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" Relocating the postcolonial self: Place, metaphor, memory and the Urdu poetry of Mustafa Zaidi (1930–1970) "
Laurel Steele
C. Seely
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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54906
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| Doc. No
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TL24860
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| Call number
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3168395
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| Main Entry
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Laurel Steele
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| Title & Author
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Relocating the postcolonial self: Place, metaphor, memory and the Urdu poetry of Mustafa Zaidi (1930–1970)\ Laurel Steele
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| College
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The University of Chicago
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| Date
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2005
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2005
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| Page No
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519
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| Abstract
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This dissertation examines the life and poetry of Mustafa Zaidi, whom the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz once called, “the greatest Urdu poet of the future.” It looks at his childhood, at how he made himself into a poet, at what he wrote, and at how he is remembered today. Born in 1930 in Allahabad, and a follower of The Poet of the Revolution, Josh Malihabadi, Zaidi achieved early fame reciting before audiences of thousands. He called himself “The Sword.” By the time he was twenty, he had published two books of verse. The freedom struggle colored his poems, as it did other poets' work. Zaidi was a brilliant scholar at Allahabad University, where he was also a student of Firaq Gorakhpuri, another leading Urdu poet. At twenty-one, he moved to Pakistan, the invented country the poet Muhammad Iqbal had imagined. Zaidi is still read in Pakistan today—an anthology recently reprinted over 250 poems—but his violent death is viewed by many as both a tragic scandal and a great literary loss. Using Zaidi's life story as an armature for the discussion, the thesis looks at Partition and the postcolonial environment, its effect on poets, and specifically on Zaidi. It examines certain traditions of Urdu poetry, and asks how Zaidi used them, exploring how he first became a poet and then relocated himself in a radically altered environment. It analyzes poems he wrote during his travels outside Pakistan, as he challenges aesthetic and intellectual locations that are not from the Urdu literary tradition. It then explores specific metaphors Zaidi uses to locate himself within the literary landscape of Urdu, while maintaining a highly personal, eroticized voice. Finally, it debates the meaning of his memory, using novels, elegies, and other evidence, in order to draw wider conclusions about the cultural, literary and political location of Zaidi and his work.
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Language, literature and linguistics; India; Memory; Metaphor; Place; Poetry; Postcolonial; Urdu; Zaidi, Mustafa; Asian literature; Literature; Biographies; 0304:Biographies; 0305:Asian literature; 0298:Literature
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C. Seely
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The University of Chicago
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