The themes of imprisonment and exile figure prominently in the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984) who spent several years in jail and dedicated his life as a journalist, educator, and poet to preserving Pakistan’s artistic and spiritual heritage. Faiz reinvigorated a fossilized Urdu literature whose stale diction conferred predetermined meanings on traditional images such as the nightingale, the rose, the love-stricken gazelle, and the moon. Drawing upon a rich store of Urdu, Persian, and Arabic poetry, and working within the demanding confines of the love couplet known as the ghazal, Faiz imparts the experience of the image to the senses in ways that draw the reader or listener into the creative process. Imprisonment awakened Faiz to the sensations of the natural world and heightened his concern for others.

After the carnage that accompanied independence in 1947, Pakistan grew militaristic and repressive. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan and its first governor general, died in 1948, barely a year after the country’s independence. Another capable and unifying leader, Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first prime minister, was assassinated in 1951 shortly after requesting that the United States vacate its air bases in Pakistan. In the years that followed, Pakistan devolved into a U. S. client state under the military regimes of Ayub Khan (1958-1969) and Yahya Khan (1969-1971). The benighted policies of these military rulers were partly responsible the breakup of Pakistan and the emergence of Bangladesh in former East Pakistan.

As the first chief editor of The Pakistan Times, Faiz defended democracy and civil liberties. In March 1951, Faiz was jailed due to the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case, which was used to silence progressive voices in Pakistan. During four years in solitary confinement, he wrote two volumes of verse, Dast-e-Saba (The Writing of the Wind) and Zindan Nama (Prison Journal). Faiz resumed his journalism upon his release from prison, but in 1958 General Ayub Khan’s military regime seized control of Progressive Papers Ltd., which owned The Pakistan Times, and placed Faiz under arrest. After his release the following year, Faiz became the Secretary of the Pakistan Arts Council of Lahore. In 1962, the year he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, the military regime forced him into exile. In his acceptance speech, Faiz condemned the blind nationalism that had led to permanent hostilities between India and Pakistan: “[H]ow foolish are these small meannesses, this desire to cut up the world into small parcels of land, this ambition to dominate little groups of people” (“I Am Convinced” 17).

Faiz’s poems about imprisonment are rooted in experience. In this excerpt from “Captivity,” the inanimate comes to life as the prisoner creates a wondrous reality:

I have

dipped my fingers

in the blood of my heart.

So what

if they have

sealed my lips?

I have threaded

with a tongue

every link of my chains.

(The Unicorn and the Dancing Girl 34)

The political dialectic of this poem is that the silencing of the prisoner has created new forms of expression written in heart-blood and spoken through chain links. The act of expression is similarly liberating in this excerpt from Faiz’s “Speak…”:

Speak – your life is still yours.

Look inside the smithy –

Leaping flames, red-hot iron.

Padlocks open their jaws.

Chains disintegrate.

(Faiz in English 23)

During the time that he was physically confined, Faiz remained spiritually free. In an interview, Faiz explains how imprisonment spurred his imagination:

Imprisonment brings in a new dimension, a new way in which you look at things. Objects one had not even noticed in normal life, because one was too busy to perceive their ugliness or beauty, appear anew. One’s sensitivity is heightened. Then you have more time in prison. You can look at the world and think about it at leisure. It was in jail that I wrote my poem on Africa and on many other subjects, which I would not have normally thought about. So, in that sense, when you are in jail, the world outside comes closer – or recedes into the distance. Ironically, imprisonment brings freedom in that sense. I feel that the kind of intellectual freedom you experience in jail, you don’t experience outside. When you are outside, you are caught up in day-to-day affairs. You never see the entire canvas. Imprisonment opens the windows of your mind. (“A Conversation” lix)

Poetry dialogues with past and future works of art and with the experience of the reader or listener. It opens avenues of inquiry, alternative futures, and nostalgic paths that threaten the hegemony of dictators.

In this excerpt from Faiz’s “Visitors,” a prisoner of conscience opens to the sensations of a living universe:

My doors are open.

I am never alone.

First comes the evening –

wistful, sad.

Then the garrulous night

anxious to narrate

her wretchedness

to the stars.

The morning rubs salt

into the wounds of memory.

The noon hides

serpents of fire

in her sleeves.

All these are my visitors.

They come and go as they please.

(The Unicorn and the Dancing Girl 104)

The personified visitors magnify memory that, however poignant, is not a faithful mirror of reality but a fantasy of that which can no longer be reached. The genesis of this poem might be found in a letter, dated 15 August 1952, that Faiz sent to his wife, Alys, from prison:

Your letter came today. I feel happy today after a mild attack of a blue period lasting over a few days. It must be the weather. It is more like spring than summer. The mornings are vaguely cool and disturbing like the first breath of love and the sun in the early hours brings more colour than heat. In the evenings the breeze seems to bring the breath of the sea and the skies seem to close not on drab prison walls but on distant palm-fringed beaches. And it is sad like all beauty that is within your sight and beyond your grasp – like all beauty that you know to be an illusion. (Two Loves 170)

We see this sense of beauty within sight and beyond reach in this excerpt from “A Prison Morning”:

The moon

flings her arms around my neck

and whispers:

awake – dreams are the froth of sleep –

you have had your fill.

