Edward Said in his essay, “Reflections on Exile” recounts an interesting anecdote about Faiz Ahmad Faiz and his friend Eqbal Ahmad. Said talks about how Faiz had several Palestinian friends but was only able to overcome his “constant estrangement” when he met Ahmad, a Pakistani friend and fellow-exile. Perhaps because he felt that Ahmad understood him. They shared the same culture, language and were both experiencing exile. I can’t help but think whether the encounter would have yielded the same results if we were to strip away some trivialities from the story. What if Faiz and Ahmad were not friends? Would two strangers have shared such an unadulterated and unembellished experience? What if Ahmad had no interest in poetry? Would he still have sat in a dreary restaurant late at night to listen to Faiz’s verse? I can’t say for sure. But I’d like to think so; if not for friendship or poetry but for familiarity and mutual disdain for the Zia regime. The point of mentioning this account is to contrast it with the interaction between the servants in Noble Sahib’s house and Ibn-ul-Vaqt, in Nazir’s Ahmad’s “Ibn-ul-Vaqt”, to examine how imperialism affects exile and relations amongst the exiled. Faiz’s exile was predominantly a physical one, whilst Ibn-ul-Vaqt was in a cultural, social and linguistic exile in his own land. Except of course it was no longer his “own” land. He and India were colonized by the British.
It was unsettling to read that the servants found their “fellow-exile” foolhardy and that they would have “laughed their heads off” at his “silly” blunders. It was difficult to accept that they felt disdain instead of compassion. They glorified the Noble Sahib, the colonizer, and deplored Ibn-ul-Vaqt, the fellow-colonized and did not deem him worthy of respect. It seemed to me that the interaction should have had the warmth I found in the anecdote about Faiz and Ahmad. This led me to realize the corrosive effect of the colonizer on the relations amongst the colonized. Ibn-ul-Vaqt, himself, found the British inexplicably glorious so much so that he likened every Englishman to a “powerful lion”. Moreover, he referred to the events of 1857 as a mutiny and the locals involved as “mutineers” and “hooligans”. Therefore, it is apparent that imperialism causes people to be exiled from their own people. It is an exile so deep that it not only rips the umbilical cord to the land but also throws the individual into a Hegelian, master-servant relationship in which the colonized exists in isolation. Faiz’s exile is clearly different from Ibn-ul-Vaqt’s exile. Ergo, can the word exile effectively capture the sensibilities of all those who are exiled? Are people who experience exile under imperialism “more exiled” than people who are in self-exile or have been forcefully displaced?
Said, at the end of his essay, talks about the positive things that come out of exile. He says, “Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that - to borrow a phrase from music is - contrapuntal. (186)” In the case of an exile under imperialist rule, this contrapuntal awareness is most unfortunate. Under the spell of the colonizer, the exiled individual feels that his own culture is rudimentary and inferior. Moreover, the confusion caused by familiarity with nuances of various cultures is devastating. Perhaps Nazir Ahmad was trying to depict this very idea in “Ibn-ul-Vaqt”, albeit with humour. Ibn-ul-Vaqt’s linguistic prowess in Arabic and Persian failed him when he scared off his wife with the Persian idiom ‘murder the lamp’ instead of the Arabic one; ‘blow out the lamp’ (5, Translated).
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