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Mevlut
Ceylan Interviews
Ahmed Ali (1910-1994)
Karachi: August 1986
Mevlut:
When selecting your wording what do you pay most attention to?
Does sensitivity or does content play a greater role when you
choose your words?
Ahmed: It is the subject that calls up
words. Meanings and words are interrelated. Without sensitivity
one cannot choose the right word for the right meaning, though
in all true art it is the computers of the mind that matches
words and meanings. In ordinary language, it is only through
symbols that one can suggest the meaning.
The symbols of poetry are words. Words have
different qualities, of similes or metaphors, which reach
different levels, simile traveling along certain levels,
allegory sounding deeper levels through metaphor. All art is
creation which springs from the unknown subconscious. It is a
complex abstract process which, in order to assume concrete
form, employs images which, in poetry, assume the form of words,
in painting of colour, and sound in music.
Ideas belong to the realm of thought which is
a hidden activity and requires expression to come into the open.
But words are not ideas; they are only symbols which have
acquired certain definite meanings which are often nebulous.
Nevertheless they evoke response similar, or close to, the ideas
or feelings of the creator or vates as the poet was called, or
as close as the associative quality of words can communicate
them to the sensitivity of the reader.
Poetry and prophecy are
akin in delving into the source of inspiration (called
revelation in the case of poetry); only poetry fails to reach
the innermost depth of the dark force that lies hidden in the
collective subconscious we call divinity.
Semantic symbols in the form of simile and
metaphor play an illuminative role in poetry, and metaphor and allegory in prophecy. In poetry a single word can illumine
connections which the multitude cannot grasp; and in allegory
the significance is communicated to the select few, though the
word is available to all.
A common example from poetry could be:
|
My love is like a red, red
rose
That’s newly sprung in
June
Robert Burns |
Which would not mean anything to a person who has not seen a
rose. For allegory, consider
|
It is one who conjoined
two large bodies of water,
One fresh (and) sweet, the
other brine (and) bitter,
And has placed an
interstice, a barrier between them
Qur’an, 25:53 |
You can yourself draw the conclusion: which
plays a more important role in poetry, content or word or both!
Mevlut:
When did you first get involved with poetry?
Ahmed: I suppose when I was eleven or
twelve, though even as a child, my mother used to tell me, and I
have a vague recollection of it, I used to babble for hours
playing by myself, making up words that made no sense.
Mevlut:
Do you think that special situations are needed for writing
poetry? Does poetry live within you?
Ahmed: Being “wrapt up” in poetry
does not make you a poet, as being dressed up in clothes does
not make you a man, though it may give you culture and polish.
The springs of poetry lie within you; you cannot acquire them by
reading which, however, may impart appreciation and a criterion of good and bad, that is, literary
efficiency.
Since poetry resides within you, special
“situations” are necessary to bring it our of you. The name
of “situations” in art and poetry is experience. Feeling and
the capacity to experience being inborn, only those can feel and
experience who are sensitive by nature.. In fact, predilection
to poetry itself occasions situations, as it is visionaries who
alone see visions which non-visionaries can neither invent nor
see.
Mevlut:
Can you comment on the development of literature (in particular
of poetry) and the stage, which it has reached today? In
today’s mass media and era of high technology of
communications, do you think that literature has been untouched
by these – can mass media convey the messages in poetry or
art—changes?
Ahmed: One requisite of poetry is
leisure. Without leisure one cannot contemplate. Without
contemplation emotion cannot open out into its many-coloured
spectrum nor find occasion for recollection in tranquility which
renews the springs of inspiration. You cannot write poetry
riding a double-decker bus in the madness of London rush.
Few have, therefore, been able to write
poetry in our day, except by finding refuge in the isolation of
their minds: Ezra Pound in his essentially demented personal
situation, T.S, Eliot in the paranoiac awareness of the
irreligiosity of his generation and the consequent escape into
the psychotic state of Christian mysticism, and Rainer Maria
Rilke in the loneliness of suffering and resultant leisure his
peculiar circumstances provided for contemplation as the Duino
Elegies show. Nonetheless, with the exceptions of Rilke it is
doubtful if their poetry achieved real greatness – Pound is so
fragmented.
The art of poetry has been progressively
declining since its rise in the Elizabethan age, in the same
proportion as material success incumbent on imperialist
expansion and industrialization, the
consequent hurry and mechanization of life have
increased, culminating in the increase of materialism
represented by Darwin’s devastating theory of man’s descent
from the ape.
This took away the sense of wonder at the
phantasmagoria of life and the divine order of Creation, and
gave rise to pessimism which has led to the gradual desiccation
of whatever hope remained in the eternal mystery of the
beginning and the End.
The best ages of poetry in the West, to
confine ourselves to the English-speaking world, were the
Elizabethan and the Caroline when in the former a new wide vista
of hope and wonder was opening up before the mind, and in the
latter a leisure was created for contemplation and love after
the turmoil in the intervening decades. (See, for instance, Andrew
Marvell’s “To His Coy Mostress.”) The French Revolution
broke the atmosphere of complacency that had come upon Europe,
and agitated the spirit into a second Romantic interlude.
But it was short-lived and marked with a sense
of haste, as though a hidden hand were pushing it out. And the
poetic careers of Wordsworth and Coleridge were confined to the
brief period of the Lyrical ballads, and those of Shelley, Keats
and Byron were too short.
The coming Industrial Revolution, trailing
into the Victorian age, produced an era of skepticism, doubt,
and a false sense of security in imperialism and the certainty
of possessing everything that was good and beautiful, and the
hypocrisy of Victorian morals against the background of
prostitution and French cancan . . . The poet of fin de
siecle is consequently sick and tired, and easily trails off
into the sentimentality of the Georgians when the poets were
crying over the dead ass as if it were their brother.
Today, with all sense of wonder drained by
the arrogance of power, the nuclear explosions, the conquest of
space, Reagan’s Star Wars, there is no room for wonder or
poetry. Man has become his own creator and destroyer; the Big
Idea of life has fled. When all real poetry and literature, the
greatness of thought and the written word have been drowned in
the noise of electronic machines, the tape and the TV, the
radio, the screen, and the computer has replaced the human mind,
what message there then remains for man’s artificial devices
to convey, when the spirit itself is dead?
Mevlut:
Do you think that poetry can change our world? Why poetry?
Ahmed:
In view of what has been said above, which seems to point
to the death of poetry, how can it “change the world”? Not
that poetry does not have the power to change the world. It has
definitely changed it once. That was after the invasions of
Changez Khan and Halaku’s hordes when the Islamic world lay
devastated in the throes of death with no hope of its rising out
of the traumatic experience.
What then sustained the Muslims and raised
them out of their stupor was the poetry and message of Jaluddin
Rumi and Sa’di Shirazi which filled them with hope and vigour
again. There was no other power that could have awakened them
and made them whole. But then belief was alive; today faith in
the eternal principle and the guiding hand that shapes the
destiny of man is dead.
Mevlut:
How do you relate the essence of the poem with its style?
Ahmed:
The answer to the relation of the essence of the poem
with the style lies embedded in the answer to questions above.
It is essentially the nature of the subject that dictates the
style, the subconscious acting as computer.
Mevlut:
In your view, what makes a poem relevant for the future?
Ahmed:
The factor that contributes most to the relevancy of a
poem is the nature of experience. If it has a lasting import and
universality, it cannot fail to cast its shadows into the
future. Its relevancy to the future lies in its presenting the
eternal verities of life, of fellow-feeling and bearing with
fortitude the trials that befall. Its appeal even to the future
is assured in such a case. posted 8 July 2005
updated 12 October 2007 |
