Agha Shahid Ali

(19492001)
Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi, India in 1949. He grew up in Kashmir, the son of a
distinguished and highly educated family in Srinagar. He attended the University of Kashmir, the
University of Delhi and, upon arriving in the United States in 1975, Pennsylvania State
University and the University of Arizona. Though a Kashmiri Muslim, Ali is best known in the
U.S. and identified himself as an American poet writing in English. The recipient of numerous
fellowships and awards and a finalist for the National Book Award, he taught at the University of
Massachusetts-Amherst, Princeton College and in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College.
At the time of his death in 2001, Ali was noted as a poet uniquely able to blend multiple ethnic
influences and ideas in both traditional forms and elegant free-verse. His poetry reflects his
Hindu, Muslim, and Western heritages. In Contemporary Poets, critic Bruce King remarked that
Alis poetry swirls around insecurity and obsessions [with]memory, death, history, family
ancestors, nostalgia for a past he never knew, dreams, Hindu ceremonies, friendships, and selfconsciousness about being a poet.
Known particularly for his dexterous allusions to European, Urdu, Arabic and Persian literary
traditions, Alis poetry collections revolve around both thematic and cultural poles. The scholar
Amardeep Singh has described Alis style as ghazalesque, referring to Alis frequent use of the
form as well as his blending of the rhythms and forms of the Indo-Islamic tradition with a
distinctly American approach to storytelling. Most of his poems are not abstract considerations of
love and longing, Singh noted, but rather concrete accounts of events of personal importance
(and sometimes political importance). Though Ali began publishing in the early 1970s, it was
not until A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987) that he received widespread recognition. King
characterized that book as a surreal world of nightmare, fantasy, incongruity, wild humor, and
the grotesque. Although the existential anxieties have their source in problems of growing up,
leaving home, being a migrant, and the meeting of cultures, the idiom is American and
contemporary. Alis next book, A Nostalgists Map of America (1991), relates a series of travels
through landscapes often blurred between his current American home and memories of his
boyhood in Kashmir. King contended that such imagination links past and present, America and
India, Islamic and American deserts, American cities and former American Indian tribes, modern
deserts and prehistoric oceans, adding there is a highly profiled language of color, paradoxes,
oxymora, and other means to lift the poems into the lyrical and fanciful.
Alis next books were widely praised. The poem originally called Kashmir Without a Post
Office was published as the title poem in The Country Without a Post Office (1997). Taking its
impetus from the 1990 Kashmiri uprising against India, which led to political violence and
closed all the countrys post offices for seven months, Alis long poem is considered one of his
masterpieces. Built on association and repetition rather than straightforward narrative logic, the
poem is filled with recurring phrases and images. Ali dedicated it to his life-long friend James
Merrill. Joseph Donahue, reviewing Alis posthumous collected volume The Veiled Suite (2009)
for Bookforum described The Country Without a Post Office as the first of the two volumes that
form the peak of his achievement. In the book, Donahue explained, the poet envisions the
devastation of his homeland, moving from the realm of the personal to an expansive poetry that
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maintains an integrity of feeling in the midst of political violence and tragedy. Kashmir is vividly
evoked, all the more so for retaining an element of the fantastic.
Rooms Are Never Finished (2001) similarly yokes political and personal tragedy, again with a
long poem as its focal point. Ali used a line from Emily Dickinson as the title for Amherst to
Kashmir, a poem that explores his grief at his mothers death and his own continued sense of
exile from his home and culture. Noting how Ali continually stitches his work from cultural,
political and personal events, Donahue described the poem as a cultural inquiry as well as a
personal lament. Ali threads the story of the martyrdom of the Shia hero Hussain throughout his
elegy, keeping the history and hope of transcendental violence always before us, drawing
strength from the strain of esoteric Islam that runs through his work.
Ali was a noted writer of ghazals, a Persian form that utilizes repetition, rhyme and couplets. As
editor of Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000), he described the long history of
fascination of Western writers with ghazals, as well as offering a succinct theoretical reading of
the form itself. In his introduction he wrote, The ghazal is made up of couplets, each
autonomous, thematically and emotionally complete in itself once a poet establishes the
schemewith total freedom, I might addshe or he becomes its slave. What results in the rest
of the poem is the alluring tension of a slave trying to master the master. Alis own book of
ghazals, Call Me Ishmael Tonight (2001), frequently references American poets and other poems,
creating a further layer of allusive tension. The poet Michael Palmer alleged that Alis ghazals
offer a path toward a level of lyric expansiveness few poets would dare to aspire to. The volume
was published posthumously, following Alis untimely death.
Ali translated the work of Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz in The Rebels Silhouette (1992), and
frequently alluded to the poets influence on his own poetry. Joseph Donahue, reviewing The
Veiled Suite, commented that through those translations, Ali first challenged the poetry of our
moment, and they resonate profoundly with the personal and cultural devastations he documents
in his own life. Some of the finest lines in The Veiled Suite can be read as a response to
Faizs. Reviewing the book for Publishers Weekly, poet Mark Doty, however, saw Merrills
influence on Alis poems not only in terms of their formal elegance but in the way that a
resonant, emotional ambiguity allows the poet to simultaneously celebrate love and lament a
landscape of personal and public losses. Noting that Alis poems fill with letters, addresses,
envelopes, lost messages and maps, and with images of home recalled and revisited in dreams,
Doty concluded that Ali so thoroughly inhabits his exile, in this haunting lifes work, that he
makes of itboth for his own spirit and for his readersa dwelling place.

