[In the following review, Hashmi traces the themes of displacement and exile in Ghose's poetry from his earliest works to his previously unpublished and newer poems collected in Selected Poems.]

Born in Sialkot in 1935, Zulfikar Ghose moved with his family to Bombay in 1942 and to England following the Partition. His first book of poems appeared in London in 1964, and he became well known as a poet from Pakistan. In quick succession came short stories, novels, and an autobiography, as well as journalism and other writings. By the time he left England for the United States in 1969, he was already a writer to reckon with in several genres.

Although during the last twenty-five years his fiction list has come to dominate the publishers' charts and the reviewers' prime slots, he remains a writer who has practiced poetry consistently since the late 1950s, when his early poems began to be published in British magazines. Ever since, his poems have appeared regularly in magazines, anthologies, textbooks, broadcasts, and individual collections. Over the years Pakistani magazines and anthologies have also carried some of his work, though hardly any of his books has been issued in Pakistan as yet. The Selected Poems therefore fills a crying gap.

The fifty-three poems chosen by Ghose for this volume have been drawn from his three poetry collections and a previous New and Selected Poems published in the United States. He has added substantially to the number chosen for the latter stateside volume, and not only with new, uncollected poems. Some items in the earlier collections which he excluded from A Memory of Asia: New and Selected Poems (declaring that “the ones not included in this volume do not now strike me as worthy of anyone's attention”) have happily made their way back here and will survive. On the other hand, the twenty new poems carried in A Memory of Asia are reduced here to eleven, whereas the twelve uncollected and included here for the first time are a treat over previous decisions of immediate excision and removal whose only remedy for the faithful reader was either the original editions or the now equally hard-to-obtain Penguin Modern Poets 25.

Still, excision, removal, and survival are not just the practical aspects of compiling Ghose's book(s); these are forces which have informed both his life and his creative work. As a child he suddenly found himself chucked out of his original habitat; as a youth he had to leave the landscape to which he was accustomed and cope with a new environment with which he could never be at one without the doubtful aid of “external” interferences and attachments; as a man he had to consider his roots, rely on memory, and invent a language that would make sense of the contemporary world for him who has all but lost his “home.” Partition and exile, and the attendant socioreligious traumas, have not been written about enough in our literature, particularly in verse of any significance, and there is yet to develop a sense of the transition of the 1940s, with its confused options and a “lost generation” on both sides of the Indo-Pakistani border and beyond. Although of that enduring generation—like Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Qurat-ul-Ain Haider, Saadat Hasan Manto, Abdullah Hussain, and Aziz Ahmad—Ghose, in the literary sense, has hardly been lost, has always described himself as Pakistani, and remains a poet of national, international, and universal dimensions.

In the early poems the personal and the historical coincide in a verse which abounds in animals juxtaposed to mechanical imagery and an inhospitable landscape characterized as India, where the old order has given way to one that looks new but is actually quite ancient: “in a bazar donkeys speak into carrots / like crooners miming into microphones” (“Across India: February 1952”). “Asoka's wheel” and the “vote,” in “A Short History of India,” mix and unmix Western and Eastern symbols into further definitions of order. Some recent comment concerning A Memory of Asia has made much of Ghose's attachment to India,¹ without realizing of course that the India of the poems is ostensibly not the state but rather the place designated so poetically, almost like the heath in King Lear. Likewise, in the same poem the eagles may be real but are quite beyond that: “Above us the sun is still, / the eagles are motifs of the air.”

And not just motifs. With the poetic progress, from the car journey in the earlier poem to “Flying over India,” the sight improves with the intelligence at work: “The point of the eagle's introspection / or its lonely watch-tower withdrawal / is also my point of view.” Both the motif and the point of view, as universal as they obviously are, closely belong to the Pakistani poetic tradition. What could be more Iqbal-like than the lines just quoted? Or consider these lines from the same poem, concluded with an ironic comment made the sharper for its perfect rhyme:

Give me the purer air. The flat earth is awful.
Give me height, height, with its cold perspective
of forms of the earth. Senseless now to dive
like eagles to the earth's sparrows. The jungle's
beasts are unseen from here. From these heights,
one can almost believe in human rights.

