Literature Review

Review of Scholarly Works on Ali’s The Last Metaphor

Usman Ali is a contemporary Pakistani English playwright who, despite his relative
obscurity as compared to his more mainstream contemporaries, has attracted a strong
academic interest for his work. The emerging critical response to his work suggests the
potency of Ali’s abilities to provide singular and pertinent insights that cut into various
dimensions of modern society ranging from the social to the cultural to the political to the
religious and economic. As one of his more prominent works, Ali’s The Last Metaphor
has enjoyed much scholarly attention with a range of critical literature dedicated to the
themes and ideas expressed in the play. Henceforth, the researcher will perform a
literature review of a series of scholarly works concerned with Usman Ali’s The Last
Metaphor.

Rahat Saleem’s research paper Strategies of Reformation in The Last Metaphor: A

Brechtian Study (2016) is concerned with Usman Ali’s pertinent efforts to deploy the art
of theatre for sociopolitical reformation, particularly that of modern Pakistani society.
The researcher positions the German playwright Bertolt Brecht as a theoretical model in
order to study strategies of reformation in Ali’s play The Last Metaphor (2014). The
study determines that Usman Ali deploys three forms of dramatic techniques in the spirit
of Brechtian theatre: active and conscious engagement of the audience, unmediated and
unfiltered exposition of the problem at hand and providing the proposed behavioral
models upfront. These techniques were used by Brecht in order to revolt against the
passive presence of the audience in the theatre and instead provoke them in such a way
that they become conscious enough to actively participate in the events transpiring on the
stage. In The Last Metaphor (2014), the devices and techniques used by Ali in order to
solicit conscious engagement from the audience range from props such as the masks
worn by the main characters, aural details such as the knocks at the door, objects partial
to the characters such as the rope and the draped dead body, the static setting of the one
room apartment, and the irrationality of the actions and behaviors exhibited by the two
main characters. This purpose of this engagement is to expose the fundamental issues that
plague Pakistani society. The playwright provides the behavioral model of the protagonist
Jugnoo who, as deduced from the events that occur prior to the premise of the play, was
once a notorious robber and murderous gangster and who now, as a result of a particular
set of circumstantial encounters pertaining to the problems of injustice and violence in
society, goes through a radical transformation and becomes a more compassionate human
being. The paper’s findings reveal that Usman Ali masterfully uses all three Brechtian
dramatic techniques to implore his audience into the realization that social reform is not
only essential and possible but the only way towards societal liberation and salvation.
(Saleem)
Sumyia Khizar and Hira Akhtar, in the paper A Study of Usman Ali’s Art of Play Writing
in The Odyssey and The Last Metaphor (2016), examine Usman Ali’s art of playwriting
and dramaturgy. To tackle the subject matter, he researchers scheme out Usman Ali’s
pessimistic theoretical proposition that ‘art is cruel as it feeds on the miseries of others’
derived from a line of dialogue in the play The Guilt (2014). The researchers
subsequently apply this aesthetic notion on Ali’s two plays: The Odyssey (2016) and The
Last Metaphor (2016). The researchers explored that The Last Metaphor (2014) deals
with violence inflicted upon innocent people and the consequent strand of anguish and
human sufferings that such violence entails. In a similar vein, the playwright, in The
Odyssey (2016), paints an extremely cruel but real picture of the unjust social system that
serves as the primary root cause of violence in Pakistani society. Through such a
depiction, the playwright fearlessly provides voice to the lives of the silenced and
disadvantaged people barely surviving at the outer margins of modern Pakistani society.
The paper concludes that Usman Ali utilizes theatre as an effectively potent medium to
create and spread social as well as political awareness for the moral and ethical
betterment of a decaying Pakistani society. (Khizar and Akhtar)

Khadija Noreen’s research paper The Last Metaphor: A Study of Compassion (2016)
establishes Usman Ali’s position as an ardent advocate of compassion among human
beings as well as for other species. The research utilizes Karen Armstrong’s theory of
compassion (2010) in order to analyze the theme and message of compassion as depicted
in the play The Last Metaphor (2014). The researcher expounds that the angry tone of
author’s note, the hauntingly visceral image of a dog being repeatedly crushed on the
road and the omnipresent incorporation of multifarious events of all-encompassing
violence in the play transmit into the audience the timely realization that unconditional
compassion is a necessary force in the service of human existence, happiness and
progress. The findings of this research paper reveal that the playwright utilizes theatre as
a germane tool for providing education to the audience through evocation and stimulation
of the sentiment of compassion. The playwright equips his plays with the noble intention
of putting a permanent end to suffering and violence and bringing much needed peace
and harmony in a chronically disturbed Pakistani society. (Noreen)

