The Destination Has Not Yet Been Reached: Faiz Ahmad Faiz in Beirut

Faiz Ahmad Faiz is one of the most iconic popular culture-heroes of Pakistan.  Renowned as an Urdu poet, he was one of the founding members of the Indian Progressive Writers Association (PWA) at the peak of its influence in the 1930s-40s, and a luminary of literature and journalism in the fledgling country after Partition.  Yet as a social activist he was a ceaseless critic of the dominant regime, imprisoned under for his role in an attempted coup against the government in 1951, and exiled under Zia ul-Haq in the 1970s.  During that time, he served as editor-in-chief of the Afro Asian Writers’ Assocation (AAWA) periodical Lotus In Beirut from 1978-82, meanwhile befriending Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Darwish.

Focusing on this unique chapter in Faiz’s career allows us a window onto the evolution of South Asian/West Asian relations and Indian and Pakistani attitudes to the Israel-Palestine conflict, born of another almost contemporaneous partition.  I contend that these attitudes were closely linked to the ways the two emergent national identities would be projected in the wider world (and thereby performed and produced) over time; while also highlighting the sometimes conflicting ideals of non-alignment and Afro Asian solidarity as competing interpretations of Third World decolonization politics.

In his famous poem "Subah-e-Azaadi" (Dawn of Freedom), Faiz gave notice that the road to liberation was not only uncompleted but indeed betrayed by the events of 1947.  Even beyond the mass trauma, neither of the new countries embodied the society that he and the progressive writers had envisioned.  As a leftist internationalist Faiz’s pre-independence affiliation with the PWA was a direct conduit to his postwar affiliation with the AAWA, through which he mapped his road beyond both the temporal limit of 1947, and the geographical limit of the South Asian subcontinent.