Why is a book like The Writer’s Brush inconceivable in our context?
Recently, I picked an interesting book The Writer’s Brush (2007) that contains 204 entries of modern and contemporary authors with reproductions of their drawings, paintings and sculptures. Names such as Kafka, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Conrad, Gogol, Lorca, Nabokov, Proust, Victor Hugo, Sylvia Plath, Kurt Vonnegut and Derek Walcott are part of the list. These writers belong to different regions and periods but are mainly European, with a few exceptions like Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali) and Gao Xingjian (Chinese).
The book focuses on individuals of three kinds: writers known primarily for their literary output; writers who are also recognised for their art practice or were formally trained in visual arts, like William Blake, D. H. Lawrence, Alfred Kubin, Kahlil Gibran, Henri Michaux, Gunter Grass; and writers who regularly contributed in the fields of art history and art criticism like Baudelaire, John Berger, Andre Breton, John Ruskin, John Updike and Tom Wolf.
The book also includes personalities who are more famous as artists, for instance, Oskar Kokoschka, Jean Arp, Ernst Barlach, Marsden Hartley, William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Leafing through this voluminous publication (457 pages), one comes across literati with remarkably-accomplished works of visual arts. Baudelaire, Sylvia Plath, Aldous Huxley, Hermann Hesse, Bruno Schulz, William Trevor and William Thackeray among many others impress a reader due to their level of skill in observation and execution. Their artistic output is not limited to oil painting and watercolour; sculpture in round and relief testify the command on medium and technique of those who spent more time pushing their pens or pressing keys on typewriters.
For a person living in the subcontinent, this kind of documentation is both familiar and alien. Traditional societies did not distinguish between genres or professions. A person could be a medical doctor and a fiction writer; similarly, a politician could be an academic, historian or an active journalist. There have been poets known and feared as wrestlers. Likewise, writers happened to be actors, singers and dancers as well. In our region, several writers/painters were accomplished calligraphers, led by Sadequain. Other names include Hanif Ramay and Aslam Kamal because, like Chinese aesthetics, there was hardly a distinction between ‘writing’ and ‘calligraphy’.
Generally, the link between the brush and the pen is not there except in a few cases such as that of Ram Kumar who was famous as a leading Hindi writer and equally respected for his paintings. We have had painters such as A. J. Shemza, Raheel Akbar Javed and Tassadaq Sohail who wrote novels or short stories. Today, their words are important mainly because of their art.
Despite being heirs to a tradition in which there was no differentiation between genres, we have reduced ourselves into niches which are hardly crossed; even if some efforts are made, these are superficial. Thus, a book like The Writer’s Brush is inconceivable in our context because many of our writers are not inclined to make art. This is a reflection of our present system of education with its emphasis on specialisation. E. H. Gombrich in his essay ‘The Tradition of General Knowledge’ argues for a comprehensive and inclusive vision of academic and cultural training, in which a person is able to converse about areas other than his discipline in an intelligent and interesting manner, possessing a sort of general knowledge, but "what should or should not belong to general knowledge, became in one sense more worrying and in another less clear".
Today, we lack this aspect of ‘culture’. A person well-equipped in one field of knowledge sometimes seems mediocre in another area; hence our writers’ general ignorance towards the works of visual arts. Many fail to notice the subtle ties between verbal and visual forms of expressions. Thus, a number of writers approach art without much depth or understanding. A few pieces of writing on art by our great writers like Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Intizar Husain and Mushtaq Ahmed Yusufi show their cursory engagement with visual arts.
One cannot also hope for a book like Poets on Painters (1988), in which some of the major poets of twentieth century, Ezra Pound, Auden, E. E. Cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and Ted Hughes wrote on art and artist in great detail -- almost replicating literary criticism. Books of collected essays on pictorial art by novelists like Julian Barnes and Siri Hustvedt are also available.
In our context, what has been written on art and artists in the past appears superficial, flowery and has a complimentary and celebratory tone. Even Faiz Ahmed Faiz, while writing on Sadequain, does not go beyond the usual diction. There is little or no possibility of a meeting point between a creation like a piece of prose or poem and an artwork that is produced for a limited audience and subsequently for a singular collector.
Unlike the West where art is not the property of a select few and is shown in art museums and public galleries; here it is limited to only those who have previous exposure. For a general viewer, it remains as distant and incomprehensible as any inscription in Classical Greek. In the West, students are initiated into arts from an early age; even an ordinary citizen earning his living as a brick layer, bus driver or a plumber can still connect with the art of his times.
On the other hand, the artists here are facing the problem of a limited audience. Only a few of our writers respond to contemporary art passionately like Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, H. M. Naqvi, Kamila Shamsie and Uzma Aslam Khan. The art produced here does not offer much to the mainstream writers.
Once the writers of our national languages start interacting with art, the contemporary art created here may initiate more solid, deep and meaningful conversations. Imagine the works of Rashid Rana, Hamra Abbas, Adeela Suleman, Risham Syed, Ayaz Jokhio, Muhammad Ali Talpur, Muhammad Zeeshan and others being discussed amongst the writers of Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto and Balochi. It will provide an unusual context to their art practices and, simultaneously, generate a new vocabulary of art-writing in local literature. Only then will both artists and writers (like two lost lovers) be able to find a common ground to converse.