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Ghulam Murtaza Aatir
By Ghulam Murtaza Aatir
Straggling through Fire: An Anthology of Proemistry
(A Collection of Urdu Verse)
In Search of a Dream (Poetic Translation of Urdu Poetry Selection)
Dreambox: Second Anthology of Proemistry
Dreambox
Second Anthology of Proemistry
Ghulam Murtaza Aatir
Published in Pakistan by Misaal Publishers
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Copyright © Ghulam Murtaza 2022
The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in November 2022 For sale in Pakistan only
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I am the kind of man who makes rules for himself … Please feel free to adopt this rule for yourself. Sherman Alexie
*Preface 1
Yes, you are right. It is not poetry; it was not conceived as poetry; it is proemistry: blend of poetry and prose, media and history and, actually, whatever you can put into it, whatever you need to put into it. Proemistry is of the margin, for the margin, by the margin. Therefore, margin is a permanent presence on the pages of the p-book – the process book of process proemistry. And it is ‘our’ book, not ‘my’ book, a collaborative project. The margin has literal as well as metaphoric significance: metaphorically it stands on the pages as a constant reminder to the readers that it is their proemistry and they have got here space for them, to add to it, to expand it, to enrich it with their laughter and sobs, grimaces and smiles, cries and slogans; yes, even slogans. When I say that “I have left two leaves at the end …” for this purpose, I mean it literally as well as metaphorically. And these two leaves can be two hundred pages, or even two thousand pages. Proemistry is full-blooded expression of the agonies of the weak. It is an ongoing genre: neither a
• From Straggling Through Fire: First Anthology of Proemistry
proem nor, therefore, a collection of proemistry can ever be complete. Its margin is meant for expansion and inclusion of the agonies of those who are getting ever new pains day by day, from city to city, from vicinity to vicinity, from generation to generation and from region to region. A proemist, hence, may compose only one collection of proemistry and then he with his collaborators – his people, all those who share his dreams and desires – will keep adding to it and so may his generation.
We need small proemists: three, four or five or even twenty proemists for three, four or five decades to keep them fresh in our minds, to cure our communal collective amnesia, to keep the road well lit that leads our past to our future. Then after a century hence around 2120 or so, may be – when English language has grown more natural and easy than it is for us in 2020 – the sterile academic generation – one may be able to collect various parts from books and pieces of proemistry to compile or even recreate a representative weltanschauung of the century, or perhaps, ten mini-weltanschauungs, to let the reader conceive a coherent map of the past leading to future to measure the then present and future against the past.
The function of proemistry is to preserve the passions we tend to forget because of being excessively used to such deformative atrocities we have been going
through for the last seven decades, i.e. since our inception – with rising momentum of amnesia from decade to decade. Lest we should forget our day to day bleedings and bombings, our proems can help us keep our memories of our wounds and losses intact. It is not to keep our wounds fresh; intact memories of wounds also imply remembrance of those who inflicted the wounds and those who received the wounds and, therefore, a way out to stand against the future wounds, and working out panacea for them.
Immediacy of proemistry renders it intelligible for the people in the street and may enable them to grapple with their situation with emotional intelligence. The elitist poetry – rather most forms of literature –leaves no space for the common reader to enter; thus goes the cliché: a literary text is such a compact whole that you can neither add a word to it nor exclude one; in either case you will damage it. Proemistry topples down this vanity of ‘great’ literature and replaces it with a democratic mode of expression.
Proemistry is a process, not product type of poetry; by process I mean that it is an ongoing writing inclusive and accommodating the readers: it is not meant to be a kind of book fixed in its number of pages and words once for all; it will keep developing. May be after two years when its next edition appears, its present count of pages expands to 200, and through the next decade to 1000. Perhaps publishing industry cannot afford it but
cyber space makes this idea easily doable. For this purpose, this book in both its hard and soft form carries a margin which is meant for additions and modifications. These additions will be incorporated in the next edition with the names of the contributors. Whosoever contributes one prine or two prines or a pranza or a pverse paragraph, his/her name will sit in the margin in front of the contribution. An endnote will give a brief introduction to that contributor.
