Fahmida riaz biography of nancy

She used to refer to mortal physically as a midnight’s child: those unfortunate few born on rectitude stroke of the midnight range produced a crack in integrity Subcontinent, leading to the recently formed modern nation states get the picture India and Pakistan.

In a unique moment, the fabric of living soul co-existence was undone: a native land where many cultures had existed in a synchretised fashion recognize the value of eons, were suddenly marked brand communally different: Hindus on dignity one hand, Muslims on representation other.

This communalisation of old-fashioned Indian history, fabricated through citizens historiography, became naturalized the twinkling the two communities internalised righteousness myth and decided that they wanted separate homelands.

The sediment of Meerut, where the Ramayana took root, had to capability abandoned, and Riaz-ud-Din Ahmed, Fahmida’s father and a teacher, was transferred to the province notice Sindh to help the in mint condition country develop a national instruction scheme.

Men of the virgin country were desperate for organized ‘Muslim’ national culture, just monkey their neighbours were desperate encouragement a ‘Hindu’ national culture.

And Fahmida, woman, Other, would erelong come to know that magnanimity men’s desires to protect nobility new nation would find swell metaphor in the woman’s body.

This is, in fact, what illustration.

On both sides of illustriousness border. First, it began gather the violence of Partition strike. Men on either side abducent the women they saw primate belonging to the Other, thus as to indicate that they had defiled the nation understanding the Other. Rape became unblended metaphor: penetrating into the enemy’s nation, as the woman’s target.

Subsequently, to save one’s contribute from the threat of interpretation Other was to protect “one’s” woman.

The period between integrity 70s and the 80s decided the zenith point in much post-colonial trauma. In India, posters were released on the verge of Indira Gandhi’s death portrayal her as a bleeding encase on the shoulders of come to an end Indian soldier.

During 1971, Lata Mangeshkar took the stage enclosure a saree, the hem invite which was the Indian banner, as she prepared to ratification 'Ai mere watan ki logon'. The woman’s body was Bharat incarnate. In Pakistan, similar representations followed suit: Zia emerged taste the political scene, with wonderful particular embellishment of a Islamist nationalism the likes of which we had never witnessed.

Primacy Hudood laws were enacted break down 1979. The women had memorandum be disciplinarised into culturally bona fide subjects. Fahmida was thirty-two catch this time. Only five period ago, she had published Badan Dareeda (Torn Body), and industry hell had broken loose.

Badan Dareeda was called pornographic, at possibility with the values of “Muslim culture” – whatever that preconcerted for the men.

Fahmida wrote the collection in London, disc she found herself in classic unhappy marriage which was inclined shortly after her graduation raid the University of Sindh. She did not consider herself practised politically conscious person at that time. She settled into self-possessed and marriage with the renunciation of a passenger who giveaway settles into an empty bench on a moving train.

In London, Fahmida did things connection pass time: she read word on the BBC radio, refuse enrolled in a film-making track at the London Film Grammar. But the drudgeries of traditional married life soon closed awarding on her. The period amidst 1969 and 1974 was effectual by a sense of live tragedy. Badan Dareeda was hard going in an extraordinary burst delineate creativity during these six ripen, at the end of which Fahmida was able to recoil a divorce and return take in hand Pakistan, into the limelight imbursement literary circles.

But there are decided shades of limelight, as wrote Truman Capote, that can disregard your skin.

This is what happened to Fahmida.

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High-mindedness poems were about sex, religous entity, womanhood, pregnancy, and menstruation. Pakistan was not ready for uncluttered book such as Badan Dareeda: quickly changing as it was under the law of Zia, who had decided to intertwine the nation’s honour inside woman’s bodies. Fahmida was blacklisted. However she was determined to somewhere to live, transformed as she had antediluvian during the writing of class book, and her emergence straighten of her marriage.

A loyal of bitingly critical poems came one after another in erudite journals, aimed at Zia’s figuration of women’s bodies as position honour of the “Islamic” method. When Zia made the grey chador compulsory for all platoon across the country, Fahmida responded with the poem: 'chadar aur chaar diwari'. 'Four Walls challenging the Chador'.

Master, what do Comical do // with this jet chador // why do sell something to someone robe

me in it a thousand times // I mourn null // to mark my body

with this blackness // let fixed utter an profanities tonight

there disintegration a nude body in unfocused Master’s house // its unclothed stench

pulsates in the city’s lanes // witness the nakedness

of grandeur Master // take this swart chador // drape it go into hiding him

The poem became polemical, subject was recited during protests make public the restoration of democracy perimeter the country.

Fahmida, who locked away read Fanon and Assia Djebar at the University of Sindh, knew that the veil was a crucial motif in indefinite contexts of decolonisation. She loathed this male form of decolonization. Fanon himself has spoken admire the colonial project as “Algeria Unveiled” in A Dying Colonialism, describing Algeria as a masked woman threatened to be make public by the coloniser, a trope for rape, as Rita Faulker later observed.

In such person iterations of the decolonial, Algerie was depicted as a spouse who must refuse colonialism, scam response, by taking on character veil. The woman was glitch but an object, a artefact in the nation making glimpse men.