Postcard from Kashmir"

Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,
my home a near four by six inches.
I always loved neatness. Now I hold
the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.
This is home. And this is the closest
Ill ever be to home. When I return,
the colors wont be so brilliant.

The Jhelums waters so clean,

so ultramarine. My love
so overexposed.
And my memory will be a little
out of focus, in it
a giant negative, black
and white, still undeveloped.
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Final Literary Thread: Agha Shahid Ali's poetic career reflects his personal attempt to
cope with exile
1.

FORM
The Poem has three stanzas, the first and third stanzas has four lines while the second has

six
Poetic Form
Free-verse
Rhyme
Ali rhymes clean with ultramarine in the fifth and sixth lines of the second stanza. He
also has an internal rhyme in the first line of the third stanza, rhyming memory with will be.
Meter

The last line of the second stanza is iambic trimeter.

In stanza two, the first syllable of lines 1-2 is stressed, the first syllable of lines 3-4 is
unstressed, and the first syllable in lines 5-6 are stressed.
2.

FUNCTION (consult Elements of Poetry handout)

MEANING

This poem is about how memories and pictures cannot compensate for actually being in
your homeland. The reference to a postcard shows that his understanding of his homeland has
become shallow and incomplete. Memories of one's homeland are clouded by nostalgia, Ali
remembers only the good, when the reality of Kashmir was more accurately violent.
METHOD

Ali says that his home is now four by six inches, implying that he is nowhere near
capable of reproducing it in his mind.

The "half-inch Himalyas" show how something majestic can lose its sense of grandeur,
like Kashmir.

Ali describes his memories as undeveloped, showing that he is losing clarity of

culture/home.

Ali calls his memories undeveloped pictures (metaphor).

Kashmir physically becomes the postcard in his mailbox (metaphor).

Ali reminds the reader to be careful what they wish for, saying "I always loved neatness"
when he is clearly upset about the loss of everything else about his home (irony).
THEME

Confronting loss of one's homeland, or even memories of it, is extremely painful.

3.

LITERARY THREAD
Ali experiences a kind of peaceful, but painful recognition that Kashmir is no longer his

home.