The humility of proemistry also comes from the understanding that poetry, I admit, is possible only in one’s mother tongue or at least in a language that almost touches the native speaker’s competence; plus extraordinary lifelong input into it in terms of reception that includes reading, listening, training, and imbibing the tradition. But when all that is absent, even then proemistry is insistent to have its say because, to borrow Vajahat Masood’s words, “Baat karna ibn-e-Adam ka virsa hay.”
Ghulam Murtaza Aatir
Preface 2
If the question arises ‘Is it poetry?’, the counter-question is ‘Whose slave am I?’ Is it necessary to follow the pattern fixed by Aristotle and his progeny? If the form and concealment of truth is so essential to literature and therefore it is not poetry, let me call these pieces proems rather than poems for their combination of prose and poetry. But if you feel they still tend more to history than poetry, we can make another adjustment in the naming: they are pieces of proemistry: poetry + prose + history. It is the cultural needs and personal capabilities and understanding that kept making distinctions what is poetry and what is not. The moment of history we are breathing in as a nation when the very idea of nation is under stress and question, I believe, we need to transcend the boundaries of genres lest something that is our responsibility to say should go unsaid under the stress of the genre restrictions.
Responsibility? One may feel annoyed at so heavy a word for poetry. But I believe it is the most appropriate word for literature, let alone poetry.
________________________________
• From Straggling Through Fire: First Anthology of Proemistry
Poetry is not merely combination of word patterns soothing to the aesthetics, verbal masturbation into the ears of the readers, if it is without consciousness of conflicts running in our era. Even those who are conscious of the suppressive realities of today, may feel restrained whether it suits poetry, as if there were some special issues suitable for poetic expression and anything unpoetic would seriously damage their position as artist. Art without commitment, without sense of belonging, without consciousness of people’s agonies, is babbling or howling or barking; anything but art. Art is never apolitical nor it should be nor it should attempt to look so. I have no vanity that what I am writing is great literature, or simply literature even, but I have raised my voice which I feel is shared by more than 20 corer people. No? Disagreed? Right. The book carries an ever increasing margin to incorporate all the differences as well as endorsements.
We have been passing through so many assaults on and interferences into our existence. But memory is so short spanned that every new regime has been coming up with a new slogan and we start bleating that slogan and after a decade or so we come to realize that the slogan was just another hollow avaricious fury begetting nothing. We feel the need to get out of it. Despite all the differences, we share this feeling of getting out of it. It is the proemistic responsibility to be with the people, write
for them, think for them, live for them, live with them. I cannot afford any vanity of any ism. If one is necessary, I opt for soilism.
Rules are for those who cannot make their own rules. If something that I feel my responsibility to say goes unsaid for restrictions of genres and structures, I would love to throw them into the air. Then am I a poet? No? O.K. You may call me ‘Nota-Poet’ or ‘a proemist’ or, … I damn care what I am called. And I damn care even if I am ignored with absolute indifference as long as I feel I have done my job. I am not answerable to anyone but myself.
The beauty of sound pattern is only secondary to poetry. The issue is the ratio of politics and morality and aesthetics. An unsaid understanding amongst literati is the pride in unintelligibility. A poet seems to suggest: “I am proud that I have not involved any politics in poetry; or, look, I have involved politics here but I am proud that my reader is unable to decipher it. So you understand how great I am!” It is not good to be very good. Why not to think beyond the pleasure of unintelligible ambiguity.
I think nomenclature is a binding that does not let us think our original way and say our original say. Poetry, especially in our traditional structure of feeling, has its own binding implications. Therefore, I have coined a new word, proemistry, to change the expectations and presuppositions of the reader. And if
my reader feels that it is more of journalism in flavor than proemistry, we can rename it as proemedistry, or proejoustry and there is no limit of our creativity to stretch it to our semantic needs. For myself I name it proemistry and leave the rest for my readers.
