Over My Shoulder – Alys Faiz

Alys Faiz is known to most people in this country as the wife of Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Few even among the English-reading public are aware that she has her own title to fame, that she is a writer and poet of profound sensibility herself. Much like her distinguished husband, she has been content with writing only when the spirit takes her, and only for select publications. That too has limited her readership. Besides, it takes some consistency of reading her to recognise her merit.

Alys has no claim to flashes of brilliance. Instead, a quiet charm, born of an uncomplicated zest for life and concern for the human condition, runs through her writings. Even a routine narrative is often lit by a sense of honest wonder and spontaneous reflections betray the pangs of a bruised soul.

It is in the nature of sensitive minds to suffer more than they ever rest in harmony with their surroundings. But Alys has also had to live through some extraordinary times. These have ranged from life with a hounded husband held for varying spells in distant captivity to days in a building flat in Beirut that became a prime target of Israeli bombing. Others would tend to be expansive about such traumatic experiences. Alys takes them in stride. She writes of them matter-of-factly. The loneliness and the pain are not flaunted, they are fought back, and they come across the more devastatingly for that. She is true not only to her English upbringing, but also to the literary tradition. Her restraint and avoidance are often more eloquent than other people’s elaborations.

It is by no means odd that Alys writes of bigger episodes of her experience in much the same vein as of the smaller ones. If the siege of Beirut concerns her, so does the state of health of the family help. Genuine compassion is undiscriminating between human sufferings. Readers may feel disappointed that in this, the first compilation of her writings (the other, ‘Dear Heart’, consisted of her letters to Faiz when he was in prison), there is almost nothing about her memories of Faiz or even of the early challenge of adapting to life in Faiz’s country. She herself said that it was still painful for her to think of her days with Faiz. But also, it has to be remembered, this is a book about Alys, a resonant reminder of her being a person in her own right.

Nevertheless, even unspoken of, Faiz somehow remains a looming wonder in this Alys-land, and one feels grateful and profoundly happy for him that a person like the one reflected in these pages was his lifelong companion.

Aziz Siddiqui