Blooming in defiance
I don’t know any mainstream Pakistani woman artist who has storyboarded their personal gender harassment trauma over the years into not just a song or two, but an entire 11-track introspective solo music album.
I ask Meesha Shafi if she knows anyone who did what she did.
I let her hang there in the awkward discomfort of recognising her own genius in the album Khilnay Ko — recently submitted for the Grammys in three categories, including Best Global Music Album.
“No. I don’t think I know any woman in Pakistan who has done this before,” she says finally.
Meesha was previously known for her hits in remixed traditional folk from the Coke Studio fame. She has been known as a singer-songwriter, but not for this multi-hyphenated world-building.
However, her latest album is spared the harrowing limitations of pop culture. It is a collaboration that did not mute Meesha’s voice but allowed it to bloom.
Khilney Ko is a solid storytelling by a woman without being exclusively for women, deeply emotional without being dramatic, and politically complex without being noisy—a multi-media journal, full of its stammers, stutters, and fears.
Most of us feel paralyzed and stunted when someone wrongs us.
Meesha Shafi made something out of something that is not at all artful.
Cyberbullying meets witchhunting
The blood sport of putting a woman down on the Internet cannot be turned into anything. It is all-consuming and ugly. Meesha frames her art as the unglamorous part of survival, embodying the silent wounds of many women while publicly confronting the unconfrontable: media slander, legal censorship, and the overt and celebrated rule of men over women in Pakistan.
She confronted societal erasure by visually documenting what actual erasure looks like.
The court decreed a gag order against her after she became known as the poster child of Pakistan’s #MeToo movement. “I could not get back up. I was no match for it,” she said.
It began as a roar and ended in a whimper, legally speaking. Mostly because: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," poet and activist Audre Lorde said it first. The courts were never ours.
Meesha was not any woman; she was the Rajkumari, the queen bee, Pakistan’s very own Beyonce. This album is Meesha’s Lemonade. Except that she is not smashing any car windshields—she is walking into the dead of wintering, staying still in the darkness, and singing through her iron muzzle.
“This is not a comeback of any kind,” she said.
We speak on the phone. I’m in the autumn in Atlanta, and winter is coming to her in Canada. The backdrop matters. We both have learned the power of context.
She has omitted revenge. She has written out all the proverbial axe murderers in her work. This is the aftermath of a war already won, the victor already crowned.
Meesha is not us, because Meesha is elite. There is elite and then there is Lahori elite, and Meesha is both.
At one point, we all felt she would go for the kill. If someone harassed her, he would have to pay.
She was, after all, not us. She has a piercingly beautiful face, brains like a Swiss knife, the creativity of spring season, and, more importantly, pedigree.
Justice was not swift. Meesha was disabused of the notion that if the ruling class had to choose between a man and a woman from their class, it would be her.
“Sirf meri khushfehmi hi rehgai khush.”
Her protest landed somewhere between the Jim Crow era and the Taliban shooting Malala in the head for wanting to go to school. The music industry remains un-insulated from practices firmly rooted in slavery.
Meesha said about how insults end up creating body trauma: “It felt like a lynching because it was so relentless.”
In Azab, we see her in the back of the car’s rear-view mirror, being driven to the Lahore High Court, and she appears diminished and washed out. The lens is turned inwards, and the lights are off.
In that sigh, we see what we really do not wish to see: Meesha is us.
Nothing sneakily patriarchal
We see, sans makeup, sans touchups, a woman being sent to the gallows because she dared to forget her place. We have all been there, where we punched up and got beat down. “It was a deliberate act to strip myself of everything sneakily patriarchal,” she said.
However, when it comes to our celebrities, we want them to be pretty. We would rather have them patriarchal. Meesha is unforgivably real. So real, she forgets she is a woman. This is unfashionable. This is a betrayal. We want to refund our tickets, but instead we keep watching. No one is getting off this roller coaster.
The last time I watched something this profound was also never.
Slander is a health crisis
“Anxiety is irrational. A million alarm bells are going off in every direction,” Meesha said.
We had a watch party, my friends and my daughters. The tiny TV screen helps her tell all in our living room. Her eyes cry out a grievance. We see the moisture on their teeth, we see her age away as one does in pain, and we see the micro-moments her face braces against a painful memory. Then she does this breaking-of-the-wall gaze, her head turned to the side at first. Now, she looks into the camera and reads out the verdict: “Mai hi hun badchalan.”
Meesha is not us.
We do not have it in us to wear our skin and walk the world, unsexed, androgynous, and asymmetrical, so close to the world, we show our pores, the places we breathe from, expunge our sweat from. We cannot.
Meesha is not us.
She is the seamstress of her own armour. Her wardrobe is intentional. “I am, before anything else, an academically trained visual artist. I simply went back to who I really am,” she said.
In Sarey Aam, she wears her own face, boxed in, piercingly gazing back at the world with deafening science. An armour is not a sword.
