Pashto poet Ameer Hamza Shinwari - A slow death for poetry

The news was buried somewhere deep in the pages of the newspaper and really it was surprising that it had been reported at all.

Against the blood and flesh deaths that take up the front and the back pages; this one represents the death of memory and of poetry.

On Wednesday, February 19, a convening was held at the Pashto Department of the University of Peshawar, whose campus has been riven with extremism over the past several years. The solemn men gathered to commemorate the Pashto poet Ameer Hamza Shinwari, a mystic and a visionary who was born in Landi Kotal and wrote about love, at a time when such things were possible.

Unsurprisingly, like so many other memories that do not fit into Pakistan’s ultra purified present, the legacy of Hamza Baba is being erased from the lore of the land.

The scholars gathered in Peshawar this week, lamented just that. The literary center built in Landi Kotal to commemorate the poet’s legacy is being lost to neglect and disrepair, unable to host even the annual poetry gathering that used to mark Hamza Baba’s memory.

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Set against the craggy hills whose barrenness has become synonymous with only gunfire and grenades; the center has long been abandoned.

Now, an apt metaphor for the loss of poetry and literary life in the country, it stands at the brink of death. The scholars who lament its passing and its promise, have urged the Government to take it over, but then, can a Government so unable to save itself, worshippers at mosques or children at schools, save poetry, rescue a literary legacy?

These are questions we do cannot answer in Pakistan.

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Hamza Baba was born in 1907 and lived until 1994, writing many collections of verse and over 40 books. As a young man, he dreamt of writing stories that would become movies, the very first was an ode to love, the script for the Pashto rendition of Laila and Majnu.

In his youth, Hamza Baba joined the Chistia Sufi order and his poetry reflected a syncretic blend of Sufi mysticism and Pashtunwali. After the creation of Pakistan, Hamza Baba set his pen to produce narratives of the new country, writing hundreds of plays that were performed on the then nascent Radio Pakistan. He was, at one point, awarded the Pride of Performance Award by the Government of Pakistan for his services to the literary vigour of the country.

Those days are gone. Hamza Baba is dead and the literary complex that tried to embed his legacy in the restive and war torn soil of Khyber stands crumbling.

It is the only such structure in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and even in its sad state still used by over a hundred poets in the region.

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In a country where poetry is fast synonymous with heresy there is little hope of rescue. Four years ago, in July 2011 Hamza Baba’s grave was attacked by the Taliban; its already humble ramparts ravaged by grenades. It has never been repaired.

Dead or alive, forgotten and buried away, poets’ even ones long gone like Hamza Baba are targets.

Killing them once is not enough, their graves and their legacies it has been decided, will be annihilated again and again to insure a complete destruction; a final forgetting, an imagined purification.