He attempt to deal with the fact that he doesn't remember on it, something he seems to
believe is akin to cheating on a lover.
It gives him an independant sense of loss because he knows that it is no longer like his
memories, it has been through violent revolt.
Agha Shahid Ali "Postcard from Kashmir
Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi, India in 1949. He grew up in Kashmir, the son of a
distinguished and highly educated family in Srinagar. He attended the University of Kashmir, the
University of Delhi and, upon arriving in the United States in 1975, Pennsylvania State
University and the University of Arizona. Though a Kashmiri Muslim, Ali is best known in the
U.S. and identified himself as an American poet writing in English. The recipient of numerous
fellowships and awards and a finalist for the National Book Award, he taught at the University of
Massachusetts-Amherst, Princeton College and in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College.
At the time of his death in 2001, Ali was noted as a poet uniquely able to blend multiple ethnic
influences and ideas in both traditional forms and elegant free-verse. His poetry reflects his
Hindu, Muslim, and Western heritages. In Contemporary Poets, critic Bruce King remarked that
Alis poetry swirls around insecurity and obsessions [with]memory, death, history, family
ancestors, nostalgia for a past he never knew, dreams, Hindu ceremonies, friendships, and selfconsciousness about being a poet.
SUMMARY OF THE POEM
In Agha Shahid Alis poem titled Postcard from Kashmir, the speaker describes receiving a
postcard from his native land, Kashmir, a region of the Indian subcontinent. Parts of Kashmir
are controlled by India, Pakistan, and China, and in fact disputes between India and Pakistan
about the territory are long-standing and have often led to armed conflict.
In the opening two lines of the poem, the speaker indicates that the postcard contains a
photograph of (part of) Kashmir, a place the speaker still considers his home (2). Apparently
he is very geographically distant from Kashmir, a fact that makes his use of the word home
ironic. He may have been born in Kashmir and may have lived there for much of his life, but
now he is apparently living somewhere else, perhaps even in some Western country such as the
United Kingdom or the United States.
In any case, the speaker next mentions that he always loved neatness a trait that emphasizes
the irony that he can now hold the half-inch Himalayas in my hand (4). The massive mountain
range has been reduced to a small, tidy picture, which is surely not the kind of neatness the
speaker truly desires. One of the most impressive aspects of his homeland has thus been
shrunken and made to seem far less impressive and significant. Although the speaker holds the
postcard, he has in more literal ways lost touch with the land he loves.
Perhaps the most intriguing and puzzling lines of the poem are these:
This is home. And this the closest
I'll ever be to home. . . . (5-6)
Does the speaker mean that Kashmir is home? If so, why does he say that this is the closest he
will ever be to home? One might assume that he means that he is unable to return to Kashmir,
and so the postcard must suffice as a poor substitute for an actual visit. In the very next phrase,
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however, the speaker seems to contemplate an inevitable return (6). Therefore, when he says
This is home, does he mean the unnamed place where he currently resides, which seems a poor
substitute for his actual home of Kashmir? The phrasing of lines 5-6 is not entirely clear and
contributes an interesting ambiguity to the poem.
The speaker assumes that when he does actually return to Kashmir (in real life and not simply in
his imagination), the real sights of the place will not live up neither to the picture of them
presented in the postcard nor to the idealized memory of them in the speakers mind. In the
poems closing lines, the speaker suggests that his memory of Kashmir is unreliable and that
Kashmir itself may be like
. . . a giant negative, black
and white, still undeveloped. (13-14)
These lines and especially the last word are suggestive. They may imply that Kashmir is still
in the process of development as a place, that it is at present still too polarized to live up either to
the speakers idealized memory of it or to the postcards idealized presentation of its beauty.
Critical Commentary:
Kashmir is the most inflammable part between the India and Pakistan. Due to the dispute many
native people of the region migrated from there, Kashmir is the heaven of the earth still there are
away from their homeland. Through this poem poet tries to focus on the sentiment of the people
of the Kashmir. Nostalgia for the motherland is the central theme of the poem. Poet is seeking
the quest for identity.

The Dacca Gauzes

. . . for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most exquisite Dacca gauzes.
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Those transparent Dacca gauzes

were distributed among

known as woven air, running

the nieces and daughters-in-law.

water, evening dew:

Those too now lost.

a dead art now, dead over

In history we learned: the hands

a hundred years. "No one

of weavers were amputated,

now knows," my grandmother says,

the looms of Bengal silenced,

"what it was to wear

and the cotton shipped raw

or touch that cloth." She wore

by the British to England.

it once, an heirloom sari from

History of little use to her,

her mother's dowry, proved

my grandmother just says

genuine when it was pulled, all

how the muslins of today

six yards, through a ring.

seem so coarse and that only

Years later when it tore,

in autumn, should one wake up

many handkerchiefs embroidered

at dawn to pray, can one

with gold-thread paisleys

feel that same texture again.

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One morning, she says, the air

it absently through her ring.

was dew-starched: she pulled

Agha Shahid Ali wrote Dacca Gauzes, a very beautiful poem full of lament and woe. Something
that is rather infectious. His poem on the "Dacca Gauzes" exemplifies Shahid's nostalgia, his
sense of history, his grace, a sensibility as fine as the gauze fabrics he describes here.
Grandmothers and their stories , the amazing woven air, the texture of morning air in autumn
and of course the tragic end of these muslins and their weavers. It is near impossible to grow up
in India, without having heard about them the fabled weave from Dacca.
Throughout the poem Agha Shahid Ali uses some images typical to the sub-continental context.
Moreover, the poem reminds us the cruel colonial policy that the British colonizers exercised on
the peasants of the Bengal
The reference to the exquisite fabric, the refined Bengali muslin, in Agha Shahid Ali's poem,
"The Dacca Gauzes," serves as a metaphor of loss of history and memory. Describing his
grandmothers nostalgia for this beautiful muslin and its splendor in the lines no one now knows,
my grandmother says, what it was like to wear that cloth, the speaker addresses the glory of this
art. The juxtaposition of the grandmothers nostalgic memory, in the following imagery, the air/
was dew-starched: she pulled/ it absently through her ring, reflecting the ephemerality of the
cloth, now lost to history, with the speakers historical knowledge of the intricate Dhaka muslins
in the following lines, In history we learned: the hands/ of weavers were amputated,/ the looms
of Bengal silenced, shows how the phrases and imagery in the poem reflect its themes of
nostalgia and loss.

