Travel Book Review ~ Warrior Poets by Benjamin Gilmour - Guns, Movie-Making and the Wild West of Pakistan

Warrior Poets by Benjamin Gilmour. ISBN 9781741962048. First Published 2008. 337 Pages. Click here to see if we currently have a copy in stock.

Ben Gilmour decided to make a film in an extremely dangerous gun totin' area of Pakistan with no experience, little money, and only one dubious local contact he met over the internet. Against all odds the film is made secretly and illegally using non-actors and non-script, with the threat of arrest and imprisonment without trial at any point.

Warrior Poets tells the story of Gilmore's time in Pakistan struggling to get the film made, spending months in Lahore just trying to get things started. He integrates with the locals in a way I could only dream of. From start to finish the book oozes with amazing yarns and insights into Pakistani culture and Islam. If is fascinating and funny, this is one of the best books I have ever read.

The film, Son of a Lion was released to much critical acclaim, even David and Margaret loved it.

As with all my reviews, I could blab on endlessly about the how good the book is, and you would have no reason to believe me because I would really like to sell a copy to you; so I select a favourite passage or two from the book and leave it up to you...

I was only a few pages into the book when I wanted to book a ticket to Pakistan. This piece on a Sufi festival in Lahore cemented the idea:

No shrine is more popular amongst Lahorites than that of Sufi saint Baba Jamal. It was a regular Thursday night out for Malik and his guests and few visitors returned disappointed. I'd never seen anything quite like it before, and in the style of black gospel churches of the Mississippi delta, it seemed to me as much of a wild party as it was a religious ceremony.

The street leading to the shrine was thronged with happy devotees and our rickshaw had great difficulty manoeuvring through the crowds who seemed oblivious to our oncoming three-wheeler. And no wonder: this was not only a popular place to hang out with mates, to sing and dance, but also where one could get thoroughly stoned on hashish—and acceptably so, because it was a holy endeavour in honour of the Sufi saints and was thought to bring one closer to God.

On the lower level of the shrine a large clearing revealed three long-haired Sufis spinning around in the style of the dervishes of Damascus. Their bright orange kaftans expanded outward as they revolved, like the centre of a clay vessel on a potter's wheel. Tied to their ankles were flat leather straps covered in bells which jingled delightfully above the thud of the dhol drummers who kept driving the rhythm ever quicker, their hands a blur of beating. Each dancing man spun his head around as though possessed, and not one lost his balance. It was mesmerising.

I'd pushed my way to the front of the crowd and knelt down to watch. With bright lights set up behind the dancers, every spray of sweat flying from their long hair seemed like fireworks. Evidently, the performance was leading up to some kind of crescendo. My heart began to race with anticipation, my feet begging to join the circle and start spinning. The spectators were hypnotised, no one spoke, no one moved. So fast was the music now that one of the younger dancers faltered, lost his concentration and suddenly slewed into the crowd like a careering motorcar before collapsing on the ground. Two old men now remained in the circle, bodies blurred into unrecognisable forms, as shapeless in their movement as the flames of a fire. When it became impossible for me to grasp how a human being could move so fast, one of the two fell down on the spot, developing a tonic stiffness I'd only seen in epileptics. When he began to seizure it was no ordinary fit involving rigidity and relaxation of the limbs or neck. Instead his whole body appeared to flip this way and that, over and back, as though he were a fried egg in a saucepan or a fish on the edge of a river. Malik, who had elbowed his way through the crowd behind me, yelled out with wild eyes, 'That man, he is in a trance, a Sufi trance.' Moments later the second devotee collapsed and suffered a similar seizure. No one seemed too bothered about assisting either of the men, who soon tired of their convulsions and fell asleep where they had fallen.

Up a long flight of stone steps and under the thick winding branches of a giant fig tree lay the graveyard, and the Baba Jamal shrine itself. I bought a fragrant strand of a hundred cloves and made my way through the graves. The place was packed with men and teenagers of Lahore, many wearing bright-patterned waistcoats and garlands of flowers. They crowded into crypts, lounged over gravestones or slow-danced in the dark narrow corridors of the cemetery. The two greatest dhol drummers of Pakistan, the Ganga brothers, had captivated the crowd. It was common knowledge that one of them was profoundly deaf since birth yet played in perfect harmony with his brother by sensing beats vibrating through the air. This was not hard to believe as I too could 'feel' the powerful, hypnotic rhythm passing through me. I tried letting myself fall into the ecstasy of the drumming but was too distracted by the Koreans, many of whom sat in the lotus position among the festival throng, clearly enjoying the crowd of stoned Pakistanis who wanted to share hash joints with their foreign visitors.

Launching into the sweating mass swarming over the graves, I stumbled upon poets reciting passionately to no one in particular, a man blowing incessantly into a conch between drags on his joint, and another talking sincerely to a headstone then laughing uncontrollably. Spilled terracotta oil pots had caused one entire headstone to go up in flames, but no one seemed to care or even notice. Nearby a boy sat with a cream-cake on his lap selling slices for five rupees a piece.