This embodied work reminds me of the ancient art of yoga. Practiced without exhibition, it leads to a very subtle wisdom and life force.
Meesha has grown up into several lived lives.
Remember your origin song
Our phone chat feels like we are both having tea in delicate teacups on a charpoy somewhere in Lahore in the two weeks the weather is unoppressive, perhaps in Lawrence Garden under a banyan tree. We are in a word dance. Both our voices have cracked by this point, and we have suspended our lived-out lives, between joy and sorrow with equal abundance.
Meesha is so Lahore.
“My family tree is incredibly diverse: Part Persian, part Delhi, part Kabul, and of course part English. It is all these cultures and languages that allowed an amalgamation of the richness of the soil from which I finally came out: Germination is language.”
But at the centre of it is Lahore.
“I think in Punjabi,” she said. The city that broke her gave her the language to rebuild.
“Yey konsa nit naya azaab hai,” cannot be said in any other profoundness.
Meesha is not us.
She is willing to wait.
“Beej andhera mangay.”
This work is an exercise in how to play the long game.
“I went into my cave of domestication after what seemed like a deliberate and cruel act of fiction against me. I didn’t rush the repair. I didn’t PR my way out of it. I sat in the decapitation with the intention of feeling it all.”
“Dhalja sooraj chand ghaarion ko.”
Our bodies, it seems, are the only tool that our oppressor cannot snatch from us.
Family as a rebirth tool
There is one more thing they cannot take from us: motherhood.
In Tareef, we see what nurturing without preconditions looks like.
There is a divine spirit in this lullaby-esque song, perhaps because this is how God loves everything he creates, from the chrysanthemums to that baby in a highchair being a baby.
Meesha is us.
In this home video from the nostalgic ’80s of Lahore to the backyard swings of Canada is my personal triumph against forgetting.
She is so little. Little enough to sit in a teacup in an amusement park, spinning, dainty in her knee-length dress, and when done, unbuckles her safety belt to step into the world. She shows off with a shy smile, a kathak dance, perfect symmetry, nothing lopsided, perfect spin, no tears, and the most extreme form of the feminine girl. An unhurt girl.
Meesha is Nirmal.
Before the hurt.
Celebrities are often torn down by those who made them, but here, the last word is not theirs; it remains with the author herself. You block her this way, like water, she will emerge elsewhere.
Meesha is not us.
She is no longer herself either.
There is a death here; slice this album every which way. This is a funeral march.
We raised this much-loved child, we nurtured her beloved parts into a pop icon, and then we shamed her for the very thing we cherish in women: keeping the world entertained.
“Dost they kum.”
This is not a song you dance to at a mehndi. This is not an album you sing to on a road trip or even in the shower. This album is a backpack that will take you on every trip.
Awais Tauhid, the director, and Abdulah Siddiqui, the producer, called it a solitude album you listen to at home.
Solitude is often called upon when there is a healing of some sort.
Meesha has spoken from the wound, not the scar.
Post-protest trauma
Meesha said her husband summed it up best:“You are not going through Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or even Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, because there is no Post.”
There is no post anything. We do not recover because we are not allowed to move on from what troubled us. Each time Meesha steps into the limelight, the takedowns begin again.
Meesha is us.
We fight a systemic injustice that expects us to marinate in it even after we protest. We go back home to our murderers, we cook delicious food for our occasional tyrants, and we sing odes to those who invest top dollars in keeping us in oblivion.
“It is not acceptable to be invisible,” she said. Meesha went into a shell and returned not as a husk but as a new shoot, mushroomed and luminous, having fed on the wood in the darkness of a forest. Life-giving.
I’ve spoken to women who were newscasters, and when they spoke up against their boss’s harassment, the first thing was to take them off the air. I’ve spoken to women who spoke up against violence in their homes and were sent home to their rightful masters to be silenced. I have spoken to women who were raped, and a panchayat decreed that they marry the rapist. As a part-time feminist, I have lived and loved within the patriarchy I write about.
We are the Meesha Shafi gag order.
Art is the subtle revolution we all need.
All turning points in history start with a woman’s testimony, and travel across worlds because some men and some women believed her version of the story.
Farar is about losing and winning. Sitting still in a white kameez shalwar, ethnic to the core, taking in the shadows of the hateful words against her on her face and body, and almost wearing it. Of course, everyone loves the sight of someone who has to escape abandoning the battlefield because of its high spectator value, but Meesha has returned, telling us how it felt to be driven out because her opponents refused to play by the rules.
It’s not one swipe of the gelatine; it is slow poisoning.
Meesha’s previous work seems external. This is a homecoming. This is an inner revolution, televised.
The slander was ‘sarey aam’.
The response had to be Sarey Aam.
The intensity is a whisper. You lean in to listen more carefully.
She said: “This is me saying simply, I am here.”
Aisha Sarwari is an intersectional feminist and her most recent book is Heart Tantrums and Brain Tumours @AishaFSarwari on X