Kakh tey kaanay by Ayesha Aslam….The Beauty of Truth by M.Afsar Sajid
THE BEAUTY OF TRUTH.
(“Kakh tay Kanay – a collection of Punjabi poems by Aisha Aslam)
ککھ تے کانے
Reviewed by: M. Afsar Sajid
Poetry is the language of emotions – distilled and synthesized by imagination. Apart from its aesthetic value, it serves to enlighten us on a multi-dimensional plane. Spontaneity of expression is quintessential to poetry. Aisha Aslam’s poems in “Kakh tay Kanay” project her as a poet who is endowed with this quality. Her poetic utterances emanate from her responses to life on the emotional, intellectual and moral planes. She has no pretence to grandiosity in style or content. Her subject is life in its mutiplicity as viewed, rather experienced, by a woman who is very sensitive and self conscious.
Aisha Aslam speaks for her class. Her accent is soft but emphatic. The image of a woman that she has been able to create in her poems is that of a deprived soul – inequally! and at times, inhumanly treated in a male-dominated society. She has to curb her passions, circumvent her desires and finally de personify herself into a feeling less, insensate creature, condemned to live in the haunting shadows of the male superiority. An undertone of a self-pitying sorrow runs through the poems contained in the book.
The poems are marked by a sincerity of expression which invests them with a relatively higher order of poetic oredebility.. Her appeal, therefore, lies to the heart as Munnu Bhai has rightly accredited her with in his prefatory remarks on the book.
She has chosen a wide range of subjects for her poetic ramblings. Her ‘l’ is essentially a woman with no commitment either to urhanity or rusticity.
. Inequitable social taboos have miserably constricted her freedom. Her consent is taken for fed in anything that relates to her personal choice or tion. She cannot express her sorrows or vent her joy’s eely. The poems are in fact treatises on the plight of the staff side in a society where male hegemony is the rule.
Aisha Aslam has also experimented with poetic prose which augurs well for the future of the Punjabi poetry. Her monologist aside captioned “Main Aurat Keyon Hoi” marks the crescendo of her vicarial wistfulness.
The book surely lends a new dimension to the Punjabi poetry. Its title is an exquisite representation of its symbolic connotation – a damsel in distress.