Chapter- V National Identity –Evolution and Celebration in the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish

The concept of national identity is as complex as its nature but in the nineteenth century the formation of nations was mostly inspired and influenced by the examples of England, France and Spain and to a lesser extent Holland and Sweden. It is due to their economical and military success story during the period of their formation in Western Europe which made these nations the aspiring countries in the world. These countries were seen as model nations in the sixteenth and seventeenth as a key to success. It was actually the concept of nationalism which catalyzed nations as well as national identities. National identity is a sense of belonging to one state or to another nation, it‘s some sort of a feeling one shares with a group of people, regardless of one's citizenship status. It‘s not an inborn trait; various studies have shown that a person's national identity results directly from the presence of elements like national symbols, language, national colors, history, national consciousness, blood ties, culture, music and cuisine etc. In other words, what we mean by national identity comprises both a cultural and political identity that is deeply rooted in a political community as well as in cultural fabric. Any attempts to attain or forge a national identity are political exercise with political ramifications. Scholars like Judith Butler argue that national identity is simply an individual choice; (1999) some like Anthony smith would argue that it is socially constructed and culture plays the most important role in it; (1996) others like Richard Jenkins would argue that national identity is an implication of boundary of social groups a symbol of one‘s ethnicity.(1996)

In the post colonial world the ideology of national identity became a central issue in the literary cannons which describes the relationship between colonizers and colonized. It is perceived that the colonial literature was used as a tool to perpetuate the authority or to support the ideological control over the colonized territories. On the other hand post colonial literature has been seen as a way out from the colonial past. The post colonial

154 poetry like other genres of literature depicts anger; protest against the atrocities, oppression committed by the colonizers and asserts the value of a national literature or the national identity. The concept of national identity has been used with increasing frequency, especially by poets, novelists and intellectuals arguing for the political self- determination. In order to survive and prosper in a hostile international environment the national groups particularly those nation who are still up against the injustice often require the national identity for a proper claim to self-determination. The sense of identity provides a powerful means of defining and locating individual‘s and others in the world, through the prism of the collective personality and its distinctive culture. It is through a shared, unique culture that people are enabled to know ‗who we are‘ in the contemporary world. Historically the ultimate objective of all nationalist movements is to make the nation and the state co-extensive. In other words, as they become conscious of their national identity, nations almost invariably claim the right to govern themselves.

The writers and poets of all these colonized nations stood up against the distorted and manipulated version of history and culture portrayed by the colonizers. The Post- Colonial poetry is one of the popular genres of literature where poets who either come from places with a history of colonialism appreciate the resistance and subversion of former colonizer. The national identity, landscape, rituals, culture and tradition translates the core of post-colonial poetry. The trend continues to assert one‘s national identity and glorify the landscape of his/her country. As Edward Said argues:

Post-colonial writers are able to take on or appropriate the forms, styles and symbols—in short, the cultural vocabulary---of the dominant texts and myths of colonial Europe. By subversively adapting, refracting, and manipulating these, by playing on the contradictions in the texts themselves, they ridicule and refute how they themselves have been represented. Moreover, crucially, in so doing they express their won subjectivity, their own perceptions of the world. (Quoted in Patricia Waugh, 2006)

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The leading post-colonial poets from Africa, Australia, Canada, India and West Indies write to underline their national identity and highlight their cultural landscape. The themes of political misrepresentation, marginalization, exploitation and national identity are implicitly found among the poets who come from the contemporary contested lands where conflict is still raging on. They create new and more fascinating images although they are gory and grim to celebrate their disputed national identities. They try to interconnect the landscape with the people‘s sentiment and tell us how the evocative memory of the past recreates the somber present. These ongoing and unresolved conflicts particularly in the Asia are directly or indirectly rooted in the British colonialism and their unknown political ulterior motives. As we know that the British colonialism had profound and wide-ranging effects on the political contours of Asia and Middle East. One of the most profound legacies of colonial period is the ongoing Kashmir and Palestine conflict in the region. It was the Labour party of 1945, with Creech Jones in the colonial office, initiatives were taken to dismantle the empire and create a new Commonwealth of independent states. India gained independence in 1947, but partition left Kashmir a disputed territory. Burma and Ceylon achieved independence more easily. In 1948, Britain terminated its Mandate over Palestine ingloriously, abandoning it to war, the forced exodus of thousands of Palestinian and the declaration of the state of Israel. The Continuing troubles of Kashmir and Israel/ Palestine are, partly, a Labor Legacy.5 (Desaiet al 213).The Palestine-Israel conflict has become the catalyst of all problems in the Middle East now for over half a century and continues to shape the Arab political discourse. The partition of Palestine in 1947 was immediately revised by the war of 1948 and was altered again by the Six-day War, the Camp David Accords, and the Oslo Agreement but nothing conclusive happened on the ground. However the Palestine leadership and the people in Arab world in contrast to their kings opposed the partition. This brewing unease and resentment among people finally lead to the 1967 War when the neighboring Arab countries of Palestine attacked the Jewish settlement to free Palestine from their occupation. But unfortunately this Arab daredevil culminated with the Israel taking complete control over the territory between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. This war leads to the massive refugee crisis and according to different independent sources more than four million Palestinians were uprooted from their homeland after the

156 creation of Israel state. The 1967 war Naksa (setback) exposed Arab regimes that not only lost creditability among the people but their rhetoric‘s of caring about Palestine suffered a huge setback which they often use for local consumption. Amidst fear and threat to their national identity the Palestinians were left with no option to launch an armed resistance against the occupation. Although there is no match with the formidable war machines of Israel but the armed resistance brought the Palestinian conflict out of the humanitarian ambit and made it an important unresolved political issue in the world. In this struggle of nationhood tactics are dictated by circumstances, abilities, emotions and limitations, and included the full gamut of tools used in anti-colonial struggles. However the ebb and flow of violence from both sides has done little to the Israeli-Palestine conflict because it has not yet contributed anything except grave miseries and sufferings.

On the other hand Indian administered Kashmir in the South Asia is another long standing conflict between the two nuclear armed countries India and Pakistan since 1947. It has become a nuclear flash point in the region and from the last six decades both the nuclear neighbors have fought four wars were over it. Alike Palestine Kashmir imbroglio has also its roots in the British colonialism when on the 15 August 1947 they partitioned the sub continent into the two independent nation states of India and Pakistan. All the 565 princely states of undivided India were offered to choose between the Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Kashmir under the last DograkingMaharajaHari Singh was also given choice to decide their future because majority of his subjects in his kingdom were Muslims. However the internal revolt in the Chinab valley and then the armed invade on 22 October 1947 by the tribal militia of NWFP of Pakistan to annex Kashmir. To quell the revolt and invasion, Maharaja signs the instrument of accession, acceding Kashmir to India without the consent of the people:

On October 27, 1947, Maharaja Hari Singh agreed to Kashmir‘s Singh agreed to Kashmir‘s accession to India. Troops were airlifted to Kashmir to Kashmir, and the Indian army succeeded in halting the advance of the tribal forces, driving them back to the western third of the state. That portion of the state then acceded to

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Pakistan as ―Azad (Free) Kashmir. On March 5, 1948, Shiekh Abdullah became prime minster of the state‘s interim government. (Human Rights in India: Kashmir Under Siege: 1991, P 8)

This instrument of accession has since been controversial particularly in Jammu &Kashmir considering it temporary and farce document. It was the first Prime Minister of India; Jawaharlal Nehru who promised before UNO that Kashmir‘s will be given right to decide their future in some point of time. He said on the floor of United Nations that:

Once the soil of the state had been cleared of the invaders (from Pakistan) and normal conditions restored, its people would be free to decide their future by the democratic method of a plebiscite or referendum which in order to ensure complete impartiality, might be held under the international auspices. (Korbel: 2015, P98)

The referendum is yet to become a reality and the document of accession is still seen as a provisional pending for plebiscite to determine the will of people of Jammu &Kashmir. The great irony of the story is the year India and Israel celebrate their birthday is actually the birthday of these two ongoing conflicts. India got her independence in 1947 so was the state of Israel founded and recognized in 1947 on the basis of a United Nations decision to partition the territory between the Jordan River and Mediterranean sea between two states, one Arab and one Jewish.

The literature which has popped up from these two conflict zones since three four decades often express protest, resistance against occupation and preserves the national identity. These writers use resistance as a tool for aesthetic and socio-political engagement in postcolonial narratives of ongoing conflicts in Kashmir and Palestine. Their writings foreground complex history of postcolonial conflicts, they also interrelate the responsibilities and representation of the besieged people. In this sense, the literature of protest provides us an inside to the life people living in these conflict zones which we won‘t get in the mainstream media. What we find in this literature is the urge to resist and

158 deconstruct postcolonial discourses and broaden the concepts of nation and identity with their unflinching steadfastness. Therefore the role of these writers and poets in the conflict zones becomes more important politically as well as ethically in mobilizing the masses and reaching out to the world.

Today, as the colonial age is over and the new age is called ‗postcolonial‘ era, however the traces of colonialism can still be observed in the postcolonial period. The wounds of colonialism are yet to be healed up as the unresolved disputes continue to bleed people and jeopardized the peace and prosperity in the South Asia and Middle East. The major themes of the post colonial writers and poets especially from the ongoing conflict zones are the fragmentation of identity crisis and the right to nationhood. Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish are the two such seminal voices of the oppressed people, who portrayed the deadly repercussions of the ongoing conflicts befalling in their homelands with depth and self-ovulation through poetry.

This sense of national identity provides a powerful means of defining and locating the person in the multiculturalism world, through the prism of the collective personality and its distinctive culture. It is due to these shared, unique culture that we are enabled to know 'who we are' in the world. By rediscovering that culture we rediscover and re- explore ourselves in the milieu of uncertain modern world. The quest for nation and its culture from time immoral remain the most unfathomable component in the lives of poets and writers. It becomes more valuable and relevant to defend when the national identity is facing the existential threat due to the foreign occupation. In such circumstances it becomes imperative and a moral responsibility to the unacknowledged legislatures of the society to defend the foreign aggression and preserve the sovereign status of their national identity. To maintain the national identity in the foreign occupation has always been a big concern among the people in Kashmir and Palestine. Both the places are often misrepresented by the mainstream media as they continue to frame them people caught between the horns f nationalism and independence. The unending subjugation and suppression to muzzle the voice of people gave rise to the strong nationalism which is not only echoed in the political discourse but is getting enough space in the literature coming

159 from Kashmir and Palestine. The idea of Palestine statehood in Arab world Palestine has been a strong and dynamic factor in the Middle East, first in the decades of the 1920‘s and 1930‘s, then again in the 1960s, especially after the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.

In the aftermath of 1948 refugee crisis thousands of Palestinian were displaced forcefully from their homeland by the Zionist settlers. It was first presumed that the United Nations or the Arab States would help the refuges but it didn‘t happen. In the 1964 a young Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat established a small guerrilla organizationFatah(Victory) with a philosophy to mobilize popular Arab support and fan the Palestinian nationalism against the Israel. The intensity to break the fetters of occupation leads to the formation of the Palestinian liberation organization (PLO) with a purpose to liberate Palestine with armed struggle. During this armed struggle the Palestinian nationalism overemphasizes the Zionism and underestimated the internal Arab crisis that not only lead to the rise of Palestinian nationalism but inflamed the Arab nationalism as well. The Palestinian writers who embraced nationalism whether its own homeland or pan –Arab blamed the western imperialism and their policies after the fall of Ottoman Empire for the anarchy and political unrest in the region.

