Faiz and his fight against tyranny

The life and poetry of Faiz, somehow have become intertwined with the fate and fortune of people of Pakistan pounded by the dictatorship of the generals, obscurantism of the pulpit and exploitation by the potentates. His hopes and dreams for a bright and blissful dawn were the same as cherished by every folk while his destiny like them was to be stung and deprived of them.
His poetry thus captured the agony and anguish of a common suffering and helplessness and a yearning for change thwarted by torturous odds and impediments. Any stirring or struggle for deliverance was relentlessly suppressed through a fiendish armoury of administrative and penal codes and a perilously grinding court system. Any deviation from the monopolistic and exploitative interpretation of religion was treated as sedition. Yet he sang of a dire need to alter this system through a persistent and protracted struggle. For this, Faiz endured the fate of many other illustrious enthusiasts and crusaders in the Afro-Asian and Latin American countries.
Faiz, however, also had a stellar distinction to render the purpose, pursuit, paradoxes and course of the crusade into an epic of enchanting beauty, thrill, diction and appeal. Though many of his compositions like Come Back Afrikia, Curbs on Kenyan Activists and the Anthem and the Three Voices exuding the Palestinian passion for freedom mirror a far wider concern for the movements of the oppressed of the earth yet most of this epic is rooted to this soil.
This epic, certainly, is not sequenced like narratives in great classics like Aeneid, Odyssey, Iliad or Shahnama but its strands are strewn in a marvelous mosaic of his life and verses. This evidently was inevitable as Faiz was not chronicling some past legends or events but depicting his own life and times, rapidly realigning and fending off a relentless four pronged (chow mukhi) onslaught. Yet his oeuvre, despite being strung into different poems and volumes, can be surmised as distinct phases of the same fight.