Nasreen Munni KabirIn the Year of Sahir: 2021 Diary

Abstract

BOOKS IN REVIEW Disappearance, The Eternal Return, and, finally, The Image. Canadian author Karoline Georges’s narrative plays out between reality and the image. Reminiscences and insecurities, disappointments and cruelties add flesh to Georges’s skeletal portrait in perfunctory prose. Her narrator learned about femininity from her grandfather’s pinups and her grandmother’s Hollywood stars, from I Dream of Jeannie, Wonder Woman, and Olivia Newton John. Jeannie and Wonder Woman are transformational: by spinning and blinking, they are reborn. Olivia Newton John is “a goddess . . . better still: a fictional character.” Even then, she was learning how to become Anouk. As a child, our narrator studied particular women’s transformational powers and recognized her capacity to blur reality and fiction. “That was my first career choice. Fictional character, body of light on a screen.” As an adult, she transforms her own reality and creates fiction; for work, she models and, in her off hours, becomes Anouk. “A career as a virtually static object was perfect for me . . . spending as much time as possible being passive, as if already I barely existed beyond the image.” The novel hinges on the theme of perception . Initially, the narrator perceives herself through others’ images: “I was learning to collect myself.” But becoming the photographer “creates a bridge between reality and fiction. Between life and death.” Her artistry reveals other means of transformation and preservation, but a family member’s illness challenges the limitations of her creativity nevertheless . With few personal relationships, this potential loss makes her yearn for “a whole truth that substituted for movements of the body, matter, time,” and digitization offers unconventional solutions. Thematic layers and resonance add complexity to this novel of ideas. Georges won the 2018 Governor General’s Award for French-Language Fiction for this novel, De synthèses; its English translator, Rhonda Mullins, previously won a Governor General’s Award in 2015 for translating Jocelyne Saucier’s Les héritiers de la mine. These are the kinds of connections that The Imago Stage’s narrator forges with Anouk: real but as much about separation as connection. The Imago Stage is flat, intensely orchestrated , and nearly lifeless: essentially and purposefully so. Marcie McCauley Toronto Nasreen Munni Kabir In the Year of Sahir: 2021 Diary Chennai, India. Westland. 2020. 144 pages. MUCH OF INDIA’S LITERARY and cinematic worlds are geared up to celebrate with considerable enthusiasm the birth centenary of Sahir Ludhianvi (Abdul Hayee; 1921–1980), “a colossus among film lyricists,” considered by many as one of the foremost Urdu poets of the twentieth century. As her contribution to these festivities , Nasreen Munni Kabir, the eminent scholar of Indian film, has published this elegantly designed, spiral-bound, diarylike collection of reminiscences of Sahir’s many prominent friends and colleagues, numerous, never-before-published photographs , brief, incisive essays, remarks, and intriguing personal bits and pieces of sahiriana . For example, the back cover shows Sahir’s actual diary for August 23–26, 1978, along with his entry for the 24th: “Kaifi / Dinner – Faiz,” presumably a meeting with poet Kaifi Azmi (1919–2002) and dinner with poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–1984). Akshay Manwani, author of Sahir Ludhianvi : The People’s Poet (2013)—the best biography of the poet in English—introduces the volume with a concise essay that charts the trajectory of Sahir’s poetry from its beginnings to its etiolation in the 1970s. The diary concludes with Kabir’s incisive and contextualizing essay “The Story behind Parchhaiyan and Shadow Speaks,” which introduces a reprint of novelist/film director K. A. Abbas’s long-out-of-print English translation of one of Sahir’s most famous (and lengthiest) poems, the antiwar Parchhaiyan (Shadows; 1955), a harrowing account of what two young lovers experience during the terror of World War II. It appears side by side with the original text in Urdu script. 112 WLT SPRING 2021 0 Sahir started writing poetry during his high school days and continued on into college, from which he was expelled for refusing to take his final exams as a political protest. He worked as a writer and subeditor of a number of major Urdu literary journals in Lahore, where he came in contact with young...