There is something about the old Frontier Province which lifts the heart when crossing the Attock into the land of the Pukhtun; the poet awakens. That is what Sir Evelyn Howell, the outstanding Pukhtunphile, wrote; or perhaps it was that other Pukhtunphile Sir Olaf Caroe. Indeed when I met him at Cambridge shortly before he died in the mid-60s, Howell was working along with Caroe on their translation of the Pukhto poems of the legendary warrior-poet Khushal Khan Khattak.
The Dragonfly and other Poems is a collection of verse by Sahibzada Riaz Noor. The foreword is written by Riaz’s mentor, the distinguished poet and former civil servant, Ejaz Rahim. Ejaz is the ideal mentor combining humility with great enthusiasm for his subject. “My assessment,” Ejaz writes, “may be summed up tersely: Riaz Noor with his maiden outpouring of verse has outclassed my 24 books of poems in terms of eloquence and passion and variety.” “In my view,” Ejaz concludes, “The Dragonfly is a masterpiece and should easily count as one of the best written in recent Pakistani poetry.” Both are products of and excellent advertisement for English medium schools: Ejaz of Burn Hall, Abbottabad, and Riaz of Edwardes College, Peshawar; the former since taken over by the administration and the latter threatened by a similar fate. Both are poets and civil servants who have served with distinction in top appointments in the old Frontier Province and other parts of Pakistan. Together, the two are a modern Pakistani equivalent of Howell and Caroe.
The imagination must lead the poet to soar to vertiginous heights one moment and plunge into the depths the next. Riaz himself, in a letter to me, has described a poet thus: “a poet in the last analysis, appears in a role nearer to that of a saint, a fakir, a sadhu lighting up a taper of relief and light in a dark surround that stretches into eternity … to emancipate man’s body and soul from the incubus of time’s, history’s and cosmic injustices …”
Riaz’s education is reflected in his poetry: the poets and philosophers he read at Edwardes College, Blake, Yeats, Tolstoy, Marx, Milton, Elliott and of course Ejaz Rahim, and the political philosophers he encountered at Oxford University. At Oxford these included “loads of endless reading”, he wrote to me describing his education,” hours at the Bodleian or Radcliffe Camera, racking the brain on Cartesian epistemology, Hume’s empiricism, the desultory and cold pretensions to science of economic models a la Classicists, Monetarists, Keynesians and Leontief and the lot.” Riaz was aware of the gap between the actual world we inhabit and the ideal one we dream of: “The real world in the political sense is much closer to Machiavelli’s city state than Plato’s Republic.”
But the poet has an answer to the cynicism of Machiavelli and the clinical mind of Plato: “Yet to life’s apparent absurdity and meaningless and faiths seeming reverses, poets like Ejaz Rahim bring the soothing balm of love in the tradition of Rumi.”
Here are samples of the poetry: There is a poem dedicated to Ejaz Rahim: On Reading Ejaz Rahim’s Book In Search of Kashmir.
In another poem he combines the traditional love poem with the ominous presence of the drone which has become such a feature of Frontier life:
“If we cannot meet here
Come soaring, invisible
Maiden of mine,
over my village in my skies
Searching for me like a drone.”
In An Ode to Your Lips, Riaz is more earthly:
There where the seasons are born
And winds get together
They take the hue And aspect
Of your passing glance
A moment of your lip’s romance.”
In The Blinded Sons of Kashmir (on Indian Army action using pellet bullets against demonstrating youth that blinded many) Riaz captures the heartbreaking story of the young men of Kashmir blinded in their struggle for freedom. He concludes this passionate poem with the following lines:
“From small graves and pine forests
My eyes will emerge brightened
One day
To raise flags of freedom and boon.”
In a powerful poem which brings tears to the eyes, Riaz describes the terrible death of another young man, this time Mashal Khan killed in Mardan by a lynch mob in an act of ignorant passion. Riaz contrasts Muslim savagery with Christian compassion in the act of the Pope washing the feet of refugees:
“Where shall my tears take refuge
My stifling sighs, in a Cruel, meaningless
Torrent of blows, a deluge
Of blindness hacking for truth
The accursed and the prosecutors
The saviors and the judges
Were one and the same
Throwing up flames from the ashes
Of evils that beget our souls In another remove,
the Pope Recants for my redemption
Washing the feet
Of my refugee tears In his hallowed skullcap.”
Riaz covers a vast range of subjects and draws us into his complex and colorful world. There are moving descriptions of glimpses from his life; who can forget the sturdy grand old man of the Frontier in the poem, My grandfather’s, Dr Sahibzada Sharif Noor,/ House in Mohallah Sangher,/ City of Kohat.
“Meaning fleeting as the changing
Colors of the wind
Tiptoe of little ripples on the shores.”
In the epic poem dedicated to his grandfather, Riaz contemplates the current desolation of his homeland:
“Now I cannot go to Parachinar Robert’s Garden lies in desolation encroached and perverted; There are fires of hatred all around I can’t find anyone who can recount ‘Dinglala’ The rape of humanity by a blind devil is complete … forsaken and empty.”
“In the evenings in those alcoves in shining rows Black smoke suit gapes at you now, candles burn in them no More.”
“Devastating floods of Chenab Devouring my carefully Preserved corn The self-same rivers That for centuries Have sung Timeless stories of love.”
Civil servants and bureaucrats are often pilloried in the press. While the general arrogance and incompetence of the service deserves the criticism, it also discourages the genuine men and women of talent from raising their heads above the turret. We are grateful that at least two outstanding and brilliant civil servants have shared their deepest emotions and thoughts with us in these poems, Riaz as author and Ejaz in his critical appraisal of the collection. In their work spanning decades of service, they have illustrated that you can be a successful administrator while also remaining a compassionate and caring human being.
At a time when Pakistani society desperately seeks role models, who better to serve in that position than our two heroic poet-administrators. Their example and work set high standards for the next generation of Pakistanis. I hope this collection is widely read and appreciated.
