Chapter II

Agha Shahid Ali and his Kashmir Agony.

The chapter will attempt to discuss All's relationship with his home, Kashmir,

vis-a-vis his life in diaspora. It will further try to show how, with the rise of violence in

Kashmir, his attitude towards homeland changes from memory to mourning. The chapter

will further try to discuss All's poetry in the light of Carolyn Forche's concept of the

Poetry of Witness.

Diaspora as a term has become ubiquitous in our day; and like many other

concepts it also dates back to the Greeks. For them diaspora was horticulture term

"derived from the Greek verb speiro (to sow) and the preposition dia (over)" (Cohen

viii), referring to the scattering and dispersal of seeds. The term was later used for human

migration as this "etymology of seeds and sperm as carriers of both culture and

reproductive capacity is central to this description of diaspora, too" (Kalra, Kaur, and

Hutnyk 9). But diaspora until the recent past has been specifically used for Jewish

displacement when they were forcefiilly exiled from Babylon in the 6* century BC by

Nebuchadnezzar II. But with the advent of globalization, migration is the norm and

people willingly travel in search of a job, an education, a business etc. making the term

more general. Diaspora, in simple words, as an anthropological term, can be defined as

dispersal or migration of a people, by will or force, from its homeland, where the reason

may be business, war, natural disaster, forced labour, finding a job, pursuit of better

education etc. This dispersal results in desire, separation, nostalgia, and inclination

towards homeland; and this nostalgic condition for the roots is one of the peculiarities of

diaspora. Home thus becomes a centre of focus and it haunts like anything. Yet, it is more

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of an abstract idea which doesn't have a particurSf^^fWrtignifier: it could be a faint

image of memories in the mind, a past that will no more return, loss of something that

cannot be gained, in short, it is something more than a house which we miss in exile, and

which we feel like a hunch or an inkling. As Lim puts it "'Home'...could be a domestic

site of comfort and security... [or] mythic homeland left behind... [or] multilocal, yet it

is, paradoxically, never fiilly ours for all times ... [and] Lacan would call "the never-

here," since "it is here when I search there; [and] it is there when I am here" (xiii).

Diasporic writers idealize home like a beloved who is praised like a beautiful

woman, cruel when wooed, and lost when searched; therefore, never to return. Home thus

becomes centre of writer's imagination and nothing substitutes it; or it becomes, as Avtar

Brah would say, "... a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination" (Brah

188).Writers in exile try to rebuild the lost home through their creative energies; and

through their engagement with letters and words they try to substitute it with the house of

bricks and stones. Amato notes that "Home is the site of natural epiphanies: the sky and

the earth touch in a certain way, horizons are vast or impeded, light has a certain quality

of radiance, rain comes in steady drizzles or downpours" (17).

Agha Shahid AH, being an emigre living in America, feels the same way about his

lost home, Kashmir. "Postcard fi-om Kashmir" is one of the exemplary diasporic poems.

In the poem AH tries to view his past, present and the future relationship with home; and

the relationship and engagement is via memory, where the poem, as Ramazani notes,

"suggests that memory and artifice transform the very past he pursues" (602). He further

says that "The postcolonial poem, like a postcard, risks miniaturizing, idealizing and

ultimately displacing the remembered native landscape." (603)

55
 Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox;

my home a neat four by six inches.

I always loved neatness. Now I hold

the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.

This is home. And this the closest

I'll ever be to home. When I return,

the colours won't be so brilliant,

the Jhelum's waters so clean,

so ultramarine. My love

so overexposed.

And my memory will be a little

out of focus, in it

a giant negative, black

and white, still underdeveloped. (AH, The Veiled 29)

Kashmir's shrinking in the mailbox for Ali is attenuation of Kashmir as an artifice

or illustration in the mind which is imagined, created and unreal, but always there to

enable the writer to be ever home. Image is based on distant memory which is blurred

and when the writer will revisit the "imagined community" he will be shocked to see the

contrast between the real and the imagined. Imagined is idyllic, pristine and beautiful, but

reality is that Jhelum won't be "so clean, so ultramarine." (Ali, The Veiled 29). The

picture in the mind through the eye of memory is like a child's fearful ghostly image,

56
which is surrealistic, and poet cannot find any descriptive metaphor to explain the

aberrant, save "a giant negative, black/ and white, still underdeveloped" (Ali, The Veiled

29). Home thus becomes a gothic or surrealistic mental image which "exists in a

fractured, discontinuous relationship with the present" (McLeod 211). All's concept of

home is similar to that of Salman Rushdie, who talks about a black and white photograph

hanging on the wall which was taken before his birth in 1946. The photograph created a

mental image of home in his mind and when he visited the house, the black and white

memory in his mind was startled to see the colourful reality:

The photograph had naturally been taken in black and white; and

my memory, feeding on such images as this, had begun to see my

childhood in the same way, monochromatically. The colours of my history

had seeped out of my mind's eye; now my other two eyes were assaulted

by colours, by the vividness of the red tiles, the yellow-edged green of

cactus-leaves, the brilliance of bougainvillaea creeper. (Rushdie 9)

Likewise, in "Prayer Rug" memories take Ali back to revisit the faith of his

grandmother and other women, and we come to know about their prayers and pilgrimage

of his grandmother to Mecca. However, between the intervals of prayers, we find women

busy "pulling thick threads/ through vegetables/ rosaries of ginger/ of rustling peppers/ in

autumn drying for winter..." (Ali, The Veiled 40). This putting of vegetables together by

threading is essential so that they will useful in harsh winters when getting fresh

vegetables become difficult. Likewise, piling up memories helps him to survive in exile,

away from home. Now away irom home he banks on stockpile of these memories which

are the only solace in homelessness; and by revisiting these archives of memory, he

57
creates beautiful poems. As Rushdie puts it: "The shards of memory acquired greater

status, greater resonance, because they were remains; fragmentation made trivia] things

seem like symbols and the mundane acquired numinous qualities" (10 ). All's memories

do not disown him but they remain with him and enable him, what Rushdie says, to

"look back in the knowledge—which gives rise to profound uncertainties— ... that we

will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary

homelands, Indias of the mind"(10). In a poem like "The Season of the Plains" All's

memories take him to the memories of his mother, when she once remembered the plains

of Lucknow in the mountainous valley of Kashmir, recollecting songs of thumri-singers

in the monsoon rains. All is mixing his memories with the memories of his mother; and

these memories, which he adapts into poems, become a kind of memorabilia which banks

on these metaphors. And "Through metaphor", as Cynthia Ozick says "the past has the

capacity to imagine us, and we it."(qtd. in Seyhan 23)

Given the particular feelings of the people in diaspora, however, the experience of

diaspora is relative: everybody has his own particular experience. As Amato says, "All

diasporas are unhappy, but every diaspora is unhappy in its own way" (1). Accordingly,

Agha Shahid All's diaspora is different in its own way. Agha Shahid All's engagement

with his home is twofold: one, like any other diasporic writer he longs for the return; and

second, it is mourning of violence and terror in his homeland, Kashmir. The poems

discussed above sketch his simple longing for home and in some other poems he laments

the violence in Kashmir.

