They make a desolation and call it peace

 (Farewell, Agha Shahid Ali)

Being away from one’s home is a state of un/belonging. Nostalgic of your homeland, you negotiate a space of discontinuity by inhabiting culturally alien places. Exile and diasporic conditions have generated a string of phrases and expressions like cultural alienation, acculturation, cultural oblivion, cultural aphasia, cultural schizophrenia, and language lag, to mention a few.

Edward Said opens his celebrated essay ‘Reflections on Exile’ by comprehensively capturing the loss of native home: "Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted."

The exilic suffering gets manifold when your home or motherland is under siege or a foreign occupation, and when it is hard to access places where you spent your childhood and buried your ancestors. When we read poetry by diasporic and expatriate poets like Palestinan-American Noami Shihab Nye, Australian-Iraqi Al-Samawi, Swedish-Iraqi Al-Sayigh, and Palestine’s national poet Mahmoud Darwish, the sense of physical separation from homeland and its haunting images surfaces in a number of poems. Their poetry serves as diverse forms of "effort to transform lyrics of loss into the indefinitely postponed drama of return", in Said’s words.

Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry on Kashmir is no exception to that description.

Representations of Kashmir, a paradise on earth, in the poetry of famous local poets like Habba Khatoon (Philomela of Medieval Kashmir), Mahmud Gami, Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor, Abdul Ahad Azad, and Dina Nath Nadim showcase the cultural richness, charm, and grandeur of Kashmir in the local language. Though their poetry is gaining worldwide popularity after being translated (like Ghani Kashmiri’s Persian poetry as The Captured Gazelle), the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, who was born in New Delhi in 1949 and grew up in Kashmir (mostly in Srinagar), is by far the most authentic representation of occupied Kashmir in English language; and this too by a Kashmiri American who taught poetry, literature, and creative writing variously at Hamilton College New York, University of Massachusettes, Amherst, University of Utah, Princeton University, and New York University.

His entire poetry collected in The Veiled Suite, published by Penguin in 2009, at once captures both his post-Second World War hyphenated Americanism and a consuming nostalgia for his homeland. Though he called English his first language and Urdu his mother tongue, his entire poetry is in English.

Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry is accordingly burdened with the pain and outrage he felt about his beloved Kashmir. In his volume The Half-Inch Himalayas, the first poem "Postcard from Kashmir" is a jubilant remembrance of home with the implication of attendant pathos:

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.

In the same postcard picture, "a giant negative, black/and white, still undeveloped" painfully refers to the unwelcome presence of the occupant. With the imagery and symbolism of snow and ice, Ali tries to get hold of the evanescent memories of his ancestors whose snow-clad lives melted into the flowing waters of Time:

My ancestor, a man,

of Himalayan snow

came to Kashmir from Samarkand

he froze women in his embrace.

His wife thawed into stony water,

her old age a clear

evaporation.

In his volume, The Country without a Post Office, Ali writes five prose pieces on the horrors in the post 1990s occupied Kashmir. In part III, he wants to say that fathers had better kill their sons themselves instead of handing them over to the Indian security forces. He plays on the idea of Id-uz-Zuha: "a record of God’s inability, for even He must melt sometimes, to let Ishmael be executed by the hand of his father. Srinagar was under curfew: . . . Son after son -- never to return from the night of torture -- was taken away."

The Country without a Post Office, was originally published as Kashmir without a Post Office but Ali changed the title in 1997 when he made it the title poem for his poetry volume. Without any linear narrative and conventional rhyme, the poem is deeply symbolic moving in layered circles. Full of love and longing for the native land, the poem is the result of the excesses of Indian army in 1990 when Kashmiris stood up against the Indian forces. That rebellion resulted in unspeakable crimes against the Kashmiri Muslims, men and women. For seven months, no mail was delivered in the occupied Kasmir. At the end of part 2 of poem, Ali writes:

Everything is finished, nothing remains."

I must force silence to be a mirror

Fire runs in waves. Should I cross the River?

Each post office is boarded up. Who will deliver

parchment cut in Paisleys, my news to prisons?

Only silence can now trace my letters

to him. Or in a dead office the dark pains.

Ali’s poem carries a distant echo of Noami Shihab Nye’s poem "Blood" in which Nye, in the context of Palestinian-Israeli conflict, shows a café in combat-weary Beirut, where life has come to a standstill and it is hard for the  "Gardener" to plant anything because "everything she planted gave up under the ground."

The death of his mother at Lenox Hill hospital near his brother’s house at Amherst in America, and her wish to be buried in war-torn home in Kashmir strangely prompt Agha Shahid Ali to synonymise his mother and his motherland. In the first poem, "Lenox Hill," included in his volume Rooms are Never Finished, he writes his vintage poetry to the effect that loving your mother is nothing different from loving your motherland. On the prospect of his mother’s death, Ali writes these signature lines:

………………….Then let the universe,

like Paradise be considered a tomb, Mother,

they asked me, So how’s the writing? I answered My Mother

is my poem. What did they expect? For no verse

sufficed except the promise, fading, of Kashmir

and the cries that reached you from the cliffs of Kashmir

(across fifteen centuries) in the hospital. Kashmir,

she’s dying.