Daily Times

“The contemplation of the past involves an evocative presence of a surreal present – you are but transformed into re-living a time that simply does not exist anymore.” This is how Fatima Ijaz begins the preface of her book, “The Shade of Longing and Other Poems”. There is indeed a sense of submission to reality and the admiration of life one lives that is evident – and often hidden in plain sight – in Fatima’s poetry. Fatima recounts and recollects pain from the years gone by and gives meaning to her emotions. She musters the courage to explain the sadness that envelopes her. She narrates in her words the grief we experience in our present that is connected to the events from our past. She divides the book into various sections. ‘Memory Book I’ takes the readers to an outlawed place. She continues to scratch through the memories and reflect on the life that once was in ‘Memory Book II’.

In the section, ‘Barzarkh’, she tells the story of an eternal traveller who – as she describes as, “live in a shadowy limbo where you may live but never belong.” During this time, as Fatima shares, “you have experienced an invocation of ghosts, forbidden and timeless realms, and endless recurrence that is true and untrue at the same moment. This changes the person, turning them into a ‘Skeptic, which is the next chapter. The final chapter, ‘Leave-Taking”, refers to the moments in life when one forgoes the old and embraces the new.

The book comprises of memories – a longing to return to the moment in the past and the urge to mend a broken heart. Fatima’s words bring hope to the teary eyes as they envision a better tomorrow – one where happiness reigns supreme. On finds a merger of optimism and pessimism in Fatima’s words. She embraces the good and fights against the bad; she finds a common ground where good and bad remain present but we must choose and act wisely in selecting the side we wish to live with.

To be honest, one needs a calm mind to understand Fatima’s poetry. They are a combination of a complex set of emotions and feelings, metaphors and symbols. Her poems reveal her command over a rich vocabulary and use it to explore the hidden labyrinths of emotions.

She compels readers to contemplate over life. In her verses, we find a restlessness of the soul, the urge to fortify relations, and the ambition to forget the past. She explores the connection between dreams and reality and the desire for one to know themselves – with truth and honesty. There are silent memories that she traces to the mind and the heart and there are moments when emotions cannot be described but are only felt. Most of her poems are written with the first-person narrative that puts the readers in the middle of the narrative. It is a collage of Fatima’s sentiments, memories, experiences, and hopes, that combine to form a tapestry of emotions. Fatima studied Liberal Arts and completed her Masters in English Linguistics from the USA. She is a contributing editor to The Pandemonium Journal and was a reader at the Karachi Literature Festival.

The writer is an independent researcher, author and columnist. He can be reached at omariftikhar@hotmail.com and Tweets at @omariftikhar