Staging Future
One important thing about the word “performance” we learnt in class is that it implies volition; staging an act, and being conscious of that act of staging. I didn’t know the meaning of performance back in 2nd grade, when I recited my first poem, but I think I enjoyed it. I don’t even remember feeling nervous, I don’t remember any stage-fright, I just remember The Redback, the insect the poem was for. My next performance was for a boy named Augustus, who wouldn’t drink his soup. The rules for the Elocution contest were that you couldn’t move your hands or feet or head. Just use your voice, my teachers said. I don’t know why I knew how to use my voice for a poem, but I did. In 5th grade, my teacher asked me to step outside of class. Turns out, I wasn’t in trouble. She just wanted me to show her how to recite a poem she was having difficulty with and that she had to perform herself. I realize now that I wasn’t all that great as everyone made me out to be; but my classmates always enjoyed my performance, because it was always marked by excess. Excess of voice, excess of emotion, excess of expression. There was too much going on with my face and voice and maybe that was fun to hear and watch. My voice shot across the room when I recited, “Bang! Bang! Bang! (The wolf) shot her dead.”
Sometimes I realize I still have that energy of excess but I’m not really sure how to use it. So I sing to Ammi, Shazz, Sarah or Mariam sometimes and they make that face, that face of not knowing what to do with this bout of absurdity. So I stage a performance of Hey Jude for them, and made them learn that song, so they know it now, too. Sometimes Ammi tells me to stop singing in English because it irritates her because she can’t understand anything. But she loves performing as well; I ask her a lyric, and she’s off, singing to me, to Assel Bhabi, to Shazz. Sometimes we laugh at how Ammi can make the most fun and upbeat song incredibly sad because her training for performances, of stages have been milaads when she was little. For her, part of the glory of her youth was her voice, and the recognition it received.
The nature of the stage changes, ofcourse. There are new rules for every stage; for instance, Imrana and I decided to sing for the 10th grade school milaad, and the rules for that stage were a white shirt and pink dupatta laced with a shiny silver bail, which is called “kiran”. Chiken ka kapra, aur kiran ki bail. The school employed a special instructor for the school milaad, somebody who we had to call Aapa; she provided us with the difficult lyrics we hardly knew the meaning of, but loved singing. Moray nayya paar kara jaana! Adab, ehtaraam, dheema lehja. We learnt to form our bodies, voices, volitions according to the rules laid out for us, and sang.
I think I’ve forgotten how to recite a poem now, because once I volunteered in class to read out a poem about Karachi and it came out all weird and shaky. So then I also have to address the absence of stage, of forgetting the confidence of taking a mic and speaking. Sometimes I am not in control of answering the question: what can I be? There are a limited number of stages, and the ones Ammi would like me to take me to, I don’t want to be on. I tried to recite my own poem only once when I grew up, but that stage wasn’t meant for me. Or I wasn’t fit for that stage. No-one really listened, and even if they did, I don’t know if they liked it because Baba was at the back watching me, waiting to take me home. Lord knows, I haven’t perfected the art of writing, of writing a poem, and certainly not of charting where and how to lay importance in a poem’s structure. My poems are still learning to grow up, and I am still trying to find a language for the stages I would like to be a part of. Forgetting comes from severe places, severe moralities, but forgetting is also birthed by learning. One day I would like to write a good poem, and one day I would like to give a good performance for it. The former has to do with language, the latter has to do with access, which I am still trying to figure out and complicate my ideas about.
Once, Assel Bhabi took us to a musical called Phantom of the Opera. It was one of the best things in my life; I could follow the stories, the songs, the dance. I loved every second of it. But our going there was pure accident, and we didn’t even know we were going to a musical. I don’t know if I’ll be able to go to a musical again, but I really I hope I can. Sometimes I think I know what my excess of energy can be used for, sometimes I have a hunch that I could arrange my face, body, costumes, hair, movement into a language of theatre, and that I’d be good at it, but I don’t know beyond that. I have a hunch, but I don’t know how you can let desire grow into strength, or success, because “success” is a place of many, many fights, and risks, and dangers.
There is the character of Akbar, a classical dancer, in a drama called Angan Terha; he is my favourite, and he makes me laugh all the time. One of my favourite lines that Akbar delivers is in response to the poet who comments, enraged by Akbar’s badtameezi, “Shayad tamaddun aap kay qareeb say naheen guzra?” Akbar says bitterly, “Qareeb say guzar kay dekhay tamaddun, aisa haath marengay!” I laughed out loud at that joke, and I want to make art-work out of it. Tamadddun – a code word for Polite Balance. Like Sir William Bradshaw’s “Sense of Proportion”. Akbar is always in excess; his humour, his costume, his walk, his talk, everything. There is nothing balanced about him, and I love him. Akbar also knows how to dance – but he can’t dance, owing to the PIA Arts Academy being shut down under General Zia. But Akbar does kind of dance, whenever he gets the chance to; like in the kitchen, where he’s supposed to be working. Instead of putting rotis on the tawa, he practices kathak with them instead, and ends up pasting un-cooked rotis on the wall. He bites his tongue afterwards, realizing that this was not the best of ideas. He can’t dance, but whenever he gets the chance to, he does, even if he messes up the wall in the process.
Everyone else refuses Akbar’s dance, in one way or another, but in the end, he starts participating in that refusal himself. He kind of gives up, he recognizes that he cannot find those spaces, on radio, on television to perform. He doesn’t really want to go with the delegation who offers to take him abroad, away from Pakistan. And then he is removed from the script; his story ends.
I don’t know how or when refusals of desire start becoming our own refusals. I don’t know if we are complicit in our own failings, all the things we don’t have the courage to be. I don’t know all the things we internalize, I can’t begin to pick them apart. I know I should, but it can be so exhausting, imagining futures which we don’t know will materialize or not, even if it’s just going to see a musical.
There are some literal tools, like make-up, like money, like clothes, like voice, like stage! All these things; I need them to perform. But given the chance, what we will we say and who will we say it to? Who will be audience to our unpracticed poems? Who will be audience to decayed knowledges about how to use a tool like voice, who will be audience to unknowledge, because it never reached us, who will be audience to loss? Who will be audience to failure? Then we will remember all the libraries that were locked, then we will remember all the books taken from our hands, then we will remember the things we forgot, then we will remember how we partook in our own erasures, maybe.
Okay, maybe that’s too dramatic. But drama is a mode of story-telling, after all. So I will let that paragraph be.
I don’t shut up around Shazz; I really don’t. We stage a performance for ourselves; we sing many songs, we affect many accents half-way into the songs, we make up props out of random objects, like Aleeza’s toy arrows, and we pretend to play all the instruments, or we adjust our voices to make variation between flute, piano, drum, guitar. My favourite thing to do is air-drum, at the end of a song. You know what? I would be a great drummer.
