Sunday, April 28, 2002		Books

Chants of an expatriate Kashmiri
Akshaya Kumar

The Country Without A Post Office: Poems 1991-1995
by Agha Shahid Ali, Ravi Dayal, Delhi. Pages 64. Rs.100.

THE untimely demise of Agha Shahid Ali, a US-based Kashmiri poet in English, when he had just crossed 50, is indeed a blow to the genre of Indian English poetry. He, along with A. K. Ramanujan, had carved an international audience for this otherwise insipid stream of Indian English writing. Most of the poems included in The Country Without a Post Office were published earlier in reputed international journals such as Yale Review, TriQuarterly, Poetry Review, Paris Review, Orion etc. Kashmir is invoked in terms of oxymorons: "a terrible beauty" (reminds one of Yeats’s Ireland in 1916), a "velvet Void", an infernal paradise. There is the river Jhelum that still flows by, but it carries a dismembered body of a Kashmir youth in it. Irony is the only structural trope that can bear the pulls of Shahid’s nostalgia of a refulgent Kashmiri past, and his awareness of its dire present.

The prologue to the collection —The Blessed Word —offers us the very poetics of Shahid’s (uni-)verse. Heartbreak is not just theme, it is craft. It is poetry of "a promise that already holds its own breaking"; an enterprise of re-inventing "an imaginary homeland, filling it, closing it" and finally "shutting oneself (himself) in it". Heartbreak stands for the silent catastrophe that wrecks the poet from within: "In the heart’s veined temple all statues have been smashed./ No priest in saffron’s left to toll its knell tonight".

In the title poem The Country without a Post Office, Kashmir is seen as a post-office, as an "archive for letters with doomed addresses". Even the calls of the muezzin have ceased long ago. "When the muezzin died, the city was robbed of every Call". The poet-persona returns to the local minaret as its new keeper. A country without post-office is country without its institutions of faith; the muezzin is the post-man of the divine.

‘Blood’ is the new reality in Kashmir that has eroded the regime of the saffron: "blood, blood shaken into letters/ cruel primitive script that would erode/ our saffron link to past". Blood is the new colour that embellishes the landscape: "Let your blood till then embellish the slaughter." "Blood sheer rubies/ on Himalayan snow". It is the bloody footprints of Kashmiri youth that provide pattern to Kashmir paisleys and carpets: "Look! Their feet bleed; they leave footprints on the street/which will give up its fabric, at dusk, a carpet".

An an exponent of ghazal-poetry in English, Shahid Ali brings rare grace and elegance to English, which undergoes Urdu-isation in this process of cultural mixing. In his ghazals each couplet forms a poem within a poem. Look at a couplet from a ghazal adapted from Makhdoom Mohinuddin: "Rumours of spring – they last from dawn till dusk — / All eyes decipher branches for blossoms". In Ghazal the poet is able to bring together the immediacy and urgency of experience by the customary use of ‘tonight’. The second line of each couplet ends with "tonight". Instead of harnessing ghazal for romanticising Kashmir, Shahid breaks into "Ghazal" to underscore the tragedy of his motherland: "Lord, cried out the idols, Don’t let us be broken;/ Only we can convert the infidel tonight".

As a poet of diaspora, Shahid recognises the impossibility of home-coming: "Mirror after mirror/ textiled by dust, will blind us (him) to our return".

In After the August Wedding in Lahore, Pakistan, almost an epilogue to the poet’s poetic enterprise, the heartbreak has already overwhelmed the poet’s consciousness.

Shahid’s collection is a dirge that bewails the slow and steady decline of Kashmir from being the hub culture to the very vale of sorrow profound.