Contrary to the traditional “keep it simple” rule, a good number of modern writers are accused of hinging their writings on obscurity and ambiguity making great demands on a reader to understand them. I remember my first encounter, with two great French intellectuals of the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan, when I was pursuing my Masters in English Literature. I would wake up weeping at 3am with nightmares about trying to understand them. Both have a writing style that is obscure, to say the least, apparently bordering on gibberish, at worst. As the angry critics have already announced, when you pick up Derrida and Lacan for the first time you will find a text which is dense, convoluted, elliptical and seemingly impenetrable, even by the most demanding standards of the current critical academy. Their impassable writing style is partly ascribed to their content: Derrida attempted a deconstruction of the whole of Western philosophy, and Lacan dealt with the human Unconscious. When the subject is grand, the style itself becomes dense and intense. My trouble with reading the great French men did not last long. I am now, more or less, comfortable with their peculiar writing style- a consummation that I devoutly wished for in my Masters. But Lacan and Derrida are not alone in creating this wilful obscurity, there are others also, in fact more impenetrable and incomprehensible than them. I am proud that my land, Kashmir, has produced one such genius of a writer, ZG Mohammad: a famous Greater Kashmir columnist whose iconoclastic writing style should go down in the history of English writing as the greatest manifestation of profound obscurity and sincere incongruity.
A legitimate measure of the influence of a thinker or writer on a discipline is the extent to which s/he transforms its customs, protocols and practices in a manner that makes it difficult to conceive how things were done before s/he appeared on the scene. Such transformations and changes are usually incorporated into the discipline and presupposed by those who come later. This explains why we often have a thankless relationship with the most influential thinkers. By definition then, great intellectuals are often those who change the way we do things in a peculiarly thankless way. But we should not maintain a thankless relation with our intellectual thinker, ZG Mohammad. He may not know it, as greatness is never apparent to itself, but we know that he has made a remarkable contribution to the writing style of English by introduction of a new form of writing. This is amply demonstrated by his recent Punchline in the daily Greater Kashmir, August 10, 2009.
I read the essay (should I call it an essay?) over a hundred times as every new reading provided a new dimension of “joy” that was soon to become hysterical . Unable to decipher the style, I asked my friends to read it, teachers were also invoked for help and inspiration, but, ultimately, only to add more confusion and obscurity. Then, finally, his own writing provided a key to the mystery.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with his political outlook the writings and noting of Ambassador Yusuf Buch are a part of Kashmir’s political literature that have could be seen as good as Edward Said’s works on Palestine. His works on Kashmir need to be compiled, researched and preserved. (GK, 10 August,2009)
Whether one cares about the writings and “noting” of Buch, one must take sufficient care to preserve the writing of ZG Mohammad. In his vain search for the Edward Said of Kashmir, he has made a remarkably great contribution to the writing style that can only be pronounced as “miraculous.” His style is continuous like the flow of the river Lidder. Inversely inspired by Raja Rao, Mohammad`s style is interminable. He has neither punctuation nor the treacherous prepositions to bother him. Episode follows episode, and when his thoughts stop, his sentence stops. His Paragraphs try to explore an idea, or tell a tale, but fail as the most heterogeneous events are yoked together by violence, ultimately, availing nothing, affecting nothing.
His peculiar style of writing incorporates explanations which are irrelevant. Titles of books and articles are not italicised, underlined or kept in inverted commas. He has mastered the art of writing multi-clause sentences without any provisions for a pause. Comma is rarely used- economic recession has affected its usage also, or does it carry the dreadful H1N1 virus? I have no answers. Mohammad enjoys the liberty of conferring greatness on Ghada Karmi, a Palestinian doctor of medicine, author and academic, without reading any of her writings. “Face of Kashmir” to him is “Kashmiri Face”, “Kashmiri Diasporas”, like many other terms is a novel coinage by him. He honours no difference between “on” and “in”: he seems to interchange them on impulse. He makes pronouns dance to the beats of this writings; they live off the false hopes of their nouns’ arrival. A quotation mark opens and remains open for its entire life. In his democratic writing style, clauses are not separated. It does not honour main and subordinate clauses.
The writer`s search for an intellectual voice for the problem of Kashmir may not be a viable one, but we have got our intellectual: the Kashmiri equivalent to Lacanian style of writing. Except that in the case of Lacan or Derrida, their translators have made sure to have got the grammar right. I am not being perverse. But the only density I could spot in his writing was that of grammatical bankruptcy. What’s more? I wonder what was the editorial team doing? Derrida and Lacan were actually trying to explore pertinent and profound issues which they did offer clues about. When one reads them in depth, one does identify the layers within which their content posits itself. Not the case with Mr Mohamed. I wonder why.
