A worth reading article about Faiz Ahmed Faiz, his Ghazal after his return from Dhakka, beautifully sung by Nayyara Noor, especially:
Un se jo kehne gaye thhe Faiz, jaa sadqa kiye
Ankahi hi reh gayi vo baat, sab baatoon ke baad
Faiz, that one thing which I went there to say with all my heart
That very thing was left unsaid, after so much had been spoken
Excerpts from article, links to Video by Nayyara Noor and Article;(F.Sheikh)
“Faiz Ahmed Faiz remains one of the great unsolved enigmas of Southasian literature. Where does Faiz the poet end and Faiz the politician begin? Where does the pan-Southasian Marxist end and the Pakistani begin? His engagement with these contradictory identities constitutes a painful puzzle for his admirers. This becomes all the more complex because Faiz never seemed to have belonged fully to any one land – the boundaries of his literary, political and cultural life are fluid, flowing and overlapping.
The issue becomes even more complex for a Bangladeshi admirer such as this writer, who was born in the 1950s and to whom Faiz offers a complex identity and a bonding to great ideals crossing all borders. He is one Pakistani whom Bangladeshis have looked upon with the greatest possible admiration and affection. Yet what challenges this bond is the Faiz of during and immediately after 1971. During those terrible days, Bangladeshis who knew about or of him would ask each other, What is Faiz saying about all this? He had become the ‘Good Pakistani’ in the eyes of those in the East. Yet, was Faiz ever a person who represented more than Pakistan? Was it possible for him to escape being a Pakistani and have a wider identity encompassing all the admiring nations of Southasia and beyond?
Faiz did visit Bangladesh in 1974, as part of an official delegation as an advisor on culture. He met with his friends but the closest ones like Shahidullah Kaiser, Munir Chowdhury, Zahir Raihan, all writers and CP activists, had disappeared. Others were uneasy with Faiz as memories, unshared history and the reality of two distant states came between friends. He clearly missed the warmth of their friendship. In one of his most painful and beautiful poems, ‘Hum ke thehre ajnabi’ (We who have been rendered strangers), Faiz summed up his personal agony – and that of many Pakistanis and Bangladeshis whose friendship had been torn asunder by the war. The final lines are:
Un se jo kehne gaye thhe Faiz, jaa sadqa kiye
Ankahi hi reh gayi vo baat, sab baatoon ke baad
Faiz, that one thing which I went there to say with all my heart
That very thing was left unsaid, after so much had been spoken
Click link to listen this Ghazal by Nayyara Noor
Click link below to read full article;
Thank you for sharing this memory. Faiz was not for a country and region but for all humanities, and it showed in his verses.
Beautiful, heart warming and heart wrenching.
Ata ur Rahman