What does a writer desire from the world?

Certainly neither honours, awards, nor positions. He desires to maintain a distance from all those invested with authority to bestow awards and positions. Hence, he can revere and safeguard the freedom to question and the freedom of expression. By manoeuvring for lucrative positions and highest awards, writers are forced to lock their tongues or suffer a blister on their tongues.

Shakaib Jalali, a modern Urdu poet says:

Haq baat aa ke ruk si gayi thi kabhi Shakaib
Chhaalay parray huay hain abhi tak
zubaan par

[Once I had shirked from pronouncing the truth/ That’s why I still have blisters on my tongue.]

To initiate a conversation with the self that has the writer write is the best moment a writer can imagine. Because it is the self that has him write, even when he is insufferably rejected by his times, the authorities and even by his contemporaries.

Hazrat Ali has said that “Do speak, so that you are known.” A writer is known not just by his national, racial or linguistic identity, but also by whether he went into silence where he was required to speak or dared to speak truth to power. A writer stays alert about the actual and contextual powers of his words.

A writer is an eternal traveller. Aside from plunging deep into the dark, terrifying dungeons of the human psyche, he steps into the prohibited planes of history, tradition, culture and politics. He declines all those paradises bedecked with cushions, goblets and where Hoors are in abundance, but where penetrating the realm of power is prohibited and/or pawning his voyager soul made mandatory. A writer wants to keep narrating fearlessly the stories of wretchedness and callousness humans are made to suffer.

Noted Urdu critic Nasir Abbas Nayyar delivered the keynote speech at the inaugural session of the 15th International Urdu Conference on December 1, 2022 at the Arts Council of Pakistan in Karachi. Eos is presenting here a slightly edited version of the address, translated from the Urdu by the author himself…

We have recently witnessed some queer events of contemporary history put an unprecedented challenge to the freedom of writers.

In the post-9/11 world, we all have found ourselves surrounded and ensnared by a smart system of surveillance. At each step, we are accountable to an unseen power. The existence of an ‘invisible Other’ is powerfully felt in our outside and inner worlds alike.

We Muslims believe that the angels Munkqr and Nakeer appear in graves soon after the burial is finished and begin to question the deeds and beliefs of the buried one. It seems the whole world has been turned into a gigantic grave and Munkar-Nakeer of the cyberworld are uninterruptedly interrogating all of us. Our existence in this world is tethered to answer to each of the questions put by the angels of the cybersphere. The Foucaultian Panopticon is unendingly surveilling within and without.

“I think, therefore I am,” was the maxim Western people would cherish to define their identity from the 17th to the 20th century. The maxim “I resist, therefore I am,” was popular among Afro-Asian colonised people to define their identity during the 19th and 20th centuries. Now the whole world seems to have cuddled up to a new maxim: “I share, therefore I am.”

Smart technology is a new earthly ‘god’. Not only does it know much more about us than we do but it exercises a sort of technological clout over all of us. Our thinking, interrogating, resisting selves are rapidly metamorphosing into a creature that unlocks and unveils all its secrets unresistingly, which are surreptitiously being stored in the form of data. What an irony! We ourselves are penning a charge-sheet against ourselves.

The idea of personal life was introduced by the liberal, democratic Western world. The same Western world has set off to tarnish the sanctity of personal life by its neo-liberal economic policies, which work in tandem with the crushing domination of the cybersphere.

In Sartre’s No Exit, three major characters are doomed to a hell-like mysterious room, but they don’t see any hellfire there. Upon their query, they are told that “Hell is other people.”

But now, because of the overpowering smart surveillance system, our personal life — stored as data — is turning into our hell. What a hell! Our digitised personal life is our hell.

We used to have whisperings, a language of love, invocation, loneliness and monologue. Whispery language has been superseded by crying words pouring out instantly and incessantly on our social media walls. It reminds me of Azm Behzad’s couplet:

Mujhay yaad aaya ik daur tha sargoshi ka
Aaj is daur ko ik kam-sukhanai [sukhani?] yaad ai

[I happen to recall that there was an age of whispering/ Today I evoked susurration of that age.]

Today, each person is thoughtlessly revealing all personal secrets through their social media accounts. He cares less about how vast the ambit of authority is and what the intentions are of the new earthly god. He is less concerned about the fact that both his social and inner worlds have been ‘digitally colonised’.

It needs to be stressed that ‘digital colonialism’ is quite distinct from past forms of colonialism. Those old forms of colonialism used to be staggeringly evident and their horrors would have been conveniently discernible, so their ubiquity ‘evoked’ and stoked resistance. But digital colonialism is so subtle, so indiscernible, and so deeply entrenched in our instinct of compliance and conformity, that we fail to realise that it is any sort of imperialism.

Our tragedy is distinct — and complex from the rest of the world. We Pakistanis have not yet fully liberated ourselves from the old forms of colonialism. For the last 75 years we have succumbed to structural and institutional imperialism. Most of the questions related to national, educational, cultural and literary realms sprout from this complex form of imperialism. Besides structural and institutional colonialism, we are also entangled in digital colonialism.

Aik aur darya ka saamna tha Munir mujh ko

[I was to face up to another river]

As disobedience against heavenly and earthly gods is ingrained in humans’ nature, so there are prospects, though dim, of resistance against smart forms of power. Smart power itself can be used against both obvious and indistinct forms of subjugation. There is a lot to be learned from how smart technology is being used by Irani women in their resistance against the ‘godly’ role of their state.

In recent years, we have observed, and suffered, the effects of the lethal combination of post-truth, the politics of populism and religiosity. Smart power has been ruthlessly used in this phenomenal episode of our recent history.

We Pakistanis are divided afresh, with novel intensity. This division doesn’t breed ‘diversity of ideas’, which is the hallmark of any strong, healthy society. Rather, this division is the killer of variety and variability.

By expressing our views, we together build a ‘world of opinions’. Peace in our real world rests upon our efforts to keep this ‘world of opinion’ a democratic one, permitting every person to form independently and express fearlessly their opinions.

However, this world of opinion is so fragile that it can easily be turned into an ‘Empire of opinion’, permitting only selective authoritative figures to express and propagate their opinions as unquestionable truths. The ‘Empire of opinion’ recklessly traverses the potentials and promises of imperialism.

This terrible lack of diversity of ideas, in tandem with a hard-nosed division, has us bogged down in a rut of a few questions. The questions of the basis of our national and cultural identity, of the role of Urdu and other Pakistani languages in informing identity, of the place of pre-Islamic cultures in the landscape of our national Muslim identity, of any prospects of the negotiation between religion and modernity, all are persistently raised, just to remain unanswered and plunging us again into a rut.

Instead of initiating a meaningful dialogue in this respect, we keep defending our point and disproving that of others. So, we are not a character of any epic, but the refrain of a tragic song! In the words of Zafar Iqbal:

Darya ruka hua hai hamara
Sehra mein rait beh rahi hai

[Our river is stagnant/ While the sand in the desert is, ironically, flowing.]

The writer is a Lahore-based critic and short story writer. His new book Naye Naqqaad Ke Naam Khatoot is coming soon

Published in Dawn, EOS, January 1st, 2023