4 days ago
‘The Missing Prayer': Personal tragedies in poems evoke painful histories of the Indian subcontinent
Ammar Aziz's debut book of poetry, The Missing Prayer, is a delightfully haunting original voice. While constantly turning the mundane into magical, this collection of poems offers an array of refreshingly impressionistic verses. With evocative, painterly language, Aziz delivers graphic details in totality: 'You pass by crushed houses / and hear them speak'. Be it Hoshiarpur 'with mango orchards/ where spring never died' or swaying sugarcane fields, 'in a soft breeze/ and men slowly sip tea/ squatting under the old banyan tree,' the stanzas resemble miniature paintings.
An intimate territory of trauma
With a deliberately deceptive simplicity, the words lie there – naked, inviting, waiting for the reader. One proceeds to touch these bare inked symbols only to realise their concealed mysterious contours metamorphosing into a very intimate territory of collective human tortures and traumas. Aziz tells us about a 'single mother' whom 'everyone wants thrown out/ of the neighbourhood.' The scenes are ordinary, at times inconsequential or even ugly; mere fragments of shockingly familiar sights and sounds fusing into a unified whole of philosophic ruminations that challenge the reader's refined sensibilities, allowing them to perceive the imperfections, jarring their view of the world as they know it.
In 'How can I seduce you?' the poet naively summons us: 'I can take you to the Temple Road/ where there's no temple anymore.' We are seduced by the poet to come out of our comfort zones only to discover that we are being deftly dislocated and placed in front of a whole plethora of ancestral prose which is both present and absent in its unpublished state. In fact, the whole collection is a series of such absences waiting to be embraced and accepted.
The backgrounds come alive, filled with a life of their own, they breathe with a Keatsian sensuousness in South Asian settings. 'Life', for example, comprehensively depicts a public hospital, 'wobbling with people ' where you see 'hues of decay', 'damp walls with fading texts' as well as hear the continuous beep of 'the discordant machines' while trying to ignore 'the pungent waft/ of disinfectant.' And amidst all this, a 'Grandmother struggles for each breath.'
The images are kinaesthetic; they move as to melt into extended metaphors and similes, creating an unusual but well-defined perspective in the stanzas. In 'Night Before Fajr', the night is a grieving woman from the beginning until the end. The myths are personified with loaded candour and grace; contrastingly, the hegemony of certain socio–religious practices is stated nonchalantly:
You were born in the mosque
Grandpa wanted to construct
Before he secretly gave up
On god
— from Elegy – for Ahmad Aziz
Death not only pervades in 'Elegy' or 'December', rather the poet mourns the demise of a heritage because neither the 'wooden sticks' nor the Mughal Empire could stop the ice cream 'from taking over kulfi.' Short and direct, 'Kulfi' becomes a multi-layered compound icon of a dying culture, the termination of a tradition, the transition in power dynamics, a nation breathing her last – a cumulative, colossal death. Then again, the poem 'Ways to Mourn' inquires about the muted credibility of a single 'unknown death' (a common man's), contrary to 'the ballads of the severed heads' in Karbala.
A celebration of Urdu
Just as death for Aziz is multi-faceted, so is the fractured femininity. The entire 'Raagmala' section is a tribute to the innate motherly instincts of courage and protection. Feminine bodies expand into landscapes and seascapes. Sacred rituals are performed to keep the sanctity of the patriarchal society intact, until a few pages ahead we witness these nightingales with scars 'disappearing into the stars'. The fragility of the female position is further enhanced by the ever-present soothing figure of the grandmother holding 'wooden prayer beads'. The tenderness hits the rough peaks of masculinity when the father transforms into a 'bat' and later into a 'harmonium' with a metal heart. Although this masculinity remains helpless in 'Moobs', and once again, Aziz unravels his awareness of the burdened human beings, with the sensitivity of a sincere artist.
Embossed on an archaic orient terrain, the personal tragedies of the speakers in the poems conjointly evoke the meta-structure imbibing polytrophic histories of the subcontinent, sometimes going beyond the borders, to raise questions of identity with subdued cynicism. 'War on Terror' documents details of a day in an ordinary Pashtun's life. One marvels at the choice of a flat tone employed for the silent mockery of the established notions in 'When they spot a Muslim'. The poet expertly presents a panoramic field of vision, like a moving camera capturing modernity's prejudice against religious archetypes.
Aziz's major contribution to the collection is his humble but confident celebration of the Urdu language. The way he establishes the edifice of Urdu, then simultaneously dismantles it to release its sweet nectar 'chaashni' on the pages, is refreshing. The lover's dilemma in the poem, 'Making Love in Urdu', is quite uniqu,e for he helplessly asks:
'You want me to talk dirty
but how does one do that
in Urdu?'
