7/30/2019 The Moment of Change is the Only Poem
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The moment of change is the only poem
Fakhra Hassan
Have you ever been through that non-stop work routine to
constantly invent colorful and intelligent
formats on Excel to make lives easy for the hard working
development experts? The routine is so
robotic that whenever you are in the deserts of South Punjab,
you get goat cravings. You talk to
baby goats, especially the ones with bells hanging around their
necks. It's not possible not to fall in
love with them, hold them and hug them. I tell their owners in
the village, "She is so beautiful, and
one day you are going to chop her head off and eat her, cruel
people! This is my favorite catharsis
for the flood affected village women because all they do is
laugh when they hear me rant about
protecting their baby goats.
No sir, no ma'am, no matter how big a pay you get for that
creative edge, you are in fact paying a
bigger price of losing your innate voice of social activism to a
paralyzing extreme.
The paralysis comes from a shocking revelation that unique women
like me, middle class feminists
are rated a little too masculine by social sub-standards. And
what to do with those God-gifted macho
personality traits when one is married to a handsome income and
has several bosses to please? And
mind you, there is no policy anywhere in Pakistan that provides
compensation for special efforts we
invest in curbing our deviance or pretending to be someone we
can never be. That, my dear friends,
is a real toughie in the world of patriarchy.
I have not even begun to challenge Justice Nisar'sunjust
verdictfor Mukhtaran Mai or to celebrate
thenewly found freedom for transsexualsin Pakistan, or todemand
the repeal of Blasphemy Laws
or condemn the brutal murders and kidnappings of scholarly
civilians, lawyers and academics in
Baluchistan.
In this state of quagmire, without further ado, I took my much
needed escape to the Potohari Arts &
Crafts Village in Islamabad for theHunarmand Artist
Residencywhere four artists from Lahore were
exhibiting their solo works.
While exploring the vast, gorgeous Potohari landscape, I bumped
into its patron Siddiqa Malik,
Chairperson of the Indus Heritage Trust (IHT), and listened
while she narrated the tale of a troupe
of folk artists from Balochistan who were refused by the CDA to
avail the residency at the Potohari
Arts and Crafts Village.
I had no prior insight on thehistory of this unholy marriage,
and perhaps did not want to have any
on account of the nausea over CDA's show of political dumbness
for shunning the minority artists
http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/5551/mukhtaran-mai-verdict-where-the-court-went-wrong/http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/5551/mukhtaran-mai-verdict-where-the-court-went-wrong/http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/5551/mukhtaran-mai-verdict-where-the-court-went-wrong/http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13192077http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13192077http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13192077http://tribune.com.pk/story/78368/time-to-repeal-the-blasphemy-law/http://tribune.com.pk/story/78368/time-to-repeal-the-blasphemy-law/http://tribune.com.pk/story/78368/time-to-repeal-the-blasphemy-law/http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/4626/murders-in-balochistan-i-blame-the-government/http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/4626/murders-in-balochistan-i-blame-the-government/http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/4626/murders-in-balochistan-i-blame-the-government/https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150157190647934.295806.624727933https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150157190647934.295806.624727933https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150157190647934.295806.624727933http://tribune.com.pk/story/116589/cda-and-ngo-an-unholy-marriage/http://tribune.com.pk/story/116589/cda-and-ngo-an-unholy-marriage/http://tribune.com.pk/story/116589/cda-and-ngo-an-unholy-marriage/http://tribune.com.pk/story/116589/cda-and-ngo-an-unholy-marriage/https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150157190647934.295806.624727933http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/4626/murders-in-balochistan-i-blame-the-government/http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/4626/murders-in-balochistan-i-blame-the-government/http://tribune.com.pk/story/78368/time-to-repeal-the-blasphemy-law/http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13192077http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/5551/mukhtaran-mai-verdict-where-the-court-went-wrong/
7/30/2019 The Moment of Change is the Only Poem
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like that. Little did the artists know of "non-violent forms of
discrimination", and our legal system
fails for not defining any penalties against it.
"You see, this is the Pakistani problem. We are disloyal to our
own homeland. We don't want to
take ownership of our civic responsibilities. We love going
overseas to mint money, and neverreturn! And this is what happens
when you disown your culture. It is a sad state of feudalistic
practices," Siddiqa remarked.
The alienation of artists from Balochistan in the very capital
of Pakistan by the CDA says volumes
about the negligence of the State institutions, and further
aggravates the already deteriorating trust
of the Baloch living in volatile socio-political conditions of
the province.
I went back to the gallery to finally look at the work and meet
the artists with a sunken heart. My
gay eyes could not stop staring at Aziz Bibi, a handicrafts
expert from Multan, fixed firmly in the
black-and-white frames of the photo gallery of Lahore-based
artist and veteran, Imran Nafees. She
constantly reminded me of Leonardo Da Vinci's mysteriously
smiling Mona Lisa. Her possible real
self is getting unearthed soon and that would eventually bring
an end to the dilemma posed by
Silvano Vinceti, Italian researcher and president of Italy's
National Committee for Cultural Heritage,
that Da Vinci's model for the painting was male. It would be
interesting if Mona Lisa turned out
transsexual.
"There is something very queer about Aziz Bibi, and that's what
I loved about her," Imran tells hisaudience. Interestingly, the
other three young artists from Lahore, Kzamania Aslam, Shahzeb
Ahmed
and Iftikhar ul Hassan made good use of black-and-white for the
main subject of their paintings who
were mostly feminine-cum-gender neutral caricatures giving life
and color to their surroundings but
themselves devoid of it - a perfect depiction of what we assume
to be humanity. Be it the search for
an identity, beauty or the worth of sacrifices or a long
journey, it seemed like I am at home and
would do anything to have the time-stopping powers of Evie Ethel
Garland fromout of this world. It
felt just right, and I knew it's not going to last very
long.
Copyright Fakhra Hassan, 2011. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386769/Mona-Lisa-grave-dug-historians.htmlhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386769/Mona-Lisa-grave-dug-historians.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_This_World_(TV_series)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_This_World_(TV_series)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_This_World_(TV_series)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_This_World_(TV_series)http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386769/Mona-Lisa-grave-dug-historians.html