Proemistry is not spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings for the man who has become entangled into one hundred and one constraints by friends and foes in the era of everything at stake including bread, borders and breaths. When we are under constant fear that something is going to happen for the worse, a proemist cannot stay aloof from his context to search for spontaneity in his subjective heaven. Spontaneity may be a proper value in Lake District but not in a country where drones and suicide attacks and blasts have been a regular feature, indiscriminately shattering the limbs of men and women, young and old, on daily basis terminologically dismissed as collateral damage.
Absolute originality demands total indifference to whatever whichever authority has said, to live with the people today, to let the words go into and come out of the tissues of the people. Much of western literature is the result of individual state of mind, observes Bloom. We are living in an era when the war between nations, identities and communities is too explicit to be ignored. I doubt the job of the writer who raises himself to the selfish production of the beautiful with indifference to
the battles peoples are fighting desperately. In this context of ever-inprocess war an artist’s withdrawal into pure aesthetics with callous indifference to the lived agony does not make any poetic sense. It is sheer nonsense that art is the asset of mankind at large. This obfuscatory claim is politically fatal to an artist’s role in the formation and protection of collective consciousness of a community. I don’t know ignoring one’s community which humanity one wants to serve.
Ghulam Murtaza Aatir
Soilism: Proemistry Continued …
Back in 2011 when I got admission in PhD in NUML Islamabad, Dr. Shaheena Ayub Bhatti had recently earned her postdoc in Native American Literature from University of Arizona. She taught us Native American literature that put me on fire. Especially Sherman Alexie was an active volcano. I did my PhD dissertation on his works. it gave me a greta opportunity to to deleve deep into the style, expression and politics of a literary giant of resistance. Reading Alexie had sown in me the seeds of a new work. For the next decade I kept producing and the first anthology of proemistry was published in 2021.
I have been teaching English literature since 1999, the year I came from Punjab University Lahore, Hostel No. 19, back to Faisalabad to see my father and mother dying of cancer and TB respectively. It was a very critical time; I used to teach till late night. I taught syllabi of four universities and got good basic understanding of tradition. I had this feeling that what I was producing would not be acceptable as poetry nor was it prose. But still it was my child, my brain-baby. I could not disown for something called tradition.
One aspect or another of literature had been rejected by various eras and men, shifting sensibility of literature from era to era. Seeing from within the flow of play had been the sole attitude to drama for around two thousand years. And seeing from above the flow of the play produced a new tradition. Character and plot had always been central to drama and then Theatre of the Absurd great literature without either of them in the traditional sense of the words. Literature is unconceivable without similes and metaphors and Wordsworth rejected them in the name of artificial language – although the claim has very different shade and is meaningful in the context of Neoclassicism, I understand. And again to quote Wordsworth, there is no essential difference between the language of prose and the language of poetry. And moving from Classics to modern era, you can shift from superhuman figure to a low man, to a Loman. The Wasteland was a great masterpiece lesson of free and liberal expression. But it is also poetry sans poetry if it is removed from it methodological context of mythic method.
With all this in my mind I had a vague sense that you can do whatever you need to do if you have courage and capability. And then Sherman Alexie intensified this courage and capability: “I am the kind of man who makes rules for himself … Please feel free to adopt this rule for yourself.” Saussure’s arbitrariness of language furthered
my idea that language and various products of language are not divine; they are at my will if I will. Postmodern rejection of center added confidence to my self-reliance. What gives literature its literariness? The question is as old as literature itself, Longinus’ On the Sublime being one of the earliest responses to this question. After this genre had developed, was born after ten years of conception, I named it proemistry, a name that suited its features. When I first showed it to Aamer Hussain when he visited GC University Faisalabad for a conference in Department of English, I showed the manuscript to him in the presence of Shah Bano Alvi, the Director of Ushba Publishers Karachi, he listened to two proems and commented: “Untrammeled by the canon of English.” Ushba said: “Chalo ab dhamal dal do.”
