The news was buried somewhere deep in the pages of the newspaper and really it was surprising that it had been reported at all.

Against the blood and flesh deaths that take up the front and the back pages; this one represents the death of memory and of poetry.

On Wednesday, February 19, a convening was held at the Pashto Department of the University of Peshawar, whose campus has been riven with extremism over the past several years. The solemn men gathered to commemorate the Pashto poet Ameer Hamza Shinwari, a mystic and a visionary who was born in Landi Kotal and wrote about love, at a time when such things were possible.

Unsurprisingly, like so many other memories that do not fit into Pakistan’s ultra purified present, the legacy of Hamza Baba is being erased from the lore of the land.

The scholars gathered in Peshawar this week, lamented just that. The literary center built in Landi Kotal to commemorate the poet’s legacy isbeing lost to neglect and disrepair, unable to host even the annual poetry gathering that used to mark Hamza Baba’s memory.

 

Also read: Security demanded for Hamaza Baba shrine

 

Set against the craggy hills whose barrenness has become synonymous with only gunfire and grenades; the center has long been abandoned.

Now, an apt metaphor for the loss of poetry and literary life in the country, it stands at the brink of death. The scholars who lament its passing and its promise, have urged the Government to take it over, but then, can a Government so unable to save itself, worshippers at mosques or children at schools, save poetry, rescue a literary legacy?

These are questions we do cannot answer in Pakistan.

 

Also read: Flashback: The waning glory

 

Hamza Baba was born in 1907 and lived until 1994, writing many collections of verse and over 40 books. As a young man, he dreamt of writing stories that would become movies, the very first was an ode to love, the script for the Pashto rendition of Laila and Majnu.