Besides broad observation, many of the poems are autobiographical, indeed historical in a material and artistic sense. Their symbolic strategies lend a universal credence to their experience. An early poem, “The Body's Independence,” illustrates this in its self-evident three-part structure, which is common to a number of other early poems as well. The biology lesson in the first part of that poem is autobiographical and tends to become symbolic in that the teacher's “voice, a lesson in prosody, / told us of the secrets of the heart. / … We furtively laughed at the shape of man, / but his eyes saw farther than the chart.” In the second part the speaker's personal illness is gradually healed “with the oil of life to anoint my head.” As Ghose has stated, he fell seriously ill at the time of Independence.² The country then was in no better condition, and symbolic means are employed to indicate that. The means of personal recovery from illness are also symbolic, equated to the Mughal prince Humayun's recovery through parental sacrifice and consecration: “My body took shape like the chart, I found / the outline of my bones fill with flesh and blood.” In the third part of the poem coalesce all three elements of the self in a reversal of fair possibility, and the earlier narrative is flinched: “India was at civil war, / the crow excreted where he pleased. And I, / reborn from my fairy tale, saw bones charred / in mounds on pavements. It was no country / for princes, and the eagle soared.”

“The Body's Independence,” a complete reflection on art's healing power and the modes of civil existence, is concerned with the close relation of the human body to the body politic and is an excellent exemplification and enhancement of a principle first enunciated by Rousseau: “The body politic, like the human body, begins to die from its birth, and bears in itself the causes of its destruction.”³ The poem ends with a precise two-pronged comment: “The blood of India ran out with my youth.” Other Pakistani poems have addressed themselves to the theme of Independence from a similar analytic standpoint,⁴ though they have not spawned a culture of resistance or revolution like the Urdu poetry of the 1940s and its later development.⁵ The symbols achieved have also the power to contain other forms of social action.

As I said earlier, the symbolic is rooted in the autobiographical and historical hold on reality; and on the other side of the opaque glass of exile is printed its universal, international, and national character in an essential symmetry of liminal relations. Poems like “The Attack on Sialkot” and “The Mystique of Roots” still address these concerns, but “The Alien” and “This Landscape, These People” paradoxically locate the speaker in England. Nearly all the poems in Ghose's second collection, Jets from Orange, tend to be more open-ended, or pointed outward from the specific contexts of imagery, and they define their subjects in frames of cultural breadth which are new, whether the subject is a picnic in Jammu (“The Picnic in Jammu”), the compunctions at the composition of art on account of the decomposition of the human body (“Decomposition”), or the culture lost between Bombay and London whose music is “hybrid jazz of no tradition” (“The Lost Culture”). The eagle or the hawk of the earlier poems has been replaced by the jet plane, while the new dog-weary existence, “as if suspended mobility,” is conveyed in intricately rhyming regular lines in “Kew Bridge” and “history's fashionable misconceptions” and other romancing find a temporary correction in lines like “we make spring-mattressed love with its / Kleenex anti-climax, hearing the planes descend” (“Don't Forget the Pill, Dear”). The earlier pun has an abortive purpose, but the clenched consonantal landing, with its iambic movement, sounds convincing enough.

Like the poem mentioned last, the poems in Ghose's third volume, The Violent West, evince an interest more in certain philosophical propositions than in the images which seem to suggest them. The excellent measure and rhyme of “Of Self-Hatred” can well examine “a stylized motif of eagle wings woven / in subtly differentiated colours on dacron that feels / like silk.” And in the last stanza, “One by one, / consider the hypotheses that come / from the undergrowth or from the cold ocean.” The search for home, as such, should prove to be even more difficult, since the propositions lead to still other images—of enticements that lead away—in these poems written since Ghose's taking up residence in the U.S. “Old Ragged Claws,” for example, ends with the telling line, “I have come so far West, the East is near.” “On Owning Property in the U.S.A.” underlines the contradictions of pursuing dreams, whereas “It's Your Land, Boss” brings home the irrelevance and unfruitful nature of one's relations to land. “An Imperial Education” considers the “subtle corruption” of the situation of the ex-colonies man in the West and the compulsions to engage in the dual conspiracy of silence and speech, none of which will lead one home.

