BOOKS-KASHMIR: Kashmiri Poet Revisits Home in Verse

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, May 6 1997 (IPS) - The poetry of the exile has always been one of longing, and of an ambiguous relation to home, from Osip Mandelstam’s poems of St. Petersburg to Mahmoud Darwish’s yearning for Palestine.

With his new book, ‘The Country without a Post Office,’ Agha Shahid Ali becomes one of the few poets to grapple successfully with the question of exile in modern times, as he recounts his own recent travels to his indelibly transformed homeland, Kashmir.

Ali, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is a Kashmiri Muslim from Srinagar, which since 1990 has been the focus of an often brutal battle for control by both the Indian government and Muslim separatists. It is a country where, citing the Roman historian, Tacitus, Ali muses that “They make a desolation and call it peace.”

It is the sort of place where, when Ali returns to visit his ill grandmother, he finds that “the army has occupied her house, making it their dingy office, dust everywhere, on old phones, on damp files, on broken desks.” It is a home which Ali imagines that Kashmiris themselves can describe as “far even from us who live here.”

‘The Country without a Post Office’ (published by Norton for 19 U.S. dollars, 96 pages) is a look at Kashmir that is therefore both topical and metaphysical, and is equal parts autobiography, current history and poetry.

Although the volume is so personal that a powerful sense of desolation and bitterness clings to every page, it also remains a virtuoso exercise in different poetic styles, from prose poetry to almost playfully rhyming villanelles to clever attempts to replicate the classic Urdu repetitive ‘ghazal’ rhymes in English.

One of the best ghazals also comments shrewdly and wittily on the very idea of writing poetry of exile about Kashmir: “The only language of loss left in the world is Arabic–/ These words were said to me in a language not Arabic.”

Ali is wise enough to know that Kashmir, the object of three wars between India and Pakistan since 1947 and divided to this day under Indian, Pakistani and Chinese control, is a forgotten struggle. Throughout his verses, references to more prominent modern conflicts — from Bosnia to Palestine, and Chechnya to Armenia — crop up.

And yet, for Ali, Kashmir is both the most beautiful of all places and the site of the worst tragedies; it could even be the lover of whom he writes, “I am everything you lost. You can’t forget me./ I am everything you lost. Your perfect enemy.”

The poet wants Kashmir to be at peace; he wishes for people of all religions to celebrate a “perfect day, perfect for forgetting God.” But God is always there, a very real presence in Ali’s poems, and so is the reality of the rift between Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims, made clearest when he recognises a Kashmiri colonel as “My lost friend Vir! Srinagar is his city, too, he wouldn’t have ordered its burning. It’s not him.”

Ali’s poetry in fact shows how almost all the everyday objects associated with Kashmir — paisley, saffron, the green threads which both the region’s Hindus and Muslims wear when visiting Sufi shrines — embody both the beauty and tragedy of Kashmir.

For example, the best saffron — the paste of which is used for Hindu ceremonies — is said to come from Kashmir; yet Ali also writes, in a metaphor referring to desecrations of Hindu temples, “In the heart’s veined temple all statues have been smashed./ No priest in saffron’s left to toll its knell tonight.”

Similarly, although wearing green threads at Sufi shrines is a practise which unites Hindu and Muslim alike (both believe that it may help to make wishes come true), the poems assert that the threads will not work anymore.

In the most complex combination of the political and spiritual themes that permeate the poems, Ali at one point stares at Kashmir from an overhead plane, and cannot decide if he is witnessing the beauty of the fall leaves or the 1995 burning of a Muslim shrine in Charar-e-Sharief. He can’t tell if “those smashed golds flying past those petrified/ reds are autumn’s last crimsoned spillage//rushing with wings down a mountainside/ or flames clinging to a torched village.”

Here too, you will find a poem in memory of Hans Christian Ostro, a tourist killed by the militant Muslim ‘al-Faran’ guerrillas; a eulogy to a fondly-remembered Srinagar cinema, burned down by the Indian troops; and a commemoration of the death of his friend Rizwan. Throughout, Ali maintains a poetic voice balanced between a calm regret and a growing understanding of the world’s horrors.

Yet if the content of the poetry is sombre, the lingering effect of it is actually partly hopeful: even after destruction, Ali suggests, home can be reclaimed through imagination and an appreciation for all humanity. Palestinian critic Edward Said says of the book, “This is poetry whose appeal is universal, its voice unerringly eloquent.” Through that voice, a Kashmir some may think lost comes back to life, in all its pain and glory.