Agha Shahid Ali as an American Poet
Agha Shahid Ali was born in New
Delhi on February 4, 1949 and died at America on December 8, 2001. He was
fondly known as ‘Bhaiyya’ to his family members and friends. His ancestors came
from Central Asia. He was the third of the four children of Agha Ashraf Ali and
Sufia Nomani. Ashraf Ali- a Ph D from USA and his wife Sufia Nomani a well
voiced woman of Persian where the primary influences on the juvenile mind of
Shahid Ali. He taught at Jamia Millia
University. He grew up in a culturally and linguistically rich environment
where the entire family read and appreciated poetry and literature in Persian,
Urdu and English. He considers Urdu his ‘mother tongue’ and English his ‘first
language’. He was sent to Irish Catholic
School, an elite institution in Kashmir, where he was taught by Irish priests. His
parents went to America for their doctoral studies, and he was with them and he
studied for three years at a school in Muncie Indiana. He spent his childhood in Kashmir, and
completed his studies from Presentation Convent, Burn Hall School. He graduated in B.A. from the University of
Kashmir in Srinagar and joined his masters in English literature at Hindu
College, Delhi University in 1986. He passed with a distinction and became a
lecturer at the same college. From there he moved to U.S. In 1984 he had completed his Ph. D degree in
English from Pennsylvania State University USA; also in 1985 he had done an
M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. His life and work were similarly affected
by his state of being an exile.
He moved from Kashmir to Delhi and from Delhi to Pennsylvania. He died on
December 8, 2001, at an early age of 52 years enacting out the paradoxical
nature of his verse to lend him immortality. The passing away of Aga Shahid Ali
was a collective loss to Kashmir. He was the most eloquent Kashmiri-English
poet, a writer of unmatched elegance and virtuosity, a chronicler of pain. His poetry
is the very stuff of beauty, loss and salvation. In short, Agha Shahid Ali, besides being an
emotionally moving politically active poet, was also an inspiring, demanding,
caring, sharp and charismatic teacher.
Agha Shahid Ali had spent his life in
exile from his childhood. He had started writing poetry from his childhood and
ever since he started writing poetry it has been recorded. He wrote his first
poem at the age of twelve. He always felt excited about his ability to write poetry. From his early age he used to send his poems
not only to national but also to international journals without being any care
of their rejections. He never takes it serious if his poems where rejected so
many times and does not bother about the humiliation of the publishers. He published his first collection “Bone
Sculpture” when he was twenty three. Most of his poems are marked by the sense
of sorrow and that of loss. As it is in the nature of man that he likes his
motherland with the core of heart and any type of exile is not liked by any
human being and same is the case with Shahid Ali. Human beings like to live
within their family and hates away from their homeland and from their loved
ones; but he went to Delhi for his higher education, to do his post-graduation.
And since that time, all the poems that he composed, most of them bear a sense
of sorrow and also a sense of loss in them. Thus, we see that to him 'exile' causes 'grief’. His collections of poetry that he published in
his life time are: “Bone Sculpture “ (1972), “In Memory Of Begum Akther and Other Poems” (1979), “A Walk Through
the Yellow Pages” (1987), “The Half-Inch Himalayas” (1987), “A
Nostalgist’s Map of America” (1991), “The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems”
(1992) , “The Country Without a Post Office”
(1997), and “Rooms Are Never Finished” (2001). His collection of ghazals
“Call Me Ishmael Tonight” posthumously published in 2003. He has firstly
published his poem “The Country without a Post Office” as ‘Kashmir without a Post
Office’ in the ‘Graham House Review’. Ali revised it and changed its name when
he included it in the collection “The Country Without a Post Office” in 1997.
Also he has written “The Rebel’s Silhouette”: Selected Poems and edited book of
ghazals “Ravishing DisUnities”: Real Ghazals in English. To his credit Ali has
eight books of poetry, one work of translation, the editor of an anthology of
ghazals, and his Ph D thesis, “T.S. Eliot as Editor”, published in 1989. He
received fellowships from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf
Writers’ Conference, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and the New York Foundation
for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and was awarded a pushcart Prize. In
2001 his famous book “Rooms Are Never Finished” was a national book award
finalist. He had taught at different universities such as the University of
Delhi, Penn State, SUNY Bringhamton, Princeton University, Hamilton College,
Baruch College, University of Utah, and Warren Wilson College. He was a regular
member of Amitav Ghosh’s writer’s “Adda” in New York in the years before he
died. In honour of his life and work,
the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, sponsored by the University of Utah Press
and The University of Utah Department of English, is awarded annually.