On the other side nationalism in Indian administered Kashmir rises from the continuous deep rooted resentment against the oppressive, totalitarian and communal character of Dogra regimes who tried to polarize the state on the religion lines. Their autocratic rule touches all the limits of oppression but couldn‘t succeed to quell the sentiment among the people. Since the formation of political organizations was banned in Kashmir during the Dogra rule. However the educated Kashmiri youth who returned from Indian universities especially from Aligarh formed an underground Reading Room Party. In establishing this organization, the main construction was to form a united Muslim stand against the Dogra rule within the state. This inevitable political conscious among the educated youth in Jammu and Kashmir actually started when the elite Muslims in India joined to form the All India Muslim League. In 1932 finally a group of young, university-educated youth from the valley and Jammu province formed the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference to mobilize the people and coordinate the

160 popular movement against the Hindu Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, demanding the democratic right. At the early stage of this organization was to unite Muslims across the state across under one political umbrella through an appeal to their sense of belonging to an Islamic community.

Right from its inception the programme of the Muslim Conference was secular and progressive. True, the leaders of Muslim Conference came forward in the Muslim name but their programme and manifesto was as broad as that of any progressive political Party of India. They fought against exploitation, regardless of the religion of the exploiter. These attitudes of Muslim leadership certainly began to influence and impress even the staunch Hindu communalists. (Tahrik-i-Hurriyat-i-Kashmir, Vol. II, pp. 17-18.)

In 1938 many internal and external incidents directly or indirectly paved the way for the Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah who was one of the founders of people‘s movement against the Dogra rulers cast Muslim Conference into National Conference. This made the organization purely nationalistic political from and became the institutional voice of the people. But with the passage of time Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah‘s growing affinity with the Indian state for the sake of power was seen with the passive reactions. The lack of ideological cohesiveness, succession issue particularly after the death of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah became an important factor in the decline of national conference. Despite political waywardness the party continued to enjoy mass support till 1987.

The final blow to the National Conference came in 1987 when its leadership rigged the election at the behest of some political opportunities in connivance with Indian State. Which resulted the lost of hope among people in this party and also proved a turning point in the future politics of the state. This led another phase of violent nationalistic movement in the Jammu and Kashmir with new political separatist leadership and dozens of armed militant organizations fight against the Indian security forces. The watershed incident in recent history like the 1984 hanging of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation front (JKLF) leader, Maqbool Bhat, the 1987 rigged elections, the mass uprisings for azadi in

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2010/11. After that again politically motivated hanging took place and it was another Kashmiri Afzal Guroo who was sent to gallows to satisfy the collective conscious of the country. The repression that began in 1989 forced Kashmir‘s to take up arms against the Indian state defines the new narratives of violence and nationalistic valor of the people in the state.

Among all the unresolved and outstanding issues which the world faces today is Palestine and Kashmir with deep rooted geopolitical and religious nature. The disputes concerning both territories are geographical, economic, cultural political and religious, especially with Israel at least. Both are the legacies of botched British colonial history so that to divide lands in order to accommodate their future neo colonial desires and ambitions in both the regions. Palestine and Kashmir are politically homogenous territories and volatile given the current spate of violence in both the places. The noted political analyst Verghese Koithara has rightly described this resemblance in this way:

There is some resemblance between the ways in which the conflicts over Palestine and Kashmir have got transformed over the decades. Initially both conflicts had manifested themselves in the form of inter-state wars-1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 in the former case and 1947-48, 1965 and 1971 in the latter case. As the intifada changes the Palestinian struggle into an internal one in 1987, militant actions converted the Kashmir conflict in 1989 from an inter-sate one to an internally located one—no doubt with extensive support. It is an interesting coincidence that the current phase of conflict in both Palestine and Kashmir began during 1987-89, after a nearly equal gestation period of four decades. It is also worth nothing that both Israel and India have much more difficulty in handling the new internally- located fighting than the earlier, well defined external wars. Also noteworthy is the fact that in both Palestine and Kashmir, what started as territorial contests got infused more and more with religion as years passed. Not only has the silence of religion increased in both conflicts, but nationalist and religious zeal have got intertwined first on one side, then on both side. (Crafting Peace in Kashmir: Through A Realist Lens, p242-243)

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Writing from the conflict zones and then stand by the people‘s resistance movement often entails serious consequences like assassination, forced exile and arbitrary arrests for such writers. There are many poets especially from the Palestine who were eliminated as well as forced to leave the land and many of them even died in exile like Mahmoud Darwish. But the literatures they produced contain aspirations of the people and deep rooted anger against the oppressive rule. Their poetry not only describes the simmering pain but also narrate the personal sufferings that these poets lived through. In the forced exile these resistance poets blended the memories of their lost homeland with their exilic life and created such resistance anthems which have become the essential breath of the besieged people in the conflict zones. For theses poets writing is an act of survival, but also an act of resistance against the imposed theatre of suppression and repression. The discourse on Kashmir, Palestine and the protracted conflicts has evoked a whole spectrum of writing both literary and non literary.

The regional poets like Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish have become great literary figures in the larger framework of resistance literature given their poetry which delves deep in the past, present and future of their homelands. Their poetry gives us an insight of the contemporary Kashmiri, Palestinian identities, and helps us to understand the struggle in identity-making in the context of ongoing conflicts. The search for identity and the sense of loss of land are the major themes in the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish.It‘s very interesting to see how both the poets navigate their national identities in their poems and how they share a common ground as for as the continuous cycle of misery, violence and the oppression in their homelands is concerned.

The dream of return to their roots and reunion with their families and lovers always rendezvous these exiled poets. In Palestinian Arabic poetry as well as in the Kashmiri poetry, the homeland is always personified as a loving mother, a beautiful mistress, and a beloved. For Ali and Darwish both this national identity is the nucleus of their poetry and which they celebrated it with pride and a sense of moral responsibility given the ongoing political crisis in their homelands.

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Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish come from the two most unfortunate parts of the world where the ongoing conflict has been a great tragedy and disaster in all respects: unabated large death toll, grave human rights abuses, displacement of populations, and disappearance of the people, a massive military buildup and the people caught up in the vortex of severe psychological distress. Kashmir, along with the Palestine conflict was among the first crisis that the United Nations had to confront in the post colonial era when the new maps were drawn. But even after the sixty years have passed, Kashmir and the Palestine conflict are yet to be resolved by the international community. In the backdrop of this ongoing political crisis prevailing in their respective homelands and then the subsequent challenges of exile, the loneliness, Ali and Darwish have more explicitly narrated the melancholic tale of their people in their poetry.

The ongoing resistance movement in the Indian administered Kashmir against the Indian state embodies a complex amalgamation of religious, nationalist and political factors which are deeply rooted in the great partition of the sub-continent. This history dates back to the time when India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were one, a time when the British colonizers adopted their policy of 'divide and rule' to create artificial boundaries between people, instigating the religious violence that continues to plague many parts of India. But undoubtedly the Kashmir conflict is rooted in the times of British colonialism because in 1848 the British Raj sold Kashmir to a Hindu Dogra kings Gulab Singh for Rsjust 75 lakhs. Then the Last dogra king Hari Singh‘s controversial dictatorial accession in the 1947 with India without taking the people on board pushed Kashmir into the perpetual embers of violence and political crisis. This great tragedy of errors in the world history was beautifully depicted by the great Urdu poet Dr. Allama Mohammad Iqbal in this way;

Oh morning breeze if you happen to pass over Geneva, Tell them that a nation was sold but was sold very cheap‖. (Iqbal, Bang-e-Dra-163-The Call of the Marching Bell)

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The once known as the paradise of east has become the land of violence and war mongering between the two nuclear armed countries India and Pakistan. The Kashmiri American English poet Agha Shahid Ali in his poetry became the chronicler of loss and created a language that speaks of miseries, atrocities and oppression which everybody is still going through in Kashmir.

Ali also features in the modern Indian poetry in the category of diaspora poets who are caught up between the two cultures. This cultural conflict and the identity crisis is the hallmark of all Indian diaspora poetry. They speak those experiences that every diaspora undergoes resulting from geographical displacement, alien culture, and the longing for homeland. Doing the double duty the diaspora poets write about their homeland for the natives of the host country and also speak of their experiences to the readers of their homeland. Nostalgia, longing and desire for home have become the central preoccupation both in the fiction and verse in Indian diaspora literature.

There is much to be found in common between the poetic musings of Darwish and Agha Sahid Ali in terms of identity, longing and politics. Ali is a poet of unparalleled elegance and virtuosity, a chronicler of pain- his poetry is dominated by the two major themes; loss and redemption. In the west he is an American poet and the first experimenter who blends the east and west in the Gazalisque literary adventure to negotiate experiences, personal and collective. However being the American citizen and living in the ‗land of dreams‘, he only had apprehensions about his homeland. Shahid is chased by his memories of Kashmir, and a surrealist account of incidents and landscapes in found abundantly in his poetry. On the other side Mahmoud Darwish is the poet of Palestinian identity par excellence. The besieged Palestinian people might suffer and die alone, but his personal tragedy is directly linked to the collective tragedy of people. The collective identity forms an integral part of the national narrative, and plays a decisive part in the ongoing resistance against the oppression in its varied aspects.

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Agha Shahid Ali

The Kashmir American poet Agha Shahid Ali occupies a prominent place in the tradition of Indian poets writing in English. He brought the plight of Kashmir torn of strife and war to the attention of American poetry readers. His poetic voice speaks with eloquence and wit of the multiple histories that constitute his home in India and the violent memory deeply rooted in the suffering of a wounded Kashmir. In his self imposed exile conditioned by the fractured identity and cultural values. His self often finds echoes in various shades of consciousness where Kashmiri identity remains the most strong and celebrated trait especially after the conflict ravaged his homeland.

Agha Shahid Ali‘s poetry is a somber tribute to Kashmir as he brings into focus the generations of sufferings, miseries and ordeals faced by the people of his homeland. Once this tiny Himalayan state used to be the abode of peace on the earth and now because of the ongoing conflict every family directly or indirectly has been affected by it. Kashmir still remained a core issue in the region and the whole international community is well concerned about of it. It is an issue of the deep aspirations of the people from the divided territory known as the Indian administered Kashmir and the Azad Kashmir. However the Indian administered part of Kashmir has remained the focus of the discourse since 1947. Since there are thousands of divided families on both sides, the desire of people to merge both the parts and have an independent state of Jammu and Kashmir is becoming louder and stronger every passing day. The poet grew up in this politically surcharged background and he reflected the entire cultural ethos and the resistance of his people in his poetry. When Agha Shahid Ali left his home for study and job in Delhi and U.S.A, he gradually realized the lost of his beautiful country. It was Kashmir which made him to write in the alien lands. Carol Muske writes:

Ali‘s voice possesses this contemporary agelessness. Ali grew up in Kashmir, a citizen of that small mountainous country torn apart by violence, its colonial past and present status as disputed territory between Pakistan and India. In this book of poems, The Country Without a Post Office, he mourned

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the devastation visited on his childhood home—once a paradise, offering the legendary jewel of Dal Lake near the ascent into the Himalayas, just a few hundred miles from china.

(Carol, p. 23)

Ali celebrated his nationality in most of his poetic oeuvre at a time when the young boys were disappearing, tortured and killed in the mountains. He wrote when the series of heart wrenching massacres took place across the valley like the brutal mass rape of entire village women in the frontier district of Kupwara during 1990‘s. The old and young women without their veils, disheveled hair, gnawing at their cheeks and beating their chests over the coffin of their loved ones became the new portrait of Kashmir. He wrote when the grief was hovering like the dark cloud in the sky of Kashmir. He wrote when the beautiful meadows were fertilized with the unmarked mass graves and the beautiful valley was turned into the beautiful jail. Hitherto to study the theme of nationality in Ali‘s poetry we need to take look at the political conflict raging on in the valley of Kashmir since decades.

