Arif Azad’s new book Thinkers, Dreamers and Doers is an enlightening collection of his articles published in national and international magazines of repute over the years. Azad has his own unique way of blending politics, literature, culture, art and the lives of great personalities in a seamless and spellbinding narrative. His grasp spans global and local history, political science, literature and curbs and curves of the modern-day media world. There is not much of significance in ideas, politics and culture that has escaped his attention and long-standing intellectual preoccupations. The book is divided into eight topical parts, each part covering a broader theme underneath which sub-themes are fleshed out. Azad’s wider compass of interest is shown up in the range of topics and articles included in the book.
This is one of the rare books to have come out of Pakistan which takes the whole world as its province. The first part of the book, in line with Azad’s wider sympathies, focuses on world literature. The articles included in this part could be considered the most remarkable pieces written recently on literature. His articles on such eminent European literary figures of the 20th century like Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig (both were Austrian novelists) and Zbigniew Herbert (Polish poet and playwright) are of particular interest. Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig, both great novelists in their own ways, were also, in the words of Azad, fervent priests of the lost world of high European civilisation in the turbulent world of earlier 20th century. This section shows Azad as an acute and insightful observer of European history, art, politics and literature. Those who are interested in understanding the fall of old Europe can find some important glimpses of that lost world in this section.
Title: Thinkers, Dreamers and Doers
Author: Arif Azad
Publishers: IRD Publications, Islamabad
ISBN: 978-627-502-011-0
Pages: 308pp.
The article on poet Zbigniew Herbert (29 October 1924 – 28 July 1998) is another dimension of Azad’s interest and insight into the European literature. In his telling, the great Polish poet. Zbigniew Herbert is no ordinary poet; he is ranked with Czeslaw Milosz, another Polish poet with worldwide fame. Azad has skilfully teased out the anguish and agonies of living under a dictatorial regime as expressed in the poems of Zbigniew Herbert. The experiences, and poetic distillation of Herbert seem to accord well with Azad’s own experience of growing up under military dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq; he finds parallels between the situation of 1950s Poland with that of Pakistan of the 1980s. Zbigniew Herbert became a byword for dissident and resistance poetry, both in style and politics, when he refused to bow down before the powerful communist regime. Azad also includes quotes from some of Herbert’s great poem to showcase his genius. One of the poems “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito” dissects the nature of dictatorship in the following lines:
“the monster of Mr Cogito
has no measurements
it is difficult to describe
escapes definition
it is like an immense depression
spread out over the country
it can’t be pierced
with a pen
with an argument
or spear
were it not for its suffocating weight
and the death it sends down
one would think
it is the hallucination
of a sick imagination
but it exists
for certain it exists
like carbon monoxide it fills
houses temples markets
poisons wells
destroys the structures of the mind”
This and the other articles together serve to introduce Pakistani readers to important artists and writers of the 20 century who are not familiar names in Pakistan. This constitutes one of the strength of the book under review.
The second part of the book covers the world of silver screen, showing the depth and range of Azad’s cultural sophistication acquired during his long sojourn in the West. The 20th century opened a new epoch in the cultural realm when cinema was inaugurated by Lumiere’s brothers. This obviously exercised transformative and spin-off effects on the related field of art, literature and music globally. As a new exciting medium, cinema soon attracted the attention of creative artists interested in expressing their genius through camera and cinema. The cinema not only provided entertainment but also but also highlighted the complexities, dilemmas, contradictions and miseries of the modern-day world.
Azad’s interest seems focused on the films of Ken Loach (British film director known for depicting socialist ideals in his films), Jean Luc Godard (French film director and critic known as the pioneer of new wave cinema) and Francois Truffaut and others. His articles on Ken Loach are quite revealing (in particular to a person like me who has hitherto viewed cinema mostly from a standpoint of entertainment), but Arif has shown that how transformative cinema could be. Ken Loach and Jean Luc Godard both have enjoyed long creative life in this medium (Ken Loach is 86 years old and Godard is 91 years old). The films of Ken Loach capture and depict all important social issues of the 20th century – poverty, homelessness, workers’ rights and the impact of privatisation on ordinary lives. The award winning movies of Ken Loach include Cathy Come Home (on homelessness, 1966), Poor Cow (on poverty, 1967), Bread and Roses (displaying inequalities in America, 2000) and many more. The genius of persons like Ken Loach and Jean Godard lies in the fact that they produced extraordinary films by depicting the lives of ordinary men and women in their movies. Through these cinema-related articles, Azad has demonstrated outstanding talent as an art critic by not only commenting on the works of these artists but also showing with a professional precision many nuances woven in the works of these great artists.
Another interesting section of the book covers lives of some important figures in the history of Pakistan. His articles on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Hamza Alavi. He also touches upon Samuel Martin Burke, Jyoti Basu and Sivanandan and others – offering some interesting glimpses from the lives of these outsized personalities. He further enlarges his focus to of some important figures of the 20th century such as Eric Hobsbawm (British historian), Philip Roth and Norman Mailer (American novelists), V.S. Naipaul (British Novelist and Nobel Prize winner in literature) and Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro and others. These figures seem to have exercised some lasting hold on the outlook of the author of the book. The book is published by Iqbal International Institute of Research and Development, a research and publication subsidiary of the Islamic International University, Islamabad. The book deserves to be on the bookshelf and coffee table of every educated and enlightened home.
A very good review