Fragments of a Fugitive Poem by Poorna Swami and Amshu Chukki

“Are you that poet?”

How unfortunate you’ve gotten mixed up in all this.”

A police officer interrogates a woman accused of sedition.  It is 1981, Karachi. The woman responds.

“I am alone

And I see a yellow desert

…

Sand, only sand for miles

Or maybe acacia trees

With large red flowers

Blooming like blotches of blood”

Shortly after, Fahmida Riaz, a poet and dissident, left dictatorship Pakistan for New Delhi, India. She took her poem, titled “Won’t You Look at the Whole Moon?”, with her. Across the border, the Urdu poem was published in Hindi, while Fahmida remained in India for the next seven years to escape capital punishment. In between, friends smuggled her poem back to Pakistan and published it in Urdu. Like her poem, she remained untethered, between homes and languages, constantly questioning where freedom lay and what it looked like. Again and again, she said, “Main chali ja rahi hoon” “I am going away”, without ever completing the thought.

Her fugitive poem has continued to rove ever since. As it searches for resolution, it finds new stanzas across places and historical periods—a rose garden in Delhi, the shorelines of Karachi and Bombay, a cricket match, the Embassy of Palestine, Ghalib’s grave, sites of protest that have been disappeared. Passersby become poets themselves, lending dreams and revolutions of their own. The poem turns into a landscape and asks us all to stay awhile.

Schedule:

Friday, Oct 31

Fragments of a Fugitive Poem (Multimedia Installation | Rose Garden, Tomb, and the Sea): 12:00 to 21:00
Movement Piece | Half-moon, Half-shore | Dipna Daryanani + Poorna Swami: 16:00
Movement Piece | Half-moon, Half-shore | Dipna Daryanani + Poorna Swami: 19:00
Artist Conversation | Poorna Swami, Amshu Chukki and Mortimer Chatterjee: 19:30

Saturday, Nov 1

Fragments of a Fugitive Poem (Multimedia Installation | Rose Garden, Tomb, and the Sea): 12:00 to 21:00
Movement Piece | Half-moon, Half-shore | Dipna Daryanani + Poorna Swami: 16:00
Electronic Piece | Akhri Geet | Pardafash: 19:00

Sunday, Nov 2

Fragments of a Fugitive Poem (Multimedia Installation | Rose Garden, Tomb, and the Sea): 12:00 to 20:00
Readings | Epilogues | Poorna Swami + Sandhya Visvanathan: 16:00
Readings | Epilogues | Poorna Swami + Sandhya Visvanathan: 19:00
Fragments of a Fugitive Poem (Multimedia Installation) loop to end at 20:00