VIEW FROM THE WINDOW

Windows are always on the verge

Of rooms

Of houses

Balancing finely between

Inviting in or out

Like eyes

Seeing and dreaming.

Then there are houses

That can't even be called houses

Where the metaphor hangs

Between a window and a door.

One conveniently leads to another.

Our ancestors understood this dilemma

Advising us not to open 

The windows when

The neighbours are bickering

Or making love.

In those moments

Houses become a divine window

Opening into one another.

Windows, they advised,

Should always open into hearts

Not into blinding green gardens!

WAQT

Mai is zalim duniya ke

Har gunaah pe 

Kalam uthane hi wala tha

Ki meri beti ne mujhse poocha:

Baba, tum ab bhi zinda ho?

Uski awaaz 

Maazi ki khasta kok se

Ya mustaqbil ki ujdti qabr se aarahi thi

Ye haal ke baanjhpan mein

Tai kar pana

Namumkin hai 

وقت

میں اس ظلم کے

ہر گناہ پر

قلم اٹھانے ہے والا تھا

کہ میری بیٹی نے مُجھسے پوچھا:

بابا, تم اب بھی زندہ ہو؟

اسکی آواز

ماضی کی خستہ کوک سے

یہ مستقبل کی اُجڑی قبر سے آرہی تھی

یہ حال کے بانجھپن میں

طے کر پانا

ناممکن ہے 

‘All Our Monuments are Mausoleums’

(The article previously appeared in The Citizen)

I

Recycling History

In Micheal Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) when Anna finally shoots Paul’s friend Peter after their exhaustive sadistic games, Paul rectifies and resurrects his friend by searching the remote and literally rewinding the whole scene for himself and for the audience. This is what we do every time an event not of our liking (ideology) occurs; we search for a remote, a website, a video, a browser that rectifies and resurrects the event for us. Haneke’s movie emerges as a critique of torture-porn and war-porn culture of mass media. The movie continuously breaks the fourth wall and in certain iconic scenes (like the one discussed above) makes the viewer conscious of the fictionality of fiction and questions our position as consumers. The present condition of the world harnesses this interpretation. While on the one hand we are exploring Mars, on the other we are still suffering from poverty. While #metoo movements with strong-willed celebrities enlighten our faces, 4.1 million girls around the globe are at the risk of undergoing female genital mutilation, while we have cluttered the outer space with our satellites, Earth’s environment is breathing its last, while the slogans and processes of Democracy are getting sharper, Palestinians and Kashmiris go on suffering, while time seems to be progressing it also at the same time seems to slope down into decadence. The time it seems, like Hamlet, is ‘out of joint’ or history like Paul’s remote is rewinding itself to rectify its mistakes before us, so that the fictional-plot goes in the desired direction. All the dreams of Enlightenment and Modernism end in nightmares and any promise of progression of time/history falls into pieces. Kant, Hegel, Marx and others can be seen wearing the mask of ideologies suffocating under the heavy debris of their grand histories.

Is this terminus ad quem then? But we have neither seen Apocalypse, Anti-Christ, Messiah nor Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’. We are stuck somewhere in-between. History it seems is on a loop, cycling or better ‘recycling’ to use Jean Baudrillard’s word.  For Baudrillard, “History has only wrenched itself from cyclical time to fall into the order of the recyclable.” However ironic it may seem, for Baudrillard the ‘end’ does not occur because of the termination or lack of something. On the contrary, it happens because of the excess of it – the excess of sex in pornography, for example, is the end of sexuality in it – the hyperreal. It is like Tyler Durden in Fight Club inserting those porn-shots within an excessive-emotional-hollywood-marketed family drama because they all belong to the same domain of hyperreal.  “The idea is destroyed by its own realization, by its own excess.” Likewise, the excess of events (more importantly the dissemination of any event in real-time through 24/7 news networks and the bombardment and proliferation of commentaries) put an end to history. “All our structures” says Baudrillard “end up swelling like red giants that absorb everything in their expansion.” It is like metastasis, the very growth of the body that ends the body – the body politic or the body social. So, then why does it not end, what’s Baudrillard’s deal with ‘recycling’? 