Pre–colonial Kashmir public discourse exhibited a comfortable coexistence of regional specificity and religious universality. Contrary to popular belief, it was not the isolation of the Kashmir valley that produced narratives of regional and religious belonging: rather, it was the valley‘s links with the world outside that helped reinforce the poetic discourse on identities in the mid –eighteenth to early- nineteenth centuries. The articulation of identities by inhabitants of the valley is a similar processes of interaction-in this instance between socio-political factors, religious affiliations, and shifting geographic contexts. (Zutshi, p16)

Ali‘s famous anthology The country without a post office (1997) is a look on the current political situation in Kashmir as well as an autobiography of a poet who lived and died in exile but celebrated his national identity till his last breath. This collection is considered one of the Ali‘s most ambitious literary endeavors in which he rediscovers his Kashmiri connection. The mind and heart of the poet felt completely overshadowed by

167 the stark realities especially the brutal savagery befalls on his birth place. The stunning poems in the collection not only narrate the tell-tale history and politics of a place to which Ali longed to return time and again so that he can retain his national identity. In ―A Prologue,‖ to The Country without a Post Office, Ali writes:

And will the blessed women rub the ashes together? Each fall they gather Chinar leaves, singing what the hills have to re-echoed for four hundred years, the songs of Habba Khatoon, the peasant girl who later became the queen. When her husband was exiled from the valley by the Mughal king Akbar, she went among the people with her sorrow. Her grief, alive to this day, in her own roused the people into frenzied opposition to Mughal rule. And since Kashmir has never been free.

(Ali, 34-41)

In his early poetic stage Agha Shahid Ali didn‘t posses any permanent political position on Kashmir but as the things became bad to worse there he explicitly expresses his political position in his poems where he stressed only on his national identity. He travelled throughout United States of America but never forget his Kashmir identity and its culture conditioned by the saints of spirituality and the serene atmosphere. In the poem, “I Dream I Am the Only Passenger on Flight 423 to Srinagar” where we can see this fusion of political overtones with the spirituality. Sitting in the plane Ali takes a birds view but to his surprise he is unable to decide whether he is watching the beautiful autumn leaves burning or the burning of the famous shrine of Sheikh Noor DeenNoorani (ra) at Chrar-e- Sharief situated in the central Kashmir. The poem had a huge impact on him and he mentioned it in this way.

He still speaks through five centuries of poets. I hear his voice: ―Fire moves on its quick knees- Through Chrar-e-Sharif-toward my shrine. Know it‘s Time to return there-before ash fingrees Roses carved in the wood of weeping trees. (53-57)

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Ali while in America was searching the sense of belonging that could satisfy his thought and feelings. Daniel Hall says that ―Agha Shahid Ali was, by his own count, the beneficiary of three cultures-Muslim, Hindu, and for lack of more precise rubric, Western‖13 (Hall:15) But after the political and armed resistance against the Indian State rocked Kashmir followed by the gruesome violence he wanted to see Kashmir either in the form of Pennsylvania or Massachusetts. When he was battling with brain cancer he wished to die in Kashmir so that he can physically restore his lost paradise. In a conversation with AmitavGhosh, he said, ―I would like to go back to Kashmir to die‖(124). It was not only the political crisis and the violence which turned him to Kashmir but over the years in the America he became too much obsessed with his native culture and identity. HomiBhabha‗s examines Ali‘s obsession of home and says an ―unhomely travel that troubles textual, geographical and cultural boundaries and invites us to rethink the meaning of ―home and the ―foreign. (The location of Culture, 2004)

Ali‘s poetic imagery, dominated with the death, the loss of homeland and the agony he felt over Kashmir is artistically and painfully rendered in his last two collections of poetry without indulging in rhetoric. As Christina Benevenuto writes that ―Ali said that India‘s political troubles made him ache for Kashmir, and this is especially evident in The Country Without A Post Office, in frequent if sometimes oblique, references to soldiers, curfews, searchlights and a city in the ruins‖(266).Ali mirrors the stark reality of his home in his poetry and maintains a pervasive theme blending the rhythms of despair and hope, desire and longing, tears and smiles. His poetic voice does not romanticize or propagandize but it is a poetic protest against the continued suppression and exploitation rampant in the beautiful valley of Kashmir. Whenever the poet returned to the land to visit his ailing grandfather, he finds that the army had occupied her house, making it their dingy office with dust everywhere, on damp files and broken desks. Prof. Syed Habib in his tribute to the poet analyzes the circumstances in this way:

The electric lights are turned off and the country without office, crying from pain, flickers under kerosene lamps. Dreams, sometimes motionless like the dead, sometimes moving like the army conveys over the mountains,

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corresponds with Ali and his readers- listeners and the sanctuary of his heart is adorned with the red wine of Ali‘s penmanship. (Habib, p4)

Ali mirrors the stark reality of his home in his poetry and maintains a pervasive theme blending the rhythms of despair and hope, desire and longing, tears and smiles. His poetic voice does not romanticize or propagandize but it is a poetic protest against the continued suppression and exploitation rampant in the beautiful valley of Kashmir. The character of Rizwan in The Country Without Post Office, portrays this ongoing fire of brutality and symbolizes all those boys who disappeared in the mountains and watered the homeland with their blood as thousands of Rizwans fell to bullets.

"Rizwan, it's you, Rizwan, it's you," I cry out As he steps closer, the sleeves of his Phiren torn. "Each night put Kashmir in your dreams," he says, Then touches me, his hands crusted with snow, Whispers, "I have been cold a long, long time." "Don't tell my father I have died," he says, and I follow him through blood on the road and hundreds of pairs of shoes the mourners left behind, as they ran from the funeral, victims of the firing. From windows we hear grieving mothers, and snow begins to fall on us, like ash. Black on edges of flames, it cannot extinguish the neighbor hoods, the homes set ablaze by midnight soldiers. Kashmir is burning. (I see Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight, 26-39)

The eponymous poems of Ali explicitly describe his national essence which he not only feel proud of but served as an impetus for other contemporary Kashmiri English

170 writers living in diaspora. Born on February 4, 1949, in New Delhi, India, Agha Shahid Ali was raised in Kashmir, but left in 1976 for the United States to pursue higher studies. He never returns Kashmir permanently until 2001 and just before he died that same year, he refused to carry the badge of US citizenship. In the 1990‘s when the spate of violence swept the valley he represented the collective conscious of oppressed people when nobody was there to represent them at the international literary radar. They make desolation and call it peace, wrote Ali, and captured the imagination of countless Kashmir‘s the inconceivable loss and pain brought upon them by the State in response to an armed revolt. In the The Half-Inch Himalayas there is a poem which is about his beloved Kashmir, now shrunk to a picture post card dropped in his mail box, ― the closest/I‖II ever be at home‖ (―Postcard from Kashmir,‖ 5-6). Another poem ―A Butcher‖ in the same anthology, Ali evokes the impossible nostalgia of the immigrant for the once- and-future home and the ―reversals of the sentence‖ required to sustain that elusive- because illusory-dwelling. There is after all, no independent Kashmir in which Ali or his poetic alter egos can dwell; Kashmir is, at present, what Ali would call in a latter collection, The Country Without a Post Office. For him the United States, where he emigrated, itself, is an ‗island‘ of exile from the web of recent colonial and postcolonial histories that determine the bothered borders in the South Asia. The idea is further expressed by W.S.Merwin in which Ali has shown concern for the sufferings of Kashmir. Merwin Writes: Agha Shahid Ali‘s Kashmir, in his poems, is our own lost but inalienable homeland. He makes that clear to us in what we think of as our own language, the words we have in common. But the grace and with, the perceptions and illuminations they serve, their accent, are his own. (Merwin, p46)

Similarly Hayder Carruta also feels about Ali‘s poems and for this particular volume, The Country Without a Post Ofiice, she writes that Ali has emerged as the strongest voice of Kashmir. The way Ali has written about his homeland, Kashmir is incomparable. She writes:

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In The Country Without a Post Ofiice, Agha Shahid Ali has emerged into his full voice; these poems convey an unmistakable presence. Combining humane elegance and moral passion, Ali speaks for Kashmir in a large, generous, compassionate, powerful and urgent voice that cuts through everything else. Few poets in this country have such a voice or such a topic. We need this power, the example of it. ( Hayder, 46)

It was the political landscape of Kashmir apart from his hyphenated identity that Ali states. In the poem Karabala(the place where grandsons of Prophet PBUH were martyred) he metaphorized Kashmir into modern Karbala, ―Death had turned every day in Kashmir into some family‘s Karbala.‖(69-70) Kashmir grew into a field of Husain-like resistance: the people were resisting the Yazid-like demands of the Indian government. The dystopia in Kashmir, a land between India and Pakistan since 1947, reached a grievous level in 1990 after the rigged election turned to be the catalyst for a full scale of uprising demanding the right to self-determination. Ali not only scribbles the gruesome incidents but highlighted many complex issues like identity, justice, struggle, and oppression which was not possible in Kashmir to portray given the plethora of mainstream rosy narratives on Kashmir. It was this national identity latter turned to be the jugular vein of many of Ali‘s best works that manifest his deep sense of love and pride for it. Ali was so much in love with Kashmir that he knew the minutest details or the old tales of Kashmir. He once even narrated the story about the zero bridge that still exists in Kashmir and the story is that Srinagar which is the main city is known as the city of seven bridges. If anybody would ask Ali for an overview of the political conflict in Kashmir, Ali said that it would be a mistake to see it strictly in Muslim-Hindu terms. Ali was imaginatively and emotionally preoccupied with Kashmir. When he started to write poems about it, challenged himself to see traditional poetic forms, he had never tried before and wanted to take on the big subject matter of the conflict.

Ali‘s famous poem Postcard from Kashmir deals with emotional and intellectual war in the mind of the poet that makes him restless. In the entire poem he celebrates the glory

172 of Kashmir and intimacy that forces him to keep it at his heart. On the map or in his dream or vision, he sees the Jhelum's water as clean and ultramarine. But he realizes that the actual scenes and situations in Kashmir are contradictory to his perception. He says:

―---- in it, a giant negative, black and white, still undeveloped.‖ (Postcard from Kashmir12-14)

The poem brings forth the political contours of Kashmir as there is a direct critical reference of Indian chaos in this Himalayan state. In the opening two lines of the poem, the speaker indicates that the postcard contains a photograph of Kashmir; a place the speaker still considers his ―home‖. It also indicates that Ali was geographically distant from Kashmir, a fact that makes his use of the word ―home‖ ironic. These lines portray that Kashmir as a neat place is still in the process of development because the raging conflict and horrendous violence has polarized it. Neither these images live up in the speaker‘s idealized memory nor in the postcard‘s idealized presentation of its beauty. His spontaneous feelings are suggestive. He writes:

This is home. And this the closest I'll ever be to home. When I return, the colors won't be so brilliant, the Jhelum's waters so clean, so ultramarine. My love so overexposed (Postcard from Kashmir 5-10)

The theme of nationality is inherently connected to his experience of the self in relation to the Kashmiri culture and geography. He has the ability to glance into the ―heart of loss and not flinch‖ and defy the continuous presence of the idealized and ingenuous making of the separation of the self and the other. He mourns like the Ishmael,

173 the son of Abraham, who was forced to leave his homeland over the loss of homeland, his family, his language, his tradition of which he was an inherent part. Hence to retrieve his lost homeland he returns back to his home in its purest form by delving deep in the streams of memory. Thus projecting the loss of tradition and the land that Ali implants makes his poems exceptional expertise on Kashmir. To celebrate his distinctive nationality and culture he used to take Roganjosh and Haakh to the drawing room discourses of New York, the plight of coal-making rural Kashmir women to debating crowd of Manhattan and Brooklyn, or introduce the pain and suffering from HabbaKhatoon to present generation of Kashmir at the international literary canvas.

