Ink that never dries
Every word Attiya Dawood wrote came at a personal cost
Attiya Dawood
KARACHI:
Praise did not come easily to Shaikh Ayaz — the grand doyen of Sindhi literature and a one-time contender for the Nobel Prize. He wrote fiery polemics against his contemporaries and critics in retaliation. Through his essays, he managed to settle old scores and even flared up a few others.
But even he was unable to withhold his praise for Attiya Dawood’s poetry. She was never made a target of ridicule. On the contrary, he reserved for her the best compliment she could be given. Each and every poem, Ayaz wrote, “is lustrous like a pearl”.
For nearly four decades now, Dawood has ensured that the hyperbole of Ayaz’s compliment reaches appropriate justification. She has firmly consolidated her image as a Sindhi and Urdu writer.
However, the journey has not been an easy one. Some of the metaphors that are synonymous with Dawood’s work are the product of a torturous journey of self-discovery. She has written about “frantic fingers which undo a tattered chaddar wrapped around the head” and “hands reaching for the door-latch of a cage kept in a man’s courtyard”. But every word she has written came at a personal cost — an undeniably painful one.
When she was first published in 1980, she found herself at the receiving end of tremendous hostility from her brother. Born into a conservative family in Moladino Larik, a small village in Sindh, Dawood struggled to break through the shackles of a narrow-minded society that deprived her of the opportunity to discover her own identity. She once wrote that her childhood milieu was built “on the skulls of what were [her] ambitions”.
Dawood recalls her first visit to a millstone in her village.
“I was only six years old,” she says. “I went there to grind five kilogrammes of wheat. It was a task reserved for men only because the millstone was far from home. No girl had dared to flout accepted norms and go to the millstone. But I did it anyway and felt great.”
Unfortunately, the inner courtyard was not the only sphere where Dawood had to face criticism. Her first anthology attracted a morass of angry letters from readers. At the same time, Dawood’s work brought her into the limelight as a fearless voice from the subcontinent.
Dawood now lives in Karachi with her husband and two daughters in a sunny apartment that faces the sea. Memories of her blinkered childhood in a small village are distant and unthreatening. She has sheltered her daughters from the turmoil she faced as a child. Unlike their mother, Dawood’s daughters do not have to reach for door-latches to find their quotient of happiness.
The writer is a student at the Institute of Business Administration and takes an interest in English, Urdu and Sindhi literature.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 4th, 2015.
Praise did not come easily to Shaikh Ayaz — the grand doyen of Sindhi literature and a one-time contender for the Nobel Prize. He wrote fiery polemics against his contemporaries and critics in retaliation. Through his essays, he managed to settle old scores and even flared up a few others.
But even he was unable to withhold his praise for Attiya Dawood’s poetry. She was never made a target of ridicule. On the contrary, he reserved for her the best compliment she could be given. Each and every poem, Ayaz wrote, “is lustrous like a pearl”.
For nearly four decades now, Dawood has ensured that the hyperbole of Ayaz’s compliment reaches appropriate justification. She has firmly consolidated her image as a Sindhi and Urdu writer.
However, the journey has not been an easy one. Some of the metaphors that are synonymous with Dawood’s work are the product of a torturous journey of self-discovery. She has written about “frantic fingers which undo a tattered chaddar wrapped around the head” and “hands reaching for the door-latch of a cage kept in a man’s courtyard”. But every word she has written came at a personal cost — an undeniably painful one.
When she was first published in 1980, she found herself at the receiving end of tremendous hostility from her brother. Born into a conservative family in Moladino Larik, a small village in Sindh, Dawood struggled to break through the shackles of a narrow-minded society that deprived her of the opportunity to discover her own identity. She once wrote that her childhood milieu was built “on the skulls of what were [her] ambitions”.
Dawood recalls her first visit to a millstone in her village.
“I was only six years old,” she says. “I went there to grind five kilogrammes of wheat. It was a task reserved for men only because the millstone was far from home. No girl had dared to flout accepted norms and go to the millstone. But I did it anyway and felt great.”
Unfortunately, the inner courtyard was not the only sphere where Dawood had to face criticism. Her first anthology attracted a morass of angry letters from readers. At the same time, Dawood’s work brought her into the limelight as a fearless voice from the subcontinent.
Dawood now lives in Karachi with her husband and two daughters in a sunny apartment that faces the sea. Memories of her blinkered childhood in a small village are distant and unthreatening. She has sheltered her daughters from the turmoil she faced as a child. Unlike their mother, Dawood’s daughters do not have to reach for door-latches to find their quotient of happiness.
The writer is a student at the Institute of Business Administration and takes an interest in English, Urdu and Sindhi literature.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 4th, 2015.