In Memory of Begum Akhtar

(d. 30 October 1974)
1
Your death in every paper,
boxed in the black and white
of photographs, obituaries,
the sky warm, blue, ordinary,
no hint of calamity,
no room for sobs,
even between the lines.

Do your fingers still scale the hungry

Bhairavi, or simply the muddy shroud?
Ghazal, that death-sustaining widow,
sobs in dingy archives, hooked to you.
She wears her grief, a moon-soaked white,
corners the sky into disbelief.
Ghazal, that death-sustaining widow,
You've finally polished catastrophe,
the note you seasoned with decades
of Ghalib, Mir, Faiz:

I wish to talk of the end of the world.

I innovate on a note-less raga.
2

3
6

Exiling you to cold mud,

your coffin, stupid and white,
astounds by its ignorance.

but I've taken the circumstantial evidence,

your records, pictures, tapes,
and offered a careless testimony.

It wears its blank pride,

defleshing the nomad's echo.
I follow you to the earth's claw,

I wish to summon you in defence,

but the grave's damp and cold, now when
Malhar longs to stitch the rain,

shouldering time's shadow.

This is history's bitter arrogance,
this moment of the bone's freedom.
4
One cannot cross-examine the dead,

wrap you in its notes: you elude

completely. The rain doesn't speak,
and life, once again, closes in,
reasserting this earth where the air
meets in a season of grief.

(for Saleem Kidwai)

Leaving your city: Analysis

The Poem that I chose to analyze is Agha Shahid Ali's titled Leaving Your City. This is a very
appropriate choice of title because it clarifies and helps you to understand the movement of the
poem. We have the writer and another character meeting and spending time together and then
they are not together and the title helps us to understand that the writer has left the city of the
newly met companion. Also the title is not stated with in the poem and is not a real clich title so
I believe that that makes it work even better.
The way Ali has broken up this poem is very interesting. He makes use of full sentences and
only uses capitalization at the beginning of each sentence. However the way that each stanza is
broken up puts a great deal of emphasis on specific lines throughout the poem. There is also
enjambment throughout the entire poem and it makes you keep reading a sentence and at the
same time has you look at the line the reader just read more carefully. There is also a great deal
of end-stopped lines and line breaks which introduce an unexpected emphasis. There is one line
that is just one word, the word meticulous, and that word alone really paints the picture of the
nameless character that is involved in someway with the speaker. The way you are forced to read
allows for a great reading experience.
Ali pulls together very unlike images and makes them work very well together. The images
however seem to be somewhat abstract. The stanza that really stands out to me is
you sharpened the knife
on the moons surface,
polished it with lunatic silver. (Ali) This is just very uncertain and it makes the reader have
to think about what the speaker is saying. There are just so many different ways in which you can
deduce that set of lines, which is definitely a good thing because then the reader definitely has
their own interpretation and experience of the writing. The speaker never uses a simile flat out
but everything that the speaker says is very important because there are so many events and
7

movements that take place in this piece, yet it is all withered down to a few precise words that
encapsulate everything the speaker is trying to convey.
The tone that the speaker sets is also very important to the reader empathizing. From the
beginning the reader seems to be looking into the past on an event that has already taken place
and is written in the past tense. Everything is in the first person which helps us to know that the
speaker is actually involved in the events and has feelings. Then the piece takes a very evident
turn where the tense changes from past to present and the speaker talks about what they have left.
The mood also changes when the tense changes. It starts out that the speaker is jovially
reminiscent of the events with this unknown person and then turns into a sort of depressed
longing to be near that other person which many people can identify with.
The interesting thing about this piece is that I am not able to see any type of meter or
established rhythm at all. Yet everything flows very well, and I believe that is due to the
simplicity of every event that the speaker expresses. There is no time wasted setting anything up
or really describing the events. The speaker simply states what happened with a few funky
adjectives.
The way this piece ends is very appropriate and it definitely resonates with the reader. It ends
in a sort of way that makes you feel like everything is just fading away while you get farther and
farther away from the events that had taken place earlier in the piece. It seems to be the best way
to end such a depressed piece and I really liked the way it put everything into perspective. Seeing
as how this class is my first experience with poetry I feel that I still have a great deal to learn
about how to analyze a piece. This is just about everything that I could extract and analyze from
Leaving You City

'Beyond the Ash Rains,' Agha Shahid Ali

What have you known of loss

Wet and cold, I spoke like a poor man,

That makes you different from other men?

