Vomitted Souls and Saved Faces

This post was written two months ago, but you know how it goes. A special thanks to The Sarri-alist Movement for really helping out with my picture data bank. 

What's your favourite twitter bio?

It's a sub-culture, twitter bios. Some people leave one politically correct quote, others write entire odes to themselves, while most try and group in as many single words that they feel attempt to describe the different facets of their life. Some even go with ironic statements that poke fun at the categories laid out above. But by and large, most people start or end with something that describes who they are as professionals. Banker, journalist, marketer, 'madvertiser', sufi, sapien. That represents a conundrum for those of us who feel uneasy about using a notion of our supposed profession as a pointer to our self. 

For example, I am supposed to be a filmmaker. I like the title, even though I haven't made anything since I left my Film degree. Still, it sounds pretty cool. Until a Pakistani wins the Oscar, and suddenly, you are supposed to not only be relevant, but also articulate what this means for your country, your people, your self, your profession, your fight against extremism, your fight against complacency and hypocrisy and decency and your struggles with art and the ether and truth and life and death.

And to be honest, I would have expected myself to have some sort of an answer. But I didn't. When people asked me what I felt about 'Saving Face', I could only say:

"I haven't seen it."

Litte did I realise how insightful that statement would be.

But first, do you remember Soul Vomit?

Soul Vomit was the first Karachi heavy metal band to release a music video.

I found out that little nugget of Pakistanica during a concert I was at last night a few weeks months ago.

Even though the concert was being held in London, it was a Pakistani affair, organised by Azme Alishaan. (No, I didn't know who/what they were either.) But here was the catch - it felt exactly like a concert in Pakistan.

As soon as you entered, everyone was dressed in black and had spent a lot of time on their hair and would turn as one to stare at whoever was coming in next, pretending to continue their conversations while they had their share of poondh. 

When the music began, most people stood around awkwardly, and although they seemed conscious of their body's desire to react to the glory of music, they preferred instead to rapidly calculate what the collective reaction to the situation was and how they could conform to it.

There were the three girls right next to the stage who would spend a lot of time lolling their heads as if they had just been injected with a sedative, but spent even more time gazing intently into the eyes of whoever was the lead singer at the moment.

There were muscled up beefy boys who came ready to mingle, but didn't quite know how to use their walnuts-in-a-condom body in a manner which could move to the music, so they chose to stare at everyone around them while grabbing every free T-shirt thrown into the crowd. 

There was the dolled up MC who braved cat calls from the crowd and her own inability to overcome her concern with how she looked long enough to be entertaining. 

There was Dino. 

There was the smell of the desi dawa in the air, even though we were in a closed room, no-smoking club. There were the four fanboys for each group who had only shown up to listen to their band sing, and when they did they were the only ones bawling out all the lyrics and prancing in delirium. There were the constant wisecracks every time the new band introduced themselves, and there was prodigious hooting every time the band trolled back at the wise guys. And even though the sound system was set up by a gora, there were continuous and unending issues with the sound, and the obligatory "chick vun too, mike chick, mike chick, tasting, tasting, vun too, vun too, haylo, haylo, mike chick..." 

But back to Soul Vomit. 

The first performer was a Brit-Paki known as Ali Abbas. He was accompanied by a guitarist who had been previously with Soul Vomit, the band that I knew of because my friends from BVS studied with them. Now, thousands of miles and memories away, here was Soul Vomit. But despite the blast of nostalgia, Soul Vomit's (I  am going to use their name as often as I can) guitarist was ill-suited for Ali Abbas, who was a remarkable performer on his own right. Classically trained, his first two songs acknowledged the two Overlords of Pakistanica - Nusrat and Bulleh. The guitar was present as Abbas's attempt at fusion, and it wasn't going well, but that scarcely mattered because his own talent was phenomenal. He had an excellent voice, but an even greater stage presence and a brilliant sense of showmanship. Immediately, I thought of Nusrat, and Rahat, and Jawad Bashir, and could envision great things for this man. And this was before he did his spectacular spoken-word performance, delivering it in Punjabi and then translating it in English without ever losing his meter or rhythm.

