Even after centuries have passed, the charm and enigma of great verse from anywhere has the strength to move someone sitting on the margins of the world of letters today — for instance, in a place as obscure in the literary sense as Islamabad. It is beyond someone such as me — who has an embarrassingly limited knowledge of French literature — to make a comment on the work, let alone do a critique, of someone as trailblazing, accomplished and celebrated as Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891). But I cannot deny he moves me.

Rimbaud’s ‘A Season in Hell’ is a long prose poem in nine parts which was written and published in 1873. It has been translated into English by a number of people, but I was introduced to it some years ago through Louise Varese’s translation contained in a book edited by Joseph M. Bernstein. Readers, like its critics, may have their own interpretation of this inner journey of the poet, with some parts being completely delirious and incomprehensible. But there is a sense of a dialogue taking place between the poet who considers himself damned and his other contradictory self. To me, the poem is a discovery of an inner being which also holds a mirror that reflects the collective human condition outside.

Paucity of space here restricts me to mentioning some lines randomly picked up from different parts of the poem and how I see them expressing the experience of living in Pakistan in this day and age. Rimbaud says in the first part of the poem: “I fled. O Witches, O Misery, O Hate, to you my treasure has been entrusted!” He continues by stressing the point again after a few more lines in the middle: “Misfortune was my god.” Ironically, these verses came to my mind when it was recently published in the media that an international survey found Pakistanis to be a relatively happy bunch of people and certainly happier than those living in neighbouring countries.

Who conducts these surveys and to what avail? We see hate, bigotry, callousness and violence all around and people being killed for the religious sect they belong to, or how they physically look, as in the case of the Hazaras in Quetta. They are being lynched for their beliefs, their houses are being gutted and their places of worship desecrated as in the case of religious minorities, or they are ostracised for the language they speak or officially profiled and discriminated against for the geographical area they come from. Most of all, a vast number of people across the country, irrespective of their background or faith, have been living in abject poverty for generations. Isn’t it then misery and hate to which the treasure of Pakistan has been entrusted, rather than to love and joy?

In another part of the poem, Rimbaud likens himself to being a beast, but one that can still be saved, before he begins to condemn the maniacs, wild men and misers. Clearly addressing the Merchant, the Judge, the General and the Emperor, he says: “…you have drunk of the untaxed liquor of Satan’s still.” He continues: “The smartest thing would be to leave this continent where madness stalks to provide hostages for these wretches.” Some of us may not be able to, and some may not like to, do the smartest thing that Rimbaud suggests: leave. For Pakistan is home, it is our habitat. But the latter part of this haunting line sums up the condition of the common people in this country of ours. In the name of faith or patriotism, madness is sewn into the social net which is used to entrap the bodies and minds of people.

In the last part of the poem, the lines that invoke an image of present-day Karachi for me are: “Autumn. Risen through the motionless mists, our boat turns to the port of misery, the enormous city with fire-and-mud-stained sky.” This is the city that we first built with such ambition and then sacrificed to our anger and lust for wealth.

But it still seems that some of us in Pakistan refuse to give up. “The song of the heavens, the marching of the peoples! Slaves! Let us never curse life.”

The writer is a poet and essayist based in Islamabad

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 6th, 2018