Following a recent visit to Pakistan, Ghose published an article titled “Going Home,” in which he said:

It was my first visit to Pakistan in twenty-eight years but when I climbed up the stupa at Dharmarajika in Taxila on a beautifully clear May morning and looked at the land stretching to the mountains on the horizon I had the sensation that my absence from that soil had been of a far longer duration and, at the same time, now that I had my feet planted in it, I had existed continuously on that earth for two thousand years. … There are moments in our lives when we can hear the soul whisper its contentment that the long torment of being has been stilled at last. The air in Taxila filled my brain with that serenity. I felt I was at home.⁶

An earlier statement about being at home in Texas⁷ is here superseded by a feeling that approximates belonging to the place, not just to the landscape. That may be qualified, arguably, by the memory of how the Ghose text ekes out its own satisfactions from the very contradictions set up by it—and by the memory of the last two lines of “The Pursuit of Frost”: “a lost-and-found / civilization (a home, wanderer!), an ancient fraud.” Still, the discovery of a perfect symbol in Peshawar which seems to capture all that it is about can evoke a sense of belonging.

At the Peshawar Museum I was struck by the power of the incomplete statue of the fasting Buddha to fix the itinerant self in a timeless and bodiless space. … That which is not there startles the mind with the certainty of its being; … the broken incomplete Buddha is the mirror the soul looks at when the body has been compelled to recognize its inconsequentiality; … he is the man in exile whose body must forever be incomplete because a part of it resides in the place of his origin. … He is and is not, simultaneously a pure idea of the ambiguity of life which is now solidly real and now an empty dream.⁸

The poems from A Memory of Asia evidence a discursive shift; memory is made up of language and perception, and the finely modulated verse paragraph of the title poem is a suitable vehicle for their permutations. “Notes towards a Nature Poem,” “E.g.,” and “I.e.” describe a sort of theory of poetry, in this case nature poetry; and poems like “Among Other Things,” “A Young Girl Diving,” and “A Dragonfly in the Sun” carry out the principles in precisely apprehended images. In “I.e.” is advanced the notion of the name and a particular, detailed registering of the object of beauty instead of the cultivating of an idealism of the nonthing—viz., Saint-John Perse's reflection on Braque's birds. The birds in the Ghose poem suggest their shapes from their names. If Perse tried to unfold a total view of man in union with the universe and tortured by history, Ghose names the subject without the epic resources and relies on it as man's only relation to his reality; but in the meantime several texts (Braque, Perse, Ghose) have overlapped and converged in a “radiance” (“E.g.”) of “the abstract group” (“I.e.”). “Trees” and “Sounds” are further explorations and fine poems in this vein. “The Oceans” is a reflection on the oceans' beauty, power, and mystery, as well as their role in our world, but the poem is a trifle overexplained.

“Flying over the Extinct Volcanoes” has transparent images, though these are not without the symbolic resonances (religion, stock market, weather chart) which must deny narrative comfort. The last poems, hitherto uncollected, generally carry forward this style. The mood is somber when not bitter. The concerns with the deceptive nature of reality (“The Sun and the Lizard”), revisionist history (“The Monument to Sibelius in Rio de Janeiro”), futility (“The Counter Riddle”), and false assumptions (“Destiny”), and with an unnatural and barren existence (“Surprising Flowers,” “Lady Macbeth's Farewell to Scotland”) continue, though not without some vague vibrations from “perfumed landscapes.”