When, the Ali composed the volume of ―The Country Without a Post Office", which according to many critics rediscovers his Kashmir connection and served as the summit of his poetic career. In this volume Ali takes us once known as ‗the blessed land‘ where the large scale of agony, oppression, mass exodus of Pundits, curfews, torture, mass rapes, army camps and constant subjugation of the people have changed it into a beautiful jail. But unfortunately the violence in Kashmir was given communal color and always looked through the prism of national interest by the media of India and Pakistan. For them it was just reportage to air and publish but always ignore the grave human rights violations so that the continuous catastrophe and carnage in which the valley is still bleeding should stop. In this volume Ali not only speaks on the behalf of his oppressed nation but tried to reach out the world community and narrates the gruesome tale of a forgotten conflict. The notion of ‗all is well‘ manifested by the Indian state and the local mainstream ruling parties have always been used as a strategy to quell the innate sentiment and hoodwink the world so that to perpetuate their authority against the wishes of the people. Ali exposed this notion in the poem ‗Farewell‟ when he writes; ‗They make desolation and call it peace‘. (2, 175). He is worried because there is no serious attempt from the all stake holders to resolve the implacable anger that fuels such conflict- beyond a sense of bitter and bitter mourning. Gowhar Fazli says in his article:

It draws from a long history of marginalization that predates modernity, tracing Kashmiri dislike and resistance against foreign occupation to the Mughal invasion

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in 1588 and the subsequent progressive emasculation and dispossession of Kashmir‘s by the Afghan, the Sikh, the Dogra and, in the same league, the Indian regime. (Until My Freedom Has Come:p, 214)

The poet, in these lines evokes images of crisis over the destruction of his homeland particularly when the Pandit community leaves the Kashmir in the 1990. He was very much disturbed over their sudden migration as he believes that it will have dire consequences on the harmony and social fabric of valley.

Kashmir is burning By that dazzling light We see men removing statues from temples. We beg them" who will protect us if you leave?" They don't answer….. (I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight 39-44)

Agha Shahid Ali‘s perennial fascination with Kashmiri food and that too in the Pandit style was also suggestive that irrespective of religion the Kashmir nationality matters for him. AmitavGhosh in his tribute to the poet says.

He had a special passion for the food of his region, one variant of it in particular: ―Kashmiri food in the Pandit style.‖ I asked him once why this was so important to him and he explained that it was because of are current dream, in which all the Pandits had vanished from the valley of Kashmir and their food had become extinct. This was a nightmare that haunted him and he returned to it again and again, in his conversation and his poetry. (Ghosh,TheGhat of the Only World)

When Ali was diagnosed of brain cancer he predicts his last journey in one of his poems, ―The Last Saffron‖ he writes:

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I will die, in autumn, in Kashmir and The shadowed routine of each vein Will almost be news, the blood censored For the saffron sun and the times of rain Will be sold in black, then destroyed, Invisibly at Zero Taxi Stand….. (The Last Saffron, 1-6)

As the, Ali predicted his inevitable death caused by the disease which unfortunately proved sadly true after sometime. Without fulfilling his earnest desire to die in Kashmir and merge with the soil of his beloved Kashmir, the sensitive poet passed away in America. The majority of poem particularly after the anthology of The Country Without Post Office portray nostalgic evocation of Kashmir. His poetry also gives special emphasis on the events since 1990 when Kashmir rebelled against Indian rule. At the centre of this devastation, with mass rapes in the villages‘/ towns left in cinders and finally the desecration of the shrine of Shiekh Noor-ud-Dinin 1995; the patron saint of Kashmir. This ongoing conflict reminds of Ali of similar wars in Bosnia and Armenia. American poet and critic Bruce King in Contemporary Poets says:

Ali‘s poetry swirls around insecurity and ―obsessions [with]…memory, death, history, family ancestors, nostalgia for a past he never knew, dreams, Hindu ceremonies, friendships, and self- consciousness about being a poet. (King, Bruce. Modern Indian Poetry in English.1987p 261)

The poems in the Half Inch Himalaya collection manifest his deepest and most intensely felt metaphorically thoughts on Kashmir. Ali‘s first and last love was Kashmir, be it in New Delhi, Pennsylvania or Amherst. He became the chronicler of miseries and the loss of men, meadows and materials of the beautiful valley, Kashmir. The poems like ―Postcard from Kashmir,‖ ―The Snowmen,‖ ―Cracked Portrait,‖ or ―The Story of a Silence,‖ Ali‘s heart aches for his beloved Kashmir. He misses the Jhelum, his house and

176 typically memory returning of the heirloom in his house, ―The Story of a Silence‖; ―Her heirloom/Of prayer from God. When he slept/ she leafed‖ (13-15). Or in the ―Cracked Portrait‖: ―Cobwebs Clings/ To the soundless/ words of my ancestor‖ (44-46). While analyzing this collection of ali, The Half-Inch Himalayas,RoohiNazki writes:

When Ali was writing this book he was putting his deepest and most intense thoughts and no longer was he discovering himself rather there was a realization and a determination that the truth needed to be told and heard. And today that he is no longer with us, that passion truth and that sensibility have lost a believer and practitioner. (Nazki,Sensor Feb.2002:3.)

Dr. SuriyaHussain substantiates the same feelings in her tribute to the poet, where she writes that after the publication of The Country Without a Post Office which entirely revolves around the Kashmir national identity and its current political uncertainty. ‗People feel totally obsessed by the voices of Kashmiri people who appear quite pure and resonant like a mountain stream. The beautiful tanned weather beaten faces and people unhurried gait with their angry voices are maintaining their dignity in the hour of sorrow and peace. The poems are meant for the common suffering people of Kashmir. Ali, quoting Suriya‘s remarks, ―felt more the rumbling volcano of revolutionary struggle in the Kashmir people. He wished the people to be the master of their own lives.‖(The Dead Forever Living! 2001p8)

Agha Shahid Ali echoes the longstanding literary resistance of Kashmir in the west particularly after the 1983 rigged elections when the Indian state attempted to delegitimize and downsized the genuine demand of people in Kashmir.Lenox Hill, From Amherst to Kashmir, Rooms Are Never Finished, Postcard from Kashmir, Snowman, The Veiled Suite etc. all are rooted in Kashmir, its people, culture, shrines, Chinars, and saffron.In his poetic collection of The Half Inch Himalayas, Ali prefaces with an epigraph from Virginia Woolf that ends "I die in exile" (ibid:35) which reveals the fact

177 that Ali was a man who lived bodily in the American land, but his mind and imagination remained in Kashmir.

I close my eyes. It doesn't leave me, The cold moon of Kashmir which breaks Into my house. (A Call, 1-3)

In the poem ―I Dream I am the only Passenger on Flight 423 to Srinagar”, he celebrates the spiritual journey with one of the tallest saint in the Kashmir till his plane landed. This companionship with the saint not only serves as a spiritual bond but serves as a symbol of unification cutting across all sections of the society irrespective of ethnicity or religion. The contribution of saint towards the Kashmiri language is immense and is considered the national legend and a harbinger of Kashmiri language in the valley. Here Ali romanticizes this journey:

The landing gear roars, we touch the ashen tarmac He holds my hand speechless to tell me if Those smashed gold‘s flying those petrified Rods are autumn‘s crimsoned spillage Rushing with wings down the mountainside Or flames clinging to a torched village. (I Dream I am the only Passenger on Flight 423 to Srinagar 66-71)

AnnyaKabir in her essay, “Language and Conflict in the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali‖, has concisely analyzed the appropriate usages of metaphor and paradoxes which convey us the realistic picture of Kashmir. She refers the poem, ―Farewell,”simply of a plaintive love letter from a Kashmiri Muslim to a Kashmir Pandit (the indigenous Hindu of Kashmir). The poem describes the onset of armed struggle in 1989 which saw an exodus of the minority Hindu from the valley into refugee camps in Delhi and Jammu. Ali opens this poem by taking responsibility for the Pandit‘s departure saying, ―at a certain point I

178 lost track of you,‖ (1). Later in the poem a darker history of inequalities is later hinted at through the repetition of the words ‗history‘ and ‗memory‘. In this context, she states that it‘s this poem which touches the genesis of political conflict in Kashmir and helps us to know that ‗the Pandit‘s have been associated for a long time with the languages of power such as Sanskrit, Persian, Urdu, and latterly, English in Kashmir. She further remarks that, ―the word ‗broadcast‘ signals a related method of evasion, which occurs in Ali‘s understanding of how Kashmir, Kashmiri and Kashmiriyat have survived political conflicts.‖( AnanyaKabir, 6-7 )

Ali‘ celebrates his unique nationality in a way that almost all the everyday objects associated with Kashmir-paisley, saffron, the green threads which binds the people of both the religion‘s to wear when visiting Sufi shrines-embody both the beauty and tragedy of Kashmir. The poetry of Ali is a reflection of the place which is caught up in the murky waters of violence. To restore the harmony which has been the basic tenet of Kashmiriyat Ali goes back to the culture roots of his homeland in order to shape the individuality of not the migrants but of the Kashmiri‘s.In his famous anthology The Country Without a Post Office Ali writes:

Let me cry out in the void, and say it as I can. I write on that void: Kashmir, Kaschmir, Cashmere, Qashmir, Cashmir, Cashmire Kashmere, Cachemire, Cushmeer, Cachmiere, Casmir. Or uchemar in a sea of stories? Or: Kacmir, Kaschemir, Kasmere Kachmire, Kasmir, Kerseymere? (The Blessed Word: A prologue 10-17, p171)

The above description of Kashmir needs Freudian or Marxian scholar to examine the origin and nature of Ali‘s ethnic neurosis and socio-political position. In this paragraph of merely forty two odd words, Kashmir figures eighteen times. Amitav Gosh in The Ghat of the Other World remarks, that for Ali, ―Kashmir became a vortex of images circling

179 around a single point of stillness: the idea of death. In this figuring of his homeland, he himself became one of the images that were spinning around the dark point of stillness— both Shahid and Shaheed, witness and martyr—his destiny inextricably linked with Kashmir‘s, each prefigured by the other.‖(ibid) In ―A Prologue,‖ to The Country Without Post Office, Ali writes:

And will the blessed woman rub the ashes together? Each fall they gather chinar leaves, singing what the hills have echoed for four hundred years, the songs of Habba Khatoon, the peasant girl who later became the queen……and since Kashmir has never been free, (The Country Without Post Office p. 34-41)

These sentenced are immersed in the genuine poetic emotion and terribly describe the sense of national identity in the background of loss. Four hundred years of colonial history has drenched the Kashmir in tears and blood. The willingness to endure the oppression by the people of this tiny Himalayan land locked state is something remarkable and bizarre. Sir Walter Lawrence tries to unravel this mystery in his book, The Valley Of Kashmir, and ironically calls the Kashmir‘s as the ―Worshippers of Tyranny‖. Here in the prologue it should be observed that how Ali, a poet of Kashmir‘s grief---evokes pity and sorrow so intensely that even the objects of nature become the voice of the voiceless. It is very interesting to see in Ali‘s poetry that loss and celebrating go juxtapose. How Ali symbolizes Rizwan in The Country Without Post Office, a multitude of young Kashmir‘s whose hearts were ripped apart by bullets and their blood has dyed scarlet the eternal snows on the peaks of the Pir Panchal. Rizwan‘s blood sheer rubies on Himalayan snow and deluged the plains in the valley. In the poem ―The Country Without a Post Office ―Kashmir is seen as a post-office, as an archive for letters with doomed addresses. He writes:

