CONTENTS
n
To
My Daughter
n Journey
n The
Voice of Silence
n The
Time-Rider
n Burning
Bright
n On
the Wings of Time
n In
Search of the Truth
n A
Bone-weary Truth
n
A Dream
Turned Real
n Starting
On A Sea-journey
n The
Other Side of the Sea
n Alone
in Karbala
n
I Am Not So Naive
n Grant
Me the Courage
n
Lamenting a Lost Moment
n
If Only I knew
Nothing
n Imageless
n My
Hands Reach the Door-Latch
n The
Narrow Bridge of Respectability
n A
Strange Thing
n Toys
in the Show-case
n Un-housed
n A
Picture Without Colors
n The
Boundaries of Love
n A
Distance in Love
n Autobiography
n The
Murder in Marriage
n Discarded
Toys
n I
Do Not Accept This
n I
Will Never Appeal
n A
Song Everlasting
n The
People of the Machine
n A
Strange Women in the Mirror
|
|
A
Roar on the Other Side of Silence
A NOTE ON READING
AND TRANSLATING THE POETRY OF ATTIYA DAWOOD
By
Asif Aslam Farrukhi
Bold, different,
defiant, feminist… Attiya Dawood is the new and exciting voice in
Sindhi poetry. A voice suggesting new choices, drawing out powerful
relationships, hinting at elusive mysteries. Choose love, she writes in
a poem addressed to her daughter, even if "they" condemn you
to be a "kari", the blackend woman. Do not let love turn into
a collar around the neck of slave, she writes in another poem, but you
should also eat the fruit of knowledge, then our love will be like
flowers and fragrance. Do not talk to me just as you talk to your
friends. I weigh heavy on shoulders of father, brother, husband, son…
bathed in the name of religion, nailed to the coffin in the name of
traditions, I am buried in the graveyard of ignorance. All my life I
kept walking on the "Pul Sarat" respectability built by
others. I hve traveled across centuries to know myself. You cannot keep
this voice locked up inside the "kot", it will not be
silenced. It announces firmly that "my hands reach out the door
latch
Slowly a trembling hand moves towards the heavily barricaded doors. This
gesture does not come easily. In one of her poems, Attiya Dawood writes
that beliefs were written "throttling my mind and dipped in my
blood", laws were framed "assuming my status as a
sub-human" and society built on "the skuls of what were once
my ambitions." Coming out of the bacground of oppersive silence,
solitary confinement in a "kot" and walking over the narrow
"Pul Sarat", Attiya Dawood is "the other voice" in
Sindhi poetry. In her introduction to "The other Voice: Twentieth
Century Women’s Poetry in Translation", the iconoclast American
women poet Adrien Rich speaks of "the great flowering, affecting
the themselves available to women we are only now egining to know as
materials and experiences becoming legitimized that were formerly
discounted as women’s subject..therefore trivial or scandlous."
In Rich’s terms, Attiya Dawood is a "special woman",
since she is "one of those who some how found her voice and moved
out to silence or the unwritten verbal tradition of women into the glare
and vulnerability of print." Attiya Dawood is acutely aware of this
eerie silence. For each woman poet who has come into print, there are
several others who are lost to silence. She has prepared interviews and
write-ups on women writers and their problems, and she ruefully
describes several instances. "One of them published her poetry
under several fictitious names, all of them rather neutral sounding so
as not to reveal the fact that she was a woman. She became a
recluse", she narrated to me. "I know some young girls who
were forbidden by their fathers or brothers from writing, even though
they came from educated families", she recites a poem and mentions
that it was frowned upon by the girl’s brother.
The journey has not been an easy one for Attiya herself. When the poem
addressed to her daughter asking her to choose love above all was
published on the literary page of a newspaper, there was a flurry of
angry, protesting letters. Attiya is not intimidated by controversies
and can defend the feminist stance of her poems as the proper subject
for poetry. "There are some of my friends who say that it was all
right for you to write about other things", she laughs as she has
no intention of following this or any other advice. She feels that she
has not acquired a "fashionable" idea which can be adopted as
a "politically correct pose", but she is writing about what
she passionately believes in, and passion is at the heart of poetry.
Attiya Dawood was born in a small village called Moledino Larik near
Kandiaro in district Naushehro Feroze, but has spent many years in
Karachi where she currently works at an office job. She is married to
Khuda Bux Abro, a well-known painter and graphic designer, and is the
mother of two daughters. She combines her personal and family life with
her work as writer and poet. She does not have a prolific output and her
poems can be contained in a volume as slim as this.
|