No Longer Voiceless Victims: Literary Resistance in Saeeda Gazdar’s “Twelfth of February, 1983” and Faakirah Irfan’s “The Kashmir You Will Never Understand”

Literature is, has always been, and always will be a powerful medium to question and oppose systems of power, embodying resistance in written word. Text plays a significant role in resistances around the world, from Palestinian “resistance literature”, as termed by Ghassan Kanafani, to the aesthetics of a human struggle against oppression, written about extensively by Ngugi wa Thiong’o. It is no wonder, then, that resistance becomes a common theme in the writings of women across South Asia, a category of peoples whose voices are historically subject to layers of discrimination and violence. The textual form extends the life of these movements beyond the lifespan of the authors, engaging the reader in a conversation perhaps inaccessible before the act of resistance that is composing a literary text. Women’s writing thus offers a unique positionality and insight into injustices faced by subjugated categories of people, and their literary dissent is a site of representations of everyday subjugation from an engendered and doubly discriminated against perspective. Kashmiri essayist and poet Faakirah Irfan’s, “The Kashmir You Will Never Understand” is one such work, making use of the short-form of an article to lay out the injustice and violence of land-occupation, critiquing a world that stands by idly. Her biting text resists the state-sanctioned internet shutdowns in mocking, sarcastic anger, representing the voice of victims. She questions the participants of discourse about Kashmir and the cushy life they can live as unspeakable violence is simultaneously inflicted on the people she speaks for. Her text is a site of resistance from within. Much like Irfan’s personal resistance, Pakistani poet Saeeda Gazdar invokes the 1983 Lahore protests which opposed the Zina Ordinance, resisting the status quo that the state of Pakistan intended to construct to write her poem, “Twelfth of February, 1983”. Gazdar’s work speaks for other women, platforming the voices of other silenced victims simultaneously and marking her dissent as collective; while the poet is a singular person, the literature of resistance makes space for a group to be represented. Irfan and Gazdar’s texts explicitly emphasise the importance of resistance through the textual form and are a microcosm of resistance literature, transcending formal boundaries to state the personhood of the peoples affected by the status quo they dissent against. This paper employs an extended close reading these texts, focusing on their historic-political contexts and the literary methods they employ, to analyse literature in South Asian resistances from a gendered perspective.