Agha Shahid Ali | Saradindu Bhattacharya - Indian Writing In English

Cite this Essay

MLA:
Bhattacharya, Saradindu. “Agha Shahid Ali.” Indian Writing In English Online, 09 Sept 2022, <indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/agha-shahid-ali-saradindu-bhattacharya/> .

Chicago:
Bhattacharya, Saradindu. “Agha Shahid Ali.” Indian Writing In English Online. September 9, 2022. <indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/agha-shahid-ali-saradindu-bhattacharya/> .

Agha Shahid Ali was born in Delhi in 1949 into a well-educated, liberal Shia Muslim family where Urdu, Kashmiri and English were spoken and poetry in these languages was frequently recited. He spent his early childhood in Srinagar and attended an Irish Catholic school there. He obtained his Master’s degree in English from the University of Delhi, following which he migrated to the United States of America and earned his PhD from the Pennsylvania State University in 1984. Subsequently, he also earned a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of Arizona and pursued a career in academics, starting at Hamilton College, New York in 1987 and then moving to the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he headed the MFA creative writing programme. He also taught a creative writing programme for poets and writers at the Warren Wilson College and for graduate students at the New York University. He was a visiting professor at Princeton University and held teaching positions at the University of Delhi, SUNY Binghamton, Baruch College, and the University of Utah. During his brief but fruitful career as an academic and poet, Ali received fellowships from several prestigious organisations – the New York Foundation of Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council of Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He was the recipient of the Pushcart Prize and was also a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. Ali died of brain cancer in 2001, the same ailment to which his mother had succumbed only a few years before him.

As an expatriate Kashmiri forever yearning for home, Ali identified himself as an American poet writing in English who was “imbued with … permutations of Hindu, Muslim and Western cultures” (Benvenuto 267). Ali acknowledged that “a proclivity to mourn historical loss was an inescapable part of his temperament” (Benvenuto 266), but also “resolutely refused to embrace the role of victim that could so easily have been his” (Ghosh 318). Ali’s early collections of poems, A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), and A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991), are marked by the lyricism that informs all of his work. They also reveal a culturally hybrid poetic persona as adept at invoking figures like Medusa and Eurydice from Greek mythology as at referencing Begum Akhtar and Emily Dickinson. Ali’s cosmopolitanism as an artist is evident from the fact that he translated the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Urdu poems into English in The Rebel’s Silhouette (1991), and edited Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English (2000). He experimented with Western poetic forms such as sestinas, villanelles and canzones, as well as wrote original ghazals in English in his last collection of poems, Call Me Ishmael Tonight (2003).

One of the major themes in Ali’s poetry is nostalgia for an irreversibly altered homeland. Ali treads the tightrope between sentimental longing and resigned awareness in capturing through his poetry the sense of loss caused by the state of being in permanent exile. This is evident in one of his best known poems, “Postcard from Kashmir”, in which Kashmir becomes both the site and the product of re-presentation, available to the speaker only in and as a picture postcard. The sublime beauty of its landscape “shrinks” to a “neat four by six inches”, and his “home” becomes commercially marketable as a souvenir that can be posted to him by mail. The poem sets up a series of contrasts that suggest the impossible contradictions that thwart any possibility of ever returning to Kashmir in its prelapsarian state, untouched by violence: thus, the speaker holds “the half-inch Himalayas” in his hand and wryly observes that when he revisits Kashmir “the colors won’t be so brilliant, / the Jhelum’s waters so clean, / so ultramarine”. The interplay between vastness and smallness, darkness and light, familiarity and strangeness, proximity and distance, reality and image, is distilled into the final metaphor of the poem:

And my memory will be a little

out of focus, in it

a giant negative, black

and white, still undeveloped. (29)