One of the many answers that interests is his concern with the leftover ideologies. For Baudrillard, “the defunct ideologies, bygone utopias, dead concepts” like “Church, communism, ethnic groups, conflicts, ideologies” are all here with us and history has become its own dustbin just like “the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.” This historical and intellectual waste scattered all over the dustbin of history poses a larger threat to us than industrial waste. The only possible function left for History is to “either perish under the weight of the non-degradable waste of great empires, the grand narratives, or the great systems” or to “recycle all this waste in the synthetic form of a heteroclite history.” It is for this reason the history never comes to an end because the ‘leftovers’ are all settled here and there is nothing that “will rid us of the sedimentation of centuries of stupidity.” The history through its “retroversion . . . to infinity” recycles the leftovers or like Paul’s remote replays itself rectifying or whitewashing any error.

This labouring in Baudrillard’s theory helps us to answer the earlier comparisons enumerated above – the heteroclite elements of progress and decadence within the democracies all over. The history is recycling and many a time recycles the fascism within democracy, or sometimes simply stupidity because democracy and Human Rights are nothing “but the confused end-product of the reprocessing of all the residues of history.” Sometimes the history recycles someone like Trump or reprocesses a Modi for democracy. This is what I was reminded of as I read Aijaz Ahmad’s ‘Post-democratic State’ written recently for Frontline.

There is a strong academic tendency to read both these figures as tyrants or fools and many theories tempt us to go into that direction. What we tend to forget is the process through which they came to the forefront as leaders of the two ‘great nations’ – they did not appoint themselves as leaders but were elected through a democratic process of election. Dismissing them as tyrants undermines the sacrosanct process of electioneering and voting so vital to the democratic life. One is reminded of Gilles Deleuze when he says, “a tyrant institutionalizes stupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed within it.” This is the time then one should shift the focus away from the subject to the system, the process – the Democracy. The question that begs the answer is, how come the 21st century democracy gives birth to such politicians and how these politicians are able to survive within that system? Is the system then so favourable for people like these? 

There are a certain number of behavioural patterns that are unique to such leaders – narcissism, controversies, attention, and approval. That is why they always have an almost pathological need to ‘pose’ – media, camera and social networking come in handy – the theatricality. Another aspect of this theatricality is the blatant and gross visibility of power against minorities or enemies. There is no ideology in force here, no hegemony, no secrets but an open agenda – visible and excessive. The power wears no masquerade, we are back to Royal power. Baudrillard’s history has recycled once again and a leftover residue is reprocessed into the system. There is no need to go through Michel Foucault’s ‘Disciplinary Societies’ when we are back to the spectacle, the theatre. If history recycles itself then maybe we have to recycle the theory too and go back to the old societies and their theatricality of power to understand the present paradoxical scenario. When considered, the idea does not seem so farfetched – theatre and democracy are twins more like the two strands of DNA.