When I completed my first collection of proemistry with ten years of emoctual investment, I saved some of the proems for the next collection though I was not sure whether the next collection would ever emerge. But it has emerged. I did not know that it would be able to get and produce any ruffle on the surface of my surroundings. But it has produced quite a few waves. I did not know that I would be able to get any passionate response. But I have got Muddassar, Amna and Naghmana. Mudassar’s essay is included in this book, Aman produced her M.Phil thesis and then a book Proemistics of Commitment in Aatir’s Straggling through
Fire, an analysis of my first anthology of promistry. Naghmana presented her paper on Straggling through Fire in First International Conference of Baltistan University. This is how gradually proemistry is gaining grounds amongst academia.
Every piece of creative writing is a blend of emotion and reason, with varying degrees of blending, differing proportions of mixing. And another factor is environment and context. The environment our generation has lived through has been of elastic truths changing day in and out, lapsing and slipping evanescently. Maybe an era or a temper of relative ease and stability affords greater intellectual depth. Maybe if Jane Austen had been bombarded 16 waking hours a day with ever increasing straining media images, none so reliable, and all intensifying the stress, she would have probably produced a work less marked with ironic pleasure and more with tragic desolation. She was living in expanding nationality while we are living a crumbling nationality with the common factor that the source of her pleasure and my agony is the same: it was colonialism then and globalization now, two names for the same propelling force, two phenomena with the same subject and object. Miss Austen, my apology for reducing you to metaphor but you are not alone in this clan. Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Marlowe, Colerdige, de la Mare are in your company.
Soilism is the reaction to the recent history of time-space breakup resulting in ‘knowledge’ removed from the place: colonial adventures covered distances, lands and regions without ever developing any association with them, except for the sake of utility if ever, if any. Columbus covered 4384 nautical miles or so from Spain to Bahamas remembering nothing from all the distance except the pressure their wait for the signs of the land and pains of their bodies.
I am the father and the mother of this genre. I feel honored to be at the beginning of this tradition, instead of being an exhausted tail-end of a sterile tradition. I believe newborn collaborative genre has immense potential of growth. I welcome new creative minds to invest their energies into it because a book of proemistry is our book, not mine. Muddassar has already started producing proems and I hope that in next five years or so he would come up with an anthology of proemistry, although it took me a decade.
Ghulam Murtaza Aatir
Defining Proemistry…….
Proemistry is a practice that transcends theory. Theory confines perception into the entrapments of academic questions: What is this little mark on the skin? Why this mark is getting red? Where has this mark come from? And how is this mark going to affect the face of human civilization. Theory reduces wounds into marks and becomes the comfy conversation of the privileged. Proemistic practice liberates perception and expresses: this is what hurts, this is why we are hurt but do not feel very bad, this is where we are hurt the most, and this is how the marginalized of the world must get rid of civilizational baggage and start counting their wounds on their own. Proemistry is a mathematical calculation, a statistical arrangement and a graphic representation of those wounds which remain subservient to similes, metaphors, rhymes and meters in canonical art. Yes, Proemistry transcends canonical art as it is a blend of prose, poetry, media and history. It is by the margin, for the margin, about the margin, and decenters the center
from the margin. We always debate about Nationalism, but my dear reader, have we ever heard the word ‘Soilism’? Proemistry is all about soilism and stands for the lived experiences of those marginalized groups that remain rooted in their soil and cannot enjoy the luxury of traveling back to their homeland for a decent burial. Theorists travel abroad, talk incessantly about the irresolvable dilemmas of third-world existence in lofty seminars and symposiums, but a Proemist experiences those dilemmas, lives with them, sleeps with them, dreams with them and dies with them.
