Hasan Mujtaba is a Pakistani poet and
journalist living in America in exile, as his work on the persecution
of Hindus in Sindh earned him the wrath of his country's government.
His poetry collection Koel Sheher Ki Katha has been recently
released, with a foreword by journalist and novelist Mohammad Hanif.
He spoke to The Sunflower Collective's Abhimanyu Singh at length
about his work, his experience of exile, his love for Allen
Ginsberg's poetry, and the murder of Sabeen Mahmud, his friend, among
other things. Here are the edited excepts :
Source : wire.in
AS: Could you tell us the exact
circumstances in which you decided to go into exile in the US? It
appears that you were there to receive a prestigious award following
which you decided to stay back?
HM: State and non-state actors were
after my blood because of my journalistic work. I was an
anti-military establishment journalist, poet and writer, and was also
a nonconformist Sindhi, and openly bisexual in today’s Islamic
Republic of Pakistan which I call as Intelligence Republic of
Ghaibistan (the land of the disappeared). The last assignment I was
doing as a journalist in Pakistan was on the state of Hindus in Sindh
in the backdrop of India-Pakistan relations. So, in the words of the
poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz,"Every road that goes from here
leads to the slaughter house." To escape death threats owing to my
published work, I wanted to flee the country and take refuge
anywhere in the world that respected human rights and freedom of
expression. Invitation from the US to receive my Excellence in
International Journalism Award from the School of Advanced
International Studies of Johns Hopkins University came out of blue. I
took it as a life jacket. America proved to be a promised land for my
safety and freedom.
AS: Exile seems to play an important
role in your poetic worldview. Could you elaborate on what it is that
exile does to a poet? Have you come to terms with it, as the poem in
the video seems to suggest?
HM: I did not come to America as an
economic refugee but as a political exile. Pull and push factors
between my country which I left behind and the new country where I
arrived would really play buzkushi with me. It ripped me off every
day and pieced me together in my dreams every night. That is why
most of the poetry I wrote here revolves around exile. I think any
poet and writer who has to say something which puts him into real
hot waters must have a country of exile. But this is the beauty of
America that it gives you a great opportunity for assimilation. Unlike your country, here you don’t have to look above your
shoulder. Or you lend your ear to your doorbell.It is the
rootlessness: walking between your country of origin and what Rushdie
calls the imagined homeland; your country of origin evaporates into
a metaphor.
AS: Do you intend to ever return?
What is it that you miss the most about Pakistan? Do you think the
murder of Sabeen Mahmud marked a new low?
HM: Well, I return every second or
third night in my dreams in my sleep. I have made America my home
but Sindh exists somewhere else. I want to return one day like
Gabriel Garcia Marquez returns in his ‘Clandestine in Chile’.
Or, only after my death, in the form of my ashes to be scattered onto
Sindhu, the river Indus. So far, I don’t intend to return. I will
return when the country really starts to respect human rights and
stops killing Sabeen Mehmuds. Her killing was a political but state
sponsored assassination which of course has sent the country into its
lowest. Everyone close to her knows well Sabeen was killed because
she hosted a seminar on Baluchistan. Talking on Baluchistan
differently than the official line of the State means inviting death
for yourself.Of course, I miss my friends, my parents who are ageing,
people and places I visited. I wish I could revisit them again. And
the people I fell in and made love with.
AS : The poem in the video pays an
ode to Allen Ginsberg. Tell us about your relationship with his work
and why do you think he remains relevant?
HM: I was in my late teens when I
was captivated by a single line of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl that I
read as a passing reference in a book that I had bought from a used
book cart in my city Hyderabad in Sindh. The line was: “I saw the
best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical
naked….”I was so amazed by the writings about Allen Ginsberg and
the Beat generation that I went to the local library of the erstwhile
American Center and got his collection of poetry Howl. Later, I was
fascinated by his Indian Journals and other works. It made me think
he was to India like Ravi Shankar was to America. He was, I thought,
up to building bridges between eastern philosophy with western
civilization, especially American sub-culture and literature. I
developed an image of America in mind that was in Allen Ginsberg’s
poetry. When I came to America, he was still alive. My friend Ifti
Nasim (who died in July 2011,alas, men of his ilk take centuries to
be born in Pakistani and Muslim societies; He was a poet, and a gay
rights activist in main stream LGBT movement in America) came to
America in mid 1970s and had a chance meeting with Allen Ginsberg. I
had then read him in American libraries and heard about him a lot
through Ifti. This was Allen Ginsberg who did not only change the
culture and every day slang of America but even influenced my
generation in the East or subcontinent of South Asia. I stayed
around Columbia University. I would hang out with my other exiled
friends like Zafaryab Ahmed and another in a famous bar called West
End near Columbia University, and in the Greenwich Village where
Allen Ginsberg and his comrades used to hang out. And with my
American sociologist friend Amy Donavan in the Greenwich Village.