The poem employs a spatial imaginary that operates on the principle of inversion – while the mighty Himalayas are scaled down to mere inches that can be held in the palm, reductively situating the sublime landscape of Kashmir within an easily measurable, two-dimensional postcard, the negative acquires a disproportionately large dimension within the abstract, subjective domain of memory and defies any attempt at containment or translation. Ali deftly uses the central image of the picture postcard to suggest how memory itself is ultimately only a story one chooses to re-construct in certain ways; in this instance, his memory of Kashmir, based on his own personal association with the land as his “home”, is fundamentally ruptured by the socio-political turmoil that lies beneath the surface of the “overexposed” beauty of the place, beyond the frame of the photograph, so to speak. The fact that Kashmir is, and will continue to be, accessible only as a text – and a generic one at that, if one considers the predictable, replicable format of the picture postcard – points to the paradox of “belonging” to it. In his analysis of the poem, Matthew Nelson draws attention to the effect of double estrangement achieved through the premise of receiving a picture postcard of “home” from a tourist: “The receipt of such a postcard alienates further, even as it evokes whatever alienation already preceded it. Loss of home is thus figured … as a form of failed sociality” (938). Thus, while the speaker does not shy away from declaring his “love” for Kashmir, he is also painfully aware that this is “the closest [he will] ever be to home”. What is notable about Ali’s poetic craft is that he manages to defamiliarise a popular “sign” of Kashmir – the stock image of its iconic mountains and rivers captured in a picture postcard – and traces it back to an unattainable origin (the “giant negative” that is still “undeveloped”), thus suggesting the inadequacy of both personal memory and popular representation, and offering what Joseph Donahue calls “a psychologically acute anatomy of loss”. The openness of the postcard as a text that can be “read” by anyone en route to its intended recipient also points to the nature of this loss: it is a loss of meaning, since the visual signs with/through which Kashmir becomes identified in the popular imagination also, paradoxically, signal the erosion of “homeliness” from its territory in the psyche of the expatriate subject.

The emotional truth of the disruptive violence experienced by native Kashmiris is often captured by Ali through his use of imagery, at once appropriate for its fidelity to the natural setting and cultural milieu of his poems and striking for its ability to invoke sensory perceptions in unsettling ways. For instance, in “A Dream of Glass Bangles”, the speaker recounts the scene of a midnight raid on his house (which, in the context of Kashmir, could be any household), wherein the comfort and safety of the parents sleeping “warm in a quilt studded / with pieces of mirrors” (32) is suddenly intruded upon by the army surrounding the house. The elemental nature of the imagery employed here – the bangles on the mother’s arms as “waves of frozen rivers”, the army “pulling icicles for torches / off the roofs” and “set[ting] the tips of water on fire”, the air into which the father steps out “a quicksand of snow”, and ultimately the sound of “a widow smashing the rivers / on her arms” (32-33) – combines paradoxical ideas of heat and cold, solidity and fluidity, and thus not only coveys the traumatic impact of the incident on the speaker’s psyche, but also suggests the vulnerability of the interior space of “home” to the precarious environment outside. The deliberate lack of specificity in the poem in terms of where, when, and why this incident took place, points to the pervasiveness and normalisation of violence, while the encoding of such violence in terms of elemental imagery draws attention to the essential unnaturalness of such an order of things. In a sense, both the speaker (presumably a child at the time of the “action” of the poem) and the reader bear witness to the subjective trauma caused by the violent breach of the sanctity of “home”, while simultaneously also recognising the symptomatic nature of such trauma, since this could be any Kashmiri family in any house.

The Kashmir of Ali’s poems is imbued with an atmosphere of pervasive uncertainty and melancholy, its social order rendered fragile by the tremendous stress imposed by state-sponsored violence on fundamental human relationships. For instance, “The Floating Post Office” opens with a suspenseful scene where the local residents of Srinagar anxiously await the arrival of the shikara (a kind of gondola) that functions as a kind of postal service. The speaker voices the collective anticipation of the assembled crowd:

Has he been kept from us? Portents
of rain, rumors, ambushed letters . . .
Curtained palanquin, fetch our word,
bring us word: Who has died? Who’ll live? (207)

