‘Women have carved themselves a space in poetry and song’

Attiya Dawood, Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed discuss the challenges faced by female poets.

KARACHI: Women have carved themselves a space in poetry and song since time immemorial, said poet Fahmida Riaz at Habib University's Second Postcolonial Higher Education Conference on Saturday.

Speaking about 'Poetry and Feminist Futures' at the pièce de résistance of the conference, renowned poets Attiya Dawood, Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed moved most of their rapt audience to tears.

The final panel discussion of the day was chaired by Asif Aslam Farrrukhi, a writer and translator. His first question set the stage for the discussion that was to follow: how did you deal with the ostracism that comes with being a poetess?

"There has to be that one Magdalene who people can point fingers at. I was her," said Naheed, whose poetry is a resistance movement in itself. "There came a point when my father asked me to pack up my collection of ghazals and send them to whomever I had written them for."

Among the questions raised at the time she began writing poetry was whether one could understand or appreciate poetry by women the same way one understands poetry written by men. "The verses said by women connoted certain ideas and nuances considered outrageous for that time," she explained.

"Every country has its feminist role models - Egypt has Cleopatra, India has Sita, Iran and Rabia Basri and Quratulain Tahira," said Naheed. "Pakistan too will have its feminist symbols when its women are free."

Riaz claimed that from singing celebratory songs at weddings, humming verses while working and singing lullabies to their children, women had their own sacred space.

"It was when I started writing verses that I realised women were not welcome to publish their poetry or writings," she said. Her book Badan Darida received heavy criticism for being too 'vulgar', she remembered. The terms 'vasal' and 'hijr' when used poetically by men would not have invited criticism the way it was directed at Riaz.

Farrukhi asked Dawood how she had managed to overcome her ultra-conservative family and her rural Sindhi background to become a poetess known the world over. "I have faced much worse from my liberal male counterparts than I did from my family," replied Dawood.

Dawood recalls when she accompanied activists from the Women's Action Forum to a graveyard to place flowers on the graves of women who had been murdered for 'honour'. There she recited the following verse that she had earlier written and addressed to her daughter:

Agar tumhein kari keh kar qatal kar dein

Mar jaana, pyar zaroor karna

Sharafat ke showcase mein

Niqab dal kar mat bethna, pyar zaroor karna

Published in The Express Tribune, October 27^th, 2014.