For clarification, he declares without doubt that Urdu is the 'language of revered forms' which swims in 'the holy waters/ of syllables'. In the culinary terms, Aziz equals the said language to the 'milk delicacy' infused with exotic spices like saffron and cardamom while posing a question for the beloved, 'How well do you speak Urdu, my love? The juxtaposition of 'milk' in the beginning of the poem and blood is an intriguing premise in the concluding lines, as it jolts the reader out of their beauty sleep, demanding them to face a disturbing reality, the paths of which can only be traced through Urdu. The language breaks its barriers, suddenly swelling out of its allotted space, travelling across time zones, critically gauging the old and the new narratives.
Urdu language is home to the very contemporary story of a mother and her son, where he cries in despair, 'My mother uses AI to write me a letter'. Again, Aziz's sage discernment and foreshadowing of the devastatingly sad as well as probable future consequences of the technological advancement deeply rooted in the displacement of mother tongue both by humans as well as the machines, is striking. The dirge for the dying language ends in lamentations:
'I feel unmoored,
orphan without her Urdu,
homeless without her typos.'
Language goes beyond words – it is nurtured by the secret rebellion of 'the fragrant folded prayer mat' that belongs to a white haired Muslim whose beard is 'partially coloured/ by henna.' Language is perfected by these conquering silences of the suppressed.
Language is the sacred marrying the profane:
' Andaam–e–nihaani,
Uzu–e–tanasul
Shed off their veils
Yet don't seem naked.'
Language is the long-lost pleasure of childhood in the lyrical reminiscence 'My white lover asks about my childhood games'. Language is the pain – transmitting the shared experience of our colonised collective past.
Taking the lore of love making further, Aziz pays homage to the masters of the craft. He captures the glorious act of seduction in 'How can I seduce you?' in continuation of the traditional playfulness of the same subject matter in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet, 'How Do I Love Thee?' Yet we find the contextual echelon quite South Asian, the voice of the speaker alluring the loved one by telling the tales of 'sadhus' and 'a dying peepal tree.' On the other hand, in the same section, 'Mortality', 'Lust', 'The shape of the Earth' and 'Hollow Earth' are echoes of Donne's love poems in which marks of Aziz's proficiency are unequivocal. He talks about the macrocosm spurring events of significant magnitude and then hastens to embrace the renowned custom of Urdu poets delineating details of the bewitching bodily features of the beloved, 'the galaxy within her eyes glistens/ yet seems so distant'.
The book concludes with an epic journey of a brown man who is stalking 'the virgin', following her when she initiates her stroll, '…ignoring the drainpipes/ weeping sewage like suppurating skin'. In this longish poem, 'The brown man's ballad of the virgin', we find this virgin, an enigmatic entity encompassing all above and beyond. She is not a stereotypical woman but a deity of massive dimensions, always escaping, always a step ahead. She transforms into a formidable force whose silence is analogous to an 'oracle'. In each part of the poem, she manages to fascinate the speaker with her mystery. Her pregnancy, along with her blood-drenched legs, parallels the psychosis of a subjugated nation. She remains an elusive existence, successfully slipping out of the pages of history demonstrated by men. She refuses to be defined, thus, the speaker in the poem admits in an exasperated tone: 'How can you ever know/ who the virgin is?'
In a terse, descriptive poem, 'When my dog writes a poem', Aziz catches us off guard, stating his dog's instinctive behaviour, battling against his own, and what remains behind is the age-old predicament, an artist's search for ever-evading perfection:
'When he chases the ball,
his paws carve verses into mud,
each imprint deep, certain,
free of revision,
while I spill ink,
chasing
what always escapes me.'
Despite these bouts of self-doubt, Aziz has composed a collection of verses that work on multiple levels. He converses like a madman in a trance, coordinating odd bits and pieces of a lingua franca interlaced with the Pakistani idiom. It can safely be claimed that he is a faithful young offspring of Pakistan's pioneering English poets Taufiq Rafat and Daud Kamal. His poetry urges the mind to understand the curious disappearance of 'the green prayer mat/ with its embroidered mosque' that we all lost at some point in our lives.
The Missing Prayer is a tell-tale rhythmic recital of the losses, the voids, the gaps and the simplest of the tiny things that we miss but then the poet himself avows, 'yet something remains' – perhaps to make the survival possible?
The book is a beaded rosary of a rare kind; in each threaded bead, we see our broken blasphemous selves reflected, clinging to the gods we construe out of the chaos, as we keep holding this holy string of prayer beads in awe, in reverence.
Mariya Anum works as an Assistant Professor of English Literature. She has a penchant for deconstructing and understanding unconventional English poetry, especially one that is written by the poets of the Indian subcontinent.
The Missing Prayer, Ammar Aziz, Red River Press.