The spectre of fear and detection – conveyed suggestively through the setting of a scene where rain jostles with rumor and letters may be ambushed – turns civilians into potential criminals and letter-writing into almost an illicit activity subject to state surveillance. Survival hinges upon a word here and is beyond the will and control of the recipients of the letters, the grammatical tense of the verbs (“has died”, “will live”) indicating the degree of helplessness experienced by these people as they wait in the present moment. As the “postman” emerges from the “fog of death” engulfing the city, we register the habitual, ritualistic nature of the unfolding scene. This is not an aberrational, temporary state of emergency; it is an established order where oppression has been routinised and the restriction of communication is recognised as part of “the sentence / passed on [the] city”. In the context of Kashmir, the governmental authority to monitor and punish civilians through the exercise of constitutional measures such as the infamous Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) has resulted in the breach of fundamental rights of privacy, life, and justice; both here and in “A Dream of Glass Bangles”, Ali presents human suffering within what Giorgio Agamben calls a state of exception, one that operates through “a suspension of the juridical order itself” (4) and creates “a zone of indifference” (23) where the distinction between the legal and the extra-legal, the norm and its abrogation, the inside and the outside is blurred. Within such a system, precarity becomes endemic to everyday life, as is evident from the dramatic tension built into this tacit, covert form of communication is conveyed through the staccato rhythm and tenuous syntax of the lines:

It came close
to reveal smudged black-ink letters
which the postman—he was alive—
gave us, like signs, without a word,

and we took them, without a word. (207)

What we witness here is a situation in which life and hope are reduced to mere chance (the letter can, after all, only guarantee that the writer “was alive” at the time of writing it), where the seemingly tranquil romance of the natural surroundings (falling autumn leaves, approaching rain, the sound of a “cymbaled prayer” from a nearby temple) belies the precarious existence of the residents of Kashmir in the near total absence of basic human rights. Typical of his style, Ali uses the letter both as a prop and as a symbol, as a precious material means and as proof of survival in a police state, as well as an emblem of the quotidian forms of repression to which its bearers are subjected. Thus, the code or the language necessitated by such a form of communication (wherein the recipients are periodically given “a new password” by the postman) is described by the speaker as “blood shaken into letters, / [a] cruel primitive script” (207); the imagery combines notions of filial ties, danger, sacrifice, and violence, and thereby contextualises the subjective experience of anguish and loss in terms of a shared “saffron link to the past” (207). Such interweaving of personal feeling with political reality is Ali’s characteristic method of developing a poetic idiom that is aesthetically and culturally rooted in Kashmir, while also being invested with allusions to the extreme order of affairs that make Kashmir an extended “graveyard”. What sustains this “order” – keeps the post office afloat, as it were – is the speaker’s quiet determination to continue to write letters “alive / with love” (208), even as he recognises the mortal risks involved in such communication:

…our each word

in the fog awaits a sentence:

[…]

Our letters will be rowed through olive

canals, tense waters no one can close. (208)