Again I ‗have returned to this country Where a minaret has been entombed. Someone soaks the wicks of clay lamps

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mustard oil, each night climbs its steps To read messages scratched on planets. His fingerprints cancel blank stamps In that archive for letters with doomed Addresses, each house buried or empty. (The Country Without a Post Office,1-8)

Describing the horrific conditions of Kashmir, Ali writes that even the calls of muezzin have ceased long ago. The poet-persona returns to the local minaret as its new keeper. Referring to a country without post office is a country without its institutions of faith; the muezzin is the postman of the divine and the poem ends on a wish and those lines are:

I want to live forever, what else can I say? It rains as I write this. Mad heart be brave. (The Country Without a Post Office 91-96)

Ali was so imaginatively and emotionally preoccupied with Kashmir and argues that his identity is created by the interweaving of many historical strands, and that multiple personalities are reflected in his writing through references to Hindu, Christian, and Muslim myths and imagery. Daniel Hall says that ―Agha Shahid Ali was, by his own count, the beneficiary of three cultures-Muslim, Hindu, and for lack of more precise rubric, Western‖ (Hall:15). But it was Kashmir which remain an alter ego for him wherever he lives. Thus Agha Shahid Ali poetry is a look on Kashmir both topical and metaphysical and in equal parts auto- biography, current history and poetry. Many of his poems on Kashmir have frequent references to the Holocaust and Yugoslavia trying to link it with other conflicts which world witnessed. In these poems he did not engage just with pain, but with questions of identity, memory, history and representation. RohintonMistry (a Parsi Poet from Bombay), once acknowledged that he had never dreamed of becoming a writer until he migrated to America. Besides Mistry, other South Asian Writers such as Arnold Itwaru, Friday Karodia, M.G.Vassanji, Uma Parmeswaran,

181 and Rienzi Crusz, developed their narratives against the familiar surroundings of their country. This satisfies their feeling of homesickness which is an indelible part of the immigrants‘ psyche. Their distance from the country of their origin them a different vision and makes them view their past from a different perspective. A critic‘s comments are very apt in this regard: ―spatial and temporal distance appears to accord these writers clarity of vision that was elusive before leaving home.‖ (Salman Rushdie, p87)

Immigrants from South Asia have reason to feel themselves doubly marginalized firstly because they are immigrants and secondly because they belong to ―racial, often linguistic and usually religious minorities.‖(Mcgifford, Diane,1992). In the alien land they have to encounter not only the chilly and forbidding climate as against the warm climate at home but also the cold antagonism of the whites who consider themselves superior to the colored minorities. New immigrant writers especially those who left behind their country fail to develop a sense of identity or belonging to the adopted country. As a result they suffer from a sense of dislocation and loss. The poetry of Shahid epitomizes the historical period of postcolonial writers who suffered literal relocation through self-exile (Hawley: 235). But it was only Kashmir and the ongoing conflict which shaped his poetic art and made him the ambassador of oppressed people in the west. Once known for the extraordinary beauty, the valley of Kashmir now hosts the biggest, bloodiest and also obscure military occupation in the world. AnanyaJahanaraKabir describes the territory in this way:

Locked within the inhospitable terrain, but professed by all to be a singularly beautiful place, the Valley has, in the course of the twentieth century, emerged as a bone of contention for three nationalisms, Indian, Pakistani and aspirant Kashmiri. (Kabir, p,1) Another concern that Ali exhibits is to bring an international dimension to the Kashmir situation and broaden its perspective than the geopolitics of South Asia. He achieves this by drawing comparisons of Kashmir with the conflicts of Bosnia, Chechnya, and Palestine. His approach is humanist, but he aims to highlight the

182 sufferings of Muslims around the world. Ali takes a longer view of Empire than simply focusing on the situation of states hurriedly carved up in the post-war period out of bits and pieces of nationalism, by hard-up and harried ex-colonizers. Many of the poems‘ epigraphs connect the Kashmir conflict with earlier anti-colonial struggles elsewhere. For example, he quotes W.B. Yeats‘ lines, ‗Wherever green is worn / A terrible beauty is born‘ (Yeats, W.B, 119-21) He employs green, the color associated with the ‗emerald isle‘ as a device in his poem ‗Easter, 1916‘ to argue for Irish independence from Britain in the early twentieth century.

Agha Shahid Ali is one of the writers that Ghosh cites as exemplifying this use of the motif of a lost utopia, which trope is easily apparent in close readings of many of the individual poems in The Country Without a Post Office. If the twin terrors of insurgency and repression could be said to have engendered any single literary leitmotif, it is surely the narrative of the loss of Paradise. […] [T]he reason why there is no greater sorrow than the recalling of times of joy, is […] that this is a grief beyond consolation 32(Ghosh 308, 313).

Kashmir has always been the abode and creative inspiration of poets, who have sung its beauty but only a few great Urdu poets like Iqbal and Hafiz Jallandahri sang its sorrow and now Ali again sings its sorrows and championing its cause of national identity. Today the national identity of Kashmir‘s is wildly misunderstood and portrayed as separatism or obscurantist and seditious by the media and governments, who administer the divided land. The history of a Kashmiri nation is undoubtedly as old as the era of Alexander the Great but unfortunately the legitimacy of their right to decide their future is yet too recognized by the world community. Given this unrecognized national history Ali delves deep in the past and creates beautiful images, history and myths in his poetry to show case the forgotten nation. It enthralls me in a different world of images and phantoms. For the last twenty years, history has taken yet another ugly turn for the people of Kashmir, though its seeds were sown in 1947. Ali has recorded in painful but powerful poetic voice for history and literature these blackest agonies and sufferings that the Kashmir‘s have been subjected to by the twisted turns of wanton race of political power.

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The innocent folks were exploited in the name of new Kashmir and their innate sentiment was continuously put on back burner by the political class who suffer from the political hubris. In the poem ―A Pastoral” Ali seems to be burning with the desire for peace and the return of sovereignty which they lost six decades ago. He writes:

We shall meet again, in Srinagar, by the gates of the Villa of Peace, our hands blossoming into fists till the soldiers return the keys and disappear. (A Pastoral 1-6,)

The most striking point which remains discernable is the fact that Ali‘s poetry is depicted as the criss-cross road of the cultures. Ali calls himself Kashmiri- American poet. According to a critic‘s opinion:

Ali reveals that American is not the end point of his identity, nor the destination of his being. Placed as it is, between the two hyphens, the ‗American‘ implies that from his position in America, Ali is able to understand the kind of Kashmiri he was before his arrival here and the Kashmir he has becomes on U.S soil. Cleverly, he suggests that America takes him back to Kashmir.33

(Arjun.Appadurai, 1993, p796-807)

The eponymous poem from The Half Inch Himalyas is about his beloved Kashmir, now shrunk to a picture post card dropped in his mail box, ―the closet/I‘ll ever be to home‖ (Postcard from Kashmir,‖ 5-6) shows his anguish and the efficient way of all insignia of occupancy. In this collection of poems he visits Kashmir again but this time he sees the old world through new realistic eyes marred with violence and unending misery. After the 1990 armed resistance against the Indian state he never think of his old identity that is son of India because after he settled in America where he made friends and found joys and also got sorrows of his life as well as of Kashmir.

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In an interview with Deborah Klenotic, Ali said that he became ―imaginatively and emotionally preoccupied‖ with Kashmir, which he still visits about a year, in 1991, when the guerilla was intensified. He started to write poems about it, he ―raised the stakes‖ for himself, challenging himself to use traditional poetic forms he had never tried before and to take on the ―Big subject matter‖ of the conflict. (Deborah Klenotic, 2002, p10).

Ali not only celebrated his ethnic identity but also the composite cultural identity of Kashmir. In the poem ―Cremation‖ the poet laments over the migration of Kashmiri panditswho suddenly left the valley in the 1990‘s due to the fear psychosis. The poem portrays the loss and destruction, the agony and ecstasy of the loss the poet is suffering and the destruction his beloved ‗Kashmir‘ witnessed to. He writes:

Your bones refused to burn When we set fire to your flesh Who would have guessed You‘d be stubborn in death?

(Cremation 1-4)

In the collection of Rooms are never finished, there is a series of odes dedicated to Ali‘s mother and her native Kashmir, now torn apart by conflict, Ali uses religious imagery from Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam to keep the composite national identity intact. Kashmir is again the backdrop and his personal loss when he and his family were accompanying the dead body of his to Kashmir for burial, for she had longed for her home during her illness in America. She had come to Amherst for treatment and died there. His another moving poem, “Lennox Hill,” plays on the word ‗Mother‘ and describes her last days, overlaid with dream-like sequence of Kashmir, he writes:

As you sit here by me you‘re just like my mother She tells me. I imagine her: a bride from Kashmir, She‗s watching at the Regal, her first film with father. If only I could gather you in my arms, Mother I‘d save you- now my daughter-from God.

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(Lennox Hill, 48-52)

When the Kashmiri pandits left the Kashmir, he had a recurrent dream, in which all the pandits vanished from the valley and their food had become extinct. This was a nightmare that haunted him and he returned to it again and again, in his conversation and his poetry:

At a certain point I lost track of you. You needed me. You needed to perfect me: In your absence you polished me into the enemy. Your history gets in the way of my memory. I am everything you lost, your perfect enemy You memory gets in way of my memory... (―Farewell,‖ 25-31)

Thus ali‘ poetry casts its craft and concern upon histories of loss, injustice and brutality particularly those endured by Kashmir weaving simultaneously the threads of individual experience and that of people close to him. Ali challenged himself to form a consummate original art and consciousness in order to struggle against the factors which inevitably work to create a sense of loss in his personal, social, emotional and intellectual involvement, especially in the state of Kashmir that form him in all circumstances remains an alter ego and a rich source of inspiration for creative purposes. Ali makes an everlasting impact of being one of the outstanding sons of Kashmir who undoubtedly remains a phenomenon of his unique mind and art in the realm of Kashmiri English resistance literature.

Mahmoud Darwish

The poetry of Mahmoud Darwish over the period of time has evolved into an essential breath for Palestinians in their resistance against the Israeli occupation. He is often remembered for being "the Palestinian national poet who played a key role in articulating Palestinian identity … and the voice of Palestinian people" (Ghannam& El-

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Zein, 2009, p.3). Darwish creates such an effective resonance in his poetry of protest against the Israeli occupation and steers the lost hope among the caged Palestinian which bombs and bullets can‘t do. He writes;

I am my Language…I am my language. I am words' writing: Be/ my body/ No land on earth bears me. Only my words…bear me/ this is my language, a necklace of stars around my neck. (Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems; p91)

Born in the small town of Galilee in Palestine,MahmoudDarwish and his family have seen the worst catastrophe of the conflict after they were forced to leave the native village by the Zionist settlers when the poet was just six years old. Darwish returned with his family to Israel months after its creation; where he grew up as a present-absentee who didn‘t return in time to be recognized as an Israeli Arab. The sense of dispossession and then the exilic life in various countries after he left the Israel polished his poetic production in which he mostly depict is personal woes and the unified voice to represent all Palestinian both under the occupation and in exile. Throughout his poetry Darwish raised his voice confronting the pain of everyday life for Palestinians. In a realism stripped of great poetic flourish, the poetry of resistance was born with this poet laureate of Palestinians. Darwish throughout his literary carrier he faced dire personal consequences for his political position and was forced to live in exile but he remained an ardent supporter of the Palestinians cause of identity and nationhood.

