Mir Liyaqat
Research
scholar
Pune
University
Loss and longing are universal
human passions which are predominantly active in sensitive souls that always
try to find vent into something more glorious and charming. The etymological
meaning of word ‘loss’ according to the Oxford Advanced learners dictionary is
the state of no longer having something or as much of something; the process
that leads to this or the disadvantage that is caused when somebody leaves or
when a useful or valuable object is taken away; a person who causes
disadvantage by leaving. In literary nomenclature, essence of loss is indeed a
complex phenomenon and its thematic interpretations are embedded with
psychological, emotional, artistic, social and realistic approaches. The sense
of loss originates from a situation of doubt or when “a man is capable of being
in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact
and reason”, as stated by the John Keats. Long back, Johann wolf won Goethe in
his essay, “escape from ideas”, interpreted the state of doubt with reference
to both human beings and work of art. A sense of loss, no doubt, is deeply
related to the state of unconsciousness which passes through various psychological
processes. On the other hand, Longing is a sense of hope and desire which is
like a fire that sets action aflame. The same sense is expressed by emotions
such as "craving" or "hankering". When a person desires
something or someone, their sense of longing is excited by the enjoyment or the
thought of item or person, and they want to take actions to obtain their
goal.
Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001) a
Kashmiri-American Diasporic poet who was born in 1949 at Delhi but was brought
up in Kashmir, the land to which he had a deep sense of belonging. He died of
brain cancer in December, 2001 and was buried in Northampton, Massachusetts. He
authored several collections of poetry, including 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 Himalyaas
(1987). In Memory to Begum Akhter and other poems (1979), and Bone and Sculpture
(1972). He was the author of T.S Eliot as editor (1986), translator of The Rebel’s Silhouette: selected poems by Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1992)
and editor of Revisiting Disunities: real
Ghazal in English (2000).
Shahid can favorably be compared
with other “Regional” writers like Seamus Heaney from Ireland, Derek Walcott
from the Caribbean and Mahmoud Dervish from Palestine, whose art is surcharged
with the politics of their native countries. What these writers share is a
rootedness in place and native landscape. The Palestinian critic, Edward Said comments:
“this is poetry whose appeal is universal, its voice unerringly eloquent.”1
Ali writes his poetry which pleads of the great loss of his mother and
motherland, friends and foreign land, his beloved, Kashmir and his love for
life. Though a poet of great sensibilities he portrays gloom and loss. To him
the sense of loss and longing constituted the basic condition for poetry. It
underlines the reality that poet normally thrive on the themes of separation, absence,
exile and loss. In the case of Ali it was both in his spirit and blood. To him
the loss and longing appear as a metaphor for his beloved which he willingly
embraces and keeps as his constant companion. This also makes him a poet of
distinction while he thematizes one experience to another by providing poetic
virgin to each expression. This poetic art becomes his distinguished gift with
which he is able to look into the depth of loss and longing, and completely
gets immersed in its unending charm and prefers to remain in that ‘ magic
casement’ forever. In this figuring of his homeland, he himself became one of
the images that were spinning around the dark point of stillness—both shahid
and shahed, witness and martyr—his destiny inextricably linked with Kashmir’s,
each prefigured by the other.
I will die, in autumn, in
Kashmir,
and the shadowed routine of each
vein
will almost be news, the blood
censored,
for the Saffron Sun and the Times
of Rain. …
All the volumes of Agha Shahid
Ali remain replete with poetic expressions of displacement, exile and longing
to come back to the place of belonging i.e. the valley of Kashmir. These images
come to the fore in his writings when the poet conceptualizes the loss of
lovers, home, country and the memory itself. Right from his first collection of
poems, Bone-Sculpture, we can see the
sense of loss and longing in one form or another. In this collection, he
depicts and structures the pangs of separation without revealing to himself and
others the details of his personal circumstances which took him away from his
homeland. Ali’s next collection, A Walk
Through the Yellow Pages, lifts the poet from the sense of loss and
destruction to enjoy a slightly lighter vein. He experimented with different
styles from bathroom graffiti to restaurant menus and the dialogue interactive
form. However, in spite of all this there exists cynical poetic loss at the
back of his mind. But the sense of loss and longing gets highly personalized in
the volume, In Memory of Begum Akhtar.
Here we find his emotional loss coming to the fore. Begum Akhtar; a Kashmiri
female singer used to sing ghazals of Mirza Galib and Faiz Ahmad Faiz in the
drawing room of his house in Kashmir.
In the Half- Inch-Himalayas, Ali’s sense of loss and longing takes another
dimension of his nostalgic feelings. Here he focuses on a specific situation,
when he wrote about the loss and this loss had a name---India, Kashmir and his
own clan Agha family in Kashmir. Ali’s first love was Kashmir, be in New Delhi,
Pennsylvania or Amherst, his pen never failed writing about the loss of men,
meadow and material of the beautiful valley, Kashmir. Poem after poem be it “ Postcard from Kashmir,” “The Snowman,” “ Prayer Rug,”
“ Cracked Portrait,” “Story of a Silence,” Ali’s heart always
remained full of his beloved Kashmir. The theme of loss and longing takes on a
diversed form in a Nostalagist’s Map of
America, a situation of an escape from reality when he faces all-round
uncertainty in a foreign land. It deals with his status as an immigrant on the
soil of U.S.A and depicts a sorrowful state of mind when he faces the death of
his friend, Philip Paul Orlando, who was suffering from a dreadful disease. In
the poem Ali frames the texts with an epigraph, “What have you known of lost?