"The Blessed Word: A Prologue" is a prologue to the book The Country Without

a Post Office, indicating what the book will be about and the events it will cover, a kind

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of "a preliminary discourse"( Prologue). The prologue tells us about the atrocities in

Kashmir, and it quotes an epigraph from Osip Mandelstam's untitled poem, 'We shall

meet again in Petersburg." Mandelstam (1891-1938), was a Russian poet and essayist,

during Stalin's rule (1927-1953) in the Soviet Union. He was an anti-conformist and

wrote against Joseph Stalin's dictatorial rule during which more than twenty million

people were killed, many of whom were starved to death, and more than a million

executed for opposing the government rule. He was detained for being "anti-government"

in May 1938 and sent to five year imprisonment where he died of starvation the same

year.

Thus, AH juxtaposes violence under Stalin's rule in Russia in the 1930s with the

atrocities in Kashmir in the 1990s. Here Ali is not merely parodying Mandelstam's

poem, but he is also trying to bring the point home by hinting towards the catastrophe in

Russia so as to portray, for his readers, the sheer height of tragedy in Kashmir. He quotes

the Quran as a second epigraph to the poem (the verse which speaks about the

resurrection) to sketch the image of apocalypse by juxtaposing it with the biblical

apocalyptic image "buried sun" (Mandelstam) used by Mandelstam. The would-be-

apocalypse promised by the scriptures, for Ali, seems to have already captured Srinagar,

and Petersburg having already gone through it.'

All's promise to meet his friend, Irfan, seems to remain unftilfilled as he has made

"it in Mandelstam's velvet dark, in the black void." (Ali, The Veiled 171) Thus Srinagar

like Soviet is now black and dark due to atrocities, to the extent that "When you leave in

the morning, you never know you'll return" (Ali, The Veiled 171); which is a daily

tragedy in Kashmir, now. Now grief of Habba Khatun, 16* century Kashmiri poet, Ali

59
feels, becomes everybody's grief; and everybody seems to sing her poignant longings

which "hills have reechoed for four hundred years" ( AH, The Veiled 172) and have

passed from generations through oral tradition— a hallmark of Kashmiri poetic culture.

In henna I have dyed my hands.

When will he come?

I die, while he roams distant lands.

My heart is numb!

O, where is now the day's delight?

I've waited long. (Khatoon)

Mandelstam "invents Petersburg and [Ali] invents Srinagar an imaginary

homeland"; (Ali, The Veiled 172) imaginary for Mandelstam because Petersburg is no

more there, neither in name nor as a capital and revolution has made it worse. "No

writer", says Berman, "was more obsessed with Petersburg's passing away, or more

determined to remember what was lost, than Osip Mandelstam." (272). For Ali Srinagar

is imaginary because he is living in the US (imaginary homeland from Rushdie), and he

imagines the destruction and catastrophe of the city in diaspora.

Structure of "The Prologue" is quite different from the structure of other poems in

the book. It is a prose poem, written as prose with all necessary elements of poetry like

rhythm, rhyme, repetition, imagery etc. Juxtaposition with Mandelstam's poem has an

important role to play in the structure of the prose poem, i.e. to create a poetic effect, as

Bertens remarks that "Parallelism and juxtaposing go hand in hand to create a 'poetic'

effect in a prose text" (48). The poem is divided into five parts. Part I introduces

Mandelstam's untitled poem and we come to know about Petersburg, its velvet void and

60
velvet darkness. Petersburg is juxtaposed with Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, the latter

reflecting what the former has already gone through in the 1930s. In first section of the

part II he cries in the void, the way he can pronounce the name of his motherland,

Kashmir— may be some one hears in the void. The different ways he cries in the void

reflect his desperate longing and lament for the tragedy in his motherland.

Let me cry out in that void, say it as I can. I write on that void:

kashmir, Kaschmir, Cashmere, Qashmir, Cashmir, Cashmire,

Kashmere, Cachemire, Cushmeer, Cachmiere, Casmir. Or Cauchemar

in a sea of stories? Or: Kacmir, Kaschemir, Kasmere, Kachmire,

Kasmir. Kerseymere? (Ali, The Veiled 171).

Geetha Dore comments on the All's cry in the void:

The homophonic play with the name "Kashmir" ... is at

once a childish sputtering symbolically manipulating the presence and

absence of the mother figure, a loud and repeated cry from depth of adult

poet's soul that echoes in the valley.... (Dore 37)

In second section of the Part II, he compares the condition of Srinagar with the

bleak portrayal of Petersburg by Osip Mandelstam, quoting almost half of the

Mandelstam's poem in indirect speech. In Part III, he does away with Mandelstam and

Petersburg, and Srinagar becomes the point of focus. The astrological imagery used by

Mandelstam, however continues here and "Guns shoot stars into the sky, the storm of

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constellations night after night" continues. It's proximity on Earth (Srinagar), is sketched

through the reference to curfew, identity pass, crackdown, torture etc. AH alludes to the

Quranic story in which God "must melt sometimes" to save Ibrahim's son Ishmael (AH,

The Veiled 172). The day is celebrated by Muslims as Id-uz-Zuha, but in Kashmir the

festival is marked by curfew, and unlike Ishmael's miraculous escape, parents in Kashmir

are no prophets, and consequently, "Son after son- never to return fi-om the night of

torture- was taken away." (AH, The Veiled 172). Part IV talks about the blessed word,

Habba Khatoun, and the continuing atrocities, with allusions to Mandelstam continuing.