As we fully know the ongoing Palestine conflict has become the root cause of anarchy and political unrest that has currently engulfed the entire Middle East. Historically the Palestine conflict is deeply rooted in the Arab defeat of 1948 and then the illegal creation of the state of Israel sowed the seeds of discord and acrimony in the region. The stateless people of Palestine became a hapless nation of wandering refugees, its citizen not only were forcefully uprooted from their land, but also lost their dignity and honor.

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The 1948 Arab defeat, or Nakba (catastrophe), the creation of Israel state, and the degrading situation of Palestinian refugees in the neighboring Arab countries and many other series of political developments in the region result the formation of Palestinian national identity. The experience of being refugees and living in camps provided the Palestinians with an identity distinct from that of the host countries. As it slowly became apparent that return to Palestine was not imminent, the refugees began to organize politically and gained a growing sense of their Palestinian identity.

A number of young Palestinians who were attracted to the idea of Arab nationalism tried to move this idea to the forefront of Palestinian politics against the Israeli occupation. The rise of Fatah, whose founding leadership included Yasir Arafat, Farouk Qaddoumi, Salah Khalaf, Khalid al-Hassan, and Khalil al-Wazir, in the late 50‘s is viewed as a direct result of the inability of the Arab regimes and the growing dangers of Zionism in the Palestinian territory. Throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, the PLO expressed a clear vision of what liberation from Zionist colonialism meant. Among the group Yasser Arafat emerged as the strong voice of Palestine whoarticulated bravely the right of nationhood in all the international forums. Despite the concessions and confusions which PLO and Arafat created regarding the Israel‘s right to be a Jewish state in the Palestine territory and transformed themselves just as the Palestinian Authority. He continued to command much support across the world and inspire solidarity everywhere.

The fall of Palestine to the Zionists in 1948 also known as the (Al-Nakbah) in Arab world brought loss of faith, despair, disbelief and demoralization in the common Arab psyche. The 1948 war (Al-Nakbah) brought immense agony for the Palestinian people and changed their life beyond recognition. The (Al-Nakbah) tragedy embodies many other things for Palestinians; the loss of homeland, the yearning desire of national aspirations and the beginning to revive the cultural heritage. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians supported covertly by the western powers leads to the series of tragic events and the harsh realities that changed the socio political discourse in the region, social. This political catastrophe however became, as SalamaJayyusi writes in the Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, ―a turning point for modern Arabic literature on a pan-

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Arab scale,‖ with poets reacting in unison to a new reality in which literature could participate in the battle of change3 (Jayyusi Khadra,1992)

The Nakba has claimed a central place in Palestinian literature since 1948. Many aspects of the Nakba tragedy have found expression in the arts, including descriptions of a vanished world, of yearnings for lost homes, and of the living conditions of the refuges. Nearly all the genres of modern Palestinian Arabic literature tend to demonstrate the mobilization of people and to reach out the world for their just cause.

Arabic poetry is considered to be the most popular genre in the Arab literature because it runs through the lives, the feelings, and reflect the geo politics of a region that takes pride in values and their ongoing epic struggle against the authoritarianism and occupation. The modern Arabic poetry underwent seismic changes in both form and content paralleling the search for a new political identity and aesthetic perspectives. This attitude towards the poetic literary genre can be explained by considering the rich literary heritage Arab world had and continues to endow in the modern times. In order to portray the present political crisis in which the entire middle east is engulfed all the Modern Arabic poets in one way and other way look at the tradition so that they can ―best reflects their sense of self identity, history and cultural values‖ (Allen, 1998:217)

Aldoux Huxley writes that ‗nations are to very large extent invented by their poets and novelists‘(1959:50).The 1967 war between the Arab countries and the state of Israel ended yet another Arab defeat and the dispersion of thousands of Palestinian in many neighboring Arab countries living with bitter nostalgia and hoping to return one day. These Palestinians refugees find themselves in-between the influence of host countries culture and the lost national identity. However the life in refugee camps ushered a new literary movement which may be better described as the literature of Exile rather than Palestinian or Refugee literature. The Palestinian diaspora used poetry as a main weapon to preserve their national identity and express their innate desire to return their roots.

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Historically if we see in the Arab peninsula poets have been the defender of his people, tribe or even sacrificed himself for them.Bassam K. Frangiehin his essay Modern Arabic Poetry: Vision and Reality sheds light on some of the famous Palestinian poets who sacrificed themselves for the cause and are still cherished and seen as the brighter stars in the casket of Arab literature:

The Palestinian poet Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud (1913-1948) was the first poet- martyr in modern time: one who carried his ―soul in the palm of his hand,‖ as he expressed it in his verse, and threw himself, indeed, into ―the Caravn of death.‖ His premature death at age 35, fighting a battle in an attempt to keep Palestine fee from foreign occupation, brought dignity to the hearts of his people. He translated his verse into death and eliminated the gap between the words and action. Abd al- Rahim Mahmoud was a courageous poet and a man of purpose who changed his vision into reality of his life into a myth-and he shall remain a symbol of heroism. (Bassam 2008: 11-12)

The poets like Hafiz Ibrahim (d.1932), Ibrahim Tauqan(d.941) and Muhammad Mahdi al Jawahiri (d. 1997) are the big icons who fought for social and political injustice by following the precedence of earlier Arab poets. The Palestinian historian, essayist, and novelist Elias Sanbar echoes the same view he says that:

The contemporary history of the Palestinians turns on a key date: 1948. That year, a country and its people disappeared from maps and dictionaries . . . ‗The Palestinian people does not exist‘, said the new masters, and henceforth the Palestinians would be referred to by general, conveniently vague terms, as either ‗refugees‘, or in the case of a small minority that had managed to escape the generalized expulsion, ‗Israeli Arabs‘. A long absence was beginning. (Sanbar, Elias, 2001 p87-91)

The scattered refugees of Palestine living in the neighboring Arab countries after the Al-Nakbah and 1967 war resorted to different venues to preserve their national identity.

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The question of national identity has become intimately connected between the Palestinian living in the refugee camps and those who live in the Israeli occupation. No group identity exists without memory as its core meaning; the sense of continuity over time and space is sustained by remembering, and what is remembered is defined by the assumed identity. Every group develops the memory of its own past and highlights its unique identity with other groups. These reconstructed memories latter turns to be basis of every national identity and plays a substantial role in shaping the identity and culture of people who suffered historical defeats such as Serbs, the Jews, and the Palestinians than of victorious nations.

The homeless Palestinian turned the Al-Nakbah into a moment they were deprived of everything which home signifies and provides. The life of the Palestinian refugees under Arab governments and Israeli rule has been the story of continuous harassment, oppression which has aggravated their sense of homelessness. The homelessness became a constant source of agony misery because the tragedy Al-Nakbah, Palestinians had a different life when the home stood like the centre of haven.Edward Said (1992) discussed this agonizing fate of Palestinian both in the refugee‘s camps and under the Israeli occupation in this way:

Each Palestinian community must struggle to maintain its identity on at least two levels: first, as Palestinian with regard to the historical encounter with Zionism and the precipitous loss of a homeland; second, as Palestinian in existential setting of day- today life, responding to the pressure in the state of residence. (Said, Edward. 1992)

Mahmoud Darwish, the national poet of Palestine does the same thing for its people by portraying their story of dislocation, dispossession and deprivation of a dignified life. Darwish was born in al-Birwa in Galilee, a village that was first occupied and then later razed by the Israeli army. At the age of six, he and his family were forcefully expelled from their village and latter found themselves in different refugee camps in southern Lebanon with thousands of Palestinians. He died in the United States of America on

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August 9, 2008, following an open-heart surgery in Houston which left him into a coma leading to his death.

The Palestinian poetry of return, a literary genre that had already developed in the early 1950‘s, is characterized by a deep yearning for a lost world, together with a fierce determination to return to that world. From the Mahmud al-Tut to the Mahmud Darwish all the sons of land versified their return and the lost paradise. These exilic souls did exactly what Franz Kafka wrote in his diary in October 1921 that:

He who cannot cope with life when he is living needs to slightly stop his despair of his own fate with one hand, ... and at the same time, use the other hand to remember what he sees in the ruins, because he could do something different and something more than other people. (Kafka, 1988:67)

Mahmud Darwish throughout his literary carrier stood out by using unequivocal Palestinian-nationalist motifs and style which were regarded as daring in the 1960‘s and 1970‘s. He left Israel and joined PLO; soon afterwards he won great acclaim both in the Palestinian resistance literature and in the Arab poetry. His poetry became so popular among the people that he earned the title of Palestinian national poet.The (Nakba) tragedy and the mass dispersion of innocent Palestinian holds a central place in Darwish‘s poetry as he surprisingly experienced it personally. The sense of loss, together with a longing for return, is reflected in the poems ―Passport” (Jawaz al Safar) and ―My Mother‖ (Ummi) in the latter he writes:

I long for mother‘s bread…. Restore to me my stars of childhood So that I can take part with little birds in the journey of return To the nest where you await. (My Mother, 25-28)

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Darwish‘s famous poem that deals with Palestinian national identity is ―I Am Joseph, O My God‖ (Ana Yousf, Ya Rabbi), written in 1987 and also expresses the alienation from Arab, who denies responsibility for their fellow Arab brothers, he writes:

They [the brothers] cast me into a pit, And accused the wolf And the wolf was more merciful than my brothers. (I Am Joseph, O My God, 15-17)

Mahmoud Darwish‘s poetry collections particularly Olive leaves (1964) A lover from Palestine (1960) At the end of the Night (1967), Birds die in Galilee (1969) express the sufferings of Palestinians and their struggle to reclaim their nationhood. The search for Palestinian identity and the sense of loss are the two main broad themes in these poetry collections. These collections were highly praised in the Arab literature because they portray the relationship between identity and the lost land. He became a household name both in the occupied land and in the Palestinian refugee camps. All most all the poems in these collections reflect the postcolonial perspective and share a common ground as they all entail a mode of resistance against the occupation. Darwish commenced his literary carrier with a poem about the Palestinian land and till his last poetic expression he remained loyal to the Palestinian cause and the identity. In Halat Hisar (state of siege) (2002) Darwish says:

―When I am liberated, I will know that homeland panegyric is similar to homeland satire‖ (p.50)

The poet is proud of being Arab and envelopes his Palestine identity becomes the part of this big world. Darwish‘s famous poem Identity Card published in 1964 in his collection Leaves of Olives revolve around a heated argument of poet with an Israel soldier and latter turned into be the anthem of defiance against the occupiers in Palestine and in the Arab world. This poem is an address to an Israeli soldier when the poet is

193 consistently harassed by the Israeli military authorities for writing and reciting poetry that expressed his strong sense of Arab and Palestinian identity. The poem begins like that; Identity Card Write down! I am an Arab And my identity card number is fifty thousand I have eight children And the ninth will come after a summer Will you be angry? . Write down! I am an Arab You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors And the land which I cultivated Along with my children And you left nothing for us Except for these rocks.. So will the State take them As it has been said? (1-17)

Here the voice and tone of Darwish bears pride and bravery towards his sense of belonging and Palestine which is the essential part of his literary discourse. The number fifty thousand on the identity card is metaphoric because it shows the long history of people living on this land of Palestine. It makes the poet extreme angry when he is subjected to frisking and checking in his own land by an occupying soldier even when he goes out for a work to earn the bread and butter for his family. Palestine becomes a literary extension of the poet because the land is occupied, lost and he tries to regain it by romanticizing its different manifestations. It has never departed from the poet wherever he went and wherever he lived. In the poem ―Sirhan Drinks His Coffee in the Cafeteria‖ the poet addresses to a ―refugee,‖ of whom he says:

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You could not find the [one] difference Between its curved [corn] fields And my palm. (between the night that sleeps in memory And the night upon the Carmel. But it‘s my homeland (Sand 22: trans. modified) The above lines clearly show that the poet draws no parallels between the land and the refugee because the ultimate origin of both refuge and poet is land. The poet appoints himself as the soul protector of the land by creating humans, flowers, fruits, and birds. In another poem “Poem of the land”, his lost land represents Darwish‘s romantic phase of his life. He writes in it;

I am the land And the land is you […] --the Galilee air wants to speak on my behalf The Galilee gazelle want to break my prison today.4 --[…] The smell of the land In early morning Awakens me , my land in the early Evenening .5 […] --I am the awakened land […] Plough my body. (Diwan Vol.1,629)

Here he infuses self, Palestine‘s nature, people and violent contemporary history in order to inflame the lost national identity. The poet‘s self represents all the shades of

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Palestine and he struggles to keep all its aspects them pure, unified and intact for the next generations.