That makes you different from other men?” and the recurrent theme of love and
longing that prevails almost in every poem of Ali as in ‘The Season of Plains’ he writes ‘their utter summer, messages pass
between lovers. Heeer and Ranja and others of legends, their love forbidden,
burned incense all night waiting for answers…’
In The Country without a Post Office, Agha Shahid Ali’s sense of loss
and longing reaches its climax, where Kashmir becomes the centre stage of his
thoughts. The very title of anthology is suggestive of the complete and
all-pervasive sense of loss for the poet. It’s a look on Kashmir that is,
current history and poetry in the sense that the people of Kashmir are still
for the democracy in real sense. It brings on forefront the feelings of the
people their pain, suffering and anguish. They are still waiting for the day
when their pain would come to an end, whatever the people of Kashmir have
experienced in the past decades, the bloodshed, losing the dear and losing the
peace for which Kashmir was known. In the 1990’s for seven months, there was no
mail delivered in Kashmir, because of political unrest and violence. A friend
of the poet’s father watched the post office from his house, as mountains of
letters piled up. One day, he walked over to the piles and picked a letter from
the top of one, discovering that it was from Ali’s father and addressed to him.
He mourns the devastation that has visited on his childhood home, Kashmir which
once called the paradise on earth In the poem “I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight” he writes, “Drippings
from a suspended burning tire, are falling on the back of a prisoner, the naked
boy screaming, “I know nothing” (13-15). As post office symbolizes a particular
address and an identity of a specific person who lives in a country and at the
same time the absence of it means an eclipse of his existence from the world,
such a situation becomes unbearable for the poet and therefore laments his
despair throughout the narrative of the poem. It was in The Country without a Post Office
that rediscovered his Kashmir connection and helped paint an unbiased
image of the plight of the people of the vale before the world. Agha Shahid Ali
offered a speaking portrayal of Kashmir from the days of Haba Khatun to the
recent days. In predominantly elegiac tone, Ali draws parallels between
Sarajevo and ancient Greece and offers a series of speaking sketches of terror
and torture. But Ali is still hopeful that the conditions in Kashmir will
become normal. In the same poem in the end he writes, “I’ve tied a knot, with
green thread at Shah Hamdan, to be, united only when the atrocities, are stunned
by your jeweled return” (52-55). Shah Hamdan is a shrine in Kashmir where both
Hindus and Muslims tie knots with green thread. It is a kind of ritual which is
supposed to bring peace and love between the two communities. Though Ali writes
about loss but he is a poet with hope. In all his writings, he ends on a
positive note. He is hopeful that one day everything will be normal.
The Rooms
Are Never Finished, convey the vast range of the sense of loss that make
him to traverse or pass through a series of sad happenings. This collection was
nominated as finalist for National Book Award in America. It dealt with his
personal loss or devastation, his mother’s death and the subsequent journey of
her dead body back to Kashmir where she wished to be buried.
Ali’s last collection, Call Me Ishmael Tonight, adds a mythical dimensions to the theme of
loss and longing. Based on the Biblical it is a book of ghazals in English. Ali
worked assiduously to establish a place in American literature for the formal
discipline of the ghazals and in a typical Faiz Ahmad Faiz style and with
publishing of this book he was been able to achieve that place. In this
collection he has made references to the Quranic version of the Abraham parable
but with a slight difference where in Quran, Ishmael has been shown willing to
be sacrificed but here it’s the elder Ishmael rather than Isaac who is called
as the sacrifice of God. Being an ardent advocate of ghazals, he firmly
believed that the rules of the ghazals should be clear and classically
stringent.
Conclusion
Thus Ali’s poetry casts its craft
and concern upon histories of loss, longing, injustice and brutality
particularly those endured by Kashmir weaving simultaneously the threads of individual’s
experience and that of people close to him. Ali challenged himself to form a
consummate original art and consciousness in order to struggle against the
factors which inevitably work to create a sense of loss in his personal,
social, emotional and intellectual involvements especially in the state of
Kashmir that for him remains an alter ego, and a rich source of inspiration for
creative purpose. It’s in this perspective of the tragedy of his birthplace
that Ali writes, “A pastoral,” in
which he seems to be burning with desire and longing for peace in Kashmir.
We shall meet again, in Srinagar,
By the gates of the villa of
peace,
Our hands blossoming into fists
Till the soldiers return the keys
and disappear. Again we will enter
Our last world, the first that
vanished
In our absence from the broken
city.
REFERENCES
Edward Said, Tributes (Kashmir:
Agha Shahid Ali Foundation, 2002) 46.
Ali,Agha Shahid. Bone- Sculpture.
Arizona: SUN. Gemini Press, Inc, 1972.
---. In Memory Of Begum Akhtar.
Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1979.
¬---. A Walk Through The Yellow
Pages. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1987.
---.The Half-Inch Himalayas.
Pennsylvania, U.S: Wesleyan University Press, 1987.
---.A Nostalgist’s Map of
America. New York, U.S: W.W.Norton and Company, Inc, 1991.
Ali, Agha Shahid. 1997. The
Country Without a Post Office. New York, U.S: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
---. Call Me Ishamael Tonight.
New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004.
