Chapter-I

Introduction

Resistance literature

The struggle for national liberations particularly in the twentieth century has not only mapped the new world borders but also produced a significant corpus of great literary writings both narrative and poetic. These writings gave representation to erstwhile suppressed people and portray their stories of oppression which demands now recognition as well as appreciation in a literary world, usually dominated by the canonical literature. This kind of literature mainly relies upon the idea of resisting the meta- narratives and the mainstream literature which usually misinterpret and misrepresent the marginalized people across the world. After the fall of colonialism the struggle between the neo-colonizers and colonized continues because many territories in the world today have been turned into the microcosm of colonial oppression and travesty of justice. The ongoing conflicts in the disputed territories like Palestine and are nothing but the imperial legacies which were intentionally left unresolved for the future socio- political designs. These disputed territories continue to haunt present and future because of their political and economical strategic importance. It has made the life of millions of people in both the places miserable and murky. Much has changed in the world since the fall of colonialism but the act of political and military intimidation continues to make havoc in the most unfortunate parts of world like Kashmir and Palestine. In these places, resistance springs from the well of historical dissent which exceeds all the lines of ultra- nationalist narratives haunted by the forceful occupation and the disproportionate use of brute force.

The resistance literature in the Indian administered Kashmir and the Palestine are consistently being written or translated into English to tell the stories of loss and longings to the world audience. They very choice of language in which the writers from the conflict zones is itself a political statement to reach out the people and power corridors of the world who have forgotten their desperate plea of justice. However this un-canonized

1 literature coming out from the two conflict zones with its own self-defined unfortunately remained ignored and unexplored by the students of literature in many parts of the world. Any literature which portrays the resilience and struggle of the people against the injustice deserves to be evaluated and studied.

The present comparative study of resistance by the Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish is intended to foreground the theme of loss which they suffer personally as well as collectively with their besieged people. As we are well aware that in the post-colonial literature only two main ideas surfaced that is representation and resistance. It‘s this resistance literature which categorically refutes the mainstream narratives of rosy pictures and connotes the saga of state subjugation in both the places. The oppressive tactics to quell the sentiment forcefully has procreated numerous resistance writings in English fiction as well as in the native languages that delineate this human estrangement and dissent in their own way. These anthems of resistances mainly revolve around the deep rooted political crisis and the large scale of unabated human rights violation that is taking place in both the places with impunity. Lullabies of pain and the tales of oppression are the common themes in the post conflict literary enterprise of Indian administered Kashmir and Palestine.

In the Indian administered Kashmir and writers now no more see the color red in roses; rather see blood soaked petals in the beautiful landscape of their homeland. The post 1990 English resistance is somehow managing to break the long spell of solitude by speaking and writing the collective conscious of people, who remained literally voiceless for a long time. The contemporary Kashmiri English writers, both native and diaspora, are not only chronicling the epic battle of fact and fiction but also showcase their moral courage and intellectual integrity in the international literary corridors. These new writings indeed employ subjective elements to present Kashmir as a conflict involving all the factors that has made life miserable for people there. The writers like Agha Shahid Ali, , Mirza Waheed, Nitasha Kaul, Shahnaz Bashir, Sanjay Kak and SuvirKaul are today enhancing and enriching the English resistance literature of Kashmir.

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On the other hand Palestine continues to remain another festering wound of the humanity which bleeds profusely because of the vested interests of the west and its historical and religious importance between the three faiths; Islam, Christianity and Judaism. After the 1948 Nakba (Tragedy) the resistance literature inside the occupied has gain new momentum and direction to portray the colossal loss of people who are caught up in the Zionist onslaught and the political limbos of the region. The Palestinian writers and poets grew up in refugee camps and in sieges which conditioned their writings of representation and resistance. They not only fought with pen and ink but are politically active which sometimes leads to their assassinations and arrests by the Israeli authority. Their writings didn‘t stop to write back about their lost identity and the un-forgetful memory of roots which they are trying to recreate in the form of words and sentences. It was the Palestinian resistance literature which succeeded in laying the foundations of a new literary movement better known as the literature of exile or refugee literature. Poets like Kamal Nasser, Khaled Ennasra, Samih al-Qasim, Mahmoud Darwish, Ibrahim Nasrallah, and Fady Joudah are the jewels in the casket of resistance literature of Palestine, who not only show defiance but have achieved the great recognition as well as respect in the literature. Their poetry should not be looked upon as if it springs suddenly but it is like a stream flowing with loss, identity and longings slowly pouring into the world literature. The Palestinian resistance poetry had become the subject of many studies and research works around the world for many scholars however the Kashmiri writers and their works remained ignored and forgotten.

