But singing about dark times which do not seem to end in this land of woes, requires courage a few among our literati can muster. Nasreen Anjum Bhatti, a poet, broadcaster and rights activist, never pretended to appear courageous but what she did, expressed immense courage that she imperceptibly embodied.
She challenged through her poetic expression the inherited class-based politico-economic structure and patriarchy-driven socio-cultural norms which flaunted conformity and compliance as apotheosis of
civilization. Human civilization of which we feel proud, is defined by power, be it that of class or gender.
Being a socially conscious artist, Nasreen exposed the nature of political system that had an inbuilt tendency to deny the people their legitimate share in all the things life offered. She showed us the insidious interior of the system’s devious exterior. Being woman, she explored the complex process of how patriarchy created gender bias reduced female to a commodity. How societal norms, cultural values, customs and traditions ultimately end up as oppressive tools to be used subtly or not so subtly against the have nots and women is what engages her at emotional and experiential level.
We find in her poetry an organic link between political oppression and patriarchal practices. In her imaginative reconstruction, the distinctions between interior and exterior, and inner and outer disappear unmistakably hinting at the totality of life that eludes contemporary individual who is forced to experience it as fragmentary and fragmented.
Nasreen in fact picked up fragments, prosaic and ordinary, and arranged them with such an artistic skill that a whole new world came into being that was fresh and familiarly unfamiliar. She was one of those poets who found the reality of life in the ordinary, realising that the extraordinary grew out of the ordinary and the abstract was born of the concrete.
For more detail In memoriam: Nasreen Anjum Bhatti is the female voice, soft but strong
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