Uncovering the political unconscious in a Socially Symbolic Act

Sayeed Ahmad’s 1964 play, The Milepost , is on the “essentiality of day-to-day life” of ordinary people but “in the absurd form” (Ahmad, “Reminiscences,” 462). The highway within the play is a place that one “can’t make a home,” yet people laugh, quarrel, eat, dance, and even flirt there, despite “black crows nibbl[ing] abandoned bodies” (Act 1, page 37). Jocund travelers, contrasted with the macabre crows, provide apt imagery of dispossession, for the “time present” of The Milepost is that of a famine that is “always there” (Act 1, page 39). Fredric Jameson argues that the narrative mode is key in symbolically embodying social reality by “mediating between the apparent fragmentation of society and the real totality underlying it” (Roberts, 81). This chapter will attempt to decipher The Milepost by uncovering the political allegory it embodies to “restor[e] to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of [the] fundamental history” of Pakistan between 1951 and 1958 (Jameson, Political , 20).