Interview with a poet
Earlier this year, the University of Stirling’s Professor Nina Parish spent a month in Pakistan. Here, she shares one of the highlights of her time on secondment, a meeting with poet and translator Naveed Alam.
Badshahi Mosque, Lahore
I spent the month of February in Lahore, Pakistan, on secondment with the DisTerrMem project, hosted by our wonderful colleagues at Forman Christian College. I spent much of the month grappling with the complex memory work going on around the British colonial past and the traumatic events of Partition in 1947 as represented (or not) in museum exhibitions in Lahore and Islamabad. I also had the pleasure of meeting the director of the Ajoka theatre company, Shahid Nadeem, and watching this company perform and rehearse their work. For me, one of the highlights of these secondments has been the extraordinary people you meet and get to work with, and a case in point in Lahore was the poet and translator, Naveed Alam. Although our lives and lived experiences may seem worlds apart, our common interests in language, representation and power led to many fascinating and enriching discussions.
Can you introduce yourself?
Welcome to Lahore Museum!
I am Naveed Alam. I live in Lahore, Pakistan. The city has been home for the past 12 years. I was born and raised in Pakistan and left for the US to start my college studies. I returned after spending more than two decades in the US. Considering that I reversed the common trend of east to west migration, I am often asked what brought me back. Frankly, I don’t have a clear or precise answer. There’s certainly a bond with the native soil and language, especially if you are the sole family member living abroad; however, I have always cherished the idea of being rootless or transplantable. I must say my apprenticeship with language(s) has played a great role in determining my personal and professional trajectories. I was immersed in English language and literature (poetry) while in the US—writing, teaching, etc. Then I got here and for the first time (re)connected with Punjabi, a language I had never used for academic or creative writing purposes. It started with translating a 16th century queer poet, Madho Lal Hussein, and led to trying out and appreciating the possibilities of cross-fertilization between the two languages. I published my first collection of bilingual poems in 2020.
Can you present the language situation in Pakistan?
The language situation here is very interesting and quite tragic. For starters, the hundred years of colonialism has a lot to do with it. We aspire to be fluent in English at the expense of our native languages. There are the minority sufferers of the superiority complex (those well versed in English who go to the private, elite educational institutions and often pursue their higher studies abroad) and there are the majority sufferers of the inferiority complex (the population without much access to quality education because of a broken public education system in a country where the powerful military has been setting up the self-serving policies since the independence from the British).
We met for the second time on International World Mother Tongue Day. Can you tell me about the significance of this day in the Pakistani context?
Well, many people here gloss over the fact that Pakistan has a lot to do with International Mother Language Day. On February 21, 1952 Pakistani forces opened fire on the students of Dhaka University protesting against the imposition of Urdu, as opposed to the native Bengali, as the sole official language in what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh. Four students were killed. In 1999 UNESCO recognized the day as the celebration of native languages and multilingualism. A few years ago when we were celebrating Mother Language Day at the Institute for Art and Culture (IAC) where we had made Punjabi a core language (i.e, required language to be taken by all students during their first year) and made IAC the first national institution of higher learning to promote a long neglected mother tongue, I translated into Punjabi and shared the following poem by one of my favorite poets, Czeslaw Milosz. Although Milosz was talking about Polish, his mother tongue, I think the sentiment is very appropriate to the Pakistani context. Every year on this day I try to dig up this poem and share it as widely as possible [you can read it at: My Faithful Mother Tongue (ronnowpoetry.com)].
In 2020, IAC changed hands, literally sold to the highest bidder. As part of the re-structuring the new administration shut down the School of Culture and Language (SCL), fired all Punjabi faculty, scrapped the Punjabi language initiative.
You have chosen to write in and translate from Punjabi. Could you tell us why?
To get to know myself better as a poet, to inform and enrich my poetry, to avail the discoveries of bilingual poetics, to piece together and make sense of the myriad pieces of my bicultural, post-colonial, and queer realities—to suture the severed halves of my being.
What would you have to say about language and memory work in the Pakistani context?
Lahore Museum
If language is the repository of a culture's memory then what kind of amnesia are we likely to suffer if we lose our language? If a language is not in good shape and the situation goes unaddressed then it’s likely to produce an unhealthy, often toxic, discourse that further disempowers the vulnerable populations likely to be affected by the biased versions of history, fabricated narratives serving the interests of the hegemonic classes; for example, the official narrative of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in the shape of text books and public media spares no effort to erase or elide the non-Islamic past and sever its link to a pre-independence common South Asian cultural heritage. Reminds me of this line by the Yugoslav-American poet, Charles Simic: The President spoke of war as of a magic love potion. They say if we don’t learn from history we are condemned to repeat it. In our Pakistani context with our poor, neglected indigenous languages how can we even access the torn and faded scripts of our history, reach the recesses of our memory, realize our creative and regenerative potential?
Professor Nina Stirling is a professor in French and Francophone Studies, Department of Literature and Languages, University of Stirling. Nina is a visiting research fellow at the University of Bath. She works on representations of difficult history, the migrant experience and multilingualism in the museum space. Between 2016 and March 2019 she was part of the EU-funded Horizon 2020 UNREST team working on innovative memory practices in sites of trauma including war museums and mass graves (www.unrest.eu). She is also an expert on the interaction between text and image in the field of modern and contemporary French Studies. She has published widely on this subject, in particular, on the poet and visual artist, Henri Michaux.