‘I Write on that Void: Kashmir, Kaschmir, Cashmere, Qashmir’ – Prism

“I hope that the mail is not very affected due to the problems in the country and that this letter reaches you. I hope this madness stops, with all my love and even more, much more, "Agha Shahid Ali wrote in a letter to his family dated November 4, 1984. Kashmir was always in Shahid's mind, no matter how far He was home, he was a negative giant for him, a measuring tool.

There are many books that shed light on the suffering of the people of Kashmir and their plight, the most influential literature was written by Shahid. It cannot be denied that the exiles have produced the most subtle but violent political nuances of protest through their poetry that recalls an inevitable sense of nostalgia and helplessness.

Agha Shahid Ali, similar to Osip Mandelstam and Mahmoud Darwish, is considered a poet of exile, because his poetry illuminates the effects of an exile and the transformations that the home undergoes in the absence of the poet. He is considered one of the most charismatic poets that emerged from Kashmir, but in reality he was never exiled, unlike the others. Shahid had emigrated to the United States by choice. While he was not exiled by a nation state or an ethno-religious community like Darwish, Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky, he was simply a migrant.

Born on February 4, 1949 in New Delhi, India, Shahid belonged to a cultured and educated Muslim Kashmir family. He emigrated to the United States in 1976 and completed his PhD in English from the Pennsylvania State University. He completed a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in creative writing from the University of Arizona and taught MFA Programs at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, at the MFA Writing Seminars at Bennington College and at the University of Utah and NYU.

On December 8, 2001, he died after a long struggle with a brain tumor, a disease that had been the cause of his mother's death, and he rests in Northampton. All his poetry resonates with nostalgia, longing, memory and, sometimes, the loss of memory of his own home. When the situation in Kashmir worsened, Shahid was in the United States and perhaps it was not space migration that affected him, but one that was cultural. But while the repressions occurred, Shahid lived in Amherst and wrote about Kashmir as did Emily Dickinson, whom she admired with all her heart.

In an interview with Stacey Chase, Shahid spoke about his exile as an involuntary state in which he has been pushed. That the reason he uses the term exile and non-expatriate is because the first is a term with a lot of resonance, because it describes some of the emotional states that the second would not do. Shahid had imposed a feeling of exile and, through his extravagant poetry, made exile a abode for him and the reader, demonstrating Darwish's opinion that one can be an exile in his homeland, in his own Home in a room.

Read below: How the legendary Begum Akhtar influenced the life and poetry of Agha Shahid Ali

Shahid's education was absolutely secular. He loved the painting of the handkerchief of Santa Verónica, which Zakir Hussain had given to his father, Agha Ashraf Ali. In fact, the first poem he had written was at the age of 12 on Christ. Shahid and his brother Iqbal, both studied in an Irish Catholic school and in an interview, recalled that: "There was never evidence of any type of parochialism in the home."

That is precisely the reason why he speaks of the "Temples and mosques enclosed in each other's reflections" in his poem "Goodbye", which he describes as a "complaining love letter from a Muslim cashmere to a cashmere pandit." Shahid wrote about the situation, loss, injustice and brutality in his homeland while crying for a lost paradise.

In another poem & # 39; Dear, Shahid & # 39 ;, writes: "Everyone carries their address in their pocket so that at least their body comes home", and it is a difficult situation faced by cashmere even today, because it is a region that has been the heart of discord for decades. And every time Shahid speaks of Kashmir, the language of loss through which he speaks is almost palpable. His words are not those of a diasporic writer, but those of an exile who yearns for his homeland. Kashmir is the most vibrant and evident in its poem "Postal Kashmir":

Kashmir shrinks in my mailbox,
My house about four by six inches.

I always loved cleaning. Now i hold
the half inch Himalayas in my hand.

This is home. And this is the closest
I'll be home sometime When I come back,
The colors will not be so bright.

The waters of the Jhelum so clean,
so ultramarine My love
so overexposed

And my memory will be a little
out of focus on her
a negative giant, black
and white, still undeveloped.

Other poems highlight the ingenuity of Shahid and his dazzling sense of humor. His poem (whose title is longer than the body of the verse) "When listening to a lover who has not been seen for twenty years has attempted suicide" in its entirety says: "I suspect it is over."

There is no sense of reconciliation in Shahid's poetry, but only a nostalgic glow that leaves the reader fascinated. Even the unfinished poems that recovered from his apartment after his death echo a half-lost feeling of memory and loss. The first loss Shahid experienced was decades before his mother died, and years before he moved to the United States. It was on the occasion of the death of Begum Akhtar in 1974.

Begum Akhtar, a ghazal singer was a favorite of Shahid along with Faiz Ahmed Faiz. He was a great fan of the singer and recited his ghazals often. Amitav Ghosh, in his eulogy "The ghat of the only world," wrote that it was Begum Akhtar who engendered his passion for ghazal. In his poem "In memory of Begum Akhtar" he wrote:

The hostess serves tea, the statesman gives me: October 31, 1974? BEGUM AKHTAR IS DEAD:
Under the headline: your photo:
she smiles: light a winch.
Sharp in flames, her face dissolves in smoke.

In his elegance, Ghosh points out how Shahid loved festivities and food. Even when he was looking at death during his last years, Shahid was gregarious and cheerful. "I love that there are so many people here," he told Ghosh once. “I love that people come and always have food. I love this festive spirit; it means I don't have time to be depressed. "

Ghosh, in his eulogy, recounts a famous incident at the Barcelona airport. Shahid was stopped by a security guard just as he was about to board a plane. The guard asked him what he did and he replied that he was a poet. When the guard asked him more about what he was doing in Spain, he said he was writing poetry. Ghosh wrote that "no matter what the question, Shahid included poetry in his answer." And when finally, the guard asked if he carried anything that could be dangerous for the other passengers, Shahid pressed his hand against his chest and spoke: only my heart. "

However, his poetry reflects another face. One who represents him as a bearer of pain and longing, and they are still heartbreaking. His poem "The Veiled Suite", which was included in Harold Bloom Until my song ends: a meeting of the latest poems, an anthology where he has curated works by one hundred poets over a period of one hundred years, ends with these lines.

What arrangements you have not made for tonight!
I have to give you a knife behind the veil
Now quickly rise from your freshly lit incense.
I'm still alive, alive to learn from your eyes
That I am your veil and I am everything you see.

Shahid was well versed in the language of yearning, and all his poems affirm this statement. His poetry leaves a profound impact on the reader that remains rooted in the heart for a long, long time. Even in his latest "Rooms never end" poems, Shahid continues to speak in the nostalgic tone he had mastered by then. His poetry pursues the reader and is recorded in the core of one. Even when you talk about something as banal as your name, it can attract the reader's attention. In the last couplet of his ghazal, in Arabic, he writes.

They ask me to tell you what Shahid means: Listen, listen:
It means "The Beloved" in Persian, "witness" in Arabic.

This couplet is inscribed in his grave in Northampton. To reveal Shahid to the world, the Beloved Witness Project, which derives its name from the same couplet, was initiated by Patricia O & # 39; Neill, who was Shahid's colleague in Amherst. The Beloved Witness Project of the Hamilton College Digital Humanities Initiative is a digital archive of video recorded readings, personal documents, letters and manuscripts accumulated by Hamilton College through contributions from letters, documents, critical perspectives and creative responses from colleagues , friends and readers of Shahid's works. . His goal is to preserve his letters and documents to get more information about Shahid.

Header image: Copyright © 1990 by Stacey Chase

This article was originally published in The Wire and has been reproduced with permission.