Jonaid Iqbal
Ms Amina Saiyid, chief, Pakistan Oxford University Press (POUP), talked the other day, about stirrings created among children with mother tongue. She said, children are fascinated when they crowd around mama and listen to her telling oral stories, or when she read story books aloud.
The process starts best when mother narrates to them fables in mother tongue. This begins as invitation to children to explore story books, and gradually, in time, they (the children) also get bold enough to read multi-language books.
The thought returns to many on the International Mother Languages Day which will be celebrated worldwide on 21st February, because, on this Day we make special effort to promote love for mother tongue and also to appreciate diversity, and beauty of around 1000 languages spoken by humankind.
We may consider why is this Day named after mother though it might remind us of the demand for inclusion of Bangla language as a state language of Pakistan, made in then Dhaka back in 1952. Primarily because we all realize that languages are intimately connected with stories we hear at mama’s lap and thus grab the faculty to communicate fluently with society.
Returning to POUP chief’s theme, we may report that Amini Saiyid is hosting a number of children’s literary festivals, which has become an annual fixture in a number of large towns across Pakistan. The emphasis here is to persuade senior writers to write books for children in Urdu or one of the 18 major languages of this country.
We may well remember that the Mother Tongue Day is about literature as vehicle for languages spoken and written in intelligible and expressive ways, a sort of launch pad and enterprise for nourishment of good and great literature.
In this country we tend to pursue this aim all through the year, but one sees its flowering especially during winter months. During the beginning months [of the New Year] it has become customary to organize literary festivals, in chief provincial cities of Hyderabad, Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar and Quetta.
In this manner, started a project at Lahore in which a discourse took place between writers and newspaper columnists with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. This was a different kind of event, with questions and answers. In fact a lot of interaction took place between writers and head of government, and it shunned customary speech making in which government functionaries lay down dictates for writers to produce literary euphemism for the state.
Organized by Punjab Arts Council head, Ataul Haq Qasmi, a known smile writer, there was a lot of talk, but in essence, the literary meeting gave way to the writer’s responsibility to learn what makes civilization tick, and note what is going on in literature of our times..
Poet Kishwar Naheed, speaking at a different function, at Islamabad, advanced the same theme on need of world awareness, by saying that she makes a particular effort to translate poetry from renowned acknowledged poets. This is similar to the work of another poet Harris Khalique, who has earned an award for writing a kind of poetry that speaks of human concerns of the wretched of the earth, in the tradition of Frantz Fanon (1925-1961). In one poem, Harris writes:
Those who write and think
Are taken for slaughter
Their lips are sealed
By they [wearing robes and cloaks]
Who report writers and thinkers?
As one who have gone astray
And tortured not to speak clean and honest words.
In such a place would one be permitted
To raise children,
In God’s ways, in my own wish
Or to tell my children
God Almighty permits no one
To come between he and Him;
He forbids intervention
By some third, be he, a cleric or priest
To come between man and his Creator.
Source: Weekly Holiday