Allusions continue in the part V where "Srinagar hunches like a wild cat" (AH, The

Veiled 173). The poem ends with a hope that Kashmiris will surely sometime in future

speak the blessed word for the first time. "The blessed word with no meaning" (AH, The

Veiled 173) might refer to Kashmir's yearning for "those days of peace when we all were

in love and the rain was in our hands wherever we went" (AH, The Veiled 195). It could

also mean a peaceful solution to the issue. It can mean anything as "Mandelstam gives no

clue" (AH, The Veiled 174). It can be what Marshall Berman says: "The "blessed word

with no meaning" is surely "Petersburg" itself, which has been emptied of meaning by

"the black velvet void" of the Soviet night" (Berman 273).

Given Agha Shahid All's angry and poignant response to the bloodshed in

Kashmir, his engagement with home, particularly with reference to violence and counter

violence, seems to be, to a large extent, nationalistic. His nationalistic inclination,

however, is not chauvinistic, but a natural inclination of love towards his homeland. As

Portuguli would tell us that the "main elements of nationalism are 'territory, place and

environment' (i.e. spatial entities) in relation to people and their collective memories (i.e.

62
temporal memories)" (qtd in Schulz and Hammer 15). Ali's spatial memories hover

around Srinagar, river Jhelum, the Dal Lake, Saffron fields etc. Similarly, his temporal

entities are engaged with the memories of family, childhood etc. But, with the rise of

violence in Kashmir, his spatial vision shifts from beautiful and pristine image of the

homeland to the horror of bloodshed in Srinagar; and his temporal entities now imagine

the "naked boy screaming"( Ali, The Veiled 174 ), "emptied Srinagar" ( AH, The Veiled

174 ), "homes set ablaze" ( AH, The Veiled 175 ). Thus the mood of his poems changes

from song to suffering in diaspora.

"The Last Saffron" is one such poem in which he mixes song and suffering. Here

Ali recollects both sweet memories and the ongoing harsh conditions in Kashmir;

moreover, he is obsessed with a desire to die in Kashmir. The poem opens with the line "1

will die, in autumn, in Kashmir" (Ali, The Veiled 181). The poem was published in 1997,

four years before he showed his desire to die in Kashmir in a chat with Amitav Ghosh, "I

would like to go back to Kashmir to die" (319). His desire to die in his homeland

explains his love and affection towards it. The poem is divided in three parts; part first

deals with his desire to go back to his homeland and ecstasy of his return. Describing

places like zero Taxi stand, Gridlays bank etc. show his love for the city of hss birth,

Srinagar. There is a mixed mood of happiness of the return and terrible situation in

Kashmir where he tries to "look for any sign of blood/in captions under the photos of

boys, / . . . killed in fluted waters..." (Ali, The Veiled 181).

Part II and III of the poem deal with Ali's obsession with death. The poem

mingles past, present and the fiiture, built around poet's memories and imagination. Part

III deals with the actual death that will take place in future, in Kashmir, "Yes, 1 remember

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it, /the day I will die" (AH, The Veiled 182). He seems to juxtapose his death with the

killing of boys whom he laments in part I of the poem. The poem ends with a famous

couplet which Jahangir (the Mughal Emperor) spoke when he had a first glimpse of

Kashmir. "If there is heaven on earth/ it is this, it is this, it is this" (AH, The Veiled 183).

The couplet takes him to the idyllic past which is heavenly, but this past is also burdened

with terrible history of oppression, therefore he finds the present as an outcome of the

history of the successive oppressive rule.^

Agha Shahid AH notifies us with a historical fact that since the invasion of Akbar

in the 16* century "Kashmir has never been free" (AH, The Veiled 173); and the

invasion, as Schofield notes, marks "the beginning of Kashmir's modem history" (3).

The rule does not end with the end of Mughals but, as Agha shahid AH writes, it led to

the "future / into wars of succession," (AH, The Veiled 224) which further led "an era

into/ another dynasty's bloody arms" (AH, The Veiled 224). That was the rule of

Afghans, Sikhs and Dogras.^ In addition, in the post 1947, Kashmir has been a flash point

of war, and in the post-1990s, with the rise in militancy, situation has worsen with

thousands of people dead. Sumantra Bose sums up the post 1947 scenario: "For the last

six decades Kashmir has been a paradise lost, its people trapped in the vortex of a bitter

sovereignty dispute between India and Pakistan over their lives and land" (154). AH

writes in the context of this troubled history and bloody present of Kashmir, sketching

pain and tribulations.

Nevertheless, Agha Shahid AH struggles with the subject matter of his poetry: he

tries to grapple with the question whether he should continue to sing of the beauties and

happy times in Kashmir, or should he write the songs of suffering, "of what shall I sing/

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and not sing" (AH, The Veiled 241). Ali chooses the latter, as Ghosh would say that he

did not take the role of victim which could have been easily his (318). Therefore, he

writes back. However, Ali was not a political activist but, as Ghosh would tell us, he was

a "secular left leaning intellectual of the Nehruvian era" (314). Ali himself acknowledged

in a chat with Ghosh that he would rather be a national than a nationalistic poet (318).

Although, he was not nationalistic in the strict sense of the word, but was resistant to the

violence in Kashmir. Therefore, in the description of the apocalypse in his poetry there

are, nevertheless, undercurrents of resistance. Schulz and Hammer say about resistance in

diaspora that "Nationalism in diasporic settings is, rather, to be seen as strategy of

resistance by the marginalized." (17). Likewise, as Eliot says that no art 'is more

stubbornly national than poetry" (qtd in Ramazani 597). Therefore, to find this national

perspective of resistance in his poetry is quite natural.

The term "Resistance Literature" was first used by Ghassan Kanafani in his book

Literature of Resistance in the Occupied Palestine: 1948-1966. Resistance literature

represents an "arena of struggle" (Harlow 8) for the people who are fighting and resisting

the authority and oppression. Resistance Literature cannot be pigeonholed as propaganda

literature; it is fairly a struggle with pen. It is not only a struggle against the apparent

oppression, but against the oppression of negative representation or the absence of

representation by power structures like media which, in the twenty first century, has

become one of the most powerful tool for the authority. Thus Ali's poetry is to be seen in

this context where he tries to resist the atrocities by penning them down and pining for

hope.