While the remoteness and fragility of “home” is experienced by Ali as an intensely personal feeling, he does make oblique connections with the more specific political circumstances that have caused a violent rupture between the natives of Kashmir and their homeland. Thus, in another poem, “The Correspondent”, Ali employs the device of a dialogue between the speaker and a news reporter who has just returned from Sarajevo with “footage … priceless with sympathy” (209). The dual meanings of “correspondence” – as communication between two characters as well as analogy in terms of the conditions of civic unrest and state oppression that exist in both Bosnia and Kashmir – offer the reader a geopolitical framework to locate and interpret contemporary history. Yet, we are also told at the very outset that the titular correspondent, for whom “the world [is] his schedule”, is eager to leave. It is the construction of Sarajevo and Kashmir as newsworthy stories – where “exploding grenades” serve as the parenthetical “soundtrack”, images of burning wheelchairs and barbed-wire camps can be conveniently fast-forwarded, and the gaze of the dead is “fractured white with subtitles” – that the poem foregrounds (209-10). For the correspondent, Kashmir is a “dream” to which he “wants exclusive rights”; in the pursuit of this dream, he will, the speaker surmises, “erase/ Bosnia” and “rewind to zero” (210). Thus, both Kashmir and Bosnia emerge as substitutable signs in a global language of terrorism and trauma, even as the speaker yearns to have his “aubades” for Kashmir transmitted via satellites. What we as readers realise with the speaker is that Kashmir’s currency is only one of many “stories” vying for visibility in a mediated, networked world, one that the correspondent will need to “revamp” and “reincarnadine” as he “bypass[es] graves that in blacks and whites/ climb ever up the hills” (210). Resonating with the blood imagery used in “The Floating Post Office”, the poem reveals, perhaps with a hint of self-reflexive irony, the violence implicit in the act of imagining and consuming Kashmir as a text and its residents as characters whose “shadow[s]” can be strategically slow-motioned, fast-forwarded, zoomed into, subtitled or erased at will. Each of these poems marks Ali’s engagement with the cultural imaginary about Kashmir, rendered through modes ranging from “landscape photography’s pervasive ironies to the more radical superimposition of the body’s traces on the landscape” (Kabir 55).

Another recurrent theme in Ali’s poetry is migration and exile. Ali explores these themes via history as well as personal experience, often tracing a lineage of physical and cultural movement across borders through the merging of his poetic persona with the lingering “presence” of other characters who are imaginatively reconstructed. In “Snowmen”, the speaker traces a genealogy back into the geological past, his ancestor “a man / of Himalayan snow” who traversed from Samarkand to Kashmir with “a bag / of whale bones: / heirlooms from sea funerals” (34). The natural elements of the landscape become organically integrated into the human body and transform it into one of several components that constitute the poet’s own history. Thus, the ancestor’s breath is “arctic” and his skeleton, “carved from glaciers”, is passed down by “generations of snowmen” to the speaker himself who feels it under his own skin and promises to “ride into spring / on their melting shoulders” (34). In another poem, “The Dacca Gauzes”, the speaker refers to another heirloom his grandmother fondly remembers – the famed muslin of colonial Bengal that she once wore as part of her bridal trousseau and which was subsequently cut into embroidered handkerchiefs and given away to nieces and grand-daughters. The speaker recounts the legendary “texture” of the Dacca gauzes – known as “woven air, running / water, evening dew” – to create a text about its lingering presence-in-absence in the grandmother’s imagination (42). Thus, the speaker deliberately ends the poem with an anecdote about how one autumn morning, when “the air / was dew-starched”, his grandmother pulled her (now lost) six yards “absently through her ring” (43). The speaker also situates this familial tale within the institutionalised discourse of history, through which he has learned how during the colonial period in India “the hands / of weavers were amputated, / the looms of Bengal silenced” to make way for British textiles (42-43). Here, memory itself becomes part of a cultural inheritance based on the verbal transmission of popular stories rather than personal experience, the material object having irrevocably disappeared and becoming only a matter of mythic vernacular narrativisation. The implicit play on the etymological connection between text, texture, and textile is suggestive of the implication of the personal in the political, of the oral and the anecdotal in the documentary and archival forms of history. Ali’s “mapping of personal and collective memories onto different geographical landscapes,” observes Nida Sajid, complicates the “official recording of events … in order to interrupt their linearity and to rupture the artifice of mainstream history” (90).

It is a similar strategy of reviewing history from the margins through the lens of memory and inheritance that Ali employs in “Leaving Sonora”, where the poet of the desert must turn “deep inside himself for shade”, for “[o]nly there do the perished tribes live” (116).