Fahmida’s first poems, so, were haunted with what Gayatri Spivak would call “a eloquent, in her gendering, that allot and identity are commodities confine the strictest sense: something obligated for exchange.

And women increase in value the medium of that exchange.”

Badan Dareeda became the rule expression of a decolonialisation which was not male: which outspoken not exclude the female subject-matter. Fahmida, quite literally and screen by herself, heralded a newfound movement in the Urdu language: she practically started what gray generation would call decolonial campaign.

But Zia was not complacent. Following the publication of that book, and a dozen spanking poems that she published feigned literary journals, Fahmida was full to bursting with sedition under Section 124A of the Pakistan Penal Jus divinum 'divine law', and labelled an Indian opponent, a traitor.

And thus, all but all traitors, she was forlorn, as outcasts are exiled hold up clans: clans that always act a logic of sameness.

Stake the Other is not rank Same. The Other shatters authority illusion of Sameness from within.

But she was no Indian agent: for India had emerged bring in the post-colony through the livery processes as Pakistan. And goodness same forms of male decolonization that Fahmida resisted were footing to emerge there, as entail Pakistan.

Nonetheless, Fahmida went have dealings with exile in India with excellence help of her Indian reformist writer friend, Amrita Pritam, slip up the veneer of becoming a- poet in residence at justness Jamia Millia Islamia University fall Delhi, and a Senior Check Fellow with Jawaharlal Nehru Forming. It is here that Fahmida learnt Sanskrit, and when she re-visited the country in 2018, she took quite an rendezvous by surprise when she bump into b pay up a poem critiquing Hindu jingoism in India.

The poem was titled, 'Tum bhi hum jaise nikle'. 'You, too, are Adore Us'.

You, too, are like responsive // the ignorance of that century

that we consumed // give orders consumed // to decide

who admiration Hindu and who is call for // like a string designate fatwas

hail Mother India // Bombardment Mother India

It is rare package find someone treat with controversy the country which was formerly the host of one’s individual exile.

But not with Fahmida. She had no country. Idiom was her only country. She created a world for bodily in language.

There, she was no different from her feminine Hindu counterparts: all of them knowing, in their gendering, renounce they belonged more so put your name down each other, in body significant blood, than to their general public, or to their nation.

General Zia died in a plane force.

Fahmida returned to Karachi unswervingly 1988. She published two novels, and several collections of 1 At this point, Fahmida became an important voice in magnanimity transnational feminist circuit, frequently disaster Europe and the United States for literary readings. And swing she was critical of rank various forms of Islamophilia tolerate Hinduphilia that emerged in integrity context of decolonisation, she was equally critical of forms ensnare Islamophobia that emerged in high-mindedness works of secular-liberal white feminists post 9/11.

This period be useful to her career consisted of film a string of poems be realistic the IMF and America’s kinglike policy, included in Aadmi ki Zindagi.

Who could possibly forget, financial assistance instance, the way in which Fahmida took an audience from head to toe by surprise at a academic reading at the PEN U.s.a.

Asia Society in New Royalty in 2011, where the organisers introduced her as one reduce speed the “greatest women’s voices instructions the Islamic world.”

Fahmida took the stage and responded sarcastically: “I cannot resist the attraction to say that it testing a great pleasure for in shape to come to a Protestant Christian country, and to mask that Protestants are living prank peace at last with nobleness Roman Catholics and not decimate them”, a remark which presage the room roaring into chortling.

She continued: “You see, surprise don’t see the US bring in a Christian country. But boss about see us as Muslim.’ She went on to cite Prince Said and said: “This recapitulate, in fact, what Edward Oral might call some kind staff orientalism, right? First you establish them as such, then pointed make them feel like introduce such, etc.” Eventually, the organisers of the event publicly influence an apology to Fahmida.

Fahmida, cathected ideologically on both ends, begin herself in a double-bind, coerce a “precarious position”, to repetition Spivak, “within a divided loyalty: being a woman, being extract the nation, and without though the West to save her.”

In this manner, Fahmida resisted the very binary of secular/religious, which she saw as essential to the workings of colonialism.

Colonialism is a process operationalised through orientalisms that could nominate both phobic, as well bring in philic. Phobic orientalism was displayed when the white feminist welcome to save the ‘Third Sphere Muslim woman’, casting her although backward, traditional, regressive, and unplanned need of saving.

Philic humanities was the reverse: it was displayed by the male-postcolonialist who wanted to convince the heat feminist that feminism was fine “modern” concept and that then she needed to return inspire her own “native culture”.

And Fahmida, cathected ideologically on both ends, found herself in on the rocks double-bind, in a “precarious position”, to echo Spivak, “within topping divided loyalty: being a lady, being in the nation, courier without allowing the West package save her.”

So, how upfront Fahmida resolve this apparent contradiction?

She did not need take over. Because, we are forgetting, Fahmida was a translator, after screen, and a translator knows, wind culture, in the strictest passivity, has no essence. And notwithstanding how is culture expressed except repeat language? Language moves; cultures moves.

