Singing Past Silence 

A Personal Coda 

 
Whilst I was unable to pursue a career as a woman singer in the country of my birth, I nonetheless found a way back to my first (and forever) love in a number of ways. One of these was to enlist my professional skills as a scholar of postcolonial feminist studies in the service of creating music videos with the technical and creative help of a gifted friend and a music producer in Lahore over a period of several years. In these music videos, I could sing and at the same time, offer critical commentary on the postcolonial nation state of Pakistan, mindful of maintaining that delicate balance between an insider/outsider positionality. 

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MUSIC VIDEOS 

 

Sacrifice | The first of these music videos, Sacrifice, mixing elements of Shi’ite martyrdom with the ritual sacrifice on Eid ul Azha, both serving as the backdrop of a hypnotic masculinist ethos that has brought the world to the edge of destruction. Anger at the ritual of (self) sacrifice that passes as passion, is offset by the female voice of suffering but also of love, and the need for love, and maybe a different kind of passion, to be found amongst the ruins of war and tragedy. This female/feminist language takes the form of Sufi poetry and music in my video—and is rooted in a more compassionate vision of the world than the reigning class-patriarchal-religious-Islamist ethos in Pakistan (as elsewhere in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim world), allows. The poem ‘Sacrifice’ is thus an ode to seeing differently, an Ode I See. This Odyssey takes the woman speaker/poet through an exploration of the idea of a ritual sacrifice—one that is rooted in the idea of a monotheistic Male God—as she is seen speaking and moving, a visible and articulate presence, between figures of four other women who, in contrast, are silent and covered-up—hence invisible, like sacrificial lambs waiting for Abraham’s knife. The video was completed just as news broke of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. 

 

Watch and listen to Sacrifice here

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Smokescreen | The second video, Smokescreen, follows the same ‘visible’ woman—who thus becomes a figure of transgression in a society careening ever more dangerously toward an extremism that tries to silence and ‘cover up’ the figure of woman—around town in Lahore as she tries to dodge the male gaze seeking to entrap her, even as she courts/craves its erotic excitement. The video can be seen as a metaphor for the nation-state at the mercy of a dictator (it was filmed as the era of Gen. President Pervez Musharraf drew to a close)—trying desperately to exercise control over the nation and silence any form of protest. The woman stands in for a country under the grip of martial law—but is also Woman embedded in the codes of a patriarchally-defined desire.

 

Watch and listen to Smokescreen here 

 

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Payal | The third music video, Payal, filmed in the famed marketplace of the Empress Victoria in Karachi (dismantled, sadly, under directives by Imran Khan’s government)—juxtaposes the postcolonial within the same time-space as the colonial and precolonial. The woman’s body—walking through the male-dominated bazaar with its lurid flashes of Pakistani film posters adorned by buxom actresses meant to be consumed just like the meat being cleaved by the butchers—can be seen only as the fetished ankle, wearing the ghungroos (ankle bells), that are the courtesan’s mark of the actress/dancer/singing girl, forcing viewers to ask, who/what is being consumed, by whom in this marketplace of ideas, of the flesh made song? The thumri is sung as an invocation to the (male) beloved for whom the eastern woman waits endlessly...but she is also singing to the spiritual cadences of her own desire—gesturing to the Sufi aspects of love and of Islam which cannot, finally, be consumed.  

 

Watch and listen to Payal here

 

Lahore | In the fourth video, Lahore, the female figure of the singing siren comes into her own as she moves past Kipling’s Gun on the Mall road, shaking the gates of the colonial-era Government College as she attempts to climb over them, all the while reciting verses that expose her own imbrication in a world of neocolonial madness. We then see her as she moves into the Sufi shrine of Shah Kamal where she sings wordlessly to the beat of Kala Saeen’s drumbeats as the camera focuses its gaze outwards from her body to focus instead on the male dancers, then on to the predominantly male audience, finally settling on a lone white girl dancing naively to the esoteric rhythms and sounds she cannot comprehend but is enthralled by: the lure of the colonial ‘exotic’ continues. 

 

Watch and listen to Lahore here 

 

Faqeera | I made the final video in this series in 2018, called Faqeera, continuing to mine the ever-increasing fetishization of the exotic ‘Sufi’ music vogue that now consumes both East and West, and in which I too participate, albeit with a sense of ironic seriousness that weaves into the music video once again, the political ‘hot button’ topics occupying center-stage in Pakistan. In this particular video I wanted to focus on the one hand, on the disturbing rape and murder of little Zainab in Kasur (the birthplace of Sufi poet Bulleh Shah) and what it reveals about toxic masculinity and the failures of the patriarchal state in reigning it in; on the other hand, I wanted to weave in the hope-inducing awareness of third-gender rights occurring in the country, which can lead to more self-reflexivity around gender and sexual identity and acceptance of non-normative behavior and thought in a nation-space where any such deviations from masculinist patriarchal codes have historically been criminalized and punished. 

 

Watch and listen to Faqeera here 

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