Human suffering has
inspired artists and creative humans throughout the recorded history of man on
this planet. Jesus Christ's agony on the cross loomed like a colossus over
centuries of Renaissance paintings in Europe. All other themes were simply
dwarfed by it. In our own Islamic and South Asian literature, the epic struggle
of Hussain, the Holy Prophet's (PBUH) grandson at the battle Of Kerbala and his
persecution have churned out mountains of erudite contributions in both prose
and poetry.
Human suffering at a
collective level has had its own poignancy for artists and literati and world
literature is redolent with epic sagas of misery and pain in which children
figure as the most unwitting victims. The 20th century was especially notorious
for inflicting untold misery and suffering on children. These hapless victims of
human greed and an insatiable appetite for aggrandizement have dotted the canvas
of our living memory from Africa to Europe, Asia to South America.
But, perhaps, no other
children in the burgeoning ranks of man-made tragedies have suffered as much as
the children of Iraq. Thirteen years of history's most punishing sanctions
against the whole mass of Iraq's 24 million people undoubtedly took the heaviest
toll on the children of that blighted land. Close to a million of them perished
in that unremitting and tortuous spell of sanctions.
The UN agencies, like
UNICEF and WHO, estimated that out of more than half of the Iraqi children under
five suffered from chronic malnutrition, one third never made it past their
fifth birthday. Bedraggled children scrounging for scraps of food at garbage
dumps was a common sight in Iraqi cities. Their nightmare is far from over under
an equally punishing and oppressive US military occupation of Iraq.
All this litany of
woes, suffering and misery came to the fore in the splendid isolation of
affluence in Winnipeg, Canada, in August. Parvin Shere, a woman of
Indo-Pakistani provenance, launched a two-CD pack, which she has christened as
Kirchiyan - shards or fragments of a grated, haunted and obsessed heart. It
contains a number of her poems focused on the suffering of humanity at large and
of the Iraqi children in particular. She has rendered in lilting melody, in her
own voice, many of those poems. The background music is hers too. Ahmed Faraz,
Amjad Islam Amjad and this scribe, in his right as a poet, have provided an
insight into Parvin's poetic propensities and her vision of a humanist. The CDs
are dedicated to the children of Iraq.
Parvin has been living
for 30 years in somnolent Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the lap of Canada's prairie
land. She looks like any other housewife whose hands are always full with chores
of life's daily grind. She has raised three children and has a doting husband, a
Mathematics professor, Waris Shere. There is, outwardly, nothing in her that
should entangle itself with the tragedy of Iraq and the penury of its oppressed
people.
But Parvin Shere is
not an ordinary woman. She is an artist of many dimensions and a very
accomplished person. A versatile painter who mostly paints nature and whose
works are on permanent display in the provincial Art Gallery of Manitoba, Parvin
has carved a niche for herself in the art circles other adopted province. But
Parvin is more than just a painter. She plays several musical instruments with
effortless ease, writes short stories and composes poetry in two languages. She
is a well-rounded artiste who has the heart of a poet, the eyes of a painter and
the hands of a musician, to quote Ahmad Faraz. These are but rare qualities,
especially amongst women from our part of the world.
Parvin's sensitive
soul was touched deeply by the suffering she saw on the streets of South Asia
during her regular visits home. Modem technology and cyber highways brought her
face to face with the nightmare of suffering in Iraq, particularly that of its
emaciated children. The unremitting spectre of wholesale death and destruction
wrought on the hapless children of Iraq grated her soul and lanced the sensitive
heart of the artiste in her. She cried out in agony:
Why Have death's long shadows blanketed
Dreamless cities with their bleak and gloomy
facades;
Why must the heaven behave like a mute and silenced
witness?
Will man's galling mendacity
Remain forever his only legacy?
But Parvin refused to
become just another bleeding heart. She decided to put her money, literally,
where her mouth, or heart, was. She resolved to take her own one-woman battle to
the heart of the issue that left her haunted and restless. She took a conscious
decision to do something truly constructive and tangible for the unheard victims
of a rapacious power's imperial lust.
All the sale proceeds
of the CDs will be donated for the welfare of Iraqi children through UNICEF. At
the launch of Kirchiyan the Iraqi sufferings came alive as speakers described
the situation there. Since I had been Pakistan's Ambassador based in Baghdad in
1996-99 and had been witness to the sufferings of the Iraqis, I was invited to
speak. Evelyn Guindon, Excutive Director of UNICEF for the Prairie Region of
Canada, and Dr. John J. Stapleton, Rector of St John's College of the University
of Manitoba were the other speakers. The launch sufficiently inspired the
audience to rise to me occasion and buy more than a hundred sets of Kirchiyan on
the spot.
Parvin's initiative
proves the point that with grit and determination even the weak can challenge
the gods of wrath and expose their mendacity in all its maddening dimensions.
The voiceless Iraqi children have a champion of their rights in her.