In the contemporary resistance movements across the world writers and poets play an important role in the political mobilization through their verses. Traditionally Poetry always evokes deep feelings about the complex socio-political issues and serves as a vehicle for expression. In 21th century, when challenges and crises intensified due to the political uncertainty, the became more involved and their role in enhancing the critical understanding among the people became important and inevitable. Today, the poets from different conflict regions of the world according to Nietzsche, have become a

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―fighter against his time‖. The Lebanese novelist and critic, Elias Khuri writes in his article, ―The world of meanings in Palestinian poetry;

Language is the very frame of steadfastness; language is the repository of the collective memory. It is the basic national value which must be preserved. The role of poetry is therefore a major one, not only because it is more powerful than other forms of writing as a means of political mobilization, but also because it sustains, within the popular memory, national continuity. (Elias Khuri, 1982, 245)

The poetry not only portrays the circumstances and position of conflict ridden nations but also suggest the necessary steps to be taken for peace and reconciliation. Thus, in the present study I have selected two seminal poets; Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri American poet and Mahmoud Darwish , the national poet of Palestine who struggled and suffered along with their people in the ongoing struggle of basic rights and political identity. Over the short period of time their poetry became the anthems of resistance among their people because it resists against the mainstream meta- narratives and their hollow aesthetics. These resistance poets have produced new vital literary corpus which is remarkable not only for coherence and magnitude, but also challenges the mainstream literary conventions. Their poetry is unique addition to the world literature because it represents the collective conscious of people. It also portrays their vicissitudes against the forceful occupation and serves an archive for the popular sentiment.

The present study aims to analyze the theme of loss in the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish. The sense of loss is a complex phenomenon and is very difficult to define in one definition. Its thematic interpretations are deeply rooted in the psychological and socio political approaches. The most interesting approach which describes the sense of loss among sensitive souls emanates from the situation of doubt or when ―a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason‖ as stated by famous English poet John Keats. The great

4 philosopher and theorist Friedrich Nietzsche attributes skepticism as one of the main factors that leads to the creation of a state of doubt and ultimately to the sense of loss. Nietzsche‘s explains this in his own words when he says:

One should not be deceived; great spirits are skeptics. Zarathustra is a skeptic. Strength, freedom which is born of the strength and over strength of the spirit, proves itself by skepticism. Men of conviction are not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions of value and disvalue conviction are prisons. Such men do not look for enough; they do not look beneath themselves: but to be permitted to join in the discussion of value and disvalue, one must see five hundred convictions beneath oneself-behind oneself. (Richard Ellman, 1965, p.98-99)

Nietzsche continues his argument and underlines the fact that even the concepts of freedom, spirit and power of existence all fall in the repository of skepticism. In his words; A spirit who wants great things, who also wants the means to them, is necessarily a skeptic. Freedom from all kinds of conviction. To be able to see freely is part of strength. Great passion, the ground and the power of his existence, even more enlightened, even more despotic than he is himself, employs his whole intellect: it makes him unhesitating it gives him courage even for unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not begrudge his convictions. Conviction as means: many things are attained only by means of a conviction. Great passion uses and uses up convictions, it doesn‘t succumb to them-it knows itself sovereign. (Richard Ellman, 1965, 99)

For the critical analysis of the present resistance poetry a critical methodology has to be adopted. Considering the fact that literature is conditioned by the society in which the writer lives, according to one school of thought Marxism is the only method for the proper understanding and interpretation of the literary work. Though the literary field today is flooded with various critical approaches that claim notable estimation, yet, the seeming abundance of the available methodologies-viz, the formalist, the psychological,

