"A Dictionary to Define My Dreams": The Politics of Remembrance and Forgetting in Kishwar Naheed's Poetry

Kishwar Naheed's seventh volume of poetry, Khayali Shakhs se Muqabala / Confronting an Imagined Person) was published in 1992 after a period of immense political turmoil in Pakistan.¹ In Confronting an Imagined Person, Naheed turns to the task of retrieving language from the abuses made in the name of the law by autocratic states in Pakistan; thus, poetry in her hands becomes a project of resuscitating an exploited vocabulary through the application of figurative, concrete, and vernacular language. While the Urdu used in her poems is deceptively simple and the form of prose poetry she employs very accessible, Naheed uses dates and events as signifiers of history for the reader, and uses simple terms to highlight the lacunae in public language for describing a woman's experiences. In attempting to salvage the collective and individual past, Naheed endeavors to imagine the possibilities of re-membering voices lost in the discourses of power, those of marginalized women and the disenfranchised silent majority. Naheed confronts the ironies and ambiguities inherent in this articulation—the apostrophic imagined other of Naheed's title is not just patriarchy or imperialism, but also herself as a poet and woman. Her poetics of incorporating the politics of forgetting and remembrance also suggests a debate about presence in the public and personal spheres, about which groups become visible and which remain invisible, essentially about who gets to occupy space and what can be said and left unsaid. Jurisdiction over memory can enable any institution (state, imperial, or religious) to create ruins, sites of absence, in discursive and imaginative realms. Kishwar Naheed's project in Confronting an Imagined Person is to reclaim language and memory so the national imaginary can be restored, her invocation of cultural memory an attempt to register trauma before it falls prey to amnesia, censorship, or apathy. I will be using Naheed's "Girti hu'i Diwar-e Berlin, Günter Grass aur Main / The Falling Berlin Wall, Günter Grass, and I" (1992, 80-81) and "Jangal men Zala-bari ka Manzar / Scene of Hailstorm in the Jungle" (39-41) from that volume to illustrate her use of poetry to restore language and memory despite all the efforts of the state apparatus to occlude national culture.

As absence leaves its traces in ruinations, Naheed lyrically pieces together the shards of material and imagined subjecthood and composes verses where this absence can be deciphered. This poetic interplay between the real and imaginary, where the borders are so porous that the two seem to fuse together, is Naheed's attempt to register in words those real events of a country that seem unreal in the actuality and frequency of their occurrence. Her poetics consists of daring to confront global, national, social, and canonical norms in a lyrical manner that imagines a new threshold of being. Naheed's published work ranges from ten volumes of poetry to two memoirs, travel narratives, collections of prose and criticism, edited anthologies and journals, collections of short stories for children, translations, and character sketches. Lyric poetry, for her, is a site for reenacting memory. The gashes in memory and the ensuing tensions in language, which would become apparent in the race against forgetting, are employed by Naheed to explore the limits and possibilities of imagined being. In her prolific literary and activist career, she has challenged the ways in which gendered identity is constitutionally negated through legislations such as the Hudood Ordinance of 1979, introduced by the military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq (1924-1988) to appease reactionary religious elements and to legitimize his military rule. Within the four-part Hudood Ordinance (hudood derives from hadd, meaning "limit" or "prohibition," where punishment is fixed by religious, and not civil, law), the Zina Ordinance criminalized zina (adultery and extramarital sex) and required that zina b'il-jabr (rape) be proved through the testimony of four pious men; and the 1982 Law of Evidence equated a woman's testimony to half that of a man (Mumtaz and Shaheed 1987; Jahangir and Jilani 1990; Jalal 1991; Khan 2003).² By...