The energy of Lotus reveals some of this, as do Faiz’s poems written in Beirut. He befriended the radicals (including a young Yasser Arafat), and found himself at the center of the city’s concerns and its imagination. He became the editor of the Afro-Asian magazine, Lotus, and became a resident in Beirut.įaiz absorbed Beirut. Feigning to go smoke a cigarette, the poet escaped his captor and fled the country. Pakistan, he wrote, has been “sold to the neo-imperialist block.” By the 1970s, when the dictatorship of Zia thwarted any democratic possibility, Faiz was put under house arrest. Both tasks floundered as Pakistan entered its unforgiving political grammar: the twenty something families that dominate the economy and polity subverted the democratic process by a turn to the Barracks, backed to the hilt by the United States imprisoned in its own Cold War calculus. When Pakistan was formed in 1947, Faiz went in two directions: as editor of Pakistan Times he was central to the creation of democratic mainstream institutions, as a communist intellectual he was part of the formidable attempt to create democratic culture in the new country. He wrote searing poetry about life, and revolution, taking older poetic forms and forging new idioms that chartered the emotions of socialism. He joined the British Indian Army he was an integral part of the Progressive Writers Association. Born in Sialkot, Punjab, Faiz came of age under colonial rule and in the throes of nationalist anti-colonialism. 'Beirut: Ornament of Our World' Faiz's 1982 Poem on Beirutįaiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984) is one of the greatest Urdu poets of the 20 th century.
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