Brown Pundits

The context of this poem is a bit complex. I wanted to experiment with some poetic gymnastics to venture into new terrain, like writing from the perspective of non-living things. So I chose The Communist Manifesto. Such a paradoxical choice, I must say in hindsight.

I first (and sadly, the last time) read it many years ago, sometime in 2019, when I was in my second (and final) year before university (though I never actually went to university, another detour we can explore some other time). I was at Edwardes College then (see the post “Against Platonic Love” for more details).

The idea for the poem surfaced after watching a dogfight — intellectually speaking — between the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. If you haven’t already, I recommend watching their full debate.

Continue reading The Fading Red

By Furqan Ali

The original review was published at Ink-e-Lab.

Title: The Shade of Longing and other Poems

Author: Fatima Ijaz

Publication Date: 01/11/2021

No. of Pages: 87

Publisher: The Little Book Company

Fatima Ijaz, born in Karachi, studied linguistics in the United States and currently serves as the editor of The Pandemonium Journal. Her debut poetry collection, The Shade of Longing, offers a complex interplay of memory, language, and abstraction, often resisting closure and certainty.

In the preface, she articulates a powerful and poignant idea that serves as a compass for the book’s aesthetic and emotional journey:

“The contemplation of the past involves an evocative presence of a surreal present…In doing so, you are in a heightened state of present-past – a double consciousness that is more than the sum equal of its parts”

This is, in many ways, a deeply Hegelian thought. One is reminded of the famous assertion in The Phenomenology of Spirit that:

“That the True is actual only as system, or that Substance is essentially Subject, is expressed in the representation of the Absolute as Spirit-the most sublime Notion and the one which belongs to the modern age and its religion. “

In essence: the memories, she is talking about, are sort of in itself objects (fixed) and also subjects (variable—dependent on the person recollecting).

Reading this book feels like discovering a cache of love letters written in a fever of emotion, letters meant for someone dearly beloved. But just before mailing them, the writer realizes how insufficient they are. So she burns them all, and what emerges from the ashes are these poems: not just expressions of feeling, but indictments of language itself. A complaint, perhaps, that language lacks the fidelity to truly capture the depths of human experience.

By acknowledging the futility of language, she leans into abstraction. She chooses uncertainty over certainty and, the infinite over the finite, and invites the reader to participate in meaning-making. The gaps in her verse are not absences—they are openings. The reader is asked to bring their own memories, their own hauntings, to fill in the silences.

In the poem “Echo of a word, x memory,” the structure is minimal yet haunting. A single word—“(stray)”—is repeated eight times on one line, and this continues for thirteen lines. The effect is disorienting, hypnotic. Memory here is not narrative, it is reverberation, a stutter echoing in an unreachable corridor of time.

Celestial imagery recurs throughout the collection (stars, suns, moons) often to widen the emotional and metaphysical frame. She reaches for the planetary to express the personal, as in lines like:

“The face of the sun is smeared with the curse”

“I saw the shadow moon hunt down oblivion”

“Language emerges out of this exchange between fiery sun and eternal sky”

“The moon becomes a cosmic mirror on such…”

Another recurring anthropomorphic presence is that of bones and the black crow, symbols that oscillate between the sacred and the ominous.

“there wasn’t an ounce of regret in my bones / I knew I had practiced the art – and thus – the sacrifice.”

“Then there is the stubborn case of the black crow…”

In the poem “Tear-Drop,” regret and remorse seep through the lines:

“It does not matter, because I can touch / The midnight with my azure-blues / Perhaps the blame is on the harpsichord / Perhaps it’s on one of us / The black consciousness has entered / and there is no un-doing it.”

Her language—or rather, her suspicion of language—remains central. The “shade” she refers to is not just the shadow of longing but also a hue: the specific color of yearning that permeates the book. It’s a longing that refuses to be pinned down, named, or resolved.

In the penultimate poem, the titular piece, she writes,

“Do you think we become in the end / characters of our own stories? Do we finally / own them enough to discard them, have the infinite power / to reform our mind of its strange habitat?”

This is a moment of quiet brilliance. One could read this as a critique of ideology—first acknowledging the narrative scaffolding of the self (“I”) and then, in almost Lacanian fashion, gesturing toward the Real (one of Lacan’s three registers). To “discard” the story is to momentarily crumble the illusion of coherence.

