Freedom Fighter Abid Anwar is a scientist now. His research into earth science and the invention of a revolutionary formula that enables the poor farmer to test his own soil practically at no cost made him famous. For this commendable job—till then unknown to this world—he won the President’s Medal in 1979. Besides, he has produced a number of volumes on agricultural research.
But I have known Abid as a passionate and sensitive poet. He has been writing copiously in most of the national dailies and periodicals since the early seventies. Moreover, his essays in criticism and literary reviews have earned attention of the readers. However, occasionally perhaps, I took a little advantage of being senior to him and often reproachingly disapproved of the use of a phrase here and a metaphor there in his poems—which I will do when he reads them out to me expecting possible suggestions for improvement. In February last, he presented me with a copy of his first collection of poems inscribing the following words:
“To you, my mentor who constantly encourage as well as upbraid me in the cultivation of my muse.”
In this anthology titled Protibimber Momi, meaning mummified reflection, he mentions [in the Flap] that a poet of today will tomorrow be a poet of yesterday when he will address the future generations. Hence, the task of a poet belonging to any age should be to record the essence of events and values of his time and to hand it on to the continuity of time. “Some poets”, he says, “do it in the surprising dexterity of the ancient Egyptian chemists” (who embalmed dried up human bodies and preserved them inside the pyramids in the desert of Gaza). As today’s thoughts, preserved in the eternity of time, will appeal to the sensibility of the readers of tomorrow, so the poetry of the present too will whisper to the posterity. The prefatory note itself is a voice of conviction: unless one is self-confident enough about one’s creative ability, one cannot possibly speak so emphatically.
Well, this may not be misconstrued as mere polemics and the reason is not far to seek why Abid takes it for certain that his verses could occupy an assured niche and, thus, achieve perpetuity. In these forty-four pieces, including three sonnets, we discover the agony, anguish, and commitment of a socially alert poet deeply concerned about the milieu. Wails and sighs of the have-nots, queer contradiction of life, and the grotesquely vulgar coexistence of the affluent and the destitute feature most of these poems, the chief attraction of which lies in their imagery and rhythm. One finds in these rhythmed verses an assemblage of meticulously chosen words. And in so doing he aspires to attain the condition of sculpture. Maybe, he is influenced by Oscar Wilde who spent much time working on each and every word and sentence.
Like all living beings and animate objects, man is very much within the cosmic scheme inevitably destined to death. Though brief and powerless is man’s life, yet he is perennially inhaling the venomous breath of upas leaves. Vices and evils corrode his torpid journey to eternity. Zoia’s characters in Teressa and Hemingway’s old man—like the shark-eaten skeleton of the giant fish—suffer the similar misery as do the helpless soldiers of Remarck crying in the bombarded pits on the battle front. Their fate is linked by a common bond of disadvantage. Through ages, great poets and thinkers have registered their voices in favour of the down-trodden, distressed people and listened to the ‘still and sad music of humanity’. Likewise, in a number of poems, we find Abid beside the thatches of the unsung.
But in so doing, invariably in the first person, he puts his imprint of individuality because he has seen the ultimate moments of life as well as annihilation from a close range. First-hand experience of mass destruction, genocide, terribly desperate armed retaliation, phoenix-like birds of his homeland out of a blood bath and the subsequent crises and disillusionment intensely affected him. And without being crude, he gives expression to his feelings in a subtle and sophisticated manner. This artistic distance, thus, makes some of his poems interesting.
The poet abhors the hypocrite in any form when he finds his fellow folks in large numbers, ‘disregarding the presence of a sobbing rustic belle, historically run amok after a white woman (ke jeno bolchhe). In the same breath, he puts himself under strict scrutiny when he says that he too is a party to this boisterous carousal of the sinners at which the woman in the frame of Picasso’s Guernica shudders (Paapi).
In Grash, he tries to reconcile with the unacceptable and so-called values of his time shrugging off the “disease of the century—the abiding influence of Neruda and Picasso.” But he lamentably fails to go by the dictates of cowardice, ills, and evil forces. In Nandantatwa, his critical look at the state of art and aesthetics is apparent. He lashes at a poet who, “like a mouse, moves around the dustbin in search of leftovers.”
In Tagore’s Universe Now—a fine example of typographical [calligraphic] poem, Abid’s tormented psyche looks for pristine glories of his country. But his beloved land has now reduced itself to a famished destitute woman “like a garrulous peevish and fretful elderly witch” who is short-tempered. Similar feeling permeates through the lines—often interspersed with images and metaphors—of the poems titled Kanabok Upakshyan, Haripado’r Dinratri, and Kabalita Manchitray. But some of the pieces are loaded with an abundance of extended metaphors thereby making them somewhat obscure. However, I look forward to having more from a very promising poet of the seventies.
Illustration : Rajat