Similarly, in “Poets on Bathroom Walls”, the addressee returns from the toilet “having memorized someone’s graffiti”, the anonymous red scrawls on the bathroom walls serving as a furtive code of communication between two women who, the speaker declares, should meet “despite all the world” (95). If such overlapping identities are imagined in and through the construction of a poetic “self” that is composite, derivative, and representative of a lineage, then Ali also explores the theme of alienation in poems like “Survivor”, where the speaker observes himself from a position of apparent neutrality, as a separate entity resembling him in every aspect of his daily life: opening the refrigerator at night, listening to news from Kashmir on the radio, practising his signature and answering his mail. The schizophrenic projection of his own “self” as a distinct character within the poem signals the speaker’s troubled perspective on, and the consequent lack of identification with, his own existence as the titular survivor of traumatic experience, even as he identifies the likeness between the two:

The mirror gives up

my face to him

He calls to my mother in my voice

She turns

He is breathless to tell her tales

in which I was never found (72-73)

It could be argued that the ambivalence Ali builds into the relation between his poetic “self” and its environment (comprising both human characters and setting) is a manifestation of a deep-seated sense of loneliness that makes it imperative for both the poet and the reader to recognise the necessity as well as the limitations of establishing links with the “other”. The recurrent use of images of mirrors, reflections, photographs, and dreams in these poems suggests the ephemeral nature of recorded history and personal memory, re-membered from shifting perspectives that blur the lines between the two; it also constitutes a poetic rendering of how Ali, as a Kashmiri expatriate, experiences othering both as a political phenomenon and as personal trauma that leads to a questioning of the very ideas of definite origins and singular identities.

In fact, Ali’s poetry abounds in images of desolate landscapes, offering the artistic premise to the poetic speaker to document what he perceives as significant details, but simultaneously also serving as the ground for an imaginative reconstruction of silenced histories. Thus, in “A Wrong Turn”, the speaker encounters “a massacred town” in his dream, one that has been “erased from maps” and contains only signs of abandonment – broken idols at altars, dry wells piled up with bones, cobwebbed booths, and rusted railway tracks. The possibility of “walking among the atrocities” that such a landscape might have witnessed leaves the interpretation of its history open to the speaker’s – and by extension, the reader’s – interpretation within the poetic framework of the dream setting. The fact that it is “[o]nly a wrong turn” (emphasis added) that leads the speaker to this landscape is offset by his confession that this is a recurrent detour in his dreams, implying that what he (and we, as readers) witness here is significant precisely because the poem itself exists in defiance of the “curfew on ghosts” (60).

We find a similar oblique voicing of the absent “other” in poems like “Vacating an Apartment” and “The Previous Occupant”–companion pieces, as it were, that extend the themes of migration, home and exile into the humdrum business of moving houses. In the former, the speaker imagines himself as the “ghost” who moves out “holding tombstones in … [his] hands” as the cleaners wipe away signs of his existence from the house – his smile, “his voicestains”, his posters on the walls, and his “crossed-out lines” at the corner-table – and the landlord gives the new tenants his (the speaker’s) “autopsy”, the new lease agreement (61-62). The contrast between the “efficient” ease of physical movement and the difficulty of a neat emotional disconnect with one’s habitat underlies the seemingly objective account of what is otherwise an unremarkable feature of urban living. If the speaker sees himself as the “other” in this poem, he imagines the eponymous previous occupant of the house he moves into as a lingering presence – another ghost, as it were – whose identity becomes the subject of his compulsive conjecture. It is the little things the previous tenant has left behind – a half-torn horoscope, a half-empty bottle of Flexol – that trigger the speaker’s imagination about who he might have been: “There’s enough missing / for me to know him”. In the speaker’s imagination, his thoughts “cling / in phrases to the frost on the windows” and he stares back through the mirror with “his brown eyes” (63). The mirroring of the “self” in the “other”, which is a technique Ali commonly uses, establishes an affiliation between the two strangers even as we recognise the fact that within the larger cultural code of urban mobility, they are merely replaceable “signs”; it is only through an active act of imaginative identification of/with the “other” that the speaker locates his own “self”:

Now that he’s found me,

my body casts his shadow everywhere.