But my eyes are blurred

with the vision of your loveliness.

I drain the cup

and try to focus

on the day’s growing brightness –

the ballet of water-lilies –

the dance of quicksilver.

My fellow-inmates

(sun-worshippers from a bygone age)

congregate in the prison-yard.

(Four Contemporary Poets 21)

The moon goddess lights the ways of the exile, the prisoner, and the forsaken. The “dance of quicksilver” reveals those mercurial aspects of the moon that represent mutability, inconstancy, change, and growth (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 669; de Vries 378). The silver sheen that coats the lunar mirror refracts the feelings of the prisoner, which merge with those of his fellow inmates and a radiant world.

Faiz’s poems express the prisoner’s need to endure, as in this excerpt from “A Few Days More”:

Your beauty veiled by the dust

Of so many injustices

And the countless frustrations

Of my brief-lived youth.

Moonlit nights –

Brittle mirrors of ice –

Withering aerial roots –

Ash-covered contours of the heart.

The body on the torturer’s rack.

A few days more –

My love –

Only a few days.

(Faiz in English 14)

The aerial roots allude to the prisoner’s ability to adapt to the harsh conditions in prison as well as to Faiz’s experience as an exile, uprooted both from his home and his people. The ash-covered heart refers to the poet’s dashed dreams and deferred hopes. The divine light from the moon finds its reflection in the prisoner despite his bleakness and stasis, which are imaged in the brittle mirrors of ice. Beauty is veiled by the dust that is emblematic of a desiccated society.

In this excerpt from Faiz’s adaption of “A Letter from Prison” by the Turkish revolutionary poet Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963), we see the liberating power of dreams and the power of the imagination:

I am bewitched by my dreams in this prison.

When sleep comes

she unclasps with her compassionate hands

my chains

and the walls come crumbling down.

It is an old story but nevertheless

I lose myself so completely in my dreams

just as a ray of sunlight

disappears in placid water.

(Unicorn and the Dancing Girl 70)

The warmth of sun light that vanishes into water symbolizes the divine light that finds its way into the soul.

Faiz’s letters to his family, those that survived the ravages of termites during his exile in Beirut, have been lovingly collected in a volume titled Two Loves: Faiz's Letters From Jail, edited by his daughter, Salima Hashmi, and the poet Kyla Pasha. The letters provide an intimate family portrait. Faiz, who felt the suffering of others more than his own, remained unembittered by his ordeal, in keeping with the observation by Briggs: “The writing of poetry leads to a kind of spiritual detachment from everyone else, particularly from one’s enemies; that in turn produces a sense of freedom, even if personal circumstances suggest the opposite, and only through a sense of that freedom – the ultimate kind – is any form of happiness obtainable” (68). Faiz turned his unjust jail sentence into a gift, writing in an essay:

Confinement, like love, is a fundamental experience. It opens many new windows on the soul. The early sensations of youth return in an intensified form. One’s curiosity returns, as does one’s sense of wonder at such phenomena as the light of early morning, the fading evening twilight, the sheer blue of the sky, or the gentle touch of the wind. Time and the immediate world become one. What was near appears to have reached into the distance and what was in the distance moves in. A passing moment can become an eternity. (“Faiz on Faiz” 5)

Confinement extends beyond the prisoner of conscience to the entire country in this excerpt from “Dedication,” in which the image of yellow leaves, in keeping with other images related to drought, denotes a spiritually barren social order:

Abacus of suffering –

frost-edged fields

of withered flowers –

a wilderness of yellow leaves.

[…]

It is for the widows

I write – for the orphans

and the unwed –

for the condemned

in their separate cells

and the stars

that will not last

through the night.

(Four Contemporary Poets 5)

The “abacus of suffering” conveys the misery of the poor, the voiceless, and the forgotten, who have been converted into units of monetary gain. Ensconced behind the high walls of mansions, the rich and powerful are confined rather differently from the poor. The withered flowers and yellow leaves crystallize a parched spiritual landscape in a country plagued by social disintegration, communal violence, ecological destruction, and demographic explosion.