Placed within the tumultuous context of Pakistani society, Abdur Rehman Tayyub in his
research paper Anxiety in Pakistan: A Socio-semiotic Study of The Last Metaphor (2016)
takes a semiotic approach towards the society as depicted in Usman Ali’s play The Last
Metaphor (2014b). Signs such as the dilapidated single room apartment, ragged clothes
of the main characters as well as their occupation as masked robbers are interpreted as
signifying the unbearably austere and precarious lives of the disadvantaged under the
brunt of an unjust capitalist system. On the other hand, references to limousines and large
quantities of owned land provide stark evidence of the opulent existence enjoyed by the
bourgeoisie in Pakistan. Furthermore, signs such malfunctioning wells, untarred road,
dust, heaps of trash, floating corpses, open sewers and the absence of roadside fences
illustrate the deteriorating condition of Pakistan’s urban infrastructure which further
illuminates the chronic indifference of the state and lack of sensibility and complacency
on the behalf of the public. The repetitive knocking at the door, sounds of thunder,
windows bursting open and the haunting presence of the dog’s draped dead body are
interpreted as the signs of death, harm, danger, fear, mystery and existential dread that
reflect the mental anguish of Pakistani people constantly awaiting calamity with each and
every breath. The researcher explores that the signs populating the play reflect
uncertainty, chaos, disorder and intense levels of anxiety which are the result of an
unconcerned populace, corrupt governing bodies and the unjust socioeconomic system
that pervades the contemporary state of Pakistan. (Tayyub)

Shakir Shahzad’s Ali’s Theatre For Social Change: A Study Of Violence (2016) is a
research thesis that is fundamentally preoccupied with Usman Ali’s attempt to use
theatrical violence to bring positive change into Pakistani society. The research aims at
exploring violence in Ali’s plays: The Guilt (2014), The Last Metaphor (2014) and The
Odyssey (2016). The research penetrates the nature and function of various strands of
violence as depicted in Ali’s plays in order to further highlight the emerging forms of
violence which have taken firm root in modern Pakistani society. The researcher extracts
from Edward Bond’s oeuvre the concept of theatrical violence while simultaneously
drawing upon Johan Galtung’s concept of the triangle of violence to contend that three
main form of violence permeate the plots of Ali’s plays. These are outlined as direct
violence, structural violence and cultural violence. These forms of violence subsequently
take various sub-forms when they infect the fabric of society. These forms of violence
take birth in the interconnected patterns that shape the dimensions of culture and the
social structure of society. The forms of violence are intertwined and interdependent.
They replenish each other, hence constructing a malicious ouroboric cycle of violence
that feeds on the marginalized in society, a stratum to which most of Ali’s characters
happen to belong. This circle of violence deprives Ali’s characters from attaining their
basic human rights instead amplifying the magnitude of their misery and impregnating
their sufferings. Furthermore, the research findings elucidate that violence, though an
inherently negative and oft-maligned force is transformed in Ali’s plays as a positive
intellectual and aesthetic device necessary for illuminating the ills of modern society.
Through the untethered representation of violence in his plays, Ali inducts violence into
the lexicon of his subversive protest against the prevalence of injustice in society. He
ruthlessly attacks the state establishment and gives outlet to his intense revulsion and
disgust at the perpetually corrupt system of his society. Furthermore, Ali deploys Edward
Bond’s concept of theatrical violence in order to put the audience in extremely
uncomfortable situations with the hope that they may confront themselves and critically
assess the circumstances that surround them so that they may arrive at the realization that
social reform is paramount and indeed possible. Hence for Ali violence becomes a
deliberate and necessary force to instill positive change in society. (Shahzad)

Fatima Khaliq and Rubina Rahman in their research paper Gricean Implicature in Usman
Ali’s The Last Metaphor (2022) employ the lens of linguistic pragmatics to investigate
Usman Ali's play The Last Metaphor (2014) by applying H.P. Grice's concept of
implicature (1975) to particular instances of language usage in the text. The researchers
take Grice’s four maxims considered necessary for the purpose of rendering conversation
meaningful. The four maxims delineated by Grice are: maxim of quality, maxim of
quantity, maxim of relation and maxim of manner. The researchers propose that Usman
Ali’s The Last Metaphor deliberately performs the linguistic maneuver of flouting in
order to imbue the text with certain sets of hidden meanings. The intentional deployment
of implicature in the text falls in line with absurdist fiction, a genre which most of Ali’s
works inhabit, for the sole of purpose of clarifying meaning of apparently nonsensical
and inane events and situations present in the text. The deployment of Gricean
implicature and flouting allows the text to hold deep metaphoric connotations which help
in the development of a text into a semantically layered and analytically debatable work
of art. (Khaliq and Rahman).