Clearly, Ghose is a poet with a moral passion, writing from a split-screen vision of himself in a consensus society. Several continents and cultures have shaped his outlook and the subjects of his verse, and there is a remarkable unity of idea and tone across his later writings in several forms. Whereas his fiction now exhibits a familiarity with Latin American literature, his poetry has remained largely untouched by the “Southern” experience, which has imparted certain changes in the work of some of his North American contemporaries—say, the later Mark Strand. Still, Ghose may not have been inclined to having two strings to his bow, which already had South Asia in place, even if South Asian English poetry itself has largely been quite parochial.⁹

In Ghose's poetry the Western formal influences have thus remained paramount. His association with the British poets known as the Group¹⁰ may not have been a decisive factor, as he has disavowed any such implication himself, naming his reading of Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959) as a turning point in his career.¹¹ Lowell's “influence,” in the early poems particularly, is highly visible, in that, like Lowell, Ghose effectively evokes large landscapes of memory embedded with personal, family, communal, and national histories. Further, the turn of phrase and the ease with the subjective image are owed more to Lowell and the American “confessional” poets than to contemporary British practice. These thematic choices and structural strategies, of memory and making, were to continue until almost the 1980s, when Ghose took to the indeterminate text and open structures as practiced by American poets like Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery. His reading of Wittgenstein, Proust, and Beckett has fostered not so much the form as the attitude,¹² and Ghose has made the language itself the source of substance and beauty, the writer's ideal home. It can be argued with point, nevertheless, that Ghose's ear was affected by the (British) Group's loud reading habits and that he hardly could outgrow the staple pentameter (even when it fluctuates), the structured stanza, the seductions of rhyme, and the overall measured if not austere movement of rather academic verse. Add to this the stress on experience (and experience as reading, as Ghose indicated to Bruce Meyer)¹³ as well as Ghose's rational intelligence, sharp irony, learning, and craftsmanship, and you might think you have been reading (or listening to) a Movement poet.¹⁴ Not so: there is greater variety and expanse in his work; his images are fresh, his voice is unique, and he has made the intercontinental terrain his province. Land (as a place to belong to, not to buy or sell), self, beliefs, and relationships are the leitmotivs—in his poetry as well as his fiction—crowned by a graceful introspective language, which is Zulfikar Ghose's counter against the chaos of our civilization.

Notes

1. K. S. Narayana Rao, review of Ghose's Memory of Asia, in WLT 59:2 (Spring 1985), p. 317.

2. Bruce Meyer, “An Interview with Zulfikar Ghose,” in Zulfikar Ghose, Selected Poems, Karachi, Oxford University Press, 1991.

3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (1762), Good translations can be seen in Social Contract, Maurice Cranston, tr., Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1969; and Social Contract and Discourses, 2d rev. ed., J. H. Brumfit and J. C. Hall, eds., G. D. H. Cole, tr., London, 1973.

4. See “Freedom's Dawn (August 1947),” in Poems by Faiz, V. G. Kiernan, tr., London, 1971; and Alamgir Hashmi, “Pakistan Movement,” in Pakistan Times, Pakistan Resolution Golden Jubilee Celebrations Supplement, 23 March 1990.

5. See “Introduction,” in The Penguin Book of Modern Urdu Poetry, Mahmood Jamal, ed. & tr., Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986.

6. Zulfikar Ghose, “Going Home,” Weekend Post (Lahore), 10 August 1990, p. 3.

7. Meyer, op. cit.

8. Ghose, “Going Home,” p. 3.

9. See the discussion of poetry in Alamgir Hashmi, Commonwealth Literature, Lahore, 1983; Alamgir Hashmi, “Poetry, Pakistani Idiom in English, and the Groupies,” WLT 64:2 (Spring 1990), pp. 268-71; and also Alamgir Hashmi, “Poetry in Contemporary India” (review article), Journal of South Asian Literature, 19:1 (1984), pp. 219-22.

10. See A Group Anthology, Philip Hobsbaum and Edward Lucie-Smith, eds., London, 1963.

11. Meyer, op. cit.

12. In his discussion of Ghose's fiction, Bruce King correctly states that “the similarities of Ghalib and Iqbal to Ghose's view of the relationship of language to reality … possibly are explained by cultural heritage.” Bruce King, “From Twilight to Midnight: Muslim Novels of India and Pakistan,” in The Worlds of Muslim Imagination, Alamgir Hashmi, ed., Islamabad, 1986, pp. 243-59.

13. Meyer, op. cit.

14. See New Lines, Robert Conquest, ed., London, 1956; see also Blake Morrison, The Movement, London, 1980.