Book Review: Poems for Gaza

Poems for Gaza
By Syed Afsar Sajid
Title: ‘Poems for Gaza with Manto’s Letter To Uncle Sam’
Author: Ejaz Rahim
Published by: Phoenix Printers Islamabad
Pages: 139 – Price: Rs.1000/-

Ejaz Rahim is a noted Pakistani poet of English enjoying wide international acclaim. The
instant collection of verse is his 29 th in a series of publications spanning a period of
thirty-two years (1993-2024). The renowned Urdu fiction writer Saadat Hasan Manto’s
‘Letter to Uncle Sam’, purported to have been written in 1951, is adduced to the book as
an epilogue, in anglicised verse form, ostensibly with a view to intensifying the thematic
impact of the poems constituting the collection.

Lauding Manto’s avowal of truth and its auxiliaries, ‘beauty, love and freedom’ as well as his aversion to power that tends to sanctify ‘selfishness and self-righteousness’, the author is led to conceive ‘A world in which/ The most powerful/ Have conspired to wrest/ From the children of Gaza/ Their homelands, their homes/ And their parents/ Their siblings and their playmates/ Their schools and health clinics/ Their everybody, their everything/ In one fell swoop/ One/ Fell’.

The note on the back cover of the book seeks to sum up the poet’s intent in inditing the
crisis in Gaza:

“The poems in this volume reflect a personal reaction to the heart-wrenching scene of
deliberate torture and calculated carnage in Gaza for a whole year running.

“All poems in this anthology may be read as one single poem. Gaza is for all of humanity
a wake-up call. Its significance for history lies in the questions it raises on the very
survival of our civilization.

“Each of the Gaza poems conveys three kinds of echoes — of elegy, of lamentation and
of epiphanic hope. One has inked these verses to celebrate Gazans for their passionate
love of freedom, their unsurmountable courage and their immortal faith. The true poems
however are those written by the Gazans themselves in the blood of martyrdom.”

The tale told in these poems relates to the ‘stark degradation’ to which Gazans have been
subjected in the last fifteen months starting end-October 2023. The narrative is intended
to stir the world conscience on the brutalities brazenly committed on the hapless people
of Gaza by the Israeli forces.

The titles of the poems loudly speak out their melancholic contents: ‘A Karbala Moment’, ‘Karbala of our Times’, ‘Gaza, You’re Not Alone’, ‘Fear’, ‘Grief’, ‘Gaza’s Yellow Rose’, ‘Mortality and Immortality’, ‘Two Scenarios – Peshawar and Gaza’, ‘If All Jews Were Like Albert Einstein’, ‘Lines for President Biden’, ‘Power-Wielders’, ‘Gaze and Shriek’, ‘Gaza Writes Back’, ‘Holocaust – Old and New’, ‘2023 Will Be Remembered’, ‘To Superpowers’, ‘To BBC and CNN’s Sense of History’, ‘Year 2024’, ‘Edhi and Netanyahoo (sic) – Two Portraits in History’s Mirror’, and ‘Saadat HasanManto’s Letter to Uncle Sam’.

In one of this scribe’s earlier reviews of Ejaz Rahim’s work, it was contended that ‘post-
modernism goes beyond the modernist emphasis on the creative role of the poet and
emphasizes the role of the reader of a text also to highlight the complex cultural web within which a poem is crafted and read. Globalization has further facilitated poets to
borrow styles, techniques and forms from a vast range of cosmopolitan cultures and
languages’.

Viewed in this perspective, the poems in the instant anthology would seem to fully testify to their author’s credentials as a poet of the zeitgeist of a turbulent era enmeshed in the two crucial centuries — current and the preceding one.

Here are a few excerpts from the book pertinent to its intent and purpose, that in the
poet’s view envisage the reliance of ‘civilisation’s survival’ on ‘dissemination of a widely-
held and deeply-felt belief in the sanctity of human life and respect for the basic axioms
of freedom and justice’ considered in the ‘larger framework of life and love’:

“To have lived through Gaza/ In these brazen times/ When one finds history/ Lowered
into a bier/ Then thrown into a pit/ Mercilessly, is to burn/ Inside the urn/ Of an Abrahamic
metaphor/ Manifesting both/ Meaning of martyrdom/ And martyrdom of meaning”

(‘To Have Lived Through Gaza’)

“You, Gaza, will arise/ From battlefields like ababeels,/ Spread out your wings as
banners/ And r ace from riverbank to seashore/ Savouring forever more/ The earth’s
fresh salt/ And the hug of the foaming sea” (‘Gaza, You’re Not Alone’)
“Gazans have shown/ To the whole world/ That the one thing/ That can quell fear/ And
defeat despair/ Even in cataclysmic times/ Is the presence of faith/ And the power of
love”

(‘Fear’)
“In the end, it is Gaza’s stones/ That shall announce history’s verdict – / Will
Netanyahoo’s (sic) wish/ To destroy and decimate/ Or Edhi’s spirit to serve and save/
Finally prevail?” (‘Edhi and Netanyahoo (sic) — Two Important Portraits in History’s
Mirror’)

“Cannibalism and Hannibalism/ Work in tandem/ In Zionist minds/ And in their war strata-
gems/ Crossing all red lines/ Imposed by civilisation/ To preserve our fragile Earth/ And
protect her imperilled children” (‘Twin War Doctrines: Cannibalism And Hannibalism’).

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