Frame Se Bahir
In Urdu literature, the long story and quality fiction have been diminishing for quite some time, becoming increasingly rare. Indeed, our literary history will remember the contemporary era as the age of the novel. However, writers like Dr. Izzharullah Izzhar, Farhat Parveen, Tariq Baloch Sahrai, Arshad Rizvi, Samina Syed, and Dua Azimi occasionally show flickers of storytelling that are enough to save the form from extinction.
Although Dua Azimi has recently emerged as a fresh and new writer, I have no hesitation in saying that she is not less than anyone in terms of creative ability. Dua Azimi is undoubtedly a highly powerful creative prose writer, and one of the foremost qualities of her prose is its poetic nature.
Dua’s stories are both symbolic and narrative. In her work, the use of symbols, similes, and metaphors elevates her prose from simple storytelling to creative writing. It is also important to clarify here that Dua’s prose is not ornate; it is creative prose.
The fundamental difference between ornate and creative prose lies in the fact that ornate prose creates beauty in the external structure of writing, while creative prose facilitates the expression of internal feelings and atmosphere. In my view, a natural creator is always compelled to turn to literature and other fine arts due to the necessity of expressing emotions and experiences.
Wordsmiths who come to literature for fashion, environment, or worldly gains carry out the task of keeping people away from true literature and confusing them throughout their lives. A natural artist undergoes a creative process without realizing when and how they have used similes, metaphors, and symbols to express their feelings.
Dua Azimi is also a traveler on this path. In her work, the expression of internal atmosphere and emotional ebbs and flows is formed through powerful abstract constructs.
Consider the example of the use of abstract similes from the first story of the book: “The black wind there sends death-laden laments to the clear air of Shangla, but the air here was cold as ice and silent as God.”
From just a few stories in *Out of Frame*, I have also come to know that Dua Azimi’s thematic canvas is global and narratively ideological. Like every great prose writer, she possesses not only the skill to maintain the atmosphere of the story’s essence through the structure of sentences but also this skill is one of her fundamental strengths.
Look at a few lines from “The Black Wind”: “When he sent his young brother away to foreign lands, he did not dream good dreams. In this valley, the shadow of funerals loomed over dreams anyway. How could greenery flourish over dreams in a village where at least one cot is lifted every week?”
Another aspect that requires deep analysis is that in her stories, somewhere in some form, death and the tragedies associated with death peek through the frame. In the short and concise stories of the collection, large themes are handled with complete creative and intellectual elegance such that after reading a story of three to four pages, the reader feels as if they have just enjoyed a wonderful and hefty novel.
Rest assured, my feeling at the end of the first story “The Black Wind” in *Out of Frame* was the same as what I experienced after reading Maxim Gorky’s novel *Mother*.