5 the mythological, the linguistic and the post-structuralist deconstruction, and so on. They suffer from an inherent debilitating characteristic in trying to understand literature in terms of its own laws. The common inadequacy of these tools lies in the fact that they tend to view literature short of its social product and its interpretation and analysis must involve adequate sociology. Graham Howe has remarked:

Criticism should be able to give some intelligible account of the relation of literature to the social order. There is a methodology for this, and so far as I know there is only one. To think on this subject at all requires some application of Marxism. (Graham Howe 1970, 57)

Thus Marxist approach has been adopted to interpret the resistance poetry of Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish. The socio -political study of literature can take a number of forms, but among all the most popular is Marxism, which incorporates an understanding of the social roots of literature with a sense of political contours. The Marxists view states that economic development plays a very important role in the historical changes. The relation between the society and literature manifests itself through the presence of certain structures in the work of the artist. The one to one co-relation of literary and social facts has been termed as vulgar literary sociology. It is now widely recognized in sociological criticism that this relation between society and literature is formed by various themes, ideas, emotions, attitudes and values, which the author has imbibed from his milieu.

Fredric Jameson considers literature to be central to Marxism as it is the supreme form of narrative. He considers it to be a socially symbolic act, especially if the narrative in question gives a social and historical background in totality:

…this is because such master narrative have inscribed themselves in the text as well as in our thinking about them; such allegorical narrative signified are a persistent dimension of literary and cultural texts precisely because they reflect

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a fundamental dimension of our collective thinking and our collective fantasies about history and reality. (Fredric Jameson 1964, 17)

Jameson insisted that only Marxism could combine the systematic analysis of signifying structures with a sense of history as a process of change rupture and transformation driven by conflict and struggle. With description of various philosophical and theoretical positions taken by the noted creative writers and thinkers, as mentioned above, it will be in the fitness of the situation to come to the study of the main theme of the thesis, i.e. poetry of loss with reference to Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish.

In the Indian administered Kashmir, Agha Shahid Ali particularly in the1990‘s emerges as a major voice when nobody was there to represent the collective conscious of the oppressed people in the international literary world. His impassioned songs of pain and misery made him the chronicler of suffering which has been inflicted on his people in the Himalayan state of Indian administered Kashmir particularly since the 1990. The ―blood dimmed tide‖ submerged the whole valley into a perennial blood bath and trauma after the rigged election of 1987, which gripped apart the peace and political stability in the state. Now the elections are conducted after every six years, a democratic set up has been installed; tourist‘s visit valley in lakhs, normalcy is manufactured after clamping indefinite curfews but the permanent peace remains an elusive dream in Shahid‘s Kashmir.

At a certain point I lost track of you. They make desolation and call it peace (Farewell, Agha Shahid Ali)

Agha Shahid Ali was born in New , in 1949 but he grew up in a distinguished and highly educated family in . He migrated to The United States of America for higher studies and is known there as an American English poet. Till his

7 death in 2001, Ali became very popular poetic voice in America, who uniquely blended multiple ethnic influences and ideas in both traditional forms and elegant free-verse. Ali‘s makes an everlasting impact of being one of the outstanding sons of Kashmir who suffered at every stage of life and willingly lived with the sense of loss as his constant companion.

He authored several collections of poetry including Rooms Are Never Finished (2001), The Country Without a Post Office (1997). The beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992). A Nostalgist‟s Map Of America (1991), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), The Half Inch Himalyaas(1987). In Memory to Begum Akhter and other poems (1979), and Bone and Sculpture (1972). He was the author of T.S Eliot as editor (1986), translator of The Rebel‟s Silhouette: Selected Poems by Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1992) and editor of Revisiting Disunities: Real in English (2000).

His poetry is like a canvas on which he draws an imaginary painting of his homeland albeit bruised, besieged but its mesmerizing landscape and rich culture remains an alter ego for him. Among all of his anthologies The Country without a Post Office is considered the best one because it was written