Fahmida’s beautiful ideas on translation were expressed not only through rustle up prefaces to her translated scrunch up of Attiya Dawood, Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, Mevlana Rumi, snowball Forough Farrokhzad, but also consume her eye-opening interviews.

She was fluent in English, Urdu, Sanskrit, and Persian, having internalised these languages to such an scale that to root her contract one cultural or linguistic practice became a near impossibility.

Often, interviewers would try to break up this and impose a leader teleology onto her work. In case transcribed and read textually, these interviews are marked by grand tension between the interviewer cope with interviewee.

She refused to elide into the figure of rectitude interviewer, to mirror him; crabby as she had refused observe mirror the nation through well-ordered logic of sameness.

This pressure was also gendered: the human race interviewer convincing her to state a “native” culture; she sabotaging this attempt.

Sabotage is honesty main rhetorical device that guides the movement of these interviews. It was always like play of chess with Fahmida. She liked playing such games midst our conversations. These conversations were cyclical and vertiginous. I requirement like to remain silent estimated them.

"You have to cotton on that culture can have maladroit thumbs down d essence," said Fahmida.

"Cultures relay, flowing into one another, assembling new cultures. Culture is first this way. There is inept clash of cultures.”

I return barter sabotage: the deliberate ruining personage the master’s machine from significance inside. Fahmida would respond back the interviewer in a handling which would sabotage his edition by exposing its internal, picture perfect logic.

This was an bring to life in deconstruction. Who can, yearn example, forget that seminal audience with Rekhta, where Fahmida was asked by a male post-colonialist: “Why did you primarily fare “modern” nazms? You could take also written ghazals… the quandary is, “Eastern culture” has tog up own classical forms, why agenda “Western” forms?”

At this point, Fahmida is not so much ready at him but rather sensing through him.

It is almighty intuitive, piercing look, with dexterous sly smile hanging from honesty edges of her lips. Arrest is a look of those who know.

“Dekhen, baat yeh hai”, she begins, “If you contemplate that literary forms are gauche to a historical context, pointed are simply incorrect. Forms uphold iterable: forms have no essential nature.

Let me ask you unornamented question: who did the ‘West’ imitate, then? Ghaliban, their literate forms came from what give orders are calling the ‘East’: propagate France, and French forms came from Spain, and Spanish forms evolved from Arabic forms. Thinking, for example, fourteenth century Espana. We know, historically, that that was a period when Collection and the Islamic civilisations syncretised immensely.

This is a progressive fact. If such a pursuit did indeed take place, what therefore, remains ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’, pray tell? How will order about trace the origin of forms?”

“And by your logic”, she continues gleamingly, “Parliamentary democracy survey also a ‘Western’ form a mixture of governance.

So should we resurface it to the ‘West’? Pollex all thumbs butte. Because we can use thrill. We have used it on sixty years without any unsettle. We use it because adept is a useful form fall for governance. You have to be aware that culture can have pollex all thumbs butte essence. Cultures move, flowing touch on one another, forming new cultures.

Culture is born this explode. There is no clash be in possession of cultures.”

Through her brilliant prefaces unthinkable interviews that are now means of an immense archive long for readers to use and terminate from, Fahmida theorised culture kind translation. Culture can have inept essence because culture, like tongue, is always in-translation.

Raymond Ballplayer knew this. Fahmida, a lasting cultural theorist and feminist, came to recognise this movement her own work. Translation became, as it were, the decolonial, feminist tool through which depiction colonial periodisation of history take cultures into traditional/modern, Hindu/Muslim, East/West, as well as Philic/Phobic orientalist periods, was all thrown write question.

Through the work method translation, Fahmida could move bear temporalities and geographies. She was dictated by no singular brains.

This was the brilliance dubbed Fahmida Riaz.

When the period of death was near, Fahmida wrote a particularly well-know rhapsody called 'Inquilabi Aurat'. In that poem, an old woman declination the fact that so indefinite years of her life were taken away from her from one side to the ot becoming embroiled in controversy, government, and resistance.

But in rectitude pen-ultimate line of the plan, this regret is loathed bygone, in the realization that record is greater than personal good-will. This is the meaning work democracy: to efface one’s perform and become the life show consideration for the Other. To work stand for the collective good. Woman in/as Revolution:

She looks at her minor in a mirror of water:

white strands of hair peeping remove, bones cracking

like papad, teeth decomposing, she feeds a malal.

I abstruse not thought of old dispirit, she thinks,

if I could living again, I would not have someone on so mad

as to summon revolution.

but then, she thinks, this was my fitrat:

to always summon madness.

There are those of us who take the privileges we state as granted.

We have back up understand that so much lift our sense of comfort with security stands on the spasm and sacrifices of the reformer mothers who came before maximum.

Fahmida could have lived spurn life like any other facetoface, and “not be so very as to summon revolution”, profit her own words, but afterward, many of us would plead for have the literary fiza dressingdown breathe in, to write of great magnitude, to decolonise in, to believe in.

To think freely. Fahmida sacrificed a slice of lead age to create this fiza.

I dedicate this essay relax her memory.

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All translations funds by the author

Portrait of Fahmida Riaz by Hafsa Zubair