Gaza is beyond words, where language goes to die
This Sunday, Bookshelf features the writing of Pakistani publisher Taiba Abbas, whose late grandfather Syed Muzaffar Aga, from Srinagar, Kashmir, served as a diplomat in Trinidad in the late 79s. Abbas, the founder of the independent publishing house Àla Books and Authors, is co-author of The Night In Her Hair with her mother, Huma Agha.
When I asked Abbas what drives her writing, her distress over the bombing in Gaza was uppermost in her mind. “Devastation, grief, horror, trauma. With 20,000 people dead, almost two million displaced, 10,000 children dead, thousands more orphaned, Gaza is where language goes to die, is beyond words. As I write these words, I face the death of language. All words and meaning wrested from their familiar, complacent, complicit place. I don’t know how to name the responsibility that we carry within ourselves as we bear witness to this unspeakable genocide, as we watch, feel, and plunge every waking moment of our consciousness in grief, in waiting, in praying, standing in all our strength, in all the force of our representation, for a free Palestine. We carry the shifting centre of the peace we seek within ourselves, a poetics of deprivation.”
Born in Pakistan, Abbas, who grew up in Italy and holds a Master’s in Comparative Literature from SOAS, University of London, describes The Night In Her Hair, a collection of nine stories and paintings, as a modern retelling of ancient Sufi folk stories. “Down the northern belt of the mountains, through the fields and rivers of Punjab, to the warm coast of the Arabian Sea this collection bears witness to lives that became the legacy of spiritual and literary traditions of Sufi thought– that continue to shape our creative expression, motifs woven deep inside our cultural psyche and identity.”
Excerpt from Heer Ranjha, in The Night In Her Hair with permission from the authors:
“Sethi watched Heer without resentment, without envy. But with a nameless fear. The cost, the danger of a beauty such as hers. ‘Tell me about that day,’ she said, ‘The day he met you.’ She could see that Heer was already there. In the high fields of Jhang, where the five saints had blessed him. In the fields where Ranjha had opened his eyes. Sethi listened. She could see it happening before her eyes.— Heer stepping out of the river, a cluster of girls around her, drying their hair on the bank, making their way to the village. Behind them, Heer was wading through the water. The sun bloomed wetly through her blood-red veil, half cloaking and revealing each turn of her body. Her mouth was full and red, like the deep cleft of a ruby. Her hair was half wet, streaking her neck, lifting in the wind, fanning down the proud slope of her shoulders. Her lustrous eyes. The jasmine flowers dangling from her ears, rivalling the cream of her skin.
‘What was he like?’ ‘I was afraid to look at him,’ said Heer, ‘Afraid that he would disappear. Afraid he wasn’t real. I had never seen anything more beautiful than him.’ The crushing sweetness of the memory pressing down on her, ‘And I never will again.’ The breath stilled in her throat, and her voice broke. ‘I saw the side of his face, gilded in the last rays of the sun. His face tilted over his flute. Looking at it. As if he was waiting for something. His hair fell over his eyes. The tree he sat under covered him in its shade, yet the light wouldn’t leave him. His eyes showed you everything, and they revealed nothing. What I saw in them was a place I would never be able to see. A tumult and a peace that was his alone. And in that moment, I would’ve never believed that it was me that he saw and that he looked at me. But then, he put his mouth to his flute, and I heard it.
‘What did you hear?’ Heer closed her eyes. ‘I became a child again. His melody stirred the years inside me. All the joys I had known and forgotten. As if he had been there all my life as if he had seen them all. His melody shook them out, unfurled them. Stretching, gold and unending like the sun. His music spun them around me. And I moved with them. I turned with them. I was free. I was everywhere. And I laughed, and I laughed. And I heard his laughter there with me.’ Heer lifted her hand and brought it to her chest. ‘Then his melody gashed me here,’ she touched her hand to her breast, ‘Here,’ she moved her hand below her heart, ‘And I became a woman,’ she smiled, her eyes still closed, and a tremor cut into her lips like a wince, as her hand pressed down, reliving the moment. ‘It held me, it owned me.
Pushing past my flesh. It burned a hole till my bones were water and smoke. But his music played on. Deeper. Till I felt I would fall through it. Till I felt I would disappear. And I did. I felt myself go. And that is when I opened my eyes and looked into Ranjha’s face. And he was looking at me as he played his flute. His dark eyes holding mine. And as I looked at him, the air returned to my lungs. My heart poured and filled me everywhere. I stood and listened as he wove my dreams— everything I never knew I wanted. Pulling me towards him.
As he touched and bared all the secrets I never knew I had. As he clutched everything I was and could be. I stood and listened. Till the hours fell away to dusk. In the dark, his voice was soft and amber; it lit the shadows. “Don’t you recognise it?” he said to me. “It is you. Look into your heart. You are the melody.”’ Heer stopped, the warm tears streaming down her face as they had when she had stood before Ranjha.”
End of Excerpt
Taiba Abbas has taught Italian, English literature, Film, and Cultural studies at universities in Lahore and Islamabad. She is currently completing her first novel.