A Scatter of Verses, Prose and Paintings is an attempt to catalogue the despair, violent emotions and inner turmoil that have hurt the imagination of the artist and poet Sadia Babar. The book is divided into five parts, titled ‘Impressionistic Images’, ‘Quest of Eve, Rise of Realism’, ‘Helen’s Odyssey Exploring Modernism’, ‘Trials of Mary, Surrealistic Dawn: Rise of Sophia’ and ‘Tales of Morrow’ and labelled by the writer as “micro fiction.”

The term ‘micro fiction’ can be defined as a style of extremely brief fiction that still offers character and plot development. Micro fiction poems are usually short, sometimes blocky. The genre alternatively enjoys names such as ‘sudden fiction’, ‘short short’, ‘flash fiction’ etc, and has been a steady undercurrent in the literary ocean since French poet Charles Baudelaire published his collection Le Spleen de Paris [Paris Spleen], also known as Petits Poemes en prose, or short prose poems.

The illustrations and paintings featured alongside enhance the artistic impact and offer a fascinating comparison between colours and words. With immense sensitivity, Babar writes about the hardships faced in life, the tumult arising from troubled relationships and the angst of betrayal.

Hers is an intimately feminine voice; the feelings and experiences arise from the depths of the feminine sensibility. Her writing exudes a cry of pain, disillusionment and the feeling of being left alone and torn apart, and she does it with a romantic intensity that would resonate with anyone. Take, for instance, the short poem titled ‘4am’:

A book brings together a poet’s urgent need to be heard and to relate the betrayal and loss faced in life with her creative expressions in other mediums

Morning they say/ Night I say,
’Tis that time/ When lonely hearts
Beat their rhyme/ When forgotten tears
Fresh fears/ Fall down/ To the hard/ Dry ground
And/ No one/ Hears

A similar note of temperamental sadness and pensive melancholy can be discerned in many of her other poems, which often start with powerful imagery and gradually build an incredible, painful portrait of being brutally hurt. For example, in ‘Doubt’:

Can it rain today?/ To wash the pain today?
To wash the worry/ You need not hurry
For us/ You little darling;
The world/ ’Tis big/ And you’ll have to dig/ Your own little
Heaven/ To survive
Their tongues/ Wagging/ Bragging/ Nagging/ Jagging
The following lines from ‘Of Winter Bugs and Forests’ also relate the same mood;
You hear that scar/ Scream...

Babar’s words grasp the universal pain of longing and sensual yearning, but tackle it with a uniquely bold perspective. In the dark, stirring lines of ‘He Speaks Sometimes’, she writes:

Tear that skin apart/ Dig, till the
Heart/ Then and only then/ You’ll see/ Just how much
I/ Love/ Thee…
Also in ‘Soul Food’:
There’s no time for sleep/ Just scrape and sweep
The shards of pain/ Just hope it’s clean/ To scream again.

The poem ‘Letters to an Unbecoming Lover’ expresses a longing arising out of unrequited love. Elsewhere, a delicate touch of satire to document human frailty and the innate human characteristic of telling lies is evident, as in ‘Cracked China’, where the poet writes:

Something new please?/ It rings stale and rusty;
It smells rank and musty/ It looks dank and dusty.
Oh I go on rhyming/ With my rhythm timing
To beats of lies/ I hear/ Every/ Bloody/ Day.

One finds helplessness and an acute melancholy in the tone and her words come out like an aching burn that awaits peaceful sleep. Take ‘Wired Escape’, where she begins the poem with: It’s tiring to be tired And ends with:Death is the only truth

Babar’s poetry reads as the urgent whispering of a soul eager to be heard and to relate the betrayal and loss faced in life. Going through the verses, one has an acute sensibility of the poet wanting to dig deep into sorrow and pain. Bottled up as it is, she wants to let it all go in an attempt to free, to be able to breathe peacefully. In the forthrightly titled ‘Operation Cleanup’, she writes:

Please, hand me that scalpel/ I have to dig out the Dirt,
It keeps my blood/ From flowing;
Free/ I want to bleed out/ The Words…
She also has eagerness in her tone:
One last breath/ Ready/ Steady/ Go…/ Aah…/ Gone.

Interestingly, after the catharsis, the writer comes up with a renewed passion to celebrate disillusionment. Her collection walks a curving path between loss, anguish, recovery and surrender but, after a moment’s respite, the guilt, regret and agony resurface and hurt with fresh, updated force. The emotions contained within are deep and complex, too big to be put plainly into words. But she manages somehow. Her choice of diction favours antiquated words — “thou”, “’tis”, “thee” — but it seems to work; imparting a whimsical tone, directing the reader’s attention to the rhyming and drawing the focus to certain, urgent words.

Interspersed through her book — scattered, if one takes a very literal approach — is Babar’s art. Her painting ‘For a PTSD Survivor’ is a stark comment on the obvious and latent struggles of dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. Babar draws, with pencil on paper, the agonised, weary face of a woman, revealing her battle with pain and the sense of being trapped inside a damaged shell. The glaring stitches indicate the healing process of the physical body, but the pain evident in her eyes reflects the difficulty of healing oneself emotionally from the injuries, or the scar itself.

With her scatter of words, sketches and colours, Babar’s book is a chronicle of the bewildering uncertainty and chaos of life.

The reviewer is a writer, artist and educationist based in Lahore

A Scatter of Verses, Prose and Paintings
By Sadia Babar
Liberty, Karachi
ISBN: 978-9698729165
193pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 15th, 2021