Review of Scholarly Works on Zoopoetics

Zoopoetics is an emerging field of study that has gotten some scholarly attention from
literary studies only in the recent history. A handful of critics and researchers have
adopted its theoretical framework and methodology in order to investigate the
hermeneutic magnitude of the presence, treatment, engagement and the interrelationship
between non-human animals and literary texts. Although the theory of Zoopoetics has
barely been utilized to explore the ‘animal question’ in contemporary Pakistani English
fiction, the theory has been developed and further applied for the sake of studying texts
that involve animals. Therefore, the researcher will proceed to perform a literature review
of a range of scholarly works that explore the imminent scope and methodological
immediacy of Zoopoetics and deploy its critical lens to investigate a range of literary
texts and their engagement with non-human animals.

Aaron M. Moe’s Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry (2014) is a foundational
text in the theoretical lifespan of Zoopoetics as it introduced and integrated the term into
critical discourse. The main objective of the book is to elucidate the process of poeisis
involving humans as well as other animal makers and to introduce novel ways of seeing
and interpreting animals as co-creators of literary texts.
The book outlines the basic theoretical framework of Zoopoetics by introducing the
concepts of bodily poiesis, attentiveness and animal agency. The concept of bodily
poiesis entails that human beings are not the only creatures capable of poetic creation but
animals are also makers that utilize their vocalizations and bodily gestures in order to
participate in the process of poetics. Zoopoetics classifies poetic creation as a
‘multispecies event’ involving human beings as well as animals. The author draws on the
works of Darwin and Aristotle in order to bestow recognition to the fact that vocal
speech, an attribute exclusively ascribed to the particular contortions of the human
mouth, is not the only definitive medium of meaningful communication but other parts of
the body, as vitally evinced by the mode of being of various animals, are rhetorically
invested ‘communicative zones’ as well. Furthermore, the author posits that animals not
only participate in poiesis which stands for making through their gestural energy,
symbolic bodily movements and nuanced vocalizations but also attentively and
innovatively imitate other species’ bodily poiesis hence participating in the process of
mimesis famously heralded by Aristotle as the ‘general origin of poetry’. The second
major tenet of Zoopoetics is attentiveness which delineates that a species must attentively
observe the bodily poiesis of another species in order to properly assimilate it into their
own processes of poiesis. It is also stated that attentiveness precedes imitation. To
illustrate this concept, the author studies a particular set of poets including Walt
Whitman, E.E Cummings, W.S Merwin and Brenda Hillman from the perspective of
Zoopoetics in order to the contend that the form and content of their verse is laced with
energies attained through attentive reflection and subsequent imitation of the gestural,
rhetorical, vocal and bodily movements of animals hence qualifying them as progenitors
of Zoopoetics. Thereby it is affirmed that throughout the course of history, the poetic-
rhetorical nuances of gestures and bodily movements of animals have majorly
contributed to the shaping of human poetry. Zoopoetics also emphasizes that animals
possess agency. A writer must consciously recognize animal agency if they are to engage
justly with the subject within the parameters of a literary text. The existence of animal
agency is a contentious subject that has often been treated with doubt and skepticism
from within and without animal studies. Yet several scholars insist upon the agency of
animals and their ability to communicate rhetorical as well as semiotic information within
the context of interspersed networks that are weaved throughout the spaces and
environments inhabited by the animals. Moe states:

“Minding and miming animals, engaging animals, living in proximity and observing
animals, attuning oneself to the motions of animals, and inviting such motions to enlarge
one’s concept of being all can impact, I suggest, a poet’s process of making—and not in a
superficial manner. The more attentive the poet, the more bound his or her poetics are to
the bodily poiesis of animals.” (Moe)
Kari Driscoll and Eva Hoffman’s article Introduction: What is Zoopoetics (2018) further
develops the theoretical underpinnings of Zoopoetics by introducing new methods and
ways of reading texts zoopoetically. The authors draw on the work of Jacques Derrida to
explicate that Zoopoetics is a concrete articulation of a ‘‘certain affinity between poetic
thinking and animal thinking’’. It is emphasized that the domain of poetry has exhibited
intense innovation in its continued endeavor to ‘‘think’’ and ‘‘think through’’ the
question of the animal while on the other hand philosophy has maintained a rigid distance
from such a line of thought in favor of human problems. Driscoll proposes that other
than the established practice of ‘‘attentive seeing’’, zoopoetics also involves the process
of ‘‘attentive listening’’ to the animal ‘‘in order to recover something that has been
forgotten or repressed’’. Kafka is central to Driscoll’s conception of zoopoetics as he is
an author whose stories provide evidence of his penchant for listening to the repressed
and the forgotten deliberately populates his texts with a wide array of animals. Kafka’s
repeated textual engagement with animals also points towards one’s bodily nature and
hence one’s own corporeal animality. As such, Kafka’s writing falls into the category of
zoopoetics because ‘‘animals that inhabit his texts serve as a necessary and
unsubstitutable means to particular, as yet inscrutable, poetic ends.’’ Furthermore,
Driscoll reiterates that zoopoetic texts are not ‘about’ animals but are ‘‘predicated upon
an engagement with animals and animality (human and nonhuman)’’. This means that a
zoopoetic text proceeds through the medium of the animal in order to arrive at the textual
destination of writing and thinking. The author tackles the traditional literary practice of
reading animals purely as symbols and metaphors that offer themselves as substitutes for
‘‘real’’ or ‘‘intended’’ meaning pertaining to human spheres of thought. This means that
through the history of literature, animals have rarely been allowed to be themselves. This
is a harmful practice as it occludes the real worth and value of both real and literary
animals by using as the a negative space on which human beings are able to define
themselves through the projectection their own subjectivities without recognizing those
of their animal others. The reduction of animals to symbolic devices reinforces
anthropocentric values and discourses that have enjoyed unquestioned adulation and
reinforcement throughout history. At the same time, one should be wary of reading
animals ‘as they are’ for such an endeavor runs into a rut when the very medium of
reading i.e. language is the root cause of anthropocentric thinking. Animals cannot be
recovered ‘as they really are’ with the prongs of language for it happens to be the very
contraption has served to subjugate them by erecting an arbitrary wall between the being
of humans and animals. Hence a zoopoetic reading should interpret animals neither as
“symbols and metaphors” nor as ‘themselves as they really are’ instead “explore what
lies between these two extremes, the mutual imbrication and entanglement of the material
and the semiotic, the body and the text, the animal and the word”. (Driscoll and Hoffman)

Dilek Bulut Sarikaya’s research article Dylan Thomas’ Animalized Self: A Zoopoetical
Reading of Dylan Thomas’ Poetry (2023) conducts a study of several of Dylan Thomas
by utilizing the critical framework of Zoopoetics that rejects the tired notion of simply
interpreting animals as metaphors and symbols in service of human concerns and instead
equips them attributes generally reserved for human beings including agency,
individuality, self-awareness and subjectivity, hence blurring the arbitrary divide between
humans and animals thereby opening new spaces for animals to dwell within the field of
literature without being confined to pre-established anthropocentric representations.
Zoopoetics is a reaction against the historically anthropocentric relegation of animals as
disposable materials for literary activity by striving to show that poetic creation is not an
exclusively human feat but actually achieved through the joint efforts of both humans and
animals. The researcher identifies the vital position occupied by animals in Dylan
Thomas’ poetry whose intense emphasis on the mutual spiritual and material
entanglement between humans and animals qualifies the poet for zoopoetical criticism.
The research’s main concern is to analyze Thomas’ unprecedented appreciation and
attraction towards animals through his affirmation of their spiritual and emotional
companionship. The researcher contends that a zoopoetical reading of Dylan Thomas’
works would provide much needed insight into the poet’s perspectives about the
animality of human beings and to what extent animals are imbued as self-consciously
‘agentic’ co-makers in his own poetic output. (Sarikaya)

Özlem Akyol in his research article The Sounds of Horseshoe: A Zoopoetic Reading of
Yılkı Atı by Abbas Sayar (2020) conducts a critical reading of Abbas Sayar’s novel Yılkı
Atı (1970) through the scrutiny of the author’s treatment of the animal characters from a
zoopoetic vantage point. The researcher identifies that the novelist invokes the agentive
prowess of animals by situating a horse named Doru as the central force in the course and
structure of the narrative. Doru’s actions and behavior affects and alters the trajectory of
other characters’ lives which include humans as well as other horses. Doru’s powerful
mode of being also transforms the development of the narrative and has an undeniably
substantial impact on the construction of the text. Vivid descriptions of the horse’s
actions and interactions with other animals entail that animals are able to communicate
with one another through various modes including language and gestures hence
identifying the animals as conscious agents in control of the navigating the course of their
own lives. Doru struggle to resist being forgotten or repressed by the human characters
marks her will in pushing back against the machinations of conventional representation
and textuality that would rather enchain her within the bounds of metaphoricity and
symbolism. Furthermore, the narrative transcribes the anthropocentric attitudes and
values of the human characters content with being willfully ignorant of the animals’
intrinsic worth and keep subscribing to the anthropocentric tradition of myopically
viewing their fellow animals as mere machines and instruments whose worth is
determined by their utility and productivity. Sayar’s unconventional portrayal of animals
provokes the reader into challenging the unquestioned tenets of their anthropocentric
assumptions and compels them to rethink and reconsider the density of the arbitrary line
that divides animals and humans. Akyol says:

“The zoopoetic reading of Yılkı Atı, then, acknowledges that each textual animal presence
enables an insight that moves beyond the human and toward a less anthropocentric
perception of the world. Such understanding can help enrich the empathetic imagination
as we all try to find better ways of coexisting with other species on this shared planet.”
(Akyol)

Claire Cazajous-Augé in her research article The Traces Animals Leave: A Zoopoetic
Study of Rick Bass’ Antlers (2019) performs a zoopoetic analysis of Rick Bass’s short
story Antlers (1995). The researcher propounds that, as a writer and eco-activist, Bass
pays close attention to the existence of animals and utilizes his role as a writer to
consciously represent in his fiction the multiplicity of animals’ “mode of being” in the
world. Through his writing, Bass shows that the bodily poiesis of animals and humans in
not insular but interconnected. Bass’s short story Antlers (1995) exemplifies this idea by
illustrating through the narrative the ways in which animal and human lives influence and
interact with each other. The short story also pays attention to the fact that animals are an
irreplaceable element of the very act of writing itself. Although the short story does not
contain any explicit interaction between human beings and animals, traces of the former
are nonetheless visible within the language and ontology of the narrative. The descriptive
distance and absence of animals in the narrative expresses their elusiveness as well as
their conscious avoidance of human beings. Rather than force representation, Bass’s
decision to describe the traces of animals testifies to his ability to inform his writing style
in accordance with the mode of dwelling of animals. The textual engagement with the
elusive traces of animals is symptomatic of Bass’s desire to attentively observe and listen
to other ways of existence and being in nature. It also shows that Bass is willing to
maintain a respectful distance from animals instead of forcibly intruding upon their lives
and the spaces they inhabit which can cause for contorted representations that my
reinforce the anthropocentric notion of incompatibility between the human and animal
ways of being in the world. Animals make brief appearances in the narrative and the
magnitude of their presence in the lives of the characters is amplified as they take
perform poetic and ekphratic observations of their gestures and bodily movements. As
Claire Cazajous-Augé observes in the article:

“The brief appearances of animals have no influence on the course of the story. These
fragments function as moments of recreation in which the characters temporarily forget
their suffering and observe animals at a distance. Moreover, the descriptions of wild
animals often appear at the end of a paragraph. But the narrator does not use nature as a
mirror of human feelings” (Cazajous-Augé)
Works Cited
Akyol, Özlem. "The Sounds of Horseshoe : A Zoopoetic Reading of Yılkı Atı by Abbas Sayar." (2020).

Cazajous-Augé, Claire. "The Traces Animals Leave: A Zoopoetic Study of Rick Bass' "Antlers"." Texts,
Animals, Environments (2019).

Driscoll, Kari and Eva Hoffman. "Introduction: What is Zoopoetics." What is Zoopoetics? Texts, Bodies,
Entanglement. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, 2018.

Khaliq, Fatima and Rubina Rahman. "Gricean Implicature in Usman Ali's The Last Metaphor." The
Dialogue (2022).

Khizar, Sumyia and Hira Akhtar. "A Study of Usman Ali’s Art of Play Writing in The Odyssey and The Last
Metaphor." (2016).
Moe, Aaron M. Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry. Lexington Books, 2014.

Noreen, Khadija. "The Last Metaphor: A Study of Compassion." (2016).

Saleem, Rahat. "Strategies of Reformation in The Last Metaphor: A Brechtian Study." (2016).

Sarikaya, Dilek Bulut. "Dylan Thomas' Animalized Self: A Zoopoetical Reading of Dylan Thomas' Poetry."
Trakya University Journal of Faculty of Letters 13.25 (2023).

Shahzad, Shakir. "Ali's Theatre For Social Change: A Study of Violence." (2016).

Tayyub, Abdur Rehman. "Anxiety in Pakistan: A Socio-semiotic Study of The Last Metaphor." (2016).