Painting the Pain

Muhammad Nadeem

Once, which seems like a lifetime ago, sitting beside my grandfather’s writing table, while he was composing his poems, he told me, “Shairey Cha Machar”, poetry is madness, and began to explain, “You would see a madman at once calm and deep in his own world and another second he bursts in a laugh or cry like a child. That’s what poetry is -- A sudden outburst of an emotion.”

There is machar in Ubair’s poetry. His first poetry collection is utter madness. A madness which makes the reader feel the love of poetry anew. 

“I’ve stolen peace from the hearts and

tore it into pieces: I’ve fed it to dogs.”

Pain(t) is a collection of Ubair’s some 65 poems dealing with dreams, feelings, fate, family, love, hope, art, self, eulogies, home, travelling, sand, sun, hurt, sickness, reading, blood, grief, songs, nightmares, colors, and how pain be turned into paint with which some art can be made to soothe the ache in hearts, and hence Pain(t).

“Color itself is a degree of darkness.”

Ubair’s precise eye for potential metaphors brings moments of unexpected lyricism to descriptions of rooms or cemeteries. to create the echo of kin, but also to illuminate the common impulses of family. 

The poet is relentless. He doesn’t want you to breathe normally.

Intricate and intelligent, these poems reveal the heart of the genealogical craze—to face mortality, and find a way to remember and be remembered. There is a smooth, lyrical rhythm in the poems.

In The Detour to the Other World, the poet talks about roaming around Lal Chowk after six months of shutdown in the Valley and to breath the airs of Jehlum and in a lot of other poems exquisitely paints the landscape of Kashmir;

“There were secrets along the way,
of love that perched on the grey of my
life,
right after the six months of unrest;
that sits somewhere watching the cars
on highway
making run for the stars.
… Kashmir slit in the silence,
in two gushes of awaited normalcy.”

“…the damp air
of Jehlum
her gusts resting on our face like polite talk”

Pursuing dreams in a place like Kashmir seems, to the poet, something that needs a lot of sacrifices;

“…so if you see a fire,

Burning alive from a distance,

Say a prayer for my dreams.”

In another poem;

“And somewhere, down that road that

runs long as the summer droughts –

down that road is slaughtered dream

lying dull on the road,

almost dying.”

The poet suggests that the presence of beauty depends on one’s lens and perspective;

“I have my heart encased in

concertina wires;

blood pours

out like water and gushes

incessantly into the earth.”

The poems are colored by emotional turbulence and finding solace in relationships and the natural world,

“… some of us prefer

to leave than forgive. I understand.

…I shall remember you in the way rocks

Learn the lines drawn on them…”

The poems are well-crafted expressions of poetic musings and flowing, hard-earned wisdom;

“We’re shelters to memories and agony;

We’re that bare naked branches of the

night that’s a strange delicacy of what is.”

Ubair is a college student, young, full of energy and emotions. And he doesn’t let go his emotions waste. He has tried to preserve his emotions in his poetry very delicately. Where there are some happy poems, some are pretty dark.

“…I kill the bees that fall in my name”

The only thing that does not seem good about this book is that it is self-published. It could have been published by some reputed publisher. There are some mistakes – grammatical, technical or otherwise, which could have been avoided.

There have been a plethora of self-published books for the past few years in Kashmir. Anyone who gets enough likes and followers on the social media assumes himself a poet worth to be published. In Niyaz Mandaana, which is a long preface of Joun Aulia’s first poetry book Shayad, he says that he waited almost 40 years and was forced by his friends to publish his poetry. There are many examples of poets who published their work very late in their life and were famous and successful.

The recent success of Insta-poets like R.M Drake, Ruby Dhal, Rupi Kour, Lang Leav and others has changed this scenario. Yet, still, there is great debate among literary circle about their poetry. With patience and a bit struggle, there were chances that Ubair’s book might have been published by some reputed publisher. 

Some of the poems in the collection feel like a sentence broken in parts and, in my opinion, shouldn’t be included in the book, or made better with and editing and time.

Normally there is no involvement of an editor or agent when one goes for self-publishing. You just send them the manuscript and they design and publish it. And, one might think, will there be anyone really able to edit and analyze the poetry in these publishing houses.

But, what else can one do? Kashmir doesn’t have a publisher of her own with a nationwide publicity.

What is published by Kashmir’s publishers remains only in Kashmir.

With the recent examples of Nazir Wani (and the silence whispered…) Huzaifa Pandit (Green is the Color of Memory), Mubashir Karim, (Love in the Time of Camera) among others, whose poetry were published by some good publishers, should give hope and courage to other poets of the valley thinking of self-publishing.

We can’t say people don’t read poetry nowadays or poetry doesn’t bring fortune to publishers and poets. If we look at the books of Rupi or Lang, they sold in millions and caught the attention of the whole literary world. There is, and absolutely should be, a debate on such poetry (Insta-Poetry vs Traditional Poetry).

Ubair’s poetry might not be something phenomenal but it definitely is much better than those of Insta-poets. But the question is, is anybody actually going to buy it, read it, and share it. And are the reputed publishers of India or International going to hunt the talent in Kashmir?