Poetry of Imroz

Inno­v­a­tive, col­lo­qui­al, indi­vid­u­al­is­tic, exper­i­men­tal with unusu­al metaphors and sym­bols… Imroz’s poet­ry is every­thing but tra­di­tion­al. It is the poet­ry of today. It is the voice of an indi­vid­ual who sees life in rela­tion to him­self, his soci­ety and the uni­verse he is a part of.

Poet­ry is basi­cal­ly the expres­sion of the self, and hence sub­jec­tiv­i­ty is very much the essence of his poems and this we find more promi­nent in his first book,”Khudkhushi ke Mausam me”. But as he moves towards his sec­ond book,”Kainaati gard me Urryan Shaam”, his thoughts and feel­ings become mature and objec­tive. We do not find raw sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty in his feel­ings. His is the love that has stood the test of time, loss, patience and pain. He says:

میں اس سفید پھول کا خدا ہوں
جو میری خود رو محبت میں اگ آیا ہے
پھر بھی آوازوں کے کوکتے جنگل میں
میرے آنسووں کا کوئی گیت نہیں

To describe his feel­ings, he con­stant­ly gets inspi­ra­tion from nature and draws his images most­ly from his imme­di­ate phys­i­cal envi­ron­ment. He also plays freely with Indi­an mythol­o­gy. “Achoot khawab ki Brah­man aankhien”, “Doos­rey gau­tam ka giyaan”, and “Iss jee­wan rutt ki sarhad mei” are replete with Hin­di myths. Bold, expres­sive and blunt… his poems may seem provoca­tive and annoy­ing to some of his read­ers. His atti­tude towards love is not some­thing heav­en­ly and oth­er­world­ly. It is very much phys­i­cal and earth­ly. Even when he finds some solace in it, it is only tran­si­to­ry. Mechan­i­cal sweet­ness of vers­es and rhyme is not to be found in Imroz’s poems. Most­ly writ­ten in prose verse, his poet­ry is intel­lec­tu­al and is more like meta­phys­i­cal poet­ry which deals main­ly with thoughts, feel­ings and ideas which grow like weeds on the fer­tile and ade­quate­ly equipped plains of his mind. Time and again, the read­ers can smell his desire to bur­row back to the womb of nature offer­ing him com­fort in the form of trees, flow­ers, birds, ants, clouds and many more things.

Human beings in his poems are snared by ortho­dox social, polit­i­cal and moral dog­mas and norms which in the form of tra­di­tions threat­en their cre­ativ­i­ty and change them mere­ly into stereo­types and arti­fi­cial beings with lack of orig­i­nal­i­ty and have shat­tered per­son­al­i­ties. Like a lib­er­al human­ist, he ide­alis­es a soci­ety where men can live with­out hurt, self- pity, guilt and degra­da­tion. Dif­fer­ences among social class­es are eas­i­ly trace­able in Imroz’s poet­ry where peo­ple try to bet­ter their con­di­tion but soon find them­selves bur­dened with the futil­i­ty and heav­i­ness of the toil which becomes all the more pur­pose­less with a sense of con­stant and unavoid­able death and hence makes his poems quite pes­simistic. In his poem “Kau­mi qaat­lo ke liey Spaas naa­ma”, he says:

اور ایک اندھی صبح کے کنارے
بے رنگ دھوئیں میں تیرتے ہوئے
ہم اپنی زندگی سے ہار جائیں گے

Liv­ing in a soci­ety where ter­ror, inse­cu­ri­ty and social injus­tice have pen­e­trat­ed to every nook, Imroz is very much con­scious of the dete­ri­o­ra­tive effects of for­eign inter­fer­ence, inter­na­tion­al and nation­al polit­i­cal poli­cies and com­mer­cial­iza­tion. “aal­mi zaal­mo ke naam”, “Par­lia­ment” and Sad­er hum­mien galey kio nahi lagaatey” give us a clear pic­ture of the world we are liv­ing in.

اجلی دنیا تعمیر کرنے کے لیے
مجھے خداوں کے دل چاہیئں
میرے نام لکھے پیغمبروں کے خطوں میں
کہیں نہیں لکھا
کہ اختلاف کا رنگ سُرخ ہے
پھر کیوں ہر روز آلودہ کفن دفنائے جاتے ہیں؟

“Exis­tence itself is a dream”, and when it is com­bined with the feel­ings of despair, lone­li­ness and pur­pose­less­ness, a sen­si­tive heart tries to cre­ate a world for him­self which is in accor­dance with his inner self. In this quest, Imroz is on a jour­ney and how much he suc­ceeds in his attempt, only time will prove because “Zinda­gi aik safar maang rahi hei”.

Image: Duy Huynh