Aijaz Ahmad - Aditya Bahl, Border-Crosser - Sidecar
Aijaz Ahmad - Aditya Bahl, Border-Crosser - Sidecar
Aijaz Ahmad - Aditya Bahl, Border-Crosser - Sidecar
ADITYA BAHL
29 APRIL 2022 — IDEAS
Ahmad fled Pakistan for the first time in 1966, at the height of Ayub
Khan’s military dictatorship. He had recently finished a masters at
the Forman Christian College, Lahore. Two years later, he started
teaching at the SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and
Knowledge) Program at the City College of New York. His colleagues
there included Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, David
Hernandez and Adrienne Rich. Although the college was located in
Harlem, the cultural epicentre of the country’s Black community,
only 9 percent of its daytime students were Black or Puerto Rican.
SEEK was instituted to counteract the college’s racist admissions
policy and course design. But radicalized by the Vietnam War and
Black Liberation, the students wanted to open more than just the
gates to a public college. Screening radical cinema and publishing
political pamphlets, they swiftly turned the campus into a site for
revolutionary politics. In December 1968, addressing a multiracial
assembly of students and activists, Stokely Carmichael offered a
thunderous ‘blueprint for armed struggle against American racism
and capitalism’ that drew inspiration from the raging anticolonial
struggles in the Global South. A decade earlier, this same struggle
had thrust Ahmad into the fold of radical politics. When Israel, the
UK and France invaded Egypt in 1956, massive anticolonial
demonstrations erupted in Lahore. The 15-year-old Ahmad had joined
the demonstrators, and in a burst of youthful impudence, climbed
onto the veranda of a British consulate official’s house, picked up a
chair and smashed it to pieces.
Living under the high noon of ’68 in Harlem, Ahmad translated the
Urdu ghazals of Mirza Ghalib, the last Mughal poet, whose career
was dramatically transformed by the failed anticolonial rebellion of
1857. In that apocalyptic summer, the Britishers had hanged around
27,000 people in Delhi alone. With his friends either dead or
deprived of their patronage and wealth, Ghalib rushed to publish
DastAmbooh, a pro-British diary of the revolt. In his private letters, he
bitterly censured the reign of colonial terror, and continued writing
poems of intense ‘moral loneliness’. Ahmad’s collaborative
translations with Adrienne Rich (a close friend), W.S. Merwin and
William Stafford first appeared in Mahfil, a mimeographed magazine
published at the University of Chicago. Their experiments created a
poetic montage, which valued the play of translating over literal
translations. Ahmad juxtaposed his ‘prose versions’ with ‘notes’
(explanation and general vocabulary) for each couplet, which were
followed by the poets’ own versions of the original ghazal. In this
newfound avant-garde collective, Ahmad listened for the echoes of an
insurgent humanism: ‘Poetry happens wherever men suffer and
posit their humanity against their suffering. Viet Nam, Harlem, the
Delhi of 1857. LeRoi and Ghalib. You hold out your hand and you tell
another person what you are going through: that is the final poem’.
During this period, Ahmad also travelled widely in the Arab world.
Defeat by Israel in the Six Day War and the subsequent decline of
Nasserism had spurred a wave of Islamist reaction. In Egypt, Anwar
Sadat declared Islam the state religion and Shar’ia ‘the main source
of state legislation’. Crisscrossing the peri-urban townships
surrounding Cairo and the small-town interiors of Anatolia, Ahmad
closely studied the unexpected rise of an Islamist bourgeoisie. In
Jordan, he discovered that ‘the (Palestinian) camps were just full of
Quranic recitations, full of Islamic cassettes of various sorts’. In
Lebanon, his comrades in Palestinian liberation organizations
painted similar pictures of Birzeit. Ahmad’s analyses were regularly
translated and published in Rose Al-Yusef, the Egyptian political
weekly, and As-Safir, the leading daily newspaper in Lebanon. He had
already experienced similar tensions in Pakistan, where the MKP had
tried to meld Marxism and Islam into a revolutionary program. Tariq
Ali memorably described it as ‘the party which begins its private and
public meetings with recitations from the Koran and whose
manifesto is liberally spiced with quotations from the same!’ But this
new shift shared little with revolutionary politics. In 1977, Pakistan
also fell to the Islamists. General Zia-ul-Haq implemented martial
law, disbanded Parliament and ordered the Islamization of the entire
country.