Centennial celebration: To an enduring symbol of resistance

ISLAMABAD: Marx may be long forgotten but Faiz is very much alive. As the year inches towards his centennial on February 13, various gatherings are being organised across the country to commemorate the “people’s poet” and his brilliant works, arguably the only body of literature that can rival Iqbal’s impact on Pakistan’s literary history.

On Thursday, the Pakistan Academy of Letters invited members of Islamabad’s literati, including leading experts on Faiz’s life and thought such as Iftikhar Arif and Ashfaq Hussain, to pay tribute to the luminary’s soul-stirring poetry. Among echoes of “wah wah” and “kya kehne hain”, they charmed the gathering with their expositions of his works and recitals of select couplets.

The romantic poet Iftikhar Arif reminded the gathering of Faiz’s relevance today, saying that he seemed to be more loved and popular after nearly two decades of his passing away. He said that those who continue to remain hostile to Faiz’s progressive and humanist ideas do so only for hostility’s sake, as the poet’s socialist message remains popular and clarifies its own self against the campaign of allegations and misinformation.

Agha Nasir expressed gratitude for the times he spent with the “soft-hearted and cool-headed” Faiz, extolling the poet’s struggle against fascism. He recited passages from a stirring poem that Faiz had penned about Gandhi.

Ashfaq Hussain, who has written six books on the subject, said that Faiz’s multi-faceted work was “deep enough for one to drown in.” To illustrate the poet’s uncanny ability to write beautifully about the most mundane matters, he recited verses from a romanticised poem that Faiz had composed about his own heart-attack.

Beginning with the warning that he was about to launch into a “serious speech”, Prof Yousuf Hassan discussed Faiz’s interpretation of Marxism, which, according to his own admission, was an accurate construal.

Sarwat Mohyuddin pointed to the poet’s towering status in the world by asserting that his message for the “freedom fighters” in Palestine and North Africa was widely honoured in countries such as Tunisia, Jordan and Egypt.

Ashfaq Saleem Mirza noted that the establishment does not deal with subversive elements, such as religious extremists, in the same way that it does with “patriotic intellectuals” such as Faiz, demonstrated by the “net of disinformation that was spread about the man and his ideology.”

The occasion’s chief guest Ghulam Fareed Kathia talked about Faiz’s influence on both his own political outlook and the PPP’s core manifesto.

For those you may have missed the memo, 2011 is ‘Faiz Ahmed Faiz Year’.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 11^th, 2011.