Agha Shahid Ali; the poetry of loss and longing

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.