Daily Times

Proemistry is the grand total of prose, poetry, media and history. I hope there must be somewhere a concept of graphological metaphor to analyse proems produced by a really original voice from Pakistan. Dr Ghulam Murtaza Aatir, a renowned professor of English Literature at GCUF, has produced a new book of proemistry titled Straggling through Fire. There is a marginal line in the right which is not just a marker of space for the community of readers to add whatever they want to the lines of proems but it figuratively becomes the main concern of the poet too. We have margin in the content because proems deal with the weak and downtrodden. Margin is in form which gives space to readers to add comments, cries, laughters and slogans. Proemistry is scriptible i.e. writerly kind of literature instead of lisible ie readerly one in Berthesian terms. Hence, proemistry is a going concern of the community of the poet and readers that has the potential to metamorphose into the worldview of the whole community over a period of time. Proemistry will take up the chronotopes of the community and turn them into a single grand somatope or a small number of somatopes printed on the embodiments of victims presented in proems or even on proems imprinted on the body of book. He writes:

The line that oozing carves on your skin

Is a proem.

The somatope will function as the worldview of the community.

They say when novelty becomes the commodity of the old, the old – the past – becomes the novel commodity. So, the focus of the poet is on the collective forgetfulness of our history. He has employed tri-paradigmatic discourse of genre-bending postmodern poems, media and history to keep wounds, the victimiser and the victim fresh in the mind of readers. The poems cannot be bounded by any limits of literary or critical canons of the West. Margin is the concern of proemistry and all the language games in this arena would be played by ‘our’ rules. Margin does not show the local myopic interests; rather it is a libratory force which puts the Self and the Other on the same footing and paves the way for dialogism between cultures on the basis of equity. The poems “Dark They were and Golden Eyed” and “Explanation” are dialogic, heteroglossic and interdiscursive. The former raises a question:

Bradbury, can you name the taste

When your elastic imagination gorges

The reversal of the positions of

Those who make atom bombs

And those whom atom bombs unmake?

The latter proem questions the popular definition of democracy given by Lincoln. The poet is confused whether the definition asserts the hegemony of America on people of other nations.

The latter proem questions the popular definition of democracy given by Lincoln. The poet is confused whether the definition asserts the hegemony of America on people of other nations

Real democracy, on the other hand, is not about institutions or infrastructure. It is about the voice and the ‘say’ of the masses. The readers as a community of participants – not the subjects – have their say in the process poems that carry creativity and criticism side by side in them. Proems question the traditional idea of space for the reader in the poem itself. In “What is a Proem?” which is a postmodern process poem, he writes:

The look that is burdened

With one hundred and one unanswered questions

Is a proem.

The shriek that is a response

To one hundred and one unanswered questions

Is a proem.

Proemistry cannot be bound by the restrictions of genre of the English canon as given to the Pakistani poet as Dr Ghulam Murtaza by the English tradition. Proems, on the contrary, are like broken circles that include the community members and exclude the others but have the ability to give space to others who faced the similar trauma such as Kashmiris and Palestinians. These rings have the ability to make strengthening chains. He addresses Malala and reprimands her for maintaining silence on the issue of Palestinians despite the fact that she can have a heavy-weight stance:

If Rushdie’s freedom of expression

Is an issue worth a book,

Proportionately then,

Palestinian infants and toddlers,

Young and old,

Men and women

Are worth an epic!

In his poems, Irony and playfulness are at work in the poems that directly deal with man. The poem “How to Write an Award Winning Piece of Pakistani Fiction” deals with the filthy ways through which people garner fame in the field of writing. An award winning piece of writing should humiliate a cleric in some way or the other; or it should paint a bleak picture of Pakistan in a disgraceful way. Here we can see that margin is present in the process through which a person, who does not use one of these winning strategies, loses and is marginalized. Dr Ghulam Murtaza ironically writes:

Islam somehow or the other

Should be downplayed.

Media or perhaps social media is a great democratic tool in the hands of common people instead of corporate entities. It gives voice to the weak and the oppressed and subverts elitism. The case in point is the video message by a Palestinian girl Mayssam. The margin is in the product of poem. Mayssam’s voice has been eternalized by the poem “Assurance” in these words:

Mayssam,

This is a proem

To reinforce your message.

But, can we all save you?

No. Alas!

In these proems, personal angst intermingles with political discontentment in many ways. Perhaps, proems prove a non-cliché: we learn from history that we cannot unlearn history. The poem “One Bhutto for Sale” is a sharp critique of history indeed:

And I have conceived two babies today

And I have named both of them Bhuttos

And one Bhutto is for sale

As shows my placard.

My father died without

Roti, Kapra aur Makaan.

Similarly, Malala’s anti-Pakistan statements have been compared with those given by Altaf Hussain. Proemistry is by no means slavish mimicry of and catch-up to the Western canon. It has carved its own path and is not the momentary rather a fairly prolonged stay against the spiritual confusion – the poem “Confusion” is epitome of it – that life in Pakistan has. The poet wants to meet God and asks Him in which language he should pray to him. All national politics has a plot to play in this very personal matter.

Perhaps the law of the jungle is the vogue of the day in which might of the powerful is the only right thing. Jungle is the symbol of society in which zoo is an institution of institutions, a fully symbolic representative microcosm for the society. The book is ‘peopled’ by tigers, leopards, bison, cranes, crows and gemsbok. Here mythmaking is at work in connection with the margin where the weak are downtrodden by various ways.

After the arrival of Dr Ghulam Murtaza’s proemistry, our literary scenario of poetry has entered a postmodern or rather neo-modern phase. Not only is the margin present in the form, content, process and product but also we have such experimentation with language and form as the neologism ‘animanism’ or we have an MCQS test; a letter; or a sonnet made up of dates as forms of proems. Each date has a wound hidden in it which is saved from the malady of collective amnesia by these proems. The poem “An Unpoetic Sonnet” is set in deviant stanzas of three, seven and nine lines and a parenthetic of six lines at the end. The poem is perhaps a performative asking ‘Whose slave am I?’ Interaction of media and history may be best observed in the poem “I won’t Let You Die as a News Item!” which depicts the children killed on December 16, 2014 hence, proemistry! The book makes a rewarding read and one is mesmerized by the nexus of affect and reason produced by these poems in one’s mind. Anatol Lieven once commented that Pakistan can only be understood if its history is written by the combined efforts of a poet’s imagination and a historian’s acumen. The truth you have before you in the form of Straggling through Fire!

The writer is a professor and can be reached at smahmoodsms@gmail.com