II

Demokratia or Theatrokratia

Around sixth century, Athens was a warring nation of tribal and foreign conflicts and Pisistratus, a tyrant (not actually a tyrant but one like our leaders) among others was trying to unify them. Greek poetry had already started with Homer around eighth century giving way to Bacchylidian lyrics by seventh century. It is worth noting that during sixth century Athens was not the great nation that we now know. Instead, Sparta, Corinth, Sikyon, and Samos were the cities of importance.  The importance of dates lies in the fact that the rise of Athens is synchronous to the rise of democracy and the rise of democracy is coetaneous with the establishment of the theatre. Around late sixth and early fifth century, Pisistratus established a single festival of Dionysos at Athens, the city of Dionysia. It was “an official celebration” around performances which provided the audience a chance to affirm themselves as citizens of the polis. Simon Critchley summarizes this sentiment when he elaborates on Simon Goldhill’s point that theatre was the ‘glue of democracy’ then.  A grand spectacle and theatricality as a tool to discipline and control people was what it was reduced to when it reached Elizabethan England. “We princes are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world”, Queen Elizabeth announced to a delegation of Lords and Commons. Stephen Greenblatt examines Elizabethan power in relation to theatre brilliantly and succinctly in his essay ‘Invisible Bullets’. “Elizabethan power” he writes “depends upon its privileged visibility. As in a theatre, the audience must be powerfully engaged by this visible presence . . .” Here, we are back to our present democracy of Princes with their visible presence and power. It means that in a theatrical-democracy the truth is less important than the performance. In fact, the spectacle of a lie performed with full theatricality can outwit truth. Democracy begs theatricality. It was perhaps for this reason that Plato was so afraid of theatre that he calls demokratia (democracy) theatrokratia.  Theatrocracy/democracy then becomes “a society of the spectacle that legitimates itself through the production of theatrical or mediatic illusion that gives the impression of legitimacy without any genuine substance.” Are we really then a society of the spectacle that Guy Debord warned us long back? “Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation” reads the first thesis of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. Reading Baudrillard as an uber-Debordian affirms that not only are we but that we have ‘progressed’ abysmally.

Postscript

With players as diverse as news channels, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, websites – democracy has become a mere theatrical game won by the best actors and directors with a large number of audience. BJP has understood it like no other party. One is reminded of Frank Underwood from Netflix series House of Cards. In the second season when he is a “heartbeat away from the presidency and not a single vote cast in [his] name” Frank proclaims: Democracy is so overrated. Is it or not?

One thing that strikes out through Haneke’s Funny Games, House of Cards and Greek theatre is: talking to the audience. For Plato, the only antidote to the poison of deceptive-theatre is philosophy or what in modern vocabulary can be called education. “The theatre was a space” writes Simon Goldhill about Greek Theatre “in which all the citizens were actors.” An educated populace, an engaging public is the only audience to this grand theatre. Frequently breaking the fourth wall and involving more and more educated audience, that is the only way to ensure whether democracy is overrated or not!

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i. The title is from Jean Baudrillard’s book The Illusion of the End.

ii. From Ian C. Storey and Arlene Allan’s A Guide to Ancient Greek Drama.

iii. Tragedy, the Greeks and Us.

iv. Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s Stay Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine.

MAI AUR TUM

I

Dil mohallay se door nahi tera ghar

Magar

Ab mai nahi

Us shehar mein rehta hoon

II

Tumhare hijr kay daag ab mai

Zahan ki dhoop se dhota hoon

II

Suna hai

Neend mein jaagti ho mai ban kar

Mai bhi apne khwabon mein

Mai ban kar hi sota hoon 

میں اور تم

I

 دل محلے سے دور نہیں تیرا گھر

مگر

اب میں نہیں

اس شہر میں رہتا ہوں

II

تمہارے ہجر کے داغ اب میں

ذہن کی دھوپ سے دھوتا ہوں

III

سنا ہے

نیند میں جاگتی ہو میں بن کر

میں بھی اپنے خوابوں میں

میں بن کر ہی سوتا ہوں 

KNOCK KNOCK

"Knock knock!

Who's there?"

There are no such jokes in Kashmir.

The door and the usher 

Both pulverized

Inside the joke, yes!

The dead laugh echoes throughout

The same old 'laugh track'

Running behind all the sitcoms. 

METAMORPHOSES

Ovid's antique pen pecks the page

And stops after a mythological stretch

Searching for a title.

A man searches his lost goat

Somewhere under the sweltering desert sun

His whole body dripping by the blisters of his feet

Fuming and breathless.

Somewhere Goethe's sagacious literary eyes

Examine the etchings of Roos.

The man finally finds the doe

Blisters burst and he hugs her

Like a mother

Overcome by sympathy

He wants to become Roos' sheep

While God proclaims to his Angels

The person is ready to become Moses

Ovid writes Metamorphoses.

This is how begins

Art, literature, religion -

This is how animals become humans.