I heard an outburst of 'Julelah!' which I had come to recognise as a term of praise for Allah, usually exclaimed by Sufis after plenty of hashish, and I turned to see a round-faced man with short hair who looked more like a Lahore banker than a spiritual type at home in a cemetery. He was behaving very oddly—stupidly more than anything— in the same way I myself used to act as a teenager around my pot-head friends, pretending to be stoned when in fact I wasn't at all and just wanted to fit in. The wide-eyed man made ape-like noises, 'Ooo, ooo, ooo!' and hammed it up with his arms raised above his head, wrists bent as though he were swinging from a tree. He then froze in that position before suddenly dropping his arms, shrinking up into a hunchback and shuffling off between gravestones like a crab among rocks. I stood puzzling at this man's unnatural 'stoned' act when a passing Sufi with a joint hanging out of his mouth motioned to the disappearing ape-man and said in English, 'Policeman, undercover,' before winking at me and tottering on down the path. It was all too weird and with the hash smoke suspended in a thick blue cloud around me, perhaps I had passively joined the hallucinating masses.

In a nearby crypt a man passed around six joints burning simultaneously between each knuckle of his right hand which he'd made into a fist, allowing his friends to inhale the smoke from an opening between his thumb and forefinger. Thinking this fantastic, I was even more enlightened to the technique of hashish consumption when I came across three men sharing an apple. They had hollowed out its centre, leaving an opening at the top through which they could inhale, and inserted burning hash cigarettes into a dozen holes burrowed in the flesh of the fruit. I considered this rather clever, especially for its potential to take the edge off hunger pangs that commonly follow hash-smoking. Thinking twelve to be an adequate number of hash-cigarettes a person should smoke at any one time, I was taken aback to chance upon a man who'd designed a kind of bamboo flute with enough holes drilled in it to fit twenty-four cigarettes (and one in the end) bringing the total to twenty-five. Inflicted as I am with the adventurer's compulsion to sample all new experiences—I once braved the bitter dish of sea-slime on the coast of Myanmar—I did try twenty-five hash cigarettes in the Baba Jamal cemetery, all at once, and almost suffered a respiratory arrest. The hash-flute owner cackled at my explosion of coughing after a single puff, which in turn caused everyone around us to start giggling.

'Don't worry, mister, there is man selling Strepsil near big tree,' he said, pointing into the darkness behind me. Sure enough, clutching my throat and tripping over a few gravestones in the darkness, I found the man who was ringing a gold bell with one hand while holding a large box of individually packed Strepsils in the other. But that brief, brutal inhalation, along with my other polite 'samplings', had rendered me too stoned to unwrap my lozenge, and I swayed for an eternity struggling stupidly with it until the Strepsil-seller kindly reached over to assist me.

 

On the first day of filming:

On the first morning of shooting, I awoke as always at the hundred muezzin calls to prayer. It started as a solitary voice in a faraway valley, then at the edge of town spread through the empty streets until I lost count, each little mosque speaker winding to life, the whole city an echoing competition of worship. At its most distorted I still found it pleasant. Hayat did not agree, and had told me the first thing he would do if he ever became MP for Kohat would be to ban not only the disruptive public broadcast of adhan, but firstly the all-day sermons each Friday. My romantic enjoyment of the adhan would diminish somewhat in the weeks to come as the call to prayer came during every important take. As for shooting film on Fridays, these interruptions would prove utterly infuriating.

To avoid attracting attention too early in the shoot, I had placed our riskiest scenes at the bottom of the schedule: the mountain firing, the weapons workshop, and Darra bazaar. The gun-market in Darra would be the iffiest of all, and for that I'd recruited Haroon John, knowing by now it would be suicide to go near it myself wielding a camera. I'd planned this footage for the last day before I departed the NWFP, so real was the risk of being caught. My adventures had taught me that the best way to avoid trouble was to simply keep moving.

So we would begin with the scenes at the rear of Hayat's house, in and around his buffalo stable, to be precise. This crumbling brick archway and adjacent mud wall would be ideal as the fictional home of Sher Alam and his son. Bibi Shinwari, Hayat's eighty-five-year-old mother, was one of the few females I'd seen uncovered in the NWFP and when I asked Hay at if I could film her he agreed, even suggesting she play the part of grandmother to Niaz: finally an actor truly playing themselves. I was pleased about including a female in the film—I never thought I'd be able to—so wrote several scenes around her character.

Sher Alam was already awake, warming a stack of roti from the night before. I dreaded the reheated curry and boiled an egg instead as Haroon woke and immediately reached for his Capstan cigarettes. With my scene cards and schedule in hand, I excitedly prepared the equipment and placed it by the gate ready to go. But nine o'clock came around and there was no sign of Hay at or Niaz. In broken Urdu, Sher Alam asked Haroon if he should stay because if he wouldn't be required then he'd much prefer to go to the sweet factory until lunchtime rather than wait in the compound. Looking to Haroon for some kind of help, I barely got a resigned shrug after which he went back to bed. On the first day of shooting The Bullet Boy, I sat alone on a charpoy, my head in my hands.

At 11 am Hayat turned up to tell me that Niaz had gone off to school for a function he'd almost forgotten about. Not to mention a meeting Hayat himself needed to attend that morning, something to do with the issue of roadwork near his petrol pump.

'But from 2 pm we will begin, Insh'Allah.' It was the first time I'd heard Hayat say this word and a sudden nausea gripped my stomach. I must have turned pale because Hayat looked suddenly worried.

'What's wrong, Benjamin?'

'Please don't say Insh'Allah, please ...'I begged, explaining to him how sensitive I was to the fatalism of that term after my experiences in Lahore; that I was only interested in concrete promises and genuine commitments. I didn't realise then, but that first morning was just a hint of what was to become the pattern of the entire process.