He’ll never, never move out of here. (64)

The poems discussed so far adequately reveal Ali’s flair for transmuting inherited memory and personal experience into art through the deft use of images and symbols that are not only apposite to his own socio-cultural milieu but also effective in situating his poetry within a larger historical context of migration and loss. While this results in an overwhelming sense of melancholy in a bulk of his poems, there are instances in his oeuvre where Ali opts for wry observation, bordering on humour, rather than the sombre reflection we encounter in his more popular poems. For instance, in “The Fate of the Astrologer / Sitting on the Pavement Outside / the Delhi Railway Station”, the poet offers no more than a pithy verbal snapshot of the titular character by way of nudging the reader to meditate on what it means to live busy, self-absorbed lives in a modern city:

“Pay, pay attention to the sky,”

he shouts to passers-by.

The planets gather dust

from passing trucks. (49)

The irony built into the use of the word “fate” in the title – the astrologer’s own fate, regardless of his supposed professional expertise in predicting the future for others, seems grim in the face of public indifference to his shouts – and the symbolism of dust gathering on his planetary charts mirroring the contrast between vehicular movement and cosmic motion aptly suggest the insular human obsession with immediate concerns. The title of this short piece, written with line breaks like the stanzas themselves, thus functions as much as art as social commentary without resorting to elaboration or overt didacticism. Similarly, in “At the Museum”, Ali uses the iconic bronze figurine of the Harappan dancing girl to speculate about the position of marginalised sections of the population (“servant girl[s]”, “soldiers and slaves”), even in a society as advanced as the Indus Valley civilisation. Thus, he wonders playfully if the sculptor deliberately polished “the ache // off her fingers stiff / from washing the walls // and scrubbing the floors, / from stirring the meat // and the crushed asafoetida / in the bitter gourd” (217). In expressing his gratitude to this “child who had to play woman” and smile at the sculptor, Ali adopts a mock-serious tone that alerts us, the readers of the history this icon embodies, to the politics of labour, its transformation into art and its appropriation into cultural discourse.

It is the same playful engagement with institutionalised history that we also witness in Ali’s revisionary poems featuring characters already well known within the canon of Western literature and culture. In “An Interview with Red Riding Hood, Now No Longer Little”, the eponymous heroine of the much-translated folktale relates how her father was “no ordinary woodsman” and how he became the owner of a timber industry – and she an heiress – by cutting down the forest and combing it for wolves, some of whom “escaped, / like guerrillas, into / the mountains” (98). The obvious possibilities of ecocritical and postcolonial readings of this account of the tale aside, Ali also re-casts Red Riding Hood as a more self-aware and candid agent of her own narrative, one who admits to getting sick of lisping “”Grandma, what big eyes you have!’” (98) and regretfully confesses:

I lied when I said it was dark.

Now I drive through the city,

hearing wolves at every turn.

How warm it was inside the wolf! (99)

The companion piece to this dark but delightful re-telling of the famous tale is “The Wolf’s Postscript to ‘Little Red Riding Hood’”, where the wolf as speaker demands acknowledgement of his “sense of history”, clarifying that he “did it for posterity, / for kindergarten teachers / and a clear moral” (100). He also claims that he, “a forest-dweller”, knew all along where the old grandmother lived, and could have “gobbled her up” years ago if he wanted, that he knew when his belly was being filled with garbage and stones by the huntsman and ran with their weight “simply so children could laugh”; in fact, it was his “generous sense of plot”, his “perfect sense of timing” that made him act as he did (100-101). In this reversal of narrative and moral agency, Ali makes the reader revise the Western hegemonic cultural codes that have traditionally served as the interpretative framework to understand and define the category of the “human” in exclusionary, oppositional terms.

In the third piece belonging to this group, “Hansel’s Game”, Ali introduces sinister themes of sexual exploitation, violence, and murder, while retaining the same casual lightness of tone as in the previous poems. Here we encounter Hansel remembering those “happily ever after” years when he “played with every Gretel in town / including Gretel, my sister”. He, “a big boy now” already knew that the witch “had to be somewhere near” and that “she would end badly”. This familiar tale of a journey “from the womb to the grave” is given a chilling twist when Hansel reveals that he only “played innocent”:

And Gretel and I lived

happily ever after. And still do:

We have a big ice-box

in our basement

where we keep the witch.

