We are into the seventh day of the New Year 2022. For most of the world, the last year was mostly consumed with battling the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic and then in the latter part of the year, the dangerous new variant known as Omicron. Violence and conflict were the norm in many parts of the world, including Myanmar, Africa, Palestine and here in South Asia. As always, one turns to poets who are the voice of the people in good and bad times. Unlike politicians, good poets cannot be bought; even in exile they keep writing good poetry and become the hopes and expectations of their people.
Ishrat Afreen is one such poet, who for more than half a century has been linked to progressive and feminist poetry while settled in the United States. Her first poem of the new year, simply titled ‘Saal Ki Pehli Nazm’ offers a dispiriting dirge for the year that has just passed. Her heart-rending couplet which occurs towards the end of the poem for me sums up a blatant truth of our era. It reads in Urdu:
Barood ke dher pe bethe hum
Jhoote guldaste baant-te hain
Yesterday I met a madman who said
What do you ask of the grief of the year that passed
That year has granted us such new pains
Which we had never before
Thought about
What do you ask of the grief of the year
The year which bore hate
The year which has divided the world into pieces of colour and faith
How to forget the sorrow of a year which passed
Now we have to consider that this new year
What new message does it bring
From the bag of this new juggler
What now comes out
Whatever was sown by the forerunners
Is reaped by the successors
Sitting upon a pile of gunpowder
We distribute fake bouquets
Yesterday a madman laughed a lot!
Perhaps the madman alluded to both at the start and end of the poem remains the sanest voice among us having anticipated the sorrows of the present!
Meanwhile, the same poet held out a more optimistic outlook with her final poem of the preceding year i.e. 2020. Titled simply as Do Hazaar Bees Ki Aakhri Nazm (The Final Poem of 2020), as one reads and compares both her first poem of the 2022 and the final poem of 2020 one is startled how the mere passage of one year can arouse such conflicting emotions of hope and despair within the same poet. In her final poem of 2020, despite the colossal human losses of the year, hope nevertheless has to be the dominant emotion, since unlike despair, it is an active emotion:
Shaakh-e-umeed jo hai amar
Is ke phal phool se
Saal-e-nau
Tu bhi jholi bhare
Main bhi jholi bharoon
Shaakh-e-umeed jo hai amar
Year 21, how to show you hospitality
We are hovering between 19 and 20
Like what is the misfortune of the calendar
The numbers have sort of frozen in their places
Time sort of halted
There is no count of how many went today
Such rubies and jewels died
Flowers became the decoration of graves
Gardens became empty
2020 you very much gave great misery
Now I think that
How to show hospitality to the new year
I think but
This red rose, my heart
The fruit of life upon the branch of hope
Life, a flowing river
The branch of hope which is immortal
With its fruits and flowers
New Year
You too fulfill your wish
I too fulfill my wish
The branch of hope which is immortal
Happy New Year!
All translations by author