Shade of Longing is not a book that yields itself easily. It is not meant to be understood in one sitting. It is a space to dwell in, misread, reread, and reinhabit. Like ghosts or witches watching from the periphery, these poems linger long after the final page is turned. Their magic lies not in answers, but in the haunting questions they leave behind.

That’s all folks.

 

The context of this poem is an interview of the legendary Urdu poet Ahmad Faraz (1931–2008) with Naeem Bukhari. Faraz is regarded as one of the true heirs of Urdu’s laminal poetic tradition and celebrated for his bold, progressive stances and romantic verses that deeply resonated with the masses.

Though I personally rank him second to Faiz Ahmed Faiz (his contemporary), due to the universality, conceptual depth, and themes Faiz cultivated in his poetry, what I love about Faraz is his radical romanticism and mastery of language. Especially since he hailed from Kohat, a non-Urdu-speaking city in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, this is particularly remarkable.

Another interesting connection between Faraz and myself is that we both attended the same institution, the prestigious Edwardes College. For those who don’t know, Edwardes College was established in 1900 and has produced generations of intellectuals and cultural figures, including Prithviraj Kapoor, the pioneering Indian film and theatre actor/director/producer; Dr. Khan Sahib (Dr. Abdul Jabbar Khan), the first Chief Minister of West Pakistan (The famous Khan Market in New Delhi is named in his honour.)

Coming back to the interview:

NB: Temperamentally aap ek romantic aadmi hain?

(Translated: Are you, temperamentally, a romantic person?)

AF: Haan, bilkul hoon. Main ek bharpoor ishq ka qail hoon. Ek mukammal insaan ke ishq ka. Main Aflatooni ishq (jo frustration ka ishq hota hai) ka haami nahi hoon. Us mein aap apne wujood ka aadha hissa zaya kar dete hain. Is liye aap mukammal mohabbat de hi nahi sakte kisi ko, jab tak apna poora wujood uske hawale na kar dein. Toh main ek mukammal insaan ki tarah, mukammal ishq chahta hoon. Jiske liye rona ho, jiske liye hansna ho, jisko aap yaad karein. Jo aapke wujood mein poori tarah sama gaya ho.

(Translated: Yes, absolutely. I believe in passionate, complete love — love for a whole person. I’m not a supporter of Platonic love, the kind that’s rooted in frustration. In that kind of love, you end up wasting half of your existence. That’s why you can’t give someone complete love unless you offer your entire being to them. So I desire complete love, as a complete person. Love for whom you cry, laugh, miss deeply — someone who becomes entirely embedded in your existence.)

And that is how I gestated this poem. Please enjoy!

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Against Platonic Love

تسکین کو ہم نہ روئیں جو ذوقِ نظر ملے

[1] حورانِ خُلد میں تیری صورت مگر ملے

Sitting aimlessly on Eid day,

Thinking about the futility of the aeon,

I thought of the fractious spell

And the resultant intoxication I had, even

After years and years of encounter.

Peshawar is far more subliminal than Eden—

I can touch and lurch in the scent of the gated city

And prostrate upon it.

What maiden houris of the afterlife,

With a lightning appearance,

Pristine countenance,

And godly silhouette,

Could hold to the eyes of this crooked earthling

The wax of your ear,

The rusted steel nose pin,

Greyish, catastrophic hairs,

And the acned cheeks of yours?

Ah, the sensation of the earthly viscera,

The dysmorphia of every kind and sort—

It is incomparable to the untouchable,

and the non-sensorous holiest of holies.

Icarus [2] vaporized in this

Frenzy of the soar—

And so too the frustrated ones,

Whose beloved is exalted,

And merely and pathetically exalted

[1] taskīñ ko ham na ro.eñ jo zauq-e-nazar mile
hūrān-e-ḳhuld meñ tirī sūrat magar mile
We would not weep for solace, if we had the gift of sight—
If, among the houris of paradise, we found your likeness.
(“`Ghalib)

[2] Icarus, a figure from Greek mythology, attempted to escape Crete using wax-and-feather wings made by his father, Daedalus. Ignoring warnings, he flew too close to the sun, causing the wax to melt and sealing his tragic fall.