There were other personalities like Edward Said I saw in Columbia and
Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn. Yet, it was a different
America. Different Greenwich Village. The world was different in
pre-September 2001 period, till terrorists attacked America. To me,
America meant poetry of Allen Ginsberg and New York. It is from the
stairs of the New York Public Library, right on the Fifth Avenue,
that I saw the Hare Rama Hare Krishna parade. And I saw a man towards
the end of the line in the parade looking like Allen Ginsberg. I did
relate that all to the giant American poet and his spiritual
connection to India, and to myself in America and back to Sindh to
the streets of Schwan and all. It unfolded to me like the opening of
floodgates of Deja vu sort of feelings, and thoughts . It really
swept me away from across the Atlantic to Sindh, from Hudson to
Sindhu and the sub-continent. I return with the poem dedicated to
Allen Ginsberg.
AS: Could you tell us a little about
your new collection? Who are the poets other than Ginsberg that inspire
you? What role does Sindh play in your poetry?
HM: “Koel Shahar Ki Katha” ( A
tale of cuckoo’s city) is a collection of Urdu and some Punjabi
poetry (as I write poetry in my native language Sindhi , Urdu,
Punjabi and little in English as well) consisting of poems I wrote
during my years of exile in New York. It has been published by Saanjh
Publishers, Lahore with a foreword by my friend and novelist Mohammed
Hanif. Though I have made America my home, Sindh is the center of
gravity of my poetry. It includes a poem about my exilic experience
in New York City though. My book begins with an ode to Allen
Ginsberg and ends on a poem against Mumbai attacks titled
“Zia-ul-Haq talking from his grave”. May be you will find it a
little different from the traditional and modern Urdu poetry. There
are some cuss words. There are curses against generals and
dictators. There is a poem against killing of children in the mosque
of Rawalpindi in the name of God. There is a poem on the
assassination of Benazir Bhutto; Benazir Bhutto of my poetry is
different than the Benazir I would love to criticize in my
journalistic writings. Of course, there are love poems based on the
theme of love for both man and woman, including my own favorite
poem written on missing a beloved, ‘That boy with the
name of Yosuif’. I have made my own kind of Sindh in America:
Sindh in exile. There is a poem in Punjabi on sale of the house of
Amrita Pritam that was I have heard razed to ground, with a plaza
to be built over its site. And there is a ‘song of missing
persons’, about the people who were made to disappear at the hands
of military in Pakistan: the Baluchs and the Sindhis. There was a
poem against Taliban which my publisher refrained to include in the
collection. Besides Allen Ginsberg, I am deeply influenced by the great Sufi and Sindhi poet Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, and, doyen of Sindhi poetry Shaikh Ayaz( Shaikh Ayaz would have been a Nobel Prize Laureate if he had found a translator befitting his poetry), Imdad Hussaini, Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, all classical masters Mir Taqi Mir, Ghalib to modern day Urdu poet Gulzar, Afzal Ahmed Syed, Fehmida Riaz, German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, American poets Silvia Plath, Charles Bukowski, Maya Angelou, and Punjabi poets great Sufi Bulleh Shah and today’s Najam Hussain Sayed, Kabir and Rumi and my own beloved friend and Sindhi poet Hasan Dars who died young; new promising voice Amar Sindhu is in the list of poets I have madly fallen in love with all my life.
AS : The Amhed episode involving the
clock shows America might be dealing with rampant Islamophobia. Does
it colour your everyday existence?
HM: This is an unfortunate incident but
Ahmed is lucky he wasn’t a Sindhi, a Hindu, and living in Sindh
under Pakistan. I know a Hindu engineer who tried to invent an
electronic gadget was harassed and hounded by the military spies.
Another brilliant engineer Ashok Kumar is still missing on charges of
a wireless found from his office since 1973. A Hindu journalist who
was mistakenly included in a group of reporters visiting the Karachi
Nuclear Power Plant came under intense investigation. However, as a
Latin American proverb goes,“exile is a cow which sometimes gives
poisonous milk.” So sometimes here in America, unfortunately,
everybody does experience attitudes, treatment, or even
discrimination by everyone else on basis of his or her color of
skin, religion, national origins, faith, sect, culture, nationality,
race , sex or sexual orientation on everyday basis on every level in
a very crude or unseemly way, although that’s not what America is
all about. It’s unlawful and unconstitutional in America . As far
as Islamophobia is concerned, there is a thin line between it and
the Islamo-fascism the world is facing these days. But I am
optimistic the world will be a livable place for everyone again.
