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    The Far Thing

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    The Far Thing

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    The Far Thing

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    of 73
    Gor gle Google nov 18 1998 Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0X2 60? Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press ‘© Introduction, Adrian A. Husain © Oxford University Press, 1997 All right reserved. No part of this publication may be a: atad Ee cvesieeal ee er menantasd, eee rie tr cara ‘whew the prior fermion in ursing of Cxiord Unheray Fre. ‘This book in sold subject to the condition that it shall mot, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or Sans ks AGATA occu aie ieee eee uber than that in whoch it b publiahed and withow! = similar condition lincheding this condition being imposed on the wubarquent purchaser ISBN 0 19 577780 8 ‘Some of these poems were firs published in Word/ail, Oxford University Press, Karachi, 1975. Acknowledgement are also due to Excrunter, London and The News, Adrian A. Husain Printed in Pakistan at Mueid Packages, Karachi. Published by Ameena Saiyid, Oxford University Press Town, Sharae Faisal P.O, Box 13033, Karachi-75350, Pakio Gor gic THE FAR THING MAKI KUREISHI Karachi Oxford University Press Oxford New York Delhi 1997 Google Iq was my mother's greatest wish to see her poems in print during her lifetime. Sadly, she died whilst the idea for this project was still in its infancy. This collection would not have been possible, therefore, without the dedication and efforts of a number of people. Thanks are due, firstly to Ameena Saiyid, Managing Director, OUP, for undertaking this project, to Tyaba Habib, Editor, OUP, who showed great personal interest in compiling all the material included in this volume in a form suitable for publication, and to Anthony Thwaite for his appreciative remarks. And, last but not least, to Adrian A. Husain, a long- standing friend and colleague, whose constant support produce much of her best work, who after her death edited and selected the poems included in this volume, and whose masterful introduction to the poems and the poet is the first work of its kind ever to be undertaken. Shireen Z. Haroun Google INTRODUCTION Adrian A. Husain After a distinguished career as an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Karachi University, and before she could add to the quite extraordinary poems she had composed over the years, Maki Kureishi, in her sixties, passed away in the wake of a short illness in the later part of 1995, Althought the idea of a volume devoted exclusively to her verse had certainly been floated by Oxford University Press earlier in the year, and she had seemed elated at the prospect, it is sad and at the same time, obviously, ironic that she was unable to see this lifelong dream realized. Since I was not just a close friend of hers, but also a fellow- poet who shared her poems with her, in the shape of rough drafts as well as finished products, it fell to my lot to select her poems, arrange them in some semblance of a coherent ‘order’ and write an introduction to them. This is a privilege I greatly value if only because I can think of no more fitting a way of paying my own personal tribute to her memory. Maki Kureishi, primarily an academic who had excelled at Middle English, was a latecomer to the creative scene, having begun to write poetry seriously only when she was over thirty. However, original and authentic from the outset, her work drew praise from the relevant quarters. Poets Taufiq Rafat and Kaleem Omar were both discerning enough to recognize the precise timbre of this new voice and quick to respond with encouragement coupled with constructive criticism, in short, to provide the support Google system necessary for its survival in an essentially hostile climate. Interaction between the three poets was to prove fruitful—and fateful—for Pakistani poetry in English as a whole, It led, eventually, to the one literary event of ‘consequence in this sphere in many years: the publication of Wordfall (Oxford University Press, Karachi, 1975), an anthology which ambitiously brought together work by these three entirely divergent poets, rescuing Pakistani ee of introducing the poetry of Maki RA e ie cand rea can this country. I think it can be said here, without the slightest hint of hyperbole and regardless of altogether arbitrary considerations of quantity, that, on the strength of the handful of poems in Wordjall by her alone, Maki Kureishi, the first woman poct in English of distinction in Pakistan, was able to secure for herself an unassailable position as prima inter pares. Before attempting a brief discussion of Kureishi’s poetry (which is the main purpose of the present preamble), I will look at some of the difficulties criticism of Pakistani poetry in English inevitably finds itself up against. First of all, Pakistani literature or, at least, poetry in English, exists on the margins of creative writing in the vernacular, It leads, at most, an unofficial existence as a rather curious accretion or excrescence of the Raj, permitted though not taken seriously, elitist but only unimportantly so. This has necessarily inhibited the emergence of anything like a tradition or the development of a perspective or context against which the writing of such poetry as a dynamics could come about, The result is before us: bleak ‘roots' poctry,' grey indeterminacies, spasmodic poetic exercises governed by impulses seldom more than half-awakened to themselves or, as in the case of a Maki Kurcishi (and very "By this | mean ethnocentric poetry or, in effect, poctry that has acquiesced in itself aa a site of the conceptual Lacanian/Althumerian capture of the subject by the colonial gare. vi few others), a merely felicitous accident. Consequently, the critic, without the benefit of any of the touchstones a stable and in