Then there was a gaggle of rappers. First up was Shizio, who despite how that names sounds was a pretty impressive performer and knew how to work the crowd. Said crowd was whipped into a frenzy when Adil Omar came on stage, but the combination of a sore throat and a subdued presence meant that the performance was a disappointment. Even then, I thought of the chequered, miserable, glorious history of Pakistani rap and how we had finally gotten to a stage where rappers were not (consciously or otherwise) a parody of themselves.

Then came on Aziz Ibrahim, a man who had a guitar with purple LED lights on it. Immediately, you would think this is that delicious combination of Sad and Fail that we all love to revel in.

But son, it wasn't that. Wasn't that at all.

I like to think of Aziz as Shoaib Akhtar, or even Afridi the batsman. His lyrics and vocals - the bread and butter of a song - were satisfactory. But his sense of showmanship was extraordinary. He wasn't a lout, preferring an almost dead pan style when retorting to the audience's cat calls, but when he began to play, it was the most brazenly stunning style that you can imagine. Insane leads, strumming with his teeth, spanking the guitar, tap-dancing on different pedals to coax out a whole universe of unheard sounds - he was smacking it. And he had an astounding tabalchi with him, both of them embarking on those gloriously exhilarating duels we first heard from Salman Ahmed and Adnan Sami Khan (not on the same song, of course. Although that would have been interesting. Or maybe not.)

Finally, Bumbu Sauce took the stage, and then proceeded to grab the occasion by the throat, force it to become a murgha and spank its bottom while taking pictures and posting them on your mom's Facebook wall. Or something like that.

Basically, it was their energy and intensity, which didn't waver for a second. They just launched into their songs, and handled the impossible art of maintaing that energy through out their set. It was exhilarating because the band had spent enough time going through the slog of practising their songs that they wouldn't mess up in a live show, because they knew who they were and who they wanted to be and how to protect and project both. They had the ability that all great bands do, which was to take the audience and invade their consciousness, so that soon enough the distinctions between the sounds and the instruments and the performers and the performees is only noticeable to someone on the outside. All of us in the front two rows was having the time of our lives, bouncing with the band, screaming the lyrics back at them, dancing till the millions of pent-up frustrations slowly began to be exhumed from our bodies.

Suddenly, I turned around and realised that the front two rows had also been the last two rows. That most of the audience had already left. That in the grand tradition of Pakistani concerts, most people had shown up to be seen and to see and had left before the best part. And that was when I had my epiphany. 

It made sense for me to have said epiphany during Bumbu Sauce's set. So much of what they do is what I would refer to, gleefully, as 'intertextuality' but what they called 'nostalgic'. Take 'bunnaynza' which irreverently combines a pronunciation of banyan (vest) and transforms it into a word which echos not just the word bonanza, but the retro Pakistani brand Bonanaza. (Later, I discovered that this was actually a poem by a famous Punjabi satirist called Anwar Masood. I know, not the Strings-father guy, but some other dude who brings out the fascist in his Punjabi followers and is really funny. Said realisation kinda ruins the previous point in particular, but reinforces what I was saying in general regarding nostalgia) Mojambo does the same with the childhood super-villain Mogambo, and the song itself is littered with popular slang, such as 'shawky billa kithe oye' and "Mojambo, WHAT THE HUCK?". "Jiggernaut" appropriates the bromantic Jigger and runs away with it, but it's greater triumph is to subvert the inane cliches that surround analytical discussions of Pakistani politics and serve them up in a manner which is ironic yet never forced.

Basically, every single Bumbu Sauce song was irrevocably linked to a generation of memories and memes that can be accessed by the general listener, but can only truly be embraced by those who have lived and grown up with them.

And that made me realise how I could contextualise every act I'd seen so far. The rappers joined the modest and mostly hilarious pantheon of Pakistani rappers and showed that it had come a long way. Both Aziz and Ali Abbas were ostensibly about fusion, but they showed how the genre existed before Coke Studio - that jugalbandis lived in Junoon and Adnan Sami, that vocal pyrotechnics had crossed over from qawwali to pop. And to round it off, there was Soul Vomit, whose guitarist was like Proust's brandy soaked madeliene cake, opening up a remembrance of things past.

