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Book: 'The Country without a Post Office: Poems' by Agha Shahid Ali
Widely regarded as Kashmir’s national poet, Agha Shahid Ali was born in Kashmir in 1949 and died in the US in 2001. His work has been included in a range of anthologies with disparate topics, varying from Harold Bloom’s Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems to Hoshang Merchant’s Yaarana: Gay Writing from South Asia.
I’ll focus here on one poem in this collection, which I hope will entice you enough to read more of his work. :-) My favourite poem in the collection is The Country without a Post Office, but it’s too long to summarise for you here in a way that can do it justice, so I’m going to talk a little about another poem in the collection, ‘The Correspondent’. I haven’t included the entire poem below, but you can read it here.
The Country without a Post Office: Poems by Agha Shahid Ali. (Norton, 1997.)
The title of the book refers to a period in which the postal service in Kashmir was suspended for several months, and many of the poems in the book are about communication of various kinds. These are the opening lines of ‘The Correspondent’:
I say “There’s no way back to your country,”
I tell him he must never leave. He cites
the world: his schedule. I set up barricades:
the mountain routes are damp;
there, dead dervishes damascene
the dark. “I must leave now,” his voice ablaze.
I take off-it’s my last resort-my shadow.
And he walks-there’s no electricity-
back into my dark, murmurs Kashmir!, lights
(to a soundtrack of exploding grenades)
a dim kerosene lamp.
"We must give back the hour its sheen.
or this spell will never end... Quick," he says,
"I've just come-with videos-from Sarajevo."
As in much of Ali’s poetry, the political is felt through the personal: the ‘soundtrack of exploding grenades’ is parenthetical to the poem’s primary concerns. Taking off one’s shadow, here, parallels taking off one’s clothes, maybe suggesting that sexual intimacy is a space in which national identities do not matter, that they can’t matter if genuine connections between people are to be forged.
There are some vivid images in the next couple of stanzas, in which the speaker describes what he sees in the footage that his lover has filmed in Bosnia: a solitary musician dressed in formal wear playing his cello on the sidewalk; the barbed-wire fence of a concentration camp; and the dead, whose “gaze” is “fractured white with subtitles”.
At the end of the poem, the speaker lights a candle, and reflects:
[…] He’ll erase
Bosnia, I feel. He will rewind to zero,
film from there a way back to his country,
bypassing graves that in blacks and whites
climb ever up the hills. The wax cascades
down the stand, silver clamp
to fasten this dream, end it unseen.
In the faltering light, he surveys
what’s left. He zooms madly into my shadow.
This erasure, this ‘rewinding to zero’, feels to me like the 'dream' of a new start, a reinvention, a way to deal with the usedupness of things, to pick up ‘what’s left’ and create something out of the ruins of what exists. ‘He zooms madly into my shadow’: the filmmaker begins his footage of Kashmir with his lover’s shadow, zooming in to what matters to him. The personal, the sensuous, the intimate: these become ways of understanding the backdrops of lives; the impact of the political is never diminished, but the poem chooses to ‘zoom in’ on the personal. And, of course, the relationship in the poem is between two men: the poem is as much about sexual identity as about national or cultural identity.
This is from an obituary that the poet Ellen Bryant Voigt wrote for Ali: We read, in part, to understand ‘the other’. He wrote, in part, to help us understand.
For more poems by Agha Shahid Ali, check out his tag at greatpoets.
I’ll focus here on one poem in this collection, which I hope will entice you enough to read more of his work. :-) My favourite poem in the collection is The Country without a Post Office, but it’s too long to summarise for you here in a way that can do it justice, so I’m going to talk a little about another poem in the collection, ‘The Correspondent’. I haven’t included the entire poem below, but you can read it here.
The Country without a Post Office: Poems by Agha Shahid Ali. (Norton, 1997.)
The title of the book refers to a period in which the postal service in Kashmir was suspended for several months, and many of the poems in the book are about communication of various kinds. These are the opening lines of ‘The Correspondent’:
I say “There’s no way back to your country,”
I tell him he must never leave. He cites
the world: his schedule. I set up barricades:
the mountain routes are damp;
there, dead dervishes damascene
the dark. “I must leave now,” his voice ablaze.
I take off-it’s my last resort-my shadow.
And he walks-there’s no electricity-
back into my dark, murmurs Kashmir!, lights
(to a soundtrack of exploding grenades)
a dim kerosene lamp.
"We must give back the hour its sheen.
or this spell will never end... Quick," he says,
"I've just come-with videos-from Sarajevo."
As in much of Ali’s poetry, the political is felt through the personal: the ‘soundtrack of exploding grenades’ is parenthetical to the poem’s primary concerns. Taking off one’s shadow, here, parallels taking off one’s clothes, maybe suggesting that sexual intimacy is a space in which national identities do not matter, that they can’t matter if genuine connections between people are to be forged.
There are some vivid images in the next couple of stanzas, in which the speaker describes what he sees in the footage that his lover has filmed in Bosnia: a solitary musician dressed in formal wear playing his cello on the sidewalk; the barbed-wire fence of a concentration camp; and the dead, whose “gaze” is “fractured white with subtitles”.
At the end of the poem, the speaker lights a candle, and reflects:
[…] He’ll erase
Bosnia, I feel. He will rewind to zero,
film from there a way back to his country,
bypassing graves that in blacks and whites
climb ever up the hills. The wax cascades
down the stand, silver clamp
to fasten this dream, end it unseen.
In the faltering light, he surveys
what’s left. He zooms madly into my shadow.
This erasure, this ‘rewinding to zero’, feels to me like the 'dream' of a new start, a reinvention, a way to deal with the usedupness of things, to pick up ‘what’s left’ and create something out of the ruins of what exists. ‘He zooms madly into my shadow’: the filmmaker begins his footage of Kashmir with his lover’s shadow, zooming in to what matters to him. The personal, the sensuous, the intimate: these become ways of understanding the backdrops of lives; the impact of the political is never diminished, but the poem chooses to ‘zoom in’ on the personal. And, of course, the relationship in the poem is between two men: the poem is as much about sexual identity as about national or cultural identity.
This is from an obituary that the poet Ellen Bryant Voigt wrote for Ali: We read, in part, to understand ‘the other’. He wrote, in part, to help us understand.
For more poems by Agha Shahid Ali, check out his tag at greatpoets.