| After the Last Sky By Amitava Kumar
We
are now condemned to mourn and to love Shahid in every
new poet in English.
Agha
Shahid Ali was a poet and a lover. I can think of no
other writer who deserves that description. The writer
as Majnoon, this is what Shahid was, seeking beauty
and love in a desert studded with sorrow. In an early
poem Shahid considers a Persian miniature. Majnoon’s
father has laid his head down to rest “on an uncut sapphire
/ bereft of prayer.” The miniature painting has margins
of gold where “verses wear bracelets of paisleys / tied
into golden knots of Arabic.”
It is impossible not to think of Shahid’s own poetry
when you read those lines, each delicate syllable stitching
rubies on what he, with everyone else, sees as desolation.
Shahid was born in New Delhi on Feb. 4, 1949. He grew
up in Kashmir and was later educated at the University
of Kashmir, Srinagar and the University of Delhi. In
1984 he completed his PhD in English from Pennsylvania
State University, after which he went on to do an MFA
from the University of Arizona in 1985. He held teaching
positions in English poetryand literature at the University
of Delhi, Penn State and Princeton, amongst others.
Shahid left us a few weeks ago, on December 8 last year.
For many months before he died, Shahid had struggled
with a grave illness, and he did not spare even death
his love. In his latest collection of poems, Rooms Are
Never Finished, a finalist for the National Book Award,
Shahid is a visitor in the dreamland of death. The opening
poem, one that Shahid addresses to his mother dying
in Lenox Hill Hospital, finds death’s page “filling
with diamonds.” In another poem, Jesus weeps because
he has seen a vision in which centuries later the grandson
of the Prophet Muhammad, Hussain, will be killed on
the very site on which Jesus now stands. Reaching across
extinction’s divide, and also the divisions of time,
this image is touched with tenderness. Shahid writes
of Hussain’s severed head being brought to Obeidullah
who carelessly turns the head over with his staff.
“Gently,” one officer protests. “By Allah! I have seen
those lips kissed by the blessed mouth of Muhammad.”
Once more, I only hear Shahid’s loving voice in those
lines, finding the memory of love, which more than being
unrequited actually risks being forgotten.
An important point that can be made about Shahid’s poetry
is that it drew as much upon English poetic traditions
as it did on Urdu literary forms. This needs to be stressed,
because Shahid’s influences were as varied as James
Merrill on the one hand, and, on the other, Faiz Ahmed
Faiz, whom he translated with great delicateness. Indeed,
it can be said that no other Indian poet writing in
English came close to attempting what was Shahid’s great
achievement — the elaboration of a poetic voice that
was representative of the subcontinent’s own mixed history.’Rooms
Are Never Finished is the last milestone in this yet
unfinished project.
A Nostalgist’s Map of America had introduced an Indian
poet to America and the world. But, it was the publication
of The Country Without a Post Office with which Shahid
came back home to India. This latter set of poems was
scored with the pain of Kashmir: “They make a desolation
and call it peace.” And yet, what was distinctive about
Shahid’s lament was not that it admitted politics. Many
have done that routinely. Rather, Shahid, even in addressing
the politics of his homeland, presented his strongest
protest because he turned away from it incessantly to
fashion in his writing what was infinitely more beautiful.
In other words, Shahid allowed politics to step into
his house, but boldly drew in its face the purdah of
poetry. “The century is ending. It is pain / from which
love departs into all new pain: / Freedom’s terrible
thirst, flooding Kashmir, / is bringing love to its
tormented glass. / Stranger, who will inherit the last
night / of the past? Of what shall I not sing, and sing?”
In Rooms Are Never Finished, this beautiful
book of leave-taking, Shahid writes of airports and
rooms in hotels and hospitals. In other poems, clad
in black, bearing the cry of the gazelle, Shahid goes
back to Karbala and he goes back to Kashmir. This book
is not so much a rebuke to death. It is more of a wooing.
Shahid wants to find in death another kind of meeting.
After all, there is a terrible solitude about death.
It takes one away. It leaves the others all alone. “The
Beloved leaves one behind to die.” In Shahid’s poems,
death is not permitted the tyranny of a singular hold
over time and over the universe. Even at the level of
form alone, the repetitions present in Shahid’s poems
mean that what has passed always returns. We are bound
by the intimacy of a rhythm whose music assures us that
we will never be left alone.
I take as my example, a poem crafted by Shahid from
the poetry of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish:’“Violins
weep with gypsies going to Andalusia / Violins weep
for Arabs leaving Andalusia // Violins weep for a time
that does not return / Violins weep for a homeland that
might return // Violins set fire to the woods of that
deep deep darkness / Violins tear the horizon and smell
my blood in the vein //“… Violins are complaints of
silk creased in the lover’s night / Violins are the
distant sound of wine falling on a previous desire //
Violins follow me everywhere in vengeance / Violins
seek me out to kill me wherever they find me // Violins
weep for Arabs leaving Andalusia / Violins weep with
gypsies going to Andalusia.”
Form must be foregrounded in any discussion of Shahid’s
work, because it is that which gave his poetry its intensity.
In a remark made about the writing of Roland Barthes,
the critic Michael Warner had said that Barthes, who
was gay, seldom wrote about his dissident sexuality.
Barthes’ gayness was expressed not at the level of the
signified but, instead, at the level of the signifier.
At least for Warner, it was the excess embodied in the
language that Barthes used — the complexity and richness
at the level of the syntax — that marked Barthes as
gay. In Shahid’s case, it is the extraordinary texture
of his verse, its delicate fire, that returns us to
a sense of tragedy and beauty that is always at the
verge of being ground to dust. Shahid’s broken lines
recall what has been broken in history, and their inventive
musicality restores to history a human dignity.
We are now condemned to mourn and to love Shahid in
every new poet in English who will pick verses in the
rubble that grows around us.
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