Afew years ago, a friend told me that he had invited over for lunch a friend who had earlier gone missing. His friend had been set free recently and forced into an exile. His (friend’s) eyes could not shake off suspicion and fear. It was as if the forced confinement had poisoned the very seams of his social being. That friend was Salman Haider.

One’s relationships to people and places, imagined or real, are the ropes or threads that give one a coherent sense of time and space; that keep one’s world intact; protect one from a feeling of vertigo, the state of falling down. Primo Levi’s accounts of his experiences in Auschwitz concentration camp for Jews during World War II show us that once one is stripped of one’s trusted human ties, one loses the sense of what one stands in or up for.

The freedom to love and exercise one’s right to what sustains life for them, is the air one breathes. True for all, it is more so for a poet. When being in exile is the only way out, one finds ways to re-connect. When cut off from one’s right to inscribe a sweet nothing, or something, anything, and to render a poetic voice to those pushed off the narrative space of the mainstream, the poet-activist finds ways to love, to resist. Haider writes on and from the margins of the page - from what is left out of the nation’s acceptable face. His poems echo the voices resisting the narrative makings for/of the mainstream. His poetry is gasping for air as he writes and waits, waits and writes from the margins of the slate.

Reading his poetry, I found it illuminating that he effortlessly personifies institutionalised injustice from the local to international level. The injustice is obvious but systematically concealed in such a way that we’ve come to un-see it.

A poem about a Baloch boy who sets out on a journey to find his missing father, walking all the way from Quetta to Karachi to Islamabad, reads:

اس نے اپنا بچپن ان سرمئی سڑکوں پر گزارا

جو آبادیوں اور ویرانوں کو

قیدیوں کی طرح آپس میں باندھے رکھتی ہیں

You realise the depth and political significance of the construction when you think of how infrastructure development connecting the local to the global passes through neoliberal capitalist hands of the state, which is not just complicit but also a means of enslaving the population for the empire in the age of what the academia have come to call anthropocene.

Apart from Haider’s signature poems, there are other poems in this collection that speak for many other kinds of the socially marginalised or oppressed. The subjects range from Hazaras killings to the invisibilised everyday re-inscriptions of patriarchy to the silence of the pen pushers and the media outlets.

The freedom to love and exercise your right to what sustains life for you is the air you breathe. True for all, it is more so for a poet. When exile is the only way out, you find ways to re-connect.

But the poetic-activist awakening takes a toll on the person; and in the afterlives of a battle an individual is never meant to win a faceless fears show up out of nowhere. A poem, titled Virsa (Heritage), reads:

مجھے اپنے خوف چھپانے کے لئے ایک سینہ درکار ہے

...

میں اپنے چہرے پر مسکراہٹ چپکا سکتا ہوں

لیکن وہ آنکھوں سے شروع نہیں ہوتی

زندگی کٹھن ہے اور دوست دور

لیکن امید میرے بیٹے کی پہلی محبت بنے گی

اور خوف

اسے وہ میرے ساتھ زمین کے سینے میں اتارے گا  

The displacement, homelessness and dispossession of what keeps one intact leaves one stranded in the uncertainty of time and space. It leaves one with uncharted selves in a way that one can’t keep account or track of who or where one is, or is not. Here’s a description of the scenario:

الجھی ہوئی زندگیوں کی گرہیں کھولتے

انگلیوں کے جوڑ لکڑی کے ہو جاتے ہیں 

Love, too, gets tough or ‘complicated’ for one fighting on such fronts (thinking-out-thoughts):

 میرے سینے پر انگلیاں پھیرتے

تم وہ عدد دریافت نہیں کر پاؤ گی

جو زندگی کا معمہ حل کر سکے  

What can one do with a life that one can’t contain or take stock of as a legible, normal self’? One writes and waits and writes some more.

میں نے چہرے پر جھریاں پہن لی ہیں/ اور اس میز پر بیٹھ گیا ہوں/ جہاں مجھے آخری نظم لکھنی ہے  

Salman Haider’s (main) poems might have come out of a specific context but they speak to a universal theme of displacement and homelessness. The theme is even more universal in today’s more-connected-than-ever-before world. The poem Intizar (Waiting), for example, could refer to any place. To me, it sounds like Lahore or Karachi, or any big city in the Global South where a number of urbanites are left with hardly any room to walk on the footpaths. The cities are increasingly moulded and folded into an urban form suited to cars and commercial needs rather than citizens. It’s not just the footpaths; the very words one needs to wade through all the time one has at one’s hands, are giving up on one. So is time, although that is all one has. Another one of my favourite poems in the book, Dewangi ka Mahal-i-Waqoo’ (The Whereabouts of Madness), is like talking to anyone in any language: what does it mean to go about the routine or the mundane, as something (maddening) stares you in the face.

There are a lot of concrete, memorable lines and noticeable, livable poems, in the debut book; all heading for a story – the story that converges on and diverges from the many stories of (de)formations of the human, and beyond. Haider’s poetry is like no one else’s. He has carved out a niche for himself. This uniqueness is not just on account of the theme(s) he writes about, but also because of the concrete imagery he brings to his poems. In his poetry, a common sight or a simple description can echo like a story, as if (James Baldwin would say) he has learnt how to see, and show.

Some of the poems in the book might sound like slogans but the sloganeering is dipped in the very refined sense of a poet opening up further possibilities for the politics of poetry – something conspicuously absent from much of our (Urdu) literary scene. Peter Sloterdijk, the German philosopher, says somewhere that the human can’t access the best in him/her at any time. A poet might be attached to every feeling, every word that comes to him but surgeon-like, an editor’s hand can help cut out the extra fat.

Hashiye Par Likhi Nazmein

Author: Salman Haider

Publisher: Maktaba-i-Danyal

Pages: 172

Price: Rs 500

The reviewer is pursuing a PhD in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin, USA