THINKING OF FAIZ AHMED FAIZ

 

I am placing an entry on Faiz to honor the 25th anniversary of the death of Hardial Bains.  To comfort him,when he was dying. a friend read aloud the poems of Faiz in URDU.

 THAT IS WHAT GREAT POETRY CAN DO!

VERY HARD TO SUM  UP THE  QUALITIES OF FAIZ

I felt so pleased when I went to Amritsar, Punjab, India  in 1975
with my husband to teach at the Guru Nanak Dev University
 and learned that  this was the same city where the poet
 FAIZ taught college too. 
His work speaks directly to me and I hope I picked up his
 blessing, I certainly would bless him if I could.


Here again I am indebted to a newer collection and translation of
  THE BEST OF FAIZ translated by Shiv Kumar  (old friend of
 my husband Yashdip Bains)

  To have said that Hafez is the great poet of Love and then to turn 
to Faiz is to find the working out of that idea in another time and
 place.The closest equivalent to Faiz as a poet of beauty and love
in English tradition would be the English Romantic
poet John Keats  who wrote in a  poem an aphorism that I read as
 a teenager and was too young to understand :

BEAUTY IS TRUTH; TRUTH BEAUTY. THAT IS ALL
YOU KNOW AND ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW.

Faiz's  message is also about  the reign and ultimate 
victory of  beauty.

.He expresses a  passion for enjoying the beauty of life,
 his deep paradoxical attachment to love of people and the
 agony of the world, his love of humanity, his patriotism,
 his passion for revolution, his sense of justice, are all
 metaphors of the agony of love.

In one poem he addresses the BELOVED
 and gives  the Beloved credit for all of his metaphors.

Agony of love is the soul of his imagination and feeling, 
 which illuminates the beauty of the world with
 the desolation of his heart.

Here is  how Keats sums up the power of longing
 for the unattainable:

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! (lines 17–20)


 For Faiz, the testing power of beauty is in its creativity.

Beauty is not mere artistic value, it is also a social and moral value:

The candle of a look, the star of imagination, 
All these illuminations
 have come from your gathering.
Whichever be the source of pain, we ascribe it to you,
Whatever complaints we have, are on account of you.
If it be the agony of the world, if it is the beloved's face
 or the hand of the rival,
We responded towards all of these with love.


When I was much older,I saw that Keats was expressing
 a profound Spiritual Truth,

 BEAUTY-TRUTH-GOODNESS-- LOVE--WISDOM

 are all attributes of GOD
.
To search honestly for any one of these attributes will
lead the Seeker to  the DIVINE.

AUGUSTINE expresses it in that line

LATE HAVE I LOVED THEE, BEAUTY ANCIENT 
AND EVER NEW.

For Faiz LOVE always TRUMPS hate.

Faiz wrote a sad revolutionary battle-song, the like of which is

 not be found in any language of the world:

For the love of your flower-like lips,
We were sacrificed on the dry branches of the noose,
For the desire of the candles of your hands
We were killed on half-dark paths.
And with revolutionary dignity:
On our lips the words of the ghazal,
And the torch of misery in our hands,
Gather our banners from the place of murder,
Caravans of other lovers will emerge,
For whose path our feet have shortened the distances of pain.



When he accepted  the Lenin Peace Prize speech he said:

  

    Human ingenuity, science and industry have made it

 possible to provide each one of us everything we need to be

 comfortable provided these boundless treasures of nature 

and production are not declared the property of a greedy

 few but are used for the benefit of all of humanity…

 However, this is only possible if the foundations of human

 society are based not on greed, exploitation and ownership

 but on justice, equality, freedom and the welfare of everyone

… I believe that humanity which has never been defeated

 by its enemies will, after all, be successful; at long last,

 instead of wars, hatred and cruelty, the foundation

 of humankind will rest on the message of the

 great Persian poet Hafez Shiraz:

 ‘Every foundation you see is faulty, except that of Love,

which is faultless’.     

And Faiz the secular Muslim  prays:

Let us too lift our hands,
We who do not remember the customary prayer,
We who do not remember any idol or God except love.


This agony of love is not only a part of the human condition
 but it is a relationship which extends from one end of the
 world to another. Faiz's love for humanity is free from the 
prejudices of race, color or nationality. 

The new literature of protest suggests a radical change
 and, in the words of Faiz, it confers on us the power
 of "forcefully spurning the hand of the killer".

 It does not accept defeat because it is convinced that
 darkness should and must end.

 
When personal sorrow drank 
the elixir of world-sorrow,
 the lovers' love became doubly strong:
My heart repents neither this love nor the other,
My heart is spotted with every kind of sorrow,
Except the mark of repentance.

rm of emotions is raging insid