His first collection of poetry “Bone-
Sculpture” was published in 1972. It has only 14- poems. This collection
revolves round the theme of love, loss, memory, death, cultural dislocation, and
nostalgia. The first poem is “Bones” which deals with mourning of Shia and Sufi
of Islam. In the poem “Dear Editor” the poet declares his identity as a
poet. The title of second volume is “In
Memory of Begum Akhtar” published in 1979. The volume contains 25- poems. The
theme of this collection is same that of the first one i.e. theme of love,
loss, memory, death, culture dislocation, nostalgia etc. The opening poem “In
Memory of Begum Akthar” shows the love of poet for music and films. This
collection like the first one deals with the theme of love, loss, memory, death,
cultural dislocation and nostalgia. The third book “The Half- Inch Himalayas”
came out in 1987; it was the first book of Shahid Ali to be published in
America. The volume contains 32 poems, with a prologue followed by four
sections. The fourth book “A Nostalgist’s Map of America” published in 1991.
The main themes of this book are nostalgia, melancholy, transnational poetics
and condition of exile. The book starts with a prologue poem “Eurydice”. The
book has four sections. The fifth book “The Country Without a Post Office”
published in 1993. The theme of this book is about the nostalgic feelings of
the poet about his homeland, Kashmir and its people. This book has a prologue “The Blessed Word: A
Prologue”, and has been divided into five small sections and at the end with
notes. “Rooms Are Never Finished” is the
last collection of poetry that was published, 2001, during Shahid’s lifetime.
The volume is divided into four sections, prefixed with a prologue poem “Lenox
Hill” which is written in the classical form, canzone. “From Amherst to
Kashmir”, which divided into twelve subsections constitutes the first section
of the volume. The second section contains ten poems including the eponymous
poem, “Rooms Are Never Finished”, two one-line poems and three ghazals. The
third section contains poems written after Mahmoud Darwish’s poems titled
“Eleven Stars Over Andalusia” which is
sub-divided into eleven sub-sections. The fourth section contains one long
poem, “I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World”. He has also composed a book of translations
which is named as “The Rebel's
Silhouette”: Translation of Verses By Faiz Ahmad Faiz, which was published
in the year 1992 by Peregrine Smith Books. This book included important Ghazals
of Faiz, such as: "Tanhai" (Solitude), "Khatm Hui
Barish-e-Sang" (The Rain of Stones is Finished) etc. The
Veiled Suite,
published in 2009, includes six volumes of poems Ali finished in the US, poems
that compulsively discover the suffering of dislocation through remembrance,
times past, representation, and a distinctive merge of European and Urdu poetic
traditions.
Agha Shahid Ali was renowned as a
poet outstandingly talented to merge numerous racial influences and thoughts in
both conventional forms and well-designed blank verse. He has been influenced
by an amalgam of different cultures and traditions of Hinduism, Muslim, and
Western influences which is reflected by his poetry. He was such a poet who
through his poetry imagines home and asserts an identity which is
trans-national, fluid and exclusively his own. He expresses the feelings of
diaspora and states of emotions such as loss, nostalgia, unrootedness, memory
and themes of joys, fears, incongruities and surprises. His poetry mostly
reflects his own experiences of life; and also his personal opinion on the delicate
political circumstances in his motherland Kashmir which has become bone of
contention among India, Pakistan and even China. He was a talented poet who
wrote his poetry in free blank verse along with the pantoum, sestinas, and many
other forms; also he was the initiator of Ghazal writing in English. Well
versed with Urdu, Persian and Arabic, Ali took the Ghazal farm and experimented
and perfected it for the English readers. Quite interestingly as he started
writing only in ‘exile’, the sense of loss always pervades his literary world.
He talks about torture, disappearances, killings, and whatever happened not
only in the dead silence of nights but also in the full light of the day across
Kashmir. He speaks of pain, anguish, longing, internal conflict, frustration
but also of optimism and hope in a truly lyrical voice. His poetry is a
dazzling display of a gallery of emotions attached to Kashmir, depicting pain,
suffering, social dissent, political turmoil, and tragedies that have remained
unsaid and unheard. He speaks from the bottom of the marginality and gives a
reverberating strong voice to the hapless plight of Kashmir, stirring hearts
and minds, far across the oceans together.
