In Requiem: Agha Shahid Ali
Memory, Longing and Nostalgia
If you leave, who will prove that my cry existed?
Tell me what was I like before I existed
Perhaps the most prolific practitioner of a Kashmiri American identity, Agha Shahid Ali weaved disparate ethnic influences and idiosyncrasies in both the traditional sonnet as well as the elegant free-verse. Born to the prestigious Agha family in Srinagar, Ali grew up in post-independence Kashmir that was just beginning to find its own identity amidst bitter political rivalries and melding ethnic, cultural and religious identities.
Ali’s works operate as remembrances of things most personal to him like his mother’s rituals, his longing for the ethereal Kashmir coloured immaculately with goodbyes, friendships, and his relationship with God. Having grown up in a home without a hint of parochialism or censorship, Ali was fond of music, poetry and “all these marvellously magical things.” (Eric Gamalinda, An Interview With Poet Agha Shahid Ali, Poets&Writers, 2nd January 2002).
The triad of “memory, nostalgia and longing” served as the prevailing themes in his poems. Ali gained inspiration from the universal feelings towards “Love, death … and language” His poetry focuses on his insecurities and “obsessions [with] … memory, death, history, ancestors, nostalgia for a past he never knew, dreams, Hindu ceremonies, friendships, and self-consciousness about being a poet.” ( Modern Indian Poetry in English, Bruce King — 1987)
Known particularly for his allusions to European, Urdu and Persian literary traditions, Ali’s poetry revolved around thematic and cultural poles, most of which stem from his personal experiences. His work “Amherst to Kashmir,” explored his grief at the time of his mother’s death, which Ali regarded as “the most monstrous thing” that had ever happened to him. His succeeding works portrayed his longing for his mother and for Kashmir, a further reflection of him being exiled from his home.
A Kashmiri Exile in America
If home is found
on both sides of the globe,
home is of course here-
and always a missed land.
Ali’s separation from Kashmir, however, brought about a detachment in his point of view as if he was a spectator to his own life, sitting behind a tinted glass window observing himself and others. Authors such as Avtar Brah and Edward Rutherfurd regard Ali’s work as Diasporic, a broad theme marked by loyalty towards one’s host country and homeland. (Thinking Through The Concept of Diaspora — January 2006)
They believe that physical spacing — similar to the one faced by Ali — is often necessary to produce a sense of homelessness and nostalgia. Such poets nourish an intense feeling of association towards their homeland, enabling them to tell their story of their tormented land in a unique way. Ali often wrote about the sense of longing for his homeland as well as his lasting feeling of isolation after he moved to the States. These feelings are etched in his verses, an example of which can be seen in his poem “Stationery,” a short piece about an ownerless landscape and his vague wish that it would say something back to him.
The world is full of paper.
Write to me.
I flipped through their visions,
left my number in their sleep.
But no one called back.
Ali viewed himself as an exile, not because he had been thrown out of the place he called home, but because of the emotional resonance associated with the sense of being “exiled”. Kashmir, therefore, becomes the imaginary homeland recreated by Ali in exile. The attachment to Kashmir — his homeland is summed up in the poem, ‘Postcard from Kashmir’.
Kashmir sinks into my mailbox
My home a neat four by sin inches.
The pangs of separation from home are rendered thus
This is the home
And this is the closest
I’ll ever be to home
In his 2001 interview with Eric Gamalinda, Ali remarked that “There are definite historical moments of exile… writers particularly interest me in that context. Of course, I’m not an exile technically, but temperamentally I would say I’m an exile, because it has an emotional resonance, the term exile does.” (See Eric Gamalinda,).
Ali spent most of his adult life longing for the valleys of Kashmir, mapping the States through a nostalgist’s eyes and searching for his “Routes of Evanescence”. Ali’s work “A Nostalgist’s Map of America” is a reflection of his quest for finding landscapes that brought back memories of his childhood in Kashmir.
The Ghazalkaar
Overwhelmed by his deteriorating health that restricted him from visiting his homeland, Ali devoted his last years to the ghazal, which turned out to be one of his most celebrated accomplishments. Heavily influenced by the inimitable poetry and voice of Begum Akhtar and the eminent educationist, Agha Ashraf Ali, Ali’s work, “Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English” embodies his struggle to blend the Urdu literary tradition with the English language.
Ali’s poem “Tonight”, which gave the title to his posthumously published work “Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals” is regarded as his best attempt at bridging the gap between the American and Arabic models of storytelling. Much of “Tonight” has to do with religion. However, Ali alludes to works of other writers in his ghazals. He used a line from Emily Dickinson as the title for “Amherst to Kashmir”. In his work “Call Me Ishmael Tonight”, the second couplet quotes Emily Dickinson:
The soul can never be without a country,
or else it is always already without a country,
always in a condition of internal exile.”
An amethyst land
However playful, Ali’s ghazals often have a deeper meaning embedded within them: about religious tradition and its violent misuse, about Ali’s own place among religions, nations and languages; and about fanaticism and violence in Kashmir.
‘Farewell’ bids a mournful goodbye to Kashmir’s former peace, while finding relevance today in the ongoing religious and political polarisation of communities.
At a certain point, I lost track of you.
They make a desolation and call it peace.
when you left even the stones were buried:
the defenceless would have no weapons
Though his poems speak of a time over 20 years in the past, his works are still relevant when one examines the system of political oppression that is commonplace today. The impact of political propaganda on the commonwealth and the resulting marginalisation of communities is something that needs more attention.
Now well into the new century, it is time to pause and read Ali’s poems to remind ourselves to not fall prey to one-sided arguments that peddle hatred and hypocrisy. It is important to read his poems to understand the conflicts that now dot the globe on a humane level and to realise that love and friendship triumph extremism and animosity.