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 "I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight", one of the most poignant poems in

the anthology The country Without a Post Office, is one such example of resistance in his

poetry; where Agha Shahid Ali tries to imagine violence in Kashmir, in diaspora. He

talks about the curfewed night in which shadow of a boy "is running away to find its

body" (Ali, The Veiled 178). There is no body but shadow which turns into nothing

inside interrogation centre where we can only hear a cry '"1 know nothing"' (Ali, The

Veiled 178). Ali tries to give us a glimpse of interrogations Kashmiri boys underwent

which have been ghastly and full of horror, as they were subjected to unbearable

conditions like staying in the light for the days together, electric shocks etc.

Rizwan suggests to Ali: '"Each night put Kashmir in your dreams"' (Ali, The

Veiled 179), and he has, in fact, tried to do the same in The Country. Rizwan, who has

been "cold a long time now" (Ali, The Veiled 179) tells Ali not to tell his father that he

has died: '"Don't tell my father I have died'" (Ali, The Veiledl79). This is one of the

most pathetic lines of the poem, in view of the fact, that even today, some parents in

Kashmir seek to know whereabouts of their children, given the number of the

disappeared to be about eight thousand (Essa). Similarly "pairs of shoes the mourners" is

from a historical incident, when, after the assassination of Molvi Farooq, mourners were

fired upon and they left hundreds pairs of shoes (pic. at Faheen58).

... I follow him through blood on the road

and hundreds of pairs of shoes the mourners

left behind, as they ran from the funeral,

victims of the firing. From windows we hear

grieving mothers, and snow begins to fall

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 on us, like ash.( AH, The Veiled 179)

Snow falling like ash projects a very apocalyptic image: it can be literally falling

of snow during winters, and ashes could be from the burning houses, set afire b) soldiers.

It could also be, as Faheen says, "a reference to a scene in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's

List where ash flying from the burning bodies of Jews appears for a moment as snow"

(58). It sketches an image of holocaust and apocalypse.

Agha Shahid Ali, while writing the poem, seems to have a mind of winter as he is

echoes Wallace Stevens' poem "The Snow Man". The poem has the same mood: it is set

in winter and we find a lot of references to snow, ice and cold juxtaposing harsh climatic

conditions with the terrible repression.

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs (Stevens)

One must wear jeweled ice in dry plains

To will the distant mountains to glass (Ali, The Veiled 178)

Likewise we also find references to other things in the poem like "His hands

crusted with snow" (Ali, The Veiled 179),"! have been cold a long, long time" (Ali, The

Veiled 178), "it shrinks almost into nothing, is/ nothing by interrogation gates"( Ali, The

Veiled 179). They have their echo from Stevens' following verses "Of the pine-trees

crusted with snow;" "And have been cold a long time", "who listens in the snow, And,

nothing himself'(Stevens).

Perkins says about "The Snowman" that it "embodies Stevens' central theme, the

relation between imagination and reality. ... Perhaps the snowman beheld nothmg only

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because he was "nothing himself," AH also talks about imagining: "to will the distant

mountains to glass" (Ali, The Veiled 178) because when he "see[s] Kashmir from New

Delhi at Midnight" (Ali, The Veiled 178) he imagines rather sees the violence. Perkins

says about Stevens' poem "We may note that the poem posits two types of listener. One

would hear a "misery in the sound of the wind. ... The other listener would hear nothing

more than the sound of the wind" (Stevens). All's poem also has two persons, one who

faces the reality, and other who imagines the reality; one who cries "I know nothing",

other is who imagines the cry from the far-off place. Rizwan represents the former and

Ali represents the latter.

In 'I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight', Rizwan is depicted as a

shadow, roaming the streets of Srinagar, searching for his body. The boy's

troubled ghost witnesses further atrocities, such as the torturing of a

prisoner by dripping molten tyre on his back. Intimations are given that

Rizwan is the poet's double; his Other, who stayed in Kashmir and was

killed. Shadows also intimate menace and threat, as with the shadowy

figures of the Indian security forces, but also the shadows of boys

'disappeared' from their homes, their bodies never found.(Chambers)

Rizwan is an Arabic word which means gate keeper of paradise, and with his

death, paradise on earth, Kashmir remain dilapidated, consequently in search of peace.

Rizwan was a teenager, son of Molvi Abdul Hai, to whom the poem has been dedicated.

He went to cross the border in the early 1990s and got killed on the border while coming

back. He is among those unburied boys who never returned. His father later on built a

college in memory of his son, named Rizwaan College of Education, where the poor are

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given free education (Nayeem). Ali laments his deatli referring to the tomb of a saint,

where the restless shadow which was "running away to find its body" (Ali, The Veiled

178), must be resting after it could not find its bullet-torn body, which remains unburied

on a mountain.

... where has your shadow fallen, like cloth

on the tomb of which saint, or body

of which unburied boy in the mountains,

bullet-torn, like you, his blood sheer rubies

on the Himalayan snow (Ali, The Veiled 180)

Mirza Waheed's novel The Collaborator talks about the boys who met such fate.

Towards the end of the novel, nameless narrator of the novel bums the dead bodies of the

boys who are rotting near the borders. He talks about many such boys.

Boys from the city, boys from the village, boys from towns, boys from

saffron fields, boys from the mountains, boys from the plains; rich boys,

poor boys, only-child boys, and boys with sisters at home; weak boys,

strong boys, big boys, small boys, singer boys, thinker boys, lonesome

boys, naked boys, scared boys, martyr boys, brave boys, guerrilla boys,

commander boys, soyeth winnable sidekick boys, orphan boys, unknown

boys and famous boys, boys— ...(Waheed 298)

Rizwan represents them all: all the boys of Kashmir who went missing, who were

interrogated, who died while crossing the border and others. At last Ali ties a knot with

green thread at Shah Hamdan's shrine, only to be untied when the atrocities end.

