POEM
From my favorite poet and a great poem:
Read the story and I am sure you will find hope!
Keeping faith in a world barren of humanity
I AM sad. I read a New York Times article the other day on Afghans
bartering their sons for wheat.
For example, Mr Akhtar Mohammed, who lives in a remote hamlet in
the mountains of northern Afghanistan, took 10-year-old Sher and
five-year-old Baz, two of his 10 children, to the market of the nearest
city and bartered them for bags of wheat.
The father accompanied the Times journalist to the city to find out how the older
boy was faring. Father and son met in a crowded street, and embraced.
Sher said that his owners did not treat him well. He was made to work very hard
and, at night, he was sent into the mountains to sleep with the sheep.
The boy also said he felt bad about being sold. 'But I understand why the selling of
me was necessary,' he added, as if he was mentioning a fact of nature, like the sun
setting in the west.
Khali Gul, too, appears in the article. She is 'a tearful woman with a bowl of grass
at her feet and, nearby, a young daughter whose face is blemished with sores'.
Grass was all that they had to eat. Her husband and two children had died of
disease not too long ago.
I wanted to talk to Sher and Khali Gul. I wanted to find them.
Because travelling to see them is well nigh impossible, I turned to Ithaca, a poem
by one of my favourite sources of hope, the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy.
Using Ithaca as a symbol for the search for meaning in life, he says (in the
translation by Rae Dalven):
'Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage./ Without her you would never have
taken the road./ But she has nothing more to give you./ And if you find her poor,
Ithaca has not defrauded you./ With the great wisdom you have gained, with so
much experience,/ you must surely have understood by then what Ithacas mean.'
What they mean is that the quality of the voyage matters more than the nature of
the destination.
It has been said of Cavafy that he is one of the few poets able to write a patriotic
poem that is not embarrassing. Hence, his quest for Ithaca is also a world citizen's
unsentimental search for a just home to which he can belong.
I just could not find Sher or Khali Gul in Cavafy's Ithaca.
Maybe Sher was asleep among the sheep on a mountain that even Cavafy had not
climbed in his imagination. Maybe Khali Gul was feeding her daughter grass and
had no interest in stopping Cavafy in his tracks as he made his way to Ithaca.
So, I looked elsewhere for the Afghans. I turned to Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the Urdu poet
from Pakistan. He, the voice of the Afro-Asian world, never climbed a mountain in
his mind or walked by a village in his sleep without the rag-tag army of the world's
dispossessed in tow.
I reread his poem Let Me Think, translated by Agha Shahid Ali. On the surface, Faiz
speaks like a traveller who has discovered not that Ithaca is poor, but that it was
erased from the face of the earth before he could discover it.
'You ask me about that country/ whose details now escape me./ I don't remember
its geography,/ nothing of its history,' he confesses.
Faiz says 'country'. Given that a poet's only country is the world, the question is:
How did he respond to a world where there was no Ithaca any more for him to hide
his dreams in?
I can almost touch the fatigue in him when he says: 'I have reached that age/
when one visits the heart merely as a courtesy...'
I would not have been so troubled by this poem had Faiz not been a lifelong
socialist who paid for his convictions by spending years in prison under a death
sentence. His release merely gave him more time to love life and sing the praises
of silent humanity.
For Faiz to adopt that plaintive tone casts doubt on Ithaca's reality, not only as a
destination but also as a journey.
Yet, what alternative is there to searching for Ithaca even in the midst of a ruined
Afghanistan?
One answer is to think that the world is not worth caring for. Nothing that you and I
can think, say or do will really change anything. Perhaps. But then, why live in this
world?
The other answer is to believe that thoughts, words and actions can make a
difference, fated though much of life seems.
Poverty has cut swathes through humanity, and compassion has a hard time
keeping up. The bartering of boys, the sale of girls, the hobbled steps of the aged
on roads as painfully long as eternity - who can stop that evil trade, that forced
march?
Perhaps we can. Those boys, girls, husbands, wives and grandparents are not the
objects of poems that have been written once and for all, but subjects of lines that
are yet to be written and set to rhyme.
Khali Gul must not suffer without demanding food. Sher must not accept a world in
which he is supposed to understand why he has to be sold.
For them, new hopes, new lines of departure, new Ithacas are necessary.
And they will not find their way to Ithaca if we do not keep them company.