fact vital poetic backdrop would normally afford, is Jeft to steer an uneasy course, intent on his subject in vacuo or obliged to locate it, a trifle gratuitously, in relation to mainstream Western writing. Born a Parsee, married to a Muslim and convent school and American college (Smith, class of 1950) educated, Kureishi brought to her writing a cultural fecundity and uniqueness of perception such as we will seek in vain in the poetic realm in Pakistan. Postcolonial, her poetry does not, however, stylistically or thematically, reflect the typical problems of mainly spatial identity by which much post- colonial writing of the subcontinent has been plagued. Kittens, a pocm for which Kurcishi is, perhaps, best known, having first appeared in print in Word/all, seems to be the exception to this? I, for one, am not convinced, though, that the poem shows Kureishi contending, as Dr Tariq Rahman suggests, with a ‘loss of social identity’? Nor is it, for me, one of her more perfect poems. It is, no doubt, startlingly matter-of-fact in its treatment of its theme: the problem of the feline population explosion, and the two. rather distasteful solutions to it available, one indigenous, the other broadly occidental: There are too many kittens. . My retains mxy; ‘Take them to a baraar... I they survive the dogs, they will starve gently... The European thing w do is drown them... "The only other ‘period’ poem by Kureishi (ome more explicitly so than Kittens) seems to be Christmas Letter to My Sister, Wordjall, op. cit *Dr Tariq Rahman, A Mistery of Pakistani Liuwarare im Engiith, Vanguard Books, Lahore, 1991, p. 1160. vu But the poem is, at the same time, a little too explicit in its intent and rigidily paradigmatic to be entirely successful. Then, at the end—‘Snagged/by two cultures, which/shall I choose?"—too much of an attitude has been struck, it has been declared in no uncertain terms that what the poet is faced with is an impossible (‘cultural’) choice, which has the somewhat unfortunate effect of shutting out the reader, or of disallowing, by pre-empting, empathy. So while the poem undoubtedly possesses considerable power, this is more by way of rhetoric than poctry. Moreover, it would appear that any suggestion of a cultural ‘conflict’ in Kittens is merely artificial, being the result of a theatrical parti pris, and no more. The ‘dilemma® is purely hypothetical since the kittens of the poem are home and dry from the start and (if the testimony of an extra-poetic grapevine be allowed) at no risk whatever at the hands of the poet's persona. What, then—given that we are confronted here with a thematic red herring—is the theme of this poem? In a word, violence. The jouissance of Kureishi ip the face of the two varieties of violence on offer, especially the Western, is noteworthy: The European thing to do is drown them. Warm water is advised to lessen the shock. They are so email in takes ‘only a minute. Hold them down and wr your head away.. They are blind and will never know you did this... We experience the same frisson as Kureishi, we are simulta- neusly fascinated and repelled along with her, the terrible, haunting irony of “They are blind and will never know/you did this...", the alibi of the instant, genocidal ‘European’ solution, not lost on us, Kittens compels and disturbs even if it is marred, to some extent, by a stilted ending. viii Violence is one of the leitmotifs of Kureishi's poetry. How, and why, did this violence come into being? Understanding the peculiar nature of Kureishi’'s ‘I’ might help answer this question, besides allowing us to formulate a possible approach to her poetry. We can, I believe, glimpse the genesis of this ‘I’, in classic Lacanian fashion, in two stark, arresting poems, Arthritic Hands and Cripple Kureishi had the misfortune of living with an implacable condition of rheumatoid arthritis which involved her whole body. Thus, the two poems are, in a way, self-portraits, depictions of the violence done by disease to Kureishi: a violence perpetrated, in one case, on her hands and, in the other, through the mediation of an cighteen-year old double, on her entire person, Yet the effects of this violence are staged in so devastatingly detached, objective and, in fact, heuristic a manner as to suggest that, more than just self-portraits, these poems actually represent living instants of self-recognition or (in Lacan's words) objectification ‘in the dialectic of identification with the other’.* Consider Arthritic Hands ‘One is rolted into a fist permanently... The left, stretched out full length, is empty... So I lodge betworn ‘one that may not accept (even grace, and the other that lets nothing escape. Kurecishi’s ‘I’ is seen to occur interstitially here, in the intervallic space between her disabled hands—hands which are hers and yet other—constituted by a strange disconcertedness or dismay, The ‘I’, disguised as ‘we’, in “ Ecrite—A Selection, wanwated by Alan Sheridan, Tavistock Publications, . Paris, 1977, p. 2. Cripple is made up of similar elemenw, having ‘mistakenly" slipped on to the scene of alienness or otherness: cathe fine map of her face misleads. Beyond it no one ventures. Eyes turn back embarrassad by a wrong address, Her body is a country uprooted by carthquake. A landscape of stumps... Nagged by an odd discomfort we resolve not to visit her again. The poems, reflecting as they do the poet's person as violated object on display, bring to mind a Western poet, placed in an analogous situation if afflicted differently: ‘Sybia Plath. The histrionics and flamboyance of Plath are a far cry from the toned energy of Kureishi, but there is none the less an affinity between the two poets. Lady Lazarus serves to illustrate this, It is a poem which enacts, fairly elaborately, and in the terms of theatre proper (in this case burlesque), the profound dismay, even discomfiture, of the suicidal ‘I’ forcibly restored to being: othe peanut

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