room for a Celebration

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Laurel Steele

Abstract

This paper examines how Faiz Ahmed Faiz is remembered at a program honoring him at the University of California, Berkeley.  All over the world, Faiz’s centennial year is now an occasion for similar events.  Faiz’s poems are read and recited.  Daughters—if the program is lucky—or friends, increasingly fewer, speak.  Bits of history and biography are recalled.  There is no other Urdu poet, born in the 20th century, who could command such a worldwide celebration.  But who is the Faiz that emerges? My analysis uses the September 2011 Berkeley program, “Guftagu: Celebrating Faiz Ahmed Faiz,â€Â as a departure point to address issues that these formal festivities both reveal and conceal.  I will take advantage of the fact that here is a gathering, in real space and in real time,  thinking and talking about Faiz in the United States.  Rather than lose the performative  aspect of the occasion, I will utilize it to ask questions and seek answers. Is Faiz an Urdu poet or a Pakistani poet?  What about his Marxism—where does that fit in the religious context of present-day Pakistan?  Does the winner of the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962 have any misgivings about the old USSR’s cultural machinery? Do we?   What about ethnicity?  Faiz was Panjabi, from Iqbal’s home town.  His Partition did not  leave him without a physical place to which he could return, unlike the poets and littérateurs  who arrived from all over India to the newly-formed Pakistan.  Did that make a difference to his poetry, or to his fame? What about Bangla Desh?  What role did Faiz and his poetry play concerning the events in Dhaka in 1971?    Finally, who are the participants in the Berkeley project?  How do they see scholarship on Faiz? What about the “Tagore phenomenon?†Does Faiz’s light obscure other major twentieth-century Urdu poets or does it shine for all?  We are in a world where an unrecorded event can happen only once, ephemera evaporates, and  Urdu scholars frequently bemoan what is lost, un-captured, or distorted.  My paper is a chance to record an evening in Berkeley when we meet to celebrate Faiz Ahmed Faiz and to examine the encounter in all its rich detail.

Article Details

Section
Transcreating Faiz
Author Biography

Laurel Steele

My academic work revolves around Urdu literature and issues of identity.  "Relocating the Postcolonial Self: Place, Metaphor, Memory and the Urdu Poetry of Mustafa Zaidi (1930-1970)," my dissertation (University of Chicago: 2005), examines the many literary influences and literary decisions an Urdu poet confronted during the break-up of the British Indian Empire. The research was funded by a Fulbright-Hays grant. Among articles and reviews,  "Hali and his Muqaddamah: The Creation of a Literary Attitude in Nineteenth-Century India" was published in the first issue of the Annual of Urdu Studies, 1981. This article has been cited in many subsequent discussions of Urdu writers and their interactions with British authority. My most recent publication is “Writing Class with Mr. Khan:  No Luncheon at Longchamps for the Jumbie Bird,â€Â a chapter in India and the Indian Diasporic Imagination  (Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2011). I am a career Foreign Service officer, and have been posted in Afghanistan, China, the Sudan, India, Pakistan and Jordan.