69
 Agha Shahid All's poetry can also be read from Forche's perspective of the

Poetry of Witness: a kind of poetry that gives us a different version of some happening

which the harsh times fail to provide. Carolyn Forche's anthology Against Forgetting:

Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, 1993 is a massive collection (812 pages) of about

145 poets from around the orld which took her 13 years to compile. The poems cover

the events like two World Wars, the Holocaust, struggles in the Soviet, South Asia,

Africa, Middle East, Vietnam, the US, China, etc. The poems bear witness to the

catastrophic events like genocide, prosecutions, terror, torture, exile, tyranny and

repression around the world over a period of years. The volume has been very much

praised; Weinberger calls it "The Quran of the witness subgenre" (Weinberger), and

Nelson Mandela calls it as "itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against

injustice" (qtd. in Weinberger). First part of the title, Against Forgetting, implores us not

to forget the past, so that the gory events of history may oblige us to resist the inhuman

events likely to happen in the future. Poetry of witness, the second part of the title, asks

us to bear witness to the ruthless happenings of the past, which would certainly be piled

up in the books of history and journalism; but poetry provides us an alternative to visit it

in touching and compassionate way, so as to empathize with the fellow sufferers of

history. Poetry at the same time describes the events poignantly, therefore, emotionally

attracts the reader; as a result, endowing with experience which the history is not able to

offer.

Agha Shahid Ali through his poetry is trying to do the same: foregrounding

violence and bearing witness to the events which might be forgotten when the events of

bloodshed end. During the troubled times in Kashmir most of the news would focus on

70
the city, Srinagar and news from the villages would get lost, and most of the times it was

delayed or failed to make in the local newspapers. Oppression of the military was

sometimes full of terror and horror in the villages, and there was nobody to record the

human rights violations. Ali, in the following lines, tries to portray or witness the state of

violence in the villages:

Rumors break on their way to us in the city. But word still reaches

us from the border towns: Men are forced to stand barefoot in snow

waters all night. The women are alone inside. Soldiers smash radios

and televisions. With their bare hands they tear our houses into pieces

(Ali, The Veiled 194).

Ali tries to present a scene of border areas where grave human rights violations

like target killing, fake encounters, etc were rife; the dead would be later on buried in the

unmarked graves about which the Amenesty report came in 2011. (Thousands Lost) Ali

would record it as following: "the dust still uneasy on hurried graves/ with no names, like

all new ones in the city?" (Ali, The Veiled 196). All's poetry, therefore, records the

events in the times of terrible disaster and sketches the violence with utmost gloom.

When he puts the scream of a naked boy, "I know nothing" (Ali, The Veiled 176) in

writing, he in fact records the voice of the boy whose voice was silenced by the severe

interrogation. When we read the poem, it seems that we must listen to the cry as sound

recording rather than line on a page. It plays in our ears long after the cry has vanished

into thin air, forgotten as if it never existed. The poem obligates us to remember.

71
 Therefore, we are supposed to approach the witness poetry in such a way that it

surfaces the elements hidden or forgotten, that is, to delve deep with a certain bent of

mind. Forche herself tells us something about it when asked what really poetry of

witness means? She says that it "had been written out of conditions of extremity. The

phrase suggests a mode of reading rather than of writing. It is a way of considering a

poem in the context of the poet's experience." (Forche, by Erin) Therefore, by giving

such remarks, she makes reading a political act, suggesting an active involvement rather

than passive reading i.e. reading with historical sense and humanistic vision.

Agha Shahid All's poem "A History of Paisley" is one such example which is to

be read or approached from historic and political sense. The poem apparently talks about

a myth regarding Hindu god Shiva and her consort Parvati who reconciled after a quarrel,

which Shiva commemorated by carving river Jehlum in the paisley shaped Ali, however,

is implicitly foregrounding the violence in Kashmir in the backdrop of the myth. While

talking about anklets of Parvati he juxtaposes it with men fleeing from soldiers: "... her

anklets/ still echoing in the valley, deaf to men/ fleeing from soldiers into dead-end

lanes"( Ali, The Veiled 218). Trails of blood on streets formed by feet in blood also form

paisleys, and they appear like carpet at dusk in backdrop of dim light. This suggests

awfulness of Mughal diadem which is being reinvented by the soldiers. But people turn

blind eye to the atrocities and do not "hear bullets drowning out the bells of her anklets"

(Ali, The Veiled 219). The sound of anklets, which is replaced by bullets now, is a relic

of Parvati'*; a relic which holds a position of devotion and attachment is now replaced by

a sign of terror and horror.

72
 Language is an important tool for writing: it is the use of language which makes a

work of art peculiar in some sense; like Romantic poetry is lyrical, absurd writing is full

of silences and ellipsis, etc. Same is the case with Forche's anthology where language is

fractured and broken; it seems that writers have struggled to deal with language as they

have not been able to articulate the thought fully.

Forche' identifies fragmented language as the binding feature of her

anthology. She notes that the fragment, neither new to poetry nor limited

to poetry of witness, "gains urgency in the face of extremity." Extremity

leads to "shattered, exploded, or splintered narrative. The story cannot

travel over the chasm of time and space. Violence has rendered it

unspeakable" (Twentieth-century)

"Return to Harmony 3" by Agha Shahid All is one of the finest examples of the

Poetry of Witness. The poem is fragmented and according to Forche fragmentation of a

poem is one of the distinctive features of the poetry of witness. The poem talks about "the

fate of Paradise" (Ali, The Veiled 199) when he "eavesdrop[s] on Operation Tiger'"

(taken from Bosnian catastrophe, which he has sketched painfully in the poem "The

Correspondent"). He listens to the terrible fiiture that "Troops will bum down the garden

and let the haven remain" (Ali, The Veiled 199). Kashmir has become a house which has

been put "under a spell" (Ali, The Veiled 199) by a bunker where Big B is always

watching you: "Shadowed eyes watch me open the gate, like a trespasser" (Ali, The

Veiled 199); and one becomes trespasser in his own house. The poem is prosaic with

sentences breaking up, and two and a half page poem has about twenty paragraphs and

some of them are single sentences of few words. It asks some questions which remain

73
unanswered. The poem is not only structurally fragmented but in terms of thought

process it starts with something and the ends with something else, as conditions which

the poet faces have "rendered it unspeakable." (Twentieth-Century)

All's poetry, therefore, is what Berlort Bretch calls "singing about the dark times"

(qtd. in Kapsaski) that becomes an archive of miseries and sorrows, and the poets' record.

As Carolyn Forche marks "The poem might be our only evidence that an event has

occurred: it exists for us as sole trace of an occurrence" (qtd in Ilesanmi 460).Thus Ali

becomes the recorder of the troubled times.

