Here, there are no bloody swords and severed limbs. Night winds do not rage. Famine and death have disappeared. There is just the poet, and some mysterious "he" who plays capricious and tyrannical tricks. Certainly, the laughter of this "he" is much more devastating than all the cries of anguish in the other poems. And the heavy boot stamping on the dreams is an act more outrageous than any torture or execution. The truly comic vision will always make paradox more clear, and possibly, more unbearable. Yet, at the heart of this expression of despair, there is already the seed of resignation, the promise of redemption. The man whose dreams survive the heavy boot, that man will surely triumph. In the very act of writing, the poet has already conquered.
One might be tempted to read specific names, places, and dates into these poems of Nazir Qaiser, to view them as specific protests against concrete situations. Such particularization might lend a certain force to the poetry; but to name specifics will also undercut its genuine universality and permanence. These are poems for all seasons in every age. Ever since Cain killed Abel, a multitude of forces have conspired to curtail and to destroy altogether the innate freedom of men and women everywhere« Whoever has experienced suffering and oppression, and who among us has not?, will find nourishment and hope in these poems. They demonstrate the seemingly endless power of the human spirit to imagine, to conjure up the face of evil and to challenge it with the more powerful countenance of goodness. For the poet, the process is inextinguishable agony, yet his anguish redeems and restores the rest of us. Through his wounds, we are made whole. Because of him, we too can dare to imagine, beyond all signs to the contrary, earth and sun rotated back into balance again a new world.
Annual of Urdu Studies, #7 9^