Attiya Dawood:
more substance
than style

By Sikandar Sarwar

She is more than a poet, an aesthetic and sensetive voice, a woman responsive to the cries of anguish and anxiety of women abused around the world.

Though she lives on the eighth floor in an apartment block in Karachi, Attiya's feet are planted firmly on the ground. Attiya Larik, now Attiya Dawood, is a young woman, in her early thirties, secure in her strong opinions, secure in her husband, secure in her two daughters. The woman is a poet and a writer, a feminist, radio and TV playwright, all concentrated and packed in one personality.

Born in a village which goes by the name of Larik, in district Naushehro Feroz, her entire education, took place in Hyderabad, up to Intermediate Arts. Though she didn't quote him, her attitude was the same as Chinua Achebe, the famous Nigerian writer, who is reported to have said something to the effect that he had been given the gift of the English Language and he intended to make full use of it. Attiya, coming as she does from a rural Sindhi background, is very strong in her language and its traditions, and she quotes adages, axioms, maxims, proverbs that show her love for and pride in the beauty of her language.

"My father," she says, "had an open mind about most things. He was not at all like other middle class people who come from the countryside. He was broad‑minded, especially about how his daughters were to be brought up. Though a hafiz, he was not a mullah. But in his desire to have a son, he married again. When that didn't answer, he married a third time. My mother. She was only thirteen, and my father was sixty. My mother gave him two daughters before she gave him two sons. And she became a widow at thirty." 'Attiya's tone was flat and unemotional when she stated these facts about her father. Perhaps she couldn't bring herself to say anything unpleasant about her father. But the very fact that she stated the difference between the ages of her father and mother spoke volumes about what her opinions were on the matter.

"There should be no disparity between the ages of husband and wife, otherwise there will be an unbridgeable gulf in their thinking." How can a child in her early teens and a man past the average national age have anything in common at the intellectual level? Obviously, Attiya attaches a great deal of premium to the quality of thinking of a woman, because a woman, according to her, is also a person. She thinks, but if riveted to a man who is more like a father figure, how can she have. any interaction with him? "My husband ' Khuda Bux Abro, is only one year older than me," Attiya says, "and he and I have a beautiful relationship, as friends. Similarly, with my brother, after we eventually arrived at an understanding that I was as much a human being as he was." Attiya does not agree that in the earlier stages, when both girls and boys have had equal exposure to the outside world (that is to say, almost none) girls acquire a greater understanding of the nature of things, and mature earlier than boys. She says that that is a sop to dry female tears.

Continuing with the theme of girls being married whil still in their early teens, she asks, "Why do Parents want to get rid of a girl as soon as may be? Why do they wrest her childhood from her? Why do they force her into marriage, when, obviously she is not yet ready for it? Khainch taan ke bara kerdete hain! It is unnatural. Is it not because they think that a daughter can do nothing to raise the glory of the family's name? They get rid of her as soon as they can, but protect the boy in every way. Very early in my life, I decided that I will prove that I too can, as a girl, achieve recognition and bring glory to my father's name. That is why I have not assumed the name of my husband even after marriage. I use my father's name, Dawood."

About feminism, Attiya is not 'hate‑the‑chauvinist‑pigs' type. And she say’s "You need not be a woman to be a feminist. Men can and do show sympathy and support. And in most cases that is enough, as far as they themselves are concerned. But let me say frankly that even with the best of intentions, the male cannot understand. He may be very understanding and supportive, but no man goes through the experiences that are the lot of a woman, every waking hour of her life. The framework of his experience is entirely divorced from reality as a woman confronts it. He may agree on the conscious level, and may be quite sincere and straightforward in his empathy toward women, but unconsciously his thinking remains different, because nothing in his experience is the same. Women are bruised and insulted in every conceivable way. With each day that passes I become more convinced of this fact. It is impossible to narrate the attitudes of one's male relatives, even one's own kith and kin, about females.

"We women ourselves are so attuned to this discriminating attitude that even mothers prefer their sons to their daughters, if you note how they feed their sons and daughters. In our school books in Sindh, Ahmad goes to school, but Zarina has to look after her parents, or clean up the house. This forced labour is shown as virtuous, woh maan baap ki khidmat kar rahi hai. Our traditions and folk songs point out the same attitude. Remember the famous Sindhi song Mor tho tille rana, mor tho tille"? The tradition behind the song is the celebration of a toddler's acquired ability to walk. His mamoon runs after him playfully and so do his mother and other women folk of the family. Meethi roti is distributed among all and sundry. This son is going to sire new generations. But this kind of ceremony or celebration is never accorded to a daughter. You see sons and daughters, as offsprings, are treated entirely differently from the very start. The thinking and reacting about sons and daughters, it appears, come from separate compartments of the same brain and not of the same person at all.

Attiya has also been writing papers for workshops and seminars, articles for newspapers and magazines for about the last ten years. Several of her efforts have helped research scholars, especially about folk artists and men of letters in the Sindhi language. She has been a regular contributor to the daily Hilal Pakistanand its women's page Sartiyun. From 1986 to 1988, Altiya compered radio programmes on women and their problems.

In April 1995, Attiya Dawood’s collection of poems, titled Raging to be Free was published by Maktaba‑e‑Daniyal, which featured English translations of her 33 poems. The famous Punjabi poet Amrita Preetam, now settled in India, wrote to her recently, saying that she intends translating her poem into Punjabi and Hindi. Meanwhile, the translations of her poems in Urdu, done by no less a person than Fehmeeda Riaz, will soon hit the bookstands in Pakistan.

Earlier, Jane Goodwin, made use of her two effective poems as a preface to The Price of Honour, a book on Muslim women, which only goes to show how representative Attiya's poems are.

Attiya has returned from Beijing and Hoairou in the middle of this month. She participated in the NGO segment of the Conference as one of the representatives of ASR Resource Centre, a Lahore based NGO. Like all NG0s, this one too bore all the expenses itself. Government participants went to the official Conference which was held in Beijing. In Hoairou, the NG0s tackled 130 workshops, each one on a separate topic. Attiya, as expected, is full of praise and glory for the more than 36,000 NG0s who met and interacted with each other, with love and common cause.

Attiya Dawood works for a government department, though, as her husband, the well known artist, Khuda Bux Abro, says "She is not cut out for a regular job." Attiya and Abro have two children, the elder one Soonha is a child prodigy. She paints extremely well for her age and has attracted critics and art lovers alike. Like any other mother, Attiya Dawood is proud of her, but makes no attempt to bring her up in her own image. "Soonha will make her own mark," says this woman who has created her own niche.

Courtesy: The Star Weekend Thursday, September 21, 1995