A tribute to Faiz Ahmed Faiz: The fiery conscience of our times

Faiz Ahmed Faiz - poet, teacher, editor, freedom- fighter, dramatist, critic, progressive writer and Lenin Peace Prize recipient - is one of the greatest poets of the Indian subcontinent. He was no mere "dreamer of dreams".

Great poets like Faiz are warriors and act as the conscience of their times. Countries have frontiers but the war against slavery and exploitation has no frontier. Faiz understood that a society without meaningful poetry is a society in the last legs of its wretched existence, a society bereft of dreams and thus a society bereft of hope.

He espoused the cause of freedom in Pakistan, and for the peoples of the world. He ranks with poets like Pablo Neruda, Naz?m Hikmet and Louis Aragon. His poetry, rich with the classical blood of Ghalib and Iqbal acquired a characteristic hue and he excelled in both the nazm and ghazal forms, blazing a trail of love and revolution.

At the hands of an artistic rebel like Faiz, even surrealism proved to be a weapon in the historical advance of the proletariat. Faiz was traditional in the sense that he was inspired by the Sufi tradition of dissent and was progressive in the sense that he was an avowed Marxist.

Faiz was born to a landed, educated family in Sialkot of pre-Partition Punjab on February 13, 1911. He became one of Pakistan's most prominent and beloved poets of all time, next only to the legendary Iqbal.

Even those who were critical of his progressive social and political beliefs could not deny him that position, although they always qualified their praise of him by regretting that such a good man should have fallen among the communists.

Faiz had a fascinating life from the very beginning - his education included religious studies from the age of four when he began memorising the Quran. He attended the Scotch Mission High School; while at the same time he learnt Persian and Arabic. He later taught as a lecturer in Amritsar and then enrolled in the army and served for five years. He was a keen student of various traditions of classical poetry in Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, and English among others.

He realised at an early age that it was the content and not the form which was basic in the art of poetry, that originality had little to do with formal experimentation and was primarily a matter of a profound understanding of human existence in its totality and wholeness.

His literary studies laid the foundation for him to construct a modern Urdu verse that took on larger social and political issues of his times while still retaining the polished style and diction of the ghazal.

An uncompromising poet of both romantic and patriotic love, Faiz was also a political figure and a very public writer, taking on the central issues of his time both inside and outside his poetry. Faiz consciously wrote poetry that reflected the concerns of the masses: oppression, injustice, exploitation, poverty, suffering of ordinary people and women.

Those issues still persist today, in even more acute forms, thus his message continues to be relevant to contemporary times. Those who attempted to put labels on him didn't understand the essence of his poetry. Or maybe labels were used to cover up their superficial understanding of these issues. His work is replete with religious symbolism but his understanding of religion was more in line with Sufi thought and not the obscurantist interpretations advanced by religious scholars.

References to the beloved (which in Sufi is always the Creator) are most vital. He once said, "The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved." His life philosophy was one of inclusivity, collectiveness, love for all beings and no anger or aggression. He didn't resent even those who imprisoned him, maligned him and wanted him dead or silent. All of these are reflections of Sufi beliefs.

Faiz was not only a communist, but also an outspoken unbeliever as well. As a Marxist Faiz rejected the notion of "art for art's sake". Referring to the poet Keats's famous lines that beauty is love and love is beauty and a beautiful object is an eternal source of joy, Faiz says that, notwithstanding what Keats may have felt, beauty can only be eternal when it is creative, when it inspires the onlooker's enthusiasm, thought and action with promoting more beauty

Faiz has been described as a "committed" poet who used his simple verse to probe not only beauty and love, but also humanism and justice. His imprisonment was evident in more than his two collections of poems written during his political detention.

Aside from being a poet, Faiz was a journalist, songwriter, and activist. He is the voice of conscience of the suffering humanity of our times. A voice which is a song as well as a challenge, which has a burning faith and cries out against the agony of its era, a constant endeavor and the thunder of the revolution, as well as the sweet recital of love and beauty. This had particularly affected the colonial economy of India. Thus, according to Faiz:

"My heart repents neither this love nor the other, / My heart is spotted with every kind of sorrow, /Except the mark of repentance."

Faiz is a poet of beauty and love. His message is the reign of beauty and love in the country. The passion for enjoying the beauty of life, his deep attachment to love of self and the agony of the world, his love of humanity, his patriotism, his passion for revolution, his sense of justice, are all metaphors of the agony of love. That agony of love which is the soul of his imagination and feeling, on account of which he illuminates the beauty of both worlds with the desolation of his heart.

Faiz believed that poetry is not just seeing, it is also struggle and in this struggle, one's participation according to one's ability is not only a demand of life, it is also a demand of art.

Faiz's philosophy of love is derived from his philosophy of beauty. He was very fond of the verse of Hafiz Shirazi in which the poet considers love to be of everlasting reality. The repetition of this verse is to be found in Faiz's poetry. Faiz prays:

"Let us too lift our hands, /We who do not remember the customary prayer, /We who do not remember any idol or God except love."

This agony of love is not only a part of the human condition but it is a relationship which extends from one end of the world to another.

Faiz's love for humanity is free from the prejudices of race, colour or nationality. The new literature of protest suggests a radical change and, in the words of Faiz, it confers on us the power of "forcefully spurning the hand of the killer". It does not accept defeat because it is convinced that darkness should and must end. Faiz was a nominee for the Nobel Prize and in 1963 was the first Asian poet to win the Lenin Peace Prize.

Iqbal had sung poems of glory to the fact of revolution and given out a clarion call to the people to rise up against the master-classes and tyrants.

Faiz, having joined the people in their rebellion, and having adopted the collective cause as a poet of the revolution, made the transformation of the individual human being and his passage through the infinite variety of situations and moods in this process, the subject of his poetry. He is concerned, above all, with the experience of the individual human soul in the long and arduous journey of revolutionary struggle. And yet love is the leit motif of his poetry.

Faiz is one of the great lyricists who seems, from one point of view, to have sung of nothing with greater passion than love.

Faiz's acceptance speech when he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, which appears as a brief preface to his collection Dast-i-tah-i-Sang (Hand under the Rock) is a great piece of humanist literature:

"Human ingenuity, science and industry have made it possible to provide each one of us everything we need to be comfortable provided these boundless treasures of nature and production are not declared the property of a greedy few but are used for the benefit of all of humanity… However, this is only possible if the foundations of human society are based not on greed, exploitation and ownership but on justice, equality, freedom and the welfare of everyone... I believe that humanity which has never been defeated by its enemies will, after all, be successful; at long last, instead of wars, hatred and cruelty, the foundation of humankind will rest on the message of the great Persian poet Hafez Shiraz: 'Every foundation you see is faulty, except that of Love, which is faultless."