O Country of prophets: come to your fruition! O Country of planters: come to your fruition! O Country of martyrs‘: come to your fruition! O Country of refugees: come to your fruition! (Jayyusi, Anthology 149)

Darwish used the image of ―planters,‖ ―martyrs‘,‖ and ―refugees and personified them so that he can connect his romanticism with the history of his homeland. On the surface level, these words showcase poet‘s outside world, fluctuating between the romantic self and his unending love for his national identity that was unfolding before him in the refugee camps. The poet goes back to the old history of homeland and feels proud of and strongly believes the current external foreign occupation will eventually come to an end. His poetry comes across as both serene and angry: serene in narrating the story of the homeland‘s ancient origin that will defeat temporary obstacles, and angry because the enemy has disturbed this timeless Palestinian harmony. In ―Al- Qatilraqamthamaniyata „ashra” (victim number 18) from his collection…Akhir al-layl (End of the Night), (Diwan vol.1, 214-216). He writes:

The olive grove was once green It was…and the sky What changed it this evening? It was, my lover Fifty causalities Made it… at sunset A red pond…fifty causalities (Trans. Nassar and Ibrahim) This rhythmic poem expresses the ancient innocence of poet‘s homeland which is being unfortunately violated and trampled. The red color overtakes the green and the

196 once cherished beauty has suddenly withered. The poem depicts the distance between the lover his beloved both were forcefully separated and now idealizing the return to the ancient roots and innocent homeland. Darwish‘s poetry constantly represents beauty as disturbed by external elements or by injustices, violence which deprive it of its earlier innocence and charm.

To inflame the resistance among the Arabian nations who face oppression from the despots and to celebrate the sense of national identity, Darwish‘s poetry plays a key role particularly in the occupied homeland. In the poem “I Belong There,”he writes ―I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home‖ (Unfortunately 7). Here Darwish‘s statement is loud and clear that he speaks on the behalf of a community that is caged and also draws a richer understanding between the words and home. It is not the physical location but the word ―Home‖ that the poet has created after destroying all the words. Paradoxically, it assumes that the poet learned and dismantled the word ―Home‖ among all words just to resurrect again and form an understanding and relationship with the words in the entire world. In the poem “The Passport”, Darwish evokes the internal and external resistance by portraying a realistic picture of the contemporary Palestinian life where they have to carry a passport in their own homeland. In this context he uses the images of Palestinian dispute and agony inside their territory as a way of an internal resistance. He writes in the poem Passport:

They did not see me in the shadow which Suck out my colour in a passport In their view, my wound was an exhibit To a tourist who adores collecting pictures They did not recognize me. (Passport, 1-5)

The poet canvases the loss and suffering as he is personally subjected to ill-treatment like other Palestinians even though forms of his land such as the trees, the rain, the sun and the moon have recognized him. He becomes outrageous over the humiliation they

197 face daily basis in their homeland but mirrors himself as the tool against the occupation. He cries:

Stripped of name and identity In land which I nurtured with my own hand Stripped of name and identity In land which I nurtured with my own hand (Passport, 20-25)

The poet suffers from the sense of frustration as he looks at the passport and continuously feels like his identityhas been stripped away from his homeland. His nationality is forcefully changed and a new identity is imposed upon him as well his people.However, he strongly feels that this piece of document can‘t show the emotional attachment of a person with his native land. The poet feels whatever the occupier does to alter our national identity but our historical and cultural is innate and impossible to wipe out it. This eternal bond with his land gives him enough courage to reject the passport that tries to set him apart from his homeland. Despite being forced into the occupation, his resolve and dream to regain his lost home remain undeterred. He expresses this urge in the poem in this way which is paramount to his national identity.

Do not ask the trees about their names Do not ask the valleys about their mother All the heart of people Are my nationality So take away my passport (Passport,Darwish, 2000: 173)

These lines show how the Darwish uses the landscape of his lost homelike trees and valleys that know their own origin, just as the speaker himself knows his unending love and bond with his homeland. In the poem “Pride and Fury‖, Darwish reveals the longing national identity and nostalgia for his homeland in this way:

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O my home land we were born and raised in your wound and at the fruits of your trees to witness the birth of your day break O eagle unjustly languishing in chains (Khouri / Algar 1975: 229)

He uses symbols and imagery frequently that culturally known to Palestinians and in the Arab world in order to galvanize the lost national pride. The bird eagle in the poem is actually a representation of power and freedom. The eagle is very popular in the Middle East history as ―The Eagle of Saladin‖, was a personal symbol of King Saladin; the only legendary Arab king who defeated Christians army during the first crusade. Today the fabled eagle is seen as a symbol of Arab nationalism and brings a sense of unity between the hapless Palestinian and other Arab countries. Here Darwish draws a parallel between the Palestinians and King Saladin because in the past both tried to free their lands from the forceful foreign occupation. In the poem "We Travel Like Other People", the poet laments over the loss of his paradise which he created in the form of words:

We have a country of words. Speak so I can put my road on the stone of a stone we have a country of words speak so we may know the end of this travel (Al-Udhari 1986:142)

Expressing deep nostalgia, vision for a country that the poet glamorizes and romanticized the Palestinian culture and national identity embolden the external resistance of Palestinians in and outside their homeland. His eternal love with his homeland has cultivated inside him the spirit of resistance to a degree that even his name serves as a fuel for the Palestinian struggle. Because the word ―fuel‖, evokes symbolically the internal resistance in the sense that Darwish‘s poetry is seen as the symbol of resistance that intensifies the will of Palestinians to resist against the

199 occupation. This shows a profound sense of resistance in the poetry of Darwish and his literary odyssey to regain the lost national identity. Even after his death in 2008 he still lives intensely, felt intensely, read intensely and resists intensely as for as the Palestinians demand to their homeland is concerned.

For Darwish Palestine was a kind of lost al-Andalus—Muslim Spain to remind its audience that their bitter state of life in modern times is just a temporary period as we are caught up in between the glorious past and a splendid future. One of the prominent themes in Darwish‘s poetry after the Israel invasion of Lebanon in 1982 is the use Al- Andalus as a mirror for Palestine. The way poet celebrates the Palestinian resistance discourse places him among the great Palestinian poets in the galaxy of Arab literature. Many circumstances and the continuous standoff between the Palestinian and the Israeli contributed to Darwaish‘s poetic project, which leads him to make the national question a priority, and this at the expense of his own aesthetics. In the poem ‗The Dice Player‟the poet brings the green back as usual:

O land ―I love you green,‖ green. An apple waving in light and water.Green. Your night Green.Your dawn, green. So plant me gently, with a mother‘s kindness, in a fistful of air. I am one of your seeds, green... (17). (quoted in MouridBarghouti, The Guardian 2008)

In the above poem Darwish clearly shows that green does not only stand for the land of olives, basils and thymes. The poet speaks of an agrarian country on the Mediterranean coast that never ceases to exist in the psyche of people despite lacking political recognition in the age of democracy and human rights. The first poem of an anthology

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―Do I Love You or Not‖ is “Psalms” where he again insists to draw the portrait of his lost homeland in this way:

I want to draw your form You‘re scattered among the files and the surprises I want to draw your form You‘re shredded on missiles‘ shrapnel and bird wings I want to draw your form But the sky steals my hand I want to draw your form You‘re entrapped between the wind and the dagger To find my form in you (Do I Love You or Not, Dar El-Adab, 1972.1-9)

Darwish celebrates the quest for the homeland and its wounded identity but it‘s incomplete until it is possible to draw first its shape. The poet here blames the supernatural elements like ―wind‖ for preventing in drawing the portrait of his land. Some unknown force is stopping poet by force to restore the sense of peace and stability of his homeland. The hostile wind wishes to keep the homeland of the poet ―shredded‖ in the air and conspires with the ―dagger‖ to alter the existence and identity of the oppressed people. Mahmoud Darwish was not only a literary stalwart of Palestine literature but was an active political worker as well. He joined the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and became an active member of PLO outside the occupied territory of Palestine. His twenty-six years of life outside the Palestine played an important role in his discourse of politics and poetry. But his political position and being the active member of the PLO resulted his imprisonments and house arrest that latter forced him to live an exilic life in Egypt and latter in Beirut. However Darwish first time returned to Ramallah in 1996 to live in the occupied Palestinian territory but unfortunately it continues to simmer under the Israeli siege for years.The poetry of Darwish is preoccupied with the siege of his homeland and the displacement of his people similar to his bio-political life both in literal and metaphorical lines. Infact, his poetry burgeoned noticeably in exile but writing from

201 home and the host country after the poet was displaced and expelled from his home need further observation. Khalidi (2010:1) shares Darwish‘s insights when he asserts that:

The quintessential Palestinian experience, which illustrate some of the most basic issues raised by Palestinian identity, takes place at a border, an airport , a checkpoint: in short, at any one of those many modern barriers where identities are checked and verified. What happens to Palestinians at these crossing points brings home to them how much they share in common as people. For it is at these borders and barriers that the six million Palestinians are singled out as for ―special treatment‖, and are forcefully reminded of their identity: of whom they are, and why they are different from others. (Khalidi (2010:1) Darwish‘s entire poetic discourses illustrate his deep sense of inseparability and love with his occupied and oppressed homeland. He not only portrays the lost landscape of Palestine but expresses his strong political urge while celebrating the national identity in exile as well as the ongoing Palestinian struggle towards the nationhood. The poet himself openly declared once (as cited in Celik, 2008: 273) that his poetry do not show mere images andmetaphors of Palestinian home but delineate the picture of landscapes, villages, fields and even communicate a place. Headded, ―I find myself looking at an olive tree, and as I am looking at it, it transforms itself before my eyesinto a symbol of our home‖ (Darwish, 2000:3)

These poems are regarded as the home in which the poet celebrates his Palestinian identity in exile such as “Identity Card”, “the Passport”, “To My Mother”, “To My Father”, “A Lover from Palestine” and “On Perseverance”, A letter from Home”, “A Diary of A Palestinian Wound”,“ The Land” and “Why did You Leave the Horse Alone‖. Darwish once asserted after recreating the home and national identity in his poetry, he says: ―The countries between my hands are the work of my hands‖ (Darwish, 2000: 4). This line articulates that the Palestine identity is an integral part to Darwish‘s thoughts and emotions because it servesfor him as a catalyst as well as an inspiration to write poems.