Although Pakistan began as a haven for Muslims, its founders expressly intended the new republic to guarantee freedom of worship and respect for the cultural practices of non-Muslims whose importance was symbolized in the white stripe in Pakistan’s flag. In his presidential address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on 11 August 1947, Mohammad Ali Jinnah famously stated,

You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the State… We are starting in the days where there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State. (101-02)

However, as we know, a lasting alliance between the military, the feudal lords, and the mullahs betrayed the original promise of a pluralistic and tolerant Pakistan. General Zia ul Haq seized power in a military coup in 1977 and two years later had Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto hanged. Under the guise of bringing Islam to Pakistan, Zia ushered in a repressive era in which religious minorities and women were deprived of rights previously guaranteed by the abrogated Constitution. Zia’s suffocating rule coincided with the final years of Faiz’s life. Mohammed Hanif describes the shrinking range of religious expression under Zia:

[A]ll God’s names were slowly deleted from the national memory, as if a wind had swept the land and blown them away. Innocuous, intimate names: Persian Khuda, which had always been handy for ghazal poets as it rhymed with most of the operative verbs; Rab, which poor people invoked in their hour of distress; Maula, which Sufis shouted in their hashish sessions. Allah had given Himself ninety-nine names. His people had improvised many more. But all these names slowly started to disappear – from official stationery, from Friday sermons, from newspaper editorials, from mothers’ prayers, from greeting cards, from official memos, from the lips of television quiz-show hosts, from children’s storybooks, from lovers’ songs, from court orders, from telephone operators’ greetings, from habeas corpus applications, from interschool debating competitions, from road inauguration speeches, from memorial services, from cricket players’ curses; even from beggars’ begging pleas. In the name of God, God was exiled from the land and replaced by the one and only Allah who, General Zia convinced himself, spoke only through him. (42)

In his quest to erase Pakistan’s sense of its past, Zia even destroyed the recorded speeches of Bhutto that were archived at Pakistan Television (Paracha). He imposed on Pakistan a static and falsified version of history that ignored or caricatured non-Islamic civilizations and spurred violence against religious minorities.

Prior to Zia’s military coup, Bhutto had designated Faiz to develop the National Council of the Arts and the Institute of Folk Heritage. A year after Zia’s military coup in 1977, Faiz went into exile in Beirut, where he edited Lotus, a quarterly of Asian and African literature. He returned to Pakistan shortly before his death in November 1984. Just before he died, Faiz wrote these final lines:

The sea

towards which

I am going

has no waves:

no island adrift.

Poetry

was the medal

I pinned

on my wounds:

circling neglect.

(“Last verses” A Remote Beginning 39)

The sea without waves conveys the stasis of death. The rich ambiguity of the final two words, “circling neglect,” expresses more about the predicament and privilege of the poet than could any volume of commentary. If “circling” is a gerund and adjective, then neglect hovers over the poet like a vulture. If “circling” is a verb, then the poet bypasses neglect. The poet remembers and is remembered. Art outlives its creator to reincarnate in other contexts, lives, ages, and lands.

Daud Kamal (1935-1987), who translated the Faiz poems in this essay, wrote a moving, posthumous tribute to Faiz shortly after his death. In “Ascent,” valleys disclose the creative outpouring of grief in response to Faiz’s death:

Ancient gardens

in your eyes

and the falling snow.

[…]

Restless traveller!

Again exiled?

The valleys unfold themselves

for you. Birdsongs.

Jewelled grace

of November leaves.

Intercede for us –

river-forgotten

magnetic stones.

(Before the Carnations Wither 73)

The November leaves connote dictatorship-induced winter while the ancient gardens recall both the distant memory of Peshawar (Kamal’s hometown) as a city of gardens and Faiz’s lifelong commitment to cultural preservation and the arts. The valley symbolizes the low point or depression associated with grief and death (Archive 110). However, the valley is also a place of fertility and gestation that is, according to J. E. Cirlot, “symbolic of life itself and … the mystic abode of shepherd and priest” (358). Faiz did, in a way, intercede on behalf of Kamal, one of Pakistan’s “river-forgotten / magnetic stones” (“Ascent,” Before the Carnations Wither 73), for Kamal became more widely known through his Faiz translations. The magnetic stone, or lodestone, denotes the attraction of love and the sacred (de Vries 304), and in the final two lines of “Ascent” this image evokes the poet whose spiritual influence lasts centuries.

Despite Faiz’s wide influence, Pakistan, notwithstanding its ostensible return to democracy, remains an unjust and violent country whose military intelligence service murders activists with impunity. As Kamal observes in an essay, “It is irrational to call the poets ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’ just as it is a romantic exaggeration to expect the artists to eradicate evil from the world or alleviate human misery and suffering. This, however, should not tempt us to under-estimate the power of art” (“The Role of the Writer” 44). Thanks to the power of poetry that redeems suffering, Faiz remains the most popular and widely translated Urdu poet of the twentieth century. Epitomizing the artist’s progress, Faiz continues to speak for the voiceless and conjure the divine.

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