Theory says: a signifier does not lead to a signified but to another signifier. Say it another way: words articulate nothing, or words misarticulate something, or words disarticulate everything. Signification as a meaning-making process displaces meanings through metaphors. In proemistry, nothing is metaphorical because wounds do not hurt metaphorically, they hurt literally. Abstractions hurt the marginalized in concrete ways. A little humiliation on not ‘feeding’ the guests properly results in one, or two, or many sleepless nights for the parents of a skinny brown girl who is 25, 27, or 30 years old, unemployed and waiting to be bargained away in marriage as early as possible. Just imagine the real and you will taste the abstract concretely. Proemistry imagines the real from the perspectives of the downtrodden. In language games
of critical theory, perspectives fight with one another and keep on fighting till the theorists are invited to a coffee break or a lunch break to let them reach at some ‘synthesis’. The practitioners of proemistry do not expect coffee breaks and lunch breaks, so their perspectives collaborate with one another to cut down the prescribed synthesis into tiny grains of ‘antithesis and thesis’. Yes, dear reader, Proemistry reverses the dialectics: Say, ‘The poor are always a lazy people’ in front of a proemist and he will respond, a poor boy XYZ could not get a job because his father ABC did not earn enough to provide him with a decent dress for interviews. After all history matters. Proemistry reverses dialectics to recall history in which a wound does not lead to some bandage but to another wound.
You know what history means? It means a system of inclusions and exclusions, a combination of what is frequently said and what is never said. Proemistry reverses the dialectics and juxtaposes the said and the unsaid to create a space for saying that needs to be said. Proemistry digs into the history of saying and unsaying to move beyond history. Confused? Alright! Keats was lucky enough to say, ‘heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter”, and Shelly was wise enough to say, “our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought”. A proemist is neither lucky nor wise. Had he been lucky, he would never have thought about writing proems in
the first place. Had he been wise, he would have worked on theorizing history and not the other way round. A proemist historicizes theory and defines a proem as “a series of shrieks, silent and aloud’. You think it Paradoxical? Yes, it is meant to be paradoxical because only a greater paradox can move beyond the paradoxical history that has always silenced the groans of the marginalized to amplify the chitchat of the centralized.
Aesthetics; the domain reserved for the center, is not a proemist’s concern. Aesthetics assert that art is always apolitical, ahistorical and transcendental but proemistry is always political because art cannot be and should not be apolitical. In order to be good at aesthetics, the art must be unintelligible for the common masses. Aesthetics can surely talk about common people but not for them. They are just objects to be observed, examined and discarded in aesthetics. Proemistry is subjectification of the marginalized and declares itself an ongoing process in which anyone can add a dot, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a picture, a diagram, a drawing, and a thumb mark. Proemistry prioritizes ethics over aesthetics and ‘the beautiful’ in proems decenters the ‘aestheticized beautiful’ from its privileged place to bring it down to the lived realities of the marginalized.
Aesthetics are required to be purposeless but dear reader, Proemistry deals with an urgency of social purpose. Call it instrumentalization of art but remember,
the marginalized have long been used as instruments in art. Now is the time to reverse the pattern and proemistry uses art as an instrument to instruct rather than (re)please the more-than-pleased-center. Aesthetics are meant to be transcendental with no temporal and spatial bondage but restricted to the elites as their receivers. Proemistry is transcendental in its own proemistic way and speaks about the wretched of the earth across histories, borders, races, religions, and nationalities. Aesthetics are a technique of exclusions but proemistry is a search for inclusions. In aesthetics, power and knowledge make a compound but in Proemistry, the songs of the wretched confront canonical powers of creativity and critique.
Proemistry is ‘creative criticism’ as it is a blend of creativity and critique. In literary tradition and critical convention, creative impulses and critical insights are divorced but proemistry is a creative expression of all those critical insights that an individual possesses but cannot express because of generic pressures. ‘Creative Criticism’ demands to be aggressive, offensive and if needs be even abusive. Canonical art teaches us to be kind, polite and decent in our expressions because it discourages violence but remains complicit with the violence hurled at the marginalized. Violence has long been reserved for the oppressed and they are always expected to be violent. It is supposed that a decent