Khattaknamah Akorkhel Khattak
“To become truly great, one has to stand with people, not above them”.
He was a true polymath – a poet, journalist, broadcaster, linguist, scholar and a politician. However despite all his patrician qualities this Renaissance man was a plebeian at heart.
Despite his capability to – and opportunities available to him for – upward social mobility, Ajmal Khattak chose to live and die in his dignified poverty. In a polity where comprador bourgeoisie, feudals and their quislings were rising to power, Ajmal stood head and shoulders above that upstart crowd, relying solely on his intellectual and political acumen. He was a giant in a political landscape dotted with pygmies.
For the Pashtuns he was the voice of their voiceless angst, expression in the muted humiliation and their freedom cry for the subjugated human dignity. Ajmal Khattak was a man of letters who, in the tradition of the warrior-poet Khushal Khan Khattak, also unfurled the standard of struggle for Pashtun unity.
Ajmal Khattak relied heavily on the Lenin’s writings, such as:” The right of nations to self-determination implies exclusively the right to independence in the political sense, the right to free political separation from the oppressor nation. Specifically, this demand for political democracy implies complete freedom to agitate for secession and for a referendum on secession by the seceding nation.
Indeed, Ajmal Khattak’s poetry is humanism personified and transcends time and frontiers. Sa’adi Shirzai wrote that stones have been chained while dogs are let loose (سنگ ہا را بستند و سگاں را کشادند – sung-ha ra bastand o sugaaN ra khushadand) and Faiz’s adaption of the same is well-known. However, Ajmal Khattak’s rendition of this thought in his poem “چرتھ چھ باران د خداۓ د قہر وریدلے دے
-cherta che baran da Khudai da qahar waraidalay de” (where it has been raining the wrath of God, is indeed my home, it is your home), makes the contrasts and ironies of our society clearer than ever to the common reader and the activist alike.
What is clear though is that the literary genius in Ajmal Khattak brought the Pashto poetry in sync with the modern times. He not only experimented with and improved on the prevalent forms as ghazal (sonnet) and ruba’ee (quatrain) but introduced the progressive political thought in his nazm, with a vigor and craft that puts him at par with Neruda, Sahir and Faiz.
Language is a great identity marker. Marxism and Leninism could not take away my Islam and Pakhtoonwali from me. I have lived and will die with them close to my heart and soul.’ Ajmal Khattak passed away on February 7, 2010
O dream! Come take me to my garden.
Take me out of this cage of thorns
To that canopy of flowers
Under which my beautiful, bouncing daughter
Plays with her companions.
One sees her father and runs to him and cries:
“O my father!”
My daughter remembers me and my cage of thorns.
She runs to her mother and cries and cries.
O dream! Come take me from here to that garden!
…
I demand the dream take me to sweet memories.
Why?
Because I want to open my old wounds.
Why?
To awaken my sleeping valor –
the angry wounds will not let me forget.
Why?
My valor will awaken all valor, and
I want to seep these sweet memories in Pashto, and
transform them to happiness in the gardens of all mankind,
I want the flame of my burning heart to give
light to the toiling and the lost.
I want my light to create a new dawn for
nations and peoples.
O God!
Help these flowers to grow from my words.
0 dream!
Become reality.
(Contributed by Najeedburehman Khan, Adamzai with excerpts from Dr. Taqi)