Because you see, music has existed as a uniquely and distinctly knowable Pakistani art form through out our lives. We've grown up with it, we've loved it and hated it, we've felt embarrassed by it and we've felt it was the only thing that made us proud. And we know about it. We know it. We know which artists we like, who we revere, who reminds us of him and who is copying her. We know who we want to be when we sing in the shower and who we wish to be with when we daydream. It is an entire cultural cosmos that we are familiar with.

And that's what Pakistani films don't have - for our generation at least.

You see, the immediate reaction about the Oscar was inevitably about everything but the film itself. 

Why? Because we hadn't seen it.

It took me a while, and two emails, to realise the short-sightedness of most of those reactions that found fault with celebrating the win.

One friend wrote to me saying:

"Most of the criticism for the reaction of the majority of Pakistan's online community of elation has been that people are simply responding to Western validation in this regard. That we as a whole are so thirsty for Western validation that we overlook other key systemic issues. However, I find the argument to be inherently shallow. It somehow lays the creative arts at the altar of Western validation while divorcing other endeavours that are equally desirous of Western validation. 

Allow me to elucidate. I find it almost comical that people who attained educational degrees from universities in the West, entirely due to the perceived (and real) superiority of the higher education systems in the West, would find the notion of Western validation for the creative arts to be a negative. The attainment of educational degrees from the West are just another form of Western validation and succumbs to Western hegemony as much as Sharmeen Chinoy's victory does. Though the notion is on a more micro level (i.e. my family will be more proud of my Harvard PhD over my Punjab University PhD), it is nonetheless a key example of Western validation that many of us aspire for (and many critics of the Oscar win have attained).

I find the kvetching over the Oscar win as succumbing to a Western narrative to be terribly discomfiting, especially when the kvetchers themselves have in their own ways succumbed to a Western narrative."

Another friend approached it from another angle, writing:

"I think what frustrated some people about the Oscar win, is that they know that she isn't the best filmmaker Pakistan has to offer, or even one with the noblest of intentions. But to be fair, neither of those two traits win you an Oscar. She won it, because that is what she set out to do, she made the right connections all along her career and because she has always had luck on her side! 

How many other Pakistani filmmakers sent their films to the Emmys or the Oscars? I don't know any. How many hobnob with Emmy & Oscar winning/nominated  filmmakers? I don't know any there either. The fact is, the world over most independent filmmakers do not look to the Oscars for recognition, they look to film festivals. But she always focused on the Oscars and she got it."

These two emails helped me make sense of my own feelings, and realise where I was obfuscating my own issues with the actual Oscar itself. And once I went to the concert, I realised how I truly felt.

I don't know how to react about the film because I haven't seen the film, and I haven't seen the film because I can't see the film.

I mean, aside from the fact that it isn't available online or on local channels etc, none of us really know what to see. We don't know how to judge 'Saving Face' because Pakistani films have dried out and almost died out in our lifetimes. We don't know how to relate to it because we don't have a library of films to choose from, we don't have directors we could grow up with and wish to emulate, we don't have a visual culture for that we can draw upon and make judgements from.

Compare that with music, which has grown up with us, which has always been there when we needed it, which has it's own galaxy of stars we've worshipped, which has it's own rituals in the form of gate-crashed concerts and hastily ripped plastic-coated cassettes and marker-scribbled 'mixtape' CDs and surreptitiously shared mp3s which have a lady saying 'Kool-Muzone' at the beginning and end of each song. Music has been there as a source of inspiration but also as a source of mirth, of bizarreness, of embarrassment and ultimately, of belonging.

Of course, there have been films and documentaries, but an indictment of their situation is how each one makes the news simply for existing. And that's what the problem is with the Oscar. It's not about western validation or American conspiracies or NGO culture or orientalism - although it is perhaps about these things too. At the end of the day, the Oscar confused us because we couldn't see it and because we didn't know how to see it. 

One day, I might be able to Save Face, but till then, I'll let my Soul Vomit.