- Gilgamesh.

without irony. You showed me the relics

of our former life, proof that wed at last

When the desert refused my history,

found each other, but in your arms I felt

Refused to acknowledge that I had lived

there, with you, among a vanished tribe,

singled out for loss. When you lit the fire

two, three thousand years ago, you parted

and poured the wine, I am going, I

murmured,

the dawn rain, its thickest monsoon curtains,

repeatedly, going where no one has been

and no one will be Will you come with me?

and beckoned me to the northern canyons.

There, among the red rocks, you lived alone.
I had still not learned the style of nomads:

You took my hand, and we walked through the streets

of an emptied world, vulnerable

to our suddenly bare history in which I was,

to walk between the rain drops to keep dry.

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but you said wont again be, singled

be exiled, never again, from your arms.

out for loss in your arms, wont ever again

A Rehearsal of Loss
The night rose from the rocks of the canyon.
his lovers door closing behind him, leaves
I drove away from your door. And the night,
that street in silence for the rest of his life.
it left the earth the way a broken man,

Ghazal
Feel the patients heart
Poundingoh please, this once
JAMES MERRILL
Ill do what I must if Im bold in real time.
A refugee, Ill be paroled in real time.
Cool evidence clawed off like shirts of hell-fire?

A former existence untold in real time ...

The one you would choose: Were you led then by him?

What longing, O Yaar, is controlled in real time?

Each syllable sucked under waves of our earth

The funeral love comes to hold in real time!

They left him alive so that he could be lonely
The god of small things is not consoled in real time.

Please afterwards empty my pockets of keys

Its hell in the city of gold in real time.

Gods angels again arefor Satan!

forlorn.
Salvation was bought but sin sold in real time.

And who is the terrorist, who the victim?

Well know if the country is polled in real time.

Behind a door marked DANGER are

being unwound
the prayers my friend had enscrolled in real time.

The throat of the rearview and sliding down it

the Street of Farewells now unrolled in real time.

I heard the incessant dissolving of silk

I felt my heart growing so old in real time.
Her heart must be ash where her body lies burned.
What hope lets your hands rake the cold in real time?
Now Friend, the Belovd has stolen your words

Read slowly: The plot will unfold in real time

(for Daniel Hall)

Ghazal

Definition:
All good things come in pairs, and the ghazal is no exception. This poetic form consists of
anywhere from five to fifteen couplets, each of which has nothing to do with the other couplets.
So why are they all in the same poem, you ask? Good question. The couplets are all united
formally in that they follow a strict pattern of rhyme and rhythm. The first line of the first couplet
sets up an internal rhyme, followed by a refrain. In the second line of the subsequent couplets,
that rhyme and refrain are picked up again. (The first line of the subsequent couplets can do
whatever it pleases.)
As with all poetic forms, it's easier to understand the ghazal in practice than in theory, so take a
look at the first three couplets of Agha Shahid Ali's "Ghazal":
I'll do what I must if I'm bold in real time.

A former existence untold in real time

A refugee, I'll be paroled in real time.

The one you would choose: Were you led then by him?

Cool evidence clawed off like shirts of hell-fore?

What longing, O Yaar, is controlled in real time?

See what we mean? The internal rhyme that gets repeated is set up with the word bold (and its
rhyming partner paroled). And the refrain, "in real time," gets repeated at the end of the second
line of all the couplets, including the first. Ali was kind of an expert at the ghazal, since he
introduced this form to the good ol' US of A. So when in doubt, read one of his and you'll catch
the gist.
There's also a tradition in ghazals of having the poet give a sort of sign-off in the last couplet,
where he's supposed to include his name in some way, as Agha Shahid Ali does in another ghazal
of his, "Tonight." Take a look at his final three couplets:
The hunt is over, and I hear the Call to Prayer
fade into that of the wounded gazelle tonight.

And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee

God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.

My rivals for your loveyou've invited them all?

This is mere insult, this is no farewell tonight.

And there it is, folks, Shahid's little shout out to

himself.

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Ghazals, by the way, are old. They come from ancient Arabia, and were popular with famous
Persian poets like Rumi and Hafiz. Often, ghazals are about unrequited or forbidden love,
longing, and Big Questions like, what on earth am I doing here all alone?