Now and then we take portions of her

to serve on special occasions.

And our old father washes

her blood from the dishes. (102-103)

This self-conscious subversion of binaries – the child and the adult, the innocent and the wicked, the victim and the victimiser –leads to an interrogation of the ways in which we have been culturally trained to “read” stories, and prompts us to reconsider the power dynamics underlying such categories. As readers we recognise the postmodernist tendencies of such retellings (similar to those of Angela Carter and A.S. Byatt) in their capacity to draw attention to the constructed nature of such “stories”, the artifice underlying the art, even as we locate them in Eurocentric pedagogic, literary, and cultural traditions.

If Ali’s posthumous reputation rests on his ability to successfully distil his multilingual, multicultural heritage and experience into poetry that easily transcends national borders, the persistent theme of the desire to “return” to an imagined “home” – so common amongst diasporic writers of the late twentieth century as to risk becoming a sociological cliché – turns in his hands not merely into a literary theme but also an instrument of formal innovation. Malcolm Woodland reads in Ali’s practice of the ghazal as a transnational poetic form (originating in Persia, coming to India via Urdu, translated from Arabic, and finally composed in English) in his final years “a radically divided stance toward nativist nostalgia and hybridist innovation” (267). If Ali’s faithful use of the technique of the refrain at the end of every couplet of a ghazal is, as Woodland contends, a linguistic mirroring of the desire to return (as repeated phrase/text) to a point of “origin” but always in an altered context (253), one might also propose that this reflects a poststructuralist move toward the use of a sign whose meanings shift with every iteration, and a corresponding awareness on the part of the poet of the provisional, inconclusive nature of any quest for identity. It is a testament to Ali’s genius as a poet that he achieves this degree of (self-)recognition by adhering to many of the original formal tenets of the ghazal even as he articulates them in a novel (Western) context. It is fitting, therefore, that Ali should end one of his last ghazals, “In Arabic” with a reference to his own name (another convention of the form), employing a poetic persona that translates, as it were, himself into a language that he shares with his English reader:

They ask me to tell them what Shahid means: Listen, listen:

It means “The Belovéd” in Persian, “witness” in Arabic. (373)

It is this cosmopolitan artistic sensibility that imbues Ali’s work and takes it beyond the context of parochial identity politics. Resistant to the very idea of being typecast as a victim or hailed as a “nationalist” poet (Ghosh 318-19), Ali mapped his writing on a global canvas whose coordinates were not determined by his own ethnicity or physical location. Thus, we find within his oeuvre numerous poems with epigraphs and dedications to writers and texts dispersed across historical periods, cultural locations and genres, ranging from William Wordsworth, Oscar Wilde, G.M. Hopkins and W.B. Yeats to Emily Dickinson, James Merrill and Hart Crane, from Ghalib to Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Begum Akhtar, Mahmoud Darwish to Alexander Pushkin, Edward Gibbon to Saleem Kidwai, and from Gilgamesh to the Bible and the Koran. Ali displays an acumen for seamlessly weaving these myriad influences into an intertextual web, wherein the “universal” and the “local” coexist in an imaginative spatio-temporal contiguity. Thus, in “After Seeing Kozinstev’s King Lear in Delhi”, the poet casually reflects on the history of Chandni Chowk as a globalized marketplace (where “perfumes from Isfahan,/ fabrics from Dacca, essence from Kabul,/ glass bangles from Agra” were sold) as well as its present status as a commercial hub (where beggars occupy the tombs of “unknown nobles and foreign saints”, “hawkers sell combs and mirrors”, and a “Bombay spectacular” is screened across the road from a Sikh temple). The resonance between the (post)colonial legacy of a specific locality in the city – the street through which Zafar, the poet-Emperor was led (“his feet in chains”) by the British to witness his sons’ hanging and subsequently exiled and buried in Burma – and the fate of the tragic protagonist of the much adapted Shakespearean play, extends and expands the scope of the “literary” without reproducing the privilege of the Western “canon” over its the colonial “other”. This corresponds to what Baidik Bhattacharya identifies as a characteristic of Anglophonic postcolonial writing – the impulse “to carry signs and traces of other languages under its own skin and to accommodate disparate histories, conflicting temporalities and discreet territories within its being” (26-27).

