Poetry in English from Pakistan:
A 21st Century Anthology
Edited by Ilona Yusuf and Shafiq Naz Alhamra
ISBN: 978-9464593310
441pp.

Tracing poetry in English by Pakistani writers, Ilona Yusuf and Shafique Naz have put together a valuable resource.

A poet writing in English in Pakistan is not an easy thing to be. There is the question of language. Must you write the King’s English or can you modify tone and structure to reflect the nuances of a different cultural matrix?

Who are you writing for? The answer to that is, first of all, yourself. Platforms were strictly limited for writers in English till the coming of the digital age. Thereafter, a number of online journals began to publish fiction and poetry in English, making it possible to dissolve boundaries and reach out to the reader, wherever in the world he/she may be.

There are some truly bilingual poets, but most Pakistani writers who choose to write in English do not really have a choice: the post-colonial milieu still values English language skills to an extent that it distances the writer from his or her own language. And the question of what is the ‘mother tongue’ further muddies the waters.

Poetry in English from Pakistan is an ambitious venture. Co-edited by poet and artist Ilona Yusuf and Shafiq Naz of Alhamra publishing, it presents the curated work of 68 poets, home-based and diasporic. While the editors’ initial aim was to provide a platform for new and emerging voices in print, the venture grew into an informal history of the genre.

Some poets from the early anthologies published by the Oxford University Press Pakistan find their way into this volume. They include Adrian A. Hussain, Salman Tarik Kureshi and Maki Qureshi. Adrian was the moving spirit behind the group ‘Mixed Voices’ in Karachi in the mid-’70s, a space where poets writing in English could compare notes and critique each others’ work. The ‘mix’ in Mixed Voices came from the inclusion of poets writing in Urdu and the Pakistani languages, a sort of cross-fertilisation taking place in terms of themes and treatment.

Thus, joining the writers in English were Jaun Elia, a well-known Urdu poet, Sara Shagufta writing in Punjabi and Hashim Babar in Pashto, among others. At about the same time, Waqas Khwaja crystalised the writers’ community in Lahore.

An ambitious anthology presents the curated work of 68 Pakistani poets writing in English, turning the venture into an informal history of the genre

Yusuf and Naz focus on works written after the year 2000, hence the “21st Century Anthology” elaboration in the title. The poets are presented in chronological order, taking date of birth as a reference point. Among the earliest writers are Zulfiqar Ghose and Ghulam Fariduddin Riaz. Moving from Sialkot to Bombay, and then from London to the quiet retreat of a university in Austin Texas, Ghose’s inner vision belongs to no particular place, as he assimilates influences from the classic poets.

Themes of displacement and loss appear quite frequently in the work of the millenials making their appearance in the second half of the book. As does the so-called ‘confessional’ mode.

Among the earlier writers, Alamgir Hashmi is a prolific poet, the author of 11 books of poetry. He has, like many other poets, divided time between academic pursuits and work as a translator and editor. He is one of the Pakistani poets who chose to explore the sonnet form in some of his work.

Sophia Naz is a US-based bilingual poet who consciously inhabits the space between two languages. She draws on historical sources and cultural traditions in her writing. Thus, her poem ‘Chappan Churi’ [Chhappan Chhuri] recounts an incident in the life of the singer Janaki Bai:

The jilted’s fifty six stabbings
Could not kill Janaki Bai
Thereafter known as chappan churi

When I type
churi, autocorrect is also
a stab at language
giving me the option
of cherry, char
cheri, churn, churl,
chi, and occasionally, chai

A conjoined cup I sip
walk a tightrope
of English-Urdu
one font in each bone-cheeni
my lines are burning fiercely

Like Janaki
each wound giving me
a brand new mouth.

Hima F. Raza, who died in a tragic car accident at the age of 27, was a poet and academic who explored experimental form and the differences between the two languages she negotiated:

She calls out to the ghosts of a forgotten language
Which feeds her marrow the taste of reverence.
The anxieties of influence that haunt the page
She writes on — even so.
Nothing quite translates it
For the children of a restless union
In between right and left,
In the space of languagelessness,
An amnesiac’s curse…

Zaman Hazir, who lives between Glasgow and Islamabad, was a graphic designer and is now a full-time woodworker. In a poem dedicated to his father, the poet Taufiq Rafat, he says:

As the last slab slides
into its place in my mind
I feel a world slip away
no cigarette burns on the sofa
or a mute heap of words on the floor
You are your books now
Buried in bookstores

Nostalgia and a yearning to go back to a time imagined in memory marks the work of other diasporic writers. Shahbano Bilgrami, in an ode to absent mothers writes:

Is there a recipe for lost mothers? To distil the essence of
Their being, to recreate the queenly feasts when love
Was cooking and cooking was love? If only we could
Reclaim you through a book, swallow you whole,
Ingest you so that you’d never leave us, all alone,
Searching for you in the empty kitchen.

Shadab Zeest Hashmi puts the ghazal form to good use in a substantial body of work. Athar Tahir adopts the sonnet, while some later writers have broken free of traditional form and metrical conventions to pursue the essence of poetry in free verse.

The human condition illuminates the work of these Pakistani poets. Perhaps the act of crossing the bridge from one language to the other could be reversed by undertaking translations of poetry in English into Urdu and other Pakistani languages.

The reviewer is one of the founding editors of Newsline magazine. She is a writer, editor, translator and documentary filmmaker

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, March 30th, 2025