The National Free Press - World Edition: Free Speech, Free Press and Human Rights

The NFP is proud to present an excerpt from the talk presented by Dr. Stephen Gill, an NFP Contributor, at the International Conference on Sufism and Peace, held from March 14 to March 16 organized by the Pakistan Academy of Letters in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Peace wombs the fetus of wisdom and the flowers of beauty. Peace is the path of prosperity and the breath of bliss. I congratulate Mr. Fakhar Zaman, head of Pakistan Academy of Letters, and members of his executive who have worked hard to organize this meaningful gathering of intellectuals to promote peace. I have brought a message from the land of peace to the land that should be proud because of its sufi poets and sages who have played expressive roles for creating peace to make the world a better place.

When I talk of peace, I mean the absence of war and fear for every individual to walk around with an independent conscious to accept or to reject any ideology or philosophy. This is my dream and this is what I write about in my poetry.

The cradle of my dream is mind, a field where battles are fought first. This field—I mean the mind—is unsullied by prejudices when a child comes into this world. This is the field which is to be taken care of if human needs a life without the engines of destruction and a conscious that is not a slave to prejudices and hatred.

It was a gasp of surprise that the Nobel Peace Prize has gone to president of the United States of America who has served his nation not even for a year and who has not demonstrated anything worthwhile, except in his statements for disarmament. The question is why the Academy was in a rush to honor him.

The Academy could have waited for a year at least to let him justify to receive this honor. If it was mainly for his talks, then there have been leaders and presidents before him who made similar statements in favour of disarmaments and to make the world nuclear-free.

The Swedish Academy consists of intellectuals and wise members. They must have looked into the part that President Obama has played in making Europe a much safer place by backing away from the plans of the Bush administration to establish a new anti-missile system in Europe because of Iran.

The accurate representation of the feelings, thoughts, moods, sights, ideas and a variety of emotions is a serious enigma which poets face. Their representations are about personal opinions that are in the mind. Without going into philosophical or logical depth, I call them the god within.

Language is inadequate to bring out the god within, because this god is intangible. In addition to a mastery over the language, communicators need special skills and movements of hands, raising of eyebrows, changing tones, shrugging of shoulders and other gestures. Still, communications are not fully accurate and are likely to be misunderstood. Verbosity does not help either. Communication becomes more difficult in poetry because it is a form of condensed expression.

Normally, I forget numbers, especially years and dates. In spite of this weakness and a lapse of substantial time, the year 1999 is secure in the locker of my memory. One reason for its security is Shrine that was released by World University Press in 1999. Even in 2008, after nine years, Shrine resurrects traumatic feelings, touching the spots of deep pain from the days of the partition of India. This collection of my poems of social concerns is the turning point in my pilgrimage as a poet, because it received encouraging reviews and is still receiving encouraging. The year 1999 is unforgettable to me for this reason and also because the poems of this collection have appeared in more than one hundred publications and several have been translated in other languages.

The year 1999 is unforgettable also because of my visit to India after a long absence, and my return to Canada with weird experiences. For nine years I carried these experiences in the womb of my soul, debating whether to share or not to share, and when and how to share. Whenever I write about India, 1999 is there in the museum of my mixed feelings. When I plan to visit India, its ghost emerges. It is now my shadow.

A Flower of Passion from the Garden of Indo-Canadian Writing has dissappeared. On the 25th of January I thought of phoning Lino Leitao to pass on a piece of information that I had received from Dr. Rollason Christopher, , a professor of literature and a writer from France.

In his newsletter, Dr. Christopher wrote about the latest issue of Pegasus that carried an article by Lino about my poetry. I wanted to pass on this information to him.

The word Diaspora is not a substitute for the word immigrant.

Diaspora essentially is a bitter experience of dislocation that leads to alienation, a sense of loss and nostalgic desires. It refers to that particular class of immigrants who are unable to go back, primarily because of the hostile climate of discrimination in the country of birth.