While most of his poetry is marked by lyrical brevity, there is a persistent tendency in Ali towards an imaginative telescoping of multiple histories that suggests a trans-national, epic frame of consciousness. It is useful in this context to refer to Sneharika Roy’s definition of the “postcolonial epic” as a genre that employs “a poetics of migration to articulate a politics of migrating identities irreducible to a single national form” (19). Such a “poetics of migration” manifests both as form and theme in Ali’s poetry as he foregrounds, in the context of a globalized world where migration is the accepted norm, the emotional immediacy of individual experience and memory typical of the lyric and locates it alongside the epic concern with the larger context of collective histories. For instance, in “I See Chile in My Rearview Mirror”, Ali employs the central conceit of a “mirrored continent” (Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Colombia, Brazil “without forests”, and Peru “without rain”) that he visualizes as he journeys across the desert towards Utah, “passing skeletal/ figures carved in 700 B.C.” (161-63). References to “blindfolded men”, “drunk soldiers” and a “wounded republic” allude to the state of civil war and environmental crisis in many of these countries even as the elusive images, mere reflections on glass and water surfaces, ultimately vanish. Ali’s awareness of the realities of the contemporary world order is thus transformed into personal(ized) “reflections” that retain an essential lyricism as well as demand a politically engaged reading. Though Ali’s poetry does not feature grand characters and actions that can be readily identified as belonging to the traditional generic category of the epic, we do find in his writing a compulsive desire to cross borders that separate the here and the elsewhere, the now and the then, even as it is marked by a perennial (and perennially unfulfilled) urge to belong. Not surprisingly, many of Ali’s poems feature airports, thresholds that rigorously mark nationalist identities but also facilitate the crossing of borders between nations. In one of such poems, “Barcelona Airport”, the speaker declares at the security gate that he carries with him only his heart, the “first terrorist” (284). In this act of self-declaration, Ali defines the migrant poet as an emblematic figure whose art defies confinement within the material and ideological limits imposed by nation-states, and it is perhaps in this respect that Ali’s contribution to contemporary English poetry is the greatest.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005.

Ali, Agha Shahid. The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems. Norton, 2009.

Benvenuto, Christine. “Agha Shahid Ali”, The Massachusetts Review, vol. 43, no.2, 2002, pp. 261-273.

Bhattacharya, Baidik. Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalization. London: Routledge, 2018.

Donahue, Joseph. “Exile Returned”, Bookforum <Agha Shahid Ali’s poems are charmed whispers that can console and devastate – Joseph Donahue – Bookforum Magazine> Accessed on 29 June, 2022.

Ghosh, Amitav. “‘The Ghat of the Only World’: Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn”, Postcolonial Studies: Culture, Politics, Economy, vol. 5, no.3,2002, pp. 311-323.

Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir. U of Minnesota P, 2009.

Nelson. Matthew. “Agha Shahid Ali and the Phenomenology of Postcolonial Nostalgia”, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 22, no.7,2020, pp. 933-950.

Roy, Sneharika. The Postcolonial Epic: From Melville to Walcott and Ghosh. London: Routledge, 2018.

Sajid, Nida. “The Transnational Cartography of Agha Shahid Ali’s Poetry,” Rocky Mountain Review 66 (2012), pp. 85-92.

Woodland, Malcolm. “Memory’s Homeland: Agha Shahid Ali and the Hybrid Ghazal”, ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 32, nos. 2-3, 2005, pp. 249-272.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Poetry

Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals (2003)
Rooms Are Never Finished (2001)
The Country Without a Post Office (1997)
The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992)
A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991)
A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987)
The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987)
In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (1979)
Bone Sculpture (1972)