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The poem “A Lover from Palestine”, talks about the immortal relationship between the people and their land. The title of the poem describes the inevitable love relationship between the poet and home, Palestine. The love for motherland is metaphoric and indispensable which the poet reiterates in the poem again and again. It exemplifies his initial perception of home by focusing on the nature and his organs which co-exist as well as interdependent to each other:

Your eyes are a thorn in my heart Your words were my song I saw your face in the walls. And you are the words of my lips (Darwish, 2000: 41)

In the above lines, the poet transforms the entire landscape of his homeland into an expression of love which latter shapes the poet‘s sense of national identity. The different aspects of Palestinian nature such as water bodies, stones, hills, fields of wheat, flora and fauna, winds, storms, are like the different organs of human body. This interdependence between the nature and human body show the different shades of Palestinian life that are mirrored by Darwish‘s lost home. The poems written in exile further exemplify poet‘s romance with his national identity and love for home. The notion of home remains connected with the Palestinian identity through the various aspects of environment which is being trampled and destroyed by the occupying forces. The poem ―A Diary of a Palestinian Wound” is regarded one of his representative poem of his exilic life in which he writes: Our land and we are one flesh and bone We are its salt and water We are its wound, but a wound that fights (Darwish, 2000:165)

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Darwish uses pronoun ―we‖ here which refers to all Palestinians either inside the occupied territory or outside it. The direct reference to land as ―our land‖ signifies that the poet means to create home in its ecological aspect as well. The line ―we are its salt and water ―evokes the sense of a deep bond between the land and the Palestinians which is similar like salt and water that are impossible to separate. Darwish delineates this image of being ―one flesh and bone‖ to show the painful situation when the fleshis removed from the bone that implicitly symbolizes his long suffering for being away from home and his sense of loss in exile. This kind of an apt portrayal shows the biocentric ingredients that speak volumes of loss and longing to restore his national identity. In another poem,“The Old Beautiful City”, the poet depicts deeply ecological motifs of home to celebrate the lost beautiful city. He writes:

We are the leaves of its trees We are the wheat of its fields We are the light of its moon We are the sound of its water Our land and we are one (Darwish, 2000: 408)

Similarly, in the poem ―An Eulogy of High Shadow”,Darwish portrays his home as a bag he is carrying in his exile when declares:

My homeland is a bag It is my bed at night My homeland is a bag I carry it on my shield (Darwish, 2000: 347)

The bag is used here as a metaphor by the poet which shows his whole political as well natural existence. On the one hand, the bag suggests that the poet carries the burden of epic and solitary struggle in exile. On the other hand, the bag is symbolic of the

204 imaginative ecology of home that accompanies him wherever he goes. The image of ―I carry it on my shield‖ indicates his constant effort, the impact of the lost land, and the mental influence of being forcefully alienated from his motherland. This stanza becomes more worthy when it is read in this statement of poet when he talks about the relationship between homeland and exile. He says:

As for me, I cannot praise exile as long as it is impossible to curse the homeland. However, the dreamed Palestine comes to my mind more readily when I write poems than the real Palestine. It‘s a problem that is at the same time personal and national and that prevents the Israelis from continuing to exile me. This is why I have to write better poems (Darwish, 2000: 356)

Furthermore, Darwish‘s perception of lost home becomes inclusive of the whole country of Palestine as being in harmony with his national identity. When he returns to Ramallah after the decades of exile he describes the feelings and emotional outburst in this way:

O‘ Palestine You are the name of people You are the name of the soil You are the name of the sky You will victorious (Darwish, 2000: 629)

The poem entitled ―Mural”, Darwish uses the wheat of his homeland to show further the ecological insights of Palestine so that the coming generations will regenerate themselves with the environment of their land. The following stanza emphasizes this assertion:

I am a grain of wheat

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That has died to live again My death makes a new life (Darwish, 2000: 732)

The metaphor ―I am a grain of land‖ in the poem clearly indicates the intimate and deep sense of belonging with the homeland where he feels revitalized and rejuvenated. Therefore, the ability of the wheat to rekindle, regenerate is symbolic of the Palestinian will and awareness to remain in struggle so that they can exist. Darwish poetry is just simply a search for identity and appealing to Palestinians' lost landscape that envelope his poetic discourse with sweet memories. His poetry have taken national and revolutionary stamp that manifest his bravery, his defense of his postcolonial identity and his nationalist issues such as his poem 'Identity Card ‗and other poems discussed in this chapter. Darwish uses words, pronouns and images to assert his national identity such as 'I am- my root, my mother's bread…etc' and makes an eternal bond between him and the elements of Palestinian landscape like olive trees, palm trees, river water etc. All these symbols serve in his poetry as the main ingredients of life and the long years of exile could not wipe out these symbols from the poet's memory. Homelessness and search for Palestinian identity has been the product of pains and sufferings in exile for Mahmoud Darwish.In a poem titled ―We Move on to a Country”, the poet describes feelings of alienation experienced by the Palestinian refugees living in exile:

We move on to a country not of our flesh. Its chestnut trees not part of our marrow. Its stones are not goats in the song of mountains, its pebble eyes are not lilies of the valley. We move on to country that suspend no singular sun over us. For us the women of legend clap their hands: a sea for us and a sea against us. If wheat and water are cut off from you, then eat our love drink our tears. Black handkerchiefs for the poets. A line of marble statues will raise our voices up.

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And a stone mortar to guard our souls from Time‘s dust. Roses against us and roses for us (Jayyusi 1987:208)

At the end of the poem, Darwish says that the how Palestinians living in these refugee camps prefer to die and be buried in their occupied homeland rather than to live and die in exile in the neighboring Arab countries. In the poem ―Homeland Between Memory and a Suitcase,‖ Darwish describes the paradoxical state of uncertainty and refugee life within their own country. He says:

The moment they arrived on your land, they defined the parameters of their existence and those of their children. And at the same time they defined yours. The moment they became natives you became refugee. (JOG 55-56)

The poet says once in the history the Jewish people lived through the feelings of refugee and exilic life but after landing illegally in my land they forget the past and are not realizing the feelings of such a state in others. The loss of land and then the Zionist narrative continuously tried to obliterate the bond of the Palestinian with their homeland. This colonial attitude of Zionism led to the resurgence of Palestine nationalism inside the occupied Palestine as well as in the refugee camps. Darwish mobilizes this strong urge of oppressed people in his poetry where he maintains a strong relation between the letters and those to whom they are addressed. His early poetry is about organizing the national discourse and preserving Palestinian identity. In the binging of his literary career, Darwish declares the political implication of his writing:

You are my virginal garden As long as our songs Are swords when we draw them. You are faithful as the seed As long as our songs

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Nourish the land … (LFP, 1- 7)

Darwish‘s poetry directly deals and contributes to the Palestinian liberation struggle because it was this political activism and his resistance poetry which send him prison many times where he found himself with the comrades in the same jail cell. He in his poetry remains obsession with the past memory about home and the revival of Palestinian tradition to maintain and assert difference between the invaders and the natives. In search of identity, Darwish in his poems often mostly indulges in dialogue with the‗other‘ who sometimes symbolize Darwish himself or the case of poet as identity-seeker. In the poem I Am Only Him, published in his collection A River Dies of Thirst, the poet talks about an absent probably himself whose identity melting away out of forceful separation and ‗swallowed‘ by darkness of long occupation. This fall and decline of national identity can be felt in the lines below:

Therefore he walks and walks and walks Until he melts away And the shadows swallow him up at the end of his journey I am only him And he is only me In different images. (Translated by Catherine Cobham in Darwish, 2009c: 45)

In the poem, From Now On You Are Somebody Else, Darwish defines ‗identity‘ as one‘s great achievements and expectations of the oppressed people rather than his name. It is this identity what Palestinians are looking to achieve rather than what is known in the annals of history. To be satisfied with your ‗image‘ before the mirror, you have to feel you have not achieved yourself yet. Darwish writes:

Identity is what we bequeath, not what we inherit… What we invent, not what we remember. .

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Identity is the distorted image in the mirror That we must break The minute we grow fond of it. I am not embarrassed about my identity Because it is still in the process of being invented, (Translated by Catherine Cobham in Darwish, 2009c: 155)

In another poem To Our Land,Darwish reminds his readers that Palestine is deeply rooted in the world history and is the homeland of the prophets. It has a rich culture, map and last the unfestering wounds because the land continuously occupied, torn, and exploited by the settlers.

To our land, and it is the one poor as a grouse‘s wings, Holy books and an identity wound To our land, And it is the one surrounded with torn hills, The ambush of a new past (Translated by FadyJoudah in Darwish, 2007: 203)

It is also the homeland of the prophets, holy books, and their miracles. When Mahmoud Darwish returned after the decades of exile from the West Bank to his promised land in 1996 but he was highly dejected. The land has been turned into a wasteland, torn into security check points and is scattered by the various pockets of settlements and settlers. In the poem That Is Her Image andThe Lover‟s Suicide,Darwish depicts the broken image of his country under forceful occupation:

From where does his earth begin? From his body occupied by the Colonies The aircraft.

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The coups. The myths.

(Translated by Mansson, 2003: 202-203)

In the same poem, Darwish further expresses his last wish that he wants to go back to Palestine and die and to be buried there not in exile:

I return… Because she is my shroud. I return Because she is my body. I return because she is my nation. (The Lover‟s Suicide11-14)

Mahmoud Darwish belongs to the group of modern Palestinian poets who became verypopular in the Middle East as the ―Resistance Poets‖. They were a group of Palestinians literary giants who lived in Israel and fought the battle with pen and ink against the oppression and occupation. The loss of the Palestine homeland to the Zionists and therelationshipwith his country which has been described ―as extend and desperate love affair with his lost homeland‖ remain the main subject in his poetry. Drawish‘s love for his homeland is inseparable from his desire to redeem it. In his own words:

Alas, my arrogant wound/ My country is not A suitcase/and I am not a traveler, but I am the lover and the earth is his beloved!‖ (The Diary of a Palestinian Wound).

Thus the above analysis of the selected poems of Mahmoud Darwish discloses that he remains undeterred in his writings to regain the lost homeland in the exile and be the link between the land and his oppressed people. Darwish utilized poetry as a main tool

210 for drawing the picture of home among homeless people in the world in general and the Palestine in particular.

The concept of ‗national identity‘ and being lost in the realms of separation from their homeland are the two main themes in both the regional poets, who no longer owns what was there, and no longer has the means except literary power to restore what has been lost. The resistance poetry has risen out of dispossession, occupation and expulsion of people from their homeland. It is so spiraled with the ongoing political conflicts like Palestine and Kashmir that are continuously evolving according to the traumatic episodes of their history and the miserable condition of people there. The new modern Palestinian Arabic poetry and the English poetry/literature emanating from the Indian administered Kashmir since the 1990‘s depict the cultural and national identity of the besieged people of both the places. Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish both shared the narratives embedded with the military might and political oppression. However, they insisted to fight continuously with their words on the behalf of victim‘s against oppression and the injustice perpetuated by the victors. Ali and Darwaish gave legitimacy and a sense of direction to the resistance poetry in their homelands. Their knowledge of respective homelands like myths and history is amazing and both used them to give a distinctive touch to their national identities. As we know the most important element of Postcolonial literature is the sense of national identity and cultural heritage of homeland. Similarly like other Postcolonial poets Ali and Darwish believe in indigenous identity. In many of their poems we can see how the national and cultural identity matters them while inculcating the collective resistance among people against the oppression. Thus their poetry articulates the aspirations, anguish, pain, suffering of their native homeland and for this both the poets won unparalleled global acclaim. Both Shahid and Darwish miserably suffer from the absence of the place and the continuous loss of lives in the ongoing conflicts ravaging in their homelands. Their quest for own national identities in the exile becomes therefore the identity and history of the besieged and oppressed people. Mahmud Darwish and Agha Shahid Ali were such displaced voices that depict the miserable conditions of their people who are living in fear, violence and re-explored the Palestinian and Kashmiri national identity in their poetry.

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