During the early 1990s when militancy was very much on the rise in Kashmir, it

was not only Muslims who suffered but Hindus, popularly known as Kashmiri Pandiths,

were forced to leave the valley.^ They were caught between the militants who killed some

of them and the state which failed to protect them. Many Kashmiris mourned the

departure of Kashmiri Pandiths, and Agha Shahid Ali is doing the same in exile (which is

voluntary unlike forced exile of Hindus). The poem "Farewell" laments the departure of

Kashmiri Pandiths and reminds them of the sorrow which the poet is feeling for the

people who "became refugees there, in the plains" (Ali, The Veiled 202). The poem uses

the epigraph "They make desolation and call it a peace" which Calgacus said about

Romans during their colonization of England. By quoting it Ali aims to deconstruct the

notion of peace which the authorities try to make up. Plass notes that "By saying that the

Romans make desolation and call it peace Calgacus is stripping the fafade from Roman

'peace' and persuading the Britons to resist oppression" (33). Ali is also trying to do the

same. The word desolation has a very bleak and sorrowful connotation assigned to it

74
which Ali tries to put against peace. A Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels tells us

something about the meaning of the word "desolation".

DESOLATION .— The history of Israel had given to this word in a line

of Christ a peculiar and sinister significance. ... [—] the idea of a wasted

and depopulated land. ... To understand the full force of the term

'desolation', we have to add to the feature of war, as known to us,

something which was then frequent accompaniment of conquest—the

carrying away of a whole population captive (Desolation 453).

Thus Agha Shahid All's allusion to the line is his attempt to portray the tragedy

facing the whole population, be it Muslims or Hindus. The poem begins with personal

pronoun "I", "At a certain point I lost track of you" (Ali, The Veiled 175). The feelings

are personal, and whole of the poem is addressed to them using " I " ^ the poet; however,

in "The Country Without a Post Office" this "I" turns into "Us" where the poet represents

all Kashmiris who, like the poet, lament the exile of Hindus (Ali, The Veiled 205).

Images and symbols used in the poem are very surreal. Burying of stones so as to leave

the defenseless without weapons symbolizes the height of oppression. (Ali, The Veiled

175) Image sketched by the line "army convoys all night like desert caravans" (Ali, The

Veiled 175) is very pathetic as desert represents a morose metaphor for the poet (c.f next

chapter); in contrast with silence and darkness of desert, army convoys are noisy with

their "smoking oil of dimmed headlights"( Ali, The Veiled 175). Image of gloom which

the desert signifies is replaced by the apocalyptical image of army convoys which gives

Kashmir the look of a military state. But even in this state of oppression Agha Shahid

75
A!is wants to tell the Pandiths that we have not forgotten you, and we your fellow

sufferers, feel your pain as memory and history mingles together. Ali says that, "In your

absence you polished me into the perfect Enemy" (Ali, The Veiled 176). Enemy, because

he couldn't stop them from leaving, therefore this memory haunts him and a sense of

guilt overwhelms him. He cannot forget the history and feels that he cannot be forgiven.

Your history gets in the way of my memory.

I am everything you lost. You can't forgive me.

I am everything you lost. Your perfect enemy.

Your memory gets in the way of my memory:

My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.

There is nothing to forgive. You won't forgive me. (Ali, The Veiled 176-

77)

Ali would always turn sad when somebody would talk about Kashmiri Pandiths.

He was very sad about what had happened and always wanted the Hindus to return home.

He would miss the food that was particular to this community, as it became extinct with

their departure making Kashmir less than it used to be. Amitav Ghosh tells us about this

in his conversation with Agha Shahid Ali:

76
 bi^*-"" ::
He had a special passion for the food oflf!§=fegmrone variant of it in

particular: "Kashmiri food in the Pandit style." I asked him once why this

was so important to him and he explained that it was because of a

recurrent dream, in which all the Pandits had vanished from the valley of

Kashmir and their food had become extinct. This was a nightmare that

haunted him and he returned to it again and again, in his conversation and

his poetry. (314)

When worshippers fled the city, Hindu temples became desolate, similarly,

"When the muezzin/died, the city was robbed of every call" (Ali, The Veiled 202). AH

wants the temples and mosques to be full of people so that they will usher in an era of

peace and harmony again. The following verse sketches a bleak image of desolation as a

result of the conflict which have left the places of worship desolate.

In the lake the arms of temples and mosques are locked

In each other's reflections.

Have you soaked saffron to pour on them when they are

Found like this centuries later in this country

I have stitched to your shadow? (Ali, The Veiled

176)

Given this bleak and desolate situation Ali feels that he is "being rowed through

Paradise on a river of hell" ( Ali, The Veiled 177); coining the oxymoron "l^:xquisite

77
ghost" which suites the situation as the Paradise on earth has turned hellish. And he has

to row through the river of hell using his heart as paddle which is doomed to "break the

porcelain waves" (AH, The Veiled 177). He is trying to portray the pain which is so acute

that he says: "I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to/myself (Ali,

The Veiled 177). In this ghostly night painful heart becomes the paddle to row the boat,

and then lotus becomes the paddle as he is being "rowed- as it withers -towards the

breeze which is soft' as/ if it is having pity on me" (Ali, The Veiled 177). The word

"lotus" gives the image of beautiful Dal Lake on which it blooms giving an aura of

beauty in the Paradise on earth, but now "as it withers" it symbolizes the gloom which

the valley is going through. Moreover lotus is a Hindu symbol^ and its withering away

also connotes the withering away of community from the valley. Ali ends the poem with

what seems to be a translation of Momin Khan Momin's couplet. "If only somehow you

could have been mine, / what would not have been possible in the world?"(Ali, The

Veiled 177) The couplet heightens the grief as he finds no way out to return back to

peace; hence there is only a wish. Agha Shahid All's lament of the Hindu exodus is

somewhat similar to the lament which Mahmoud Darwaish has written about the exodus

of Moors from Andulasia which has been translated by Agha Shahid Ali with Ahmad

Dallal. "Violins weep for a time that does not return/ Violins weep for a homeland that

might return" (Ali, The Veiled 312).

In the poem "The Country Without a Post Office" he imagines the exile of

Pandiths and compares it with the conditions of Muslims in the state. He finds "... each

house buried or empty. /Empty because so many fled, ran away, /And became refugees

there, in the plains"( Ali, The Veiled 202). He is trying to imagine the exile of Hindus

78
and how they would be viewing and imagining their own home. Ali can imagine it better

as he has firsthand experience of exile; and "they must now will a final dewfall to turn

the mountain to glass" (Ali, The Veiled 202). He now differentiates between "they" and

"us"; they will see us through them, "we [who] are faithful" (Ali, The Veiled 203). Ali is

trying to juxtapose two tragedies one of the Hindus in exile and other of the Muslims

under oppression.

However, Agha Shahid Ali is not a political analyst who would debate the discourse of

exile. He is a poet and his concerns are humanistic. Even though we find a lament for the

exodus of Hindus, but there is hope of return: return of Kashmiri Pandiths, and the return

of peace. Feeling the agony of division between "they" and "us" (Ali, The Veiled 205),

he has no prayer but "just a shout, held in, it's US! US!" (Ali, The Veiled 205) whose

letters are cries that break like bodies in the prison, echoing the cry "I know nothing"

(Ali, The Veiled 178). Ali wants the return to be permanent, peaceful and possible. Even

in the lament there is the agony which cries for return. In "A Pastoral" Ali is trying to

gamer a hope of this return: return of Hindus from exile, return of peace, and a return to

the old life full of love and sharing which is symbolized by the phrase "blessed

word"(Ali, The Veiled 174). The place of return is Srinagar where they will meet "by the

gates of the Villa of peace"; (Ali, The Veiled 196) but the homecoming is only possible

when "the soldiers return the keys and disappear" (Ali, The Veiled 196), that is when

Kashmir becomes fi-ee. Ali uses the last line of Zbigniew Herbert's poem "A Halt" as an

epigraph, "on the wall the dense ivy of executions" (Ali, The Veiled 196). Herbert was a

Polish poet, essayist and dramatist and an active member of the Polish resistance

movement and one of the most translated poets of the post World War II period.

79
Herbert's poem is full of Christian symbolism: the breaking of bread echoes the last

supper, gallows echo crucifixion. In addition the setting is pastoral given the words like

garden, star, cricket, thick smell of earth, the bustle of insects, violet, hill, ivy etc. (The

Halt). Ali uses the symbol of ivy, as used by Herbert, saying that we will "bind the open

thorns, warm the ivy/ into roses" (Ali, The Veiled 196) or "Pluck the blood: My words

will echo thus/ at sunset, by the ivy, but to what purpose?" (Ali, The Veiled 197).

"Ivy has long been emblematic of death and resurrection, but is also

associated with fidelity and memory. A plaque in the Mehrinplatz, in

Berlin, quotes Herbert as saying "The loss of memory by a nation is also

its loss of conscience," and it's not much of a jump to see how ivy, in that

context, might come to be associated with executions, especially by

someone involved in political struggle." (The Halt)

For Ali the meaning is the same, he too wants the resurrection. He wants to undo

the idea of apocalypse he sketched in "The Prologue" and wants to turn it into the

resurrection of peace. But the pain of "ivy of execution" (Ali, The Veiled 196) is very

severe which memory can't undo, and he refers to it ironically in the voice of a bird:

"Human beings can bear anything" (Ali, The Veiled 196). Tearing shirts into tourniquets

and warming "ivy into roses" will be the end of bloodshed and Kashmir will return back

to its old cultural ethos; a state of peace. In the whole poem he describes the future, but in

the fiiture he gets obsessed with the past, which actually is the present. This obsession

with the present even while describing the future shows his concern with the catastrophe

in Kashmir. Therefore, like Herbert, he wants to keep the memories of nation intact.

80
 Similarly, AH talks about the old Kashmiri syncretic culture and the burning of

the shrine of Sheik-ul-Alam who was one of the harbingers of the traditional culture. The

Kashmiri culture has been fashioned by old Hindu and Buddhist civilizations, and later

on by Rishism. With advent of Islam in 14* and 15* centuries Sufism got introduced in

Kashmir. The most important among the Sufis was the man who laid the foundations of

Islam in Kashmir, Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani, popularly known as Shah Hamdan. He

along with Lai Ded and Sheikhul Alam have influenced Kashmiri culture through ages.

The trio represents the Sufi-Secular culture of Kashmiris where people have lived

together in peace and mutual understanding which is usually called kashmiriyat. Burning

of Char Sharief symbolizes the destruction of that culture at the hand of Indian military

and militants. Shrine represents the spiritual centre which has shaped Kashmiri culture

for over five centuries and when "Fire moves on its quick knees-/ through Chrar-e-

Sharif' (Ali, The Veiled 186) it becomes "too late for threads at Chrar-e- Sharif'(Ali, The

Veiled 187). Threads represent faith, hope, wishes and aspirations which were all turned

down as the tragedy would have it, and whole village is turned into ashes including the

shrine with threads tied to it. Now instead of threads we touch ashen tarmac which lays

the roads of destruction (Ali, The Veiled 187). The devastation of shrine symbolizes the

destruction of Kashmiriyat. Anaya Kabir talks about All's "A History of Paisleys" (which

has been discussed above) as a poem in which Ali is lamenting the loss of kashmiriyat by

juxtaposing Kashmiri shawl with Paisley shaped embroidery with Shiva and Parvati

myth:

This suturing of myth, nature and traditional Kashmiri craft— weaving

embroidery—into a memorial for Kashmir, and for Kashmiriyat retrieves a

81
 "history of paisley" that is actually a counter-history to the limitations of

narratives that are not preserved in language but spluntered through

multiple scripts and multiple linguistic legacies" (145)

However, of late, Kashmiriyat is seen as a political discourse than a sociological

or an anthropological term. For some it is impossible to return back to the old

harmonized mutuality between Hindus and Muslims. For example, Neil Aggarwal says

that "Kashmiriyat acts as an empty signifier, a truth beyond representation and

falsification which reflects an imaginary rather than actual phenomenon" (6). For some

like Hamidah Nayeem it is a "colonial discouse" constructed to pacify the resistance in

Kashmir (qtd. in Ganai). Nevertheless, Ali is still hopeful for the return of mutual

brotherhood and existence whatever it may mean and be.

Ali does not only lament the loss of Muslims and Hindus and their mutual living

culture, Kashmiriyat; but also the incident about Hans Christian Ostro a Norwegian

traveler who was taken as hostage by AL-Farhan militants in August 1995 and later on

beheaded. "Hans Christian Ostro" has been described by Daniel Hall as "the most

poignant of Shahid's political poems" (Ali, The Veiled 18).The poem exemplifies All's

humanitarian concerns and his lament is fiill of pathos: "I cannot protect you: these are

my hands" (Ali, The Veiled 236). In the lament Ali represents all Kashmiri people, who

like Ali are grieved by the death and feel that it is unjust. And to make his point he quotes

the Quran "Whosoever gives life to the soul shall be as if had to all mankind given life"

trying to say that there was no religious sanctioning of the death rather it was unjust and

82
painful. Daniel Hall further writes about the poem and grief of Kashmiris due tc death of

Ostro.

Kashmiris the world over were traumatized by the news: after all, theirs is

the culture in which generosity and hospitality are elevated to high moral

principles. Much of the poem is oblique, but ends with a particularly

haunting image, perhaps of the Kashmiri people themselves mourning the

young man's death (qtd AH, The Veiled 8)

In describing all this violence and tribulation in Kashmir Agha Shahio Ali has

used the concept of letters and messages over and again, so much so that he entitled his

book dealing with atrocities in Kashmir as The Country Without a Post Office. There are

many poems which deal with this subject including the poem from which the book has

been given its title, "The Country Without a Post Office", "The Floating Post Office",

"Dear Shahid", etc.

The poem "Dear Shahid" is either a letter written by somebody to Agha Shahid

Ali, or Agha Shahid Ali is addressing it to an unknown addressee, or writing an open

letter where everybody becomes the reader. He quotes from Elena Bonner's open letter to

Boris Yelsen in the epigraph. In both cases Agha Shahid Ali is shahid (^kxdb'xc equivalent

of witness), that is, bearing witness to the atrocities in Kashmir. The letter comes from

the "far-off country, far even from us who live here" (Ali, The Veiled 194). The letter

informs about the world's unknown conflict from the place where no news escapes the

curfew, and death is very common; and identity is nowhere, but in one's pockets:

"Everyone carries his address in his pocket so that at least his body will reach home'"

(Ali, The Veiled 194). By using the metaphor of letters and post cards and Post Office,

83
AH is trying to find messages and information from the place from where no information

comes out, and everybody is desperate to share the sorrow. The epigraph of the poem

"...letters sent/ To dearest him that lives alas! Away." is from G M Hopkins' sonnet, "I

wake and feel the fell of dark, not day" (Hopkins) .The sonnet longs about spiritual

darkness, and AH talks about similar spiritual messages which find no answer.

Spirituality has something to do with minarets which adjoin the mosques from where

muezzin gives call to prayers. Now because the "minarets have been entombed" (AH, The

Veiled 202), therefore, there is nobody to invite the people: "When the muezzin/ died,

city was robbed of every Call."(AH, The Veiled 202) Climbing the stairs of the tomb "to

read the messages scratched on the planets" gives astrological imagery: as if he is trying

to find a ray of hope in the darkness, for which he has nothing to light but clay lamps. He

now compares spiritual messages with the messages sent via post to the persons who no

longer live there. Thus the metaphor of letter for AH is an act of witness, protest, and

longing for peace.

These letters and reference to the letters and messages is All's performative act,

where AH is disseminating information, even if, letters are barred and restricted. J L

Austin in 1950 introduced a term called "performative utterance" to differentiate it from

"constatives", which are the expressions describing a statement as true or false.

Performative utterances are statements that in talking about an action enact it. As Austin

says "it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate

circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be

doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it' (qtd in Royle 22)." There are many types

of performative utterances, for example, Derrida considers letter writing "as performative

84
written text, which anticipates, speaks to, and even "produce" its absent, "mute" and

"hollowed-out" addressee" (32), of which "Dear Shahid" is the best example. Similarly in

"The Floating Post Office" the post office is a floating house-boat, an attractive carriage

carrying terrifying messages of death and destruction, as the boat is "being rowed through

the fog of death, the sentence passed on our city"(Ali, The Veiled 207). The boat comes

"close to reveal smudged black-ink letters" (Ali, The Veiled 207) — an image of a blood-

stained city as in the next stanza we find "blood, blood shaken into letters" (Ali, The

Veiled 207). The whole poem seeks to carry this message across waters, "the one open

road" that seems to be closing now. The struggle to row the boat continues till the end

where he feels that letters will reach the destination "through olive/ canals, tense waters

no one can close" (Ali, The Veiled 208). In the last line he actually pledges to carry the

burden of messages from this unknown conflict, and disseminate them to the world, and

he succeeds.

Thus, to sum up, Agha Shahid All's relationship with Kashmir is both: nostalgia

for the lost home and a lament for the catastrophic events taking place there. Ali, through

his poetry, seeks to bear witness to the tragedy, and through the metaphor of letters and

post office he tries to narrate the tragedy to the world. He wants the end of violence and

return of peace in Kashmir, hence he resists the oppression.

85
 Notes

1 Name of St. Petersburg was changed during the 1917 Russian revolution because

they wanted the name to sound more Russian rather than German. They named it

Petrograd but it was changed back to St. Petersburg in 1991 after the fall of

communism.

2 Akbar invaded Kashmir in the 16"^ century and Mughal rule lasted from 1587 to

1752. Afghan rule (1752 - 1819) followed when Ahmad Shah Durrani invaded the

valley in 1752, a period remembered as one of severe oppression. This was

followed by a period of Sikh rule (1819-46), considered to be the darkest period

ever in the history of Kashmir. Continuing this legacy of tyranny was the Dogra

rule (1846-1957).

3 Paisley is a pattern used in Kashmiri shawls and called boet in the local language.

4 Parvati is believed to wear lot of jewelry including anklets which has been praised

by many Hindu devotional poets. (Upamanyu)

5 There is no consensus on the number of Pandiths killed; some organizations put

the figure as 399, others say that about 650 were killed. However, figures by the

state say that 219 Kashmiri Pandiths were killed and about 200,000 were forced to

leave the valley. Most of them lived in refiigee camps in Jammu for over a decade;

they have now been given permanent houses there, and many live in Delhi and

other Indian cities. (Essa, Kahmiri Pandits) 19

6 Lotus is regarded as one of the holiest flowers for Hindus. It symbolizes

detachment with the world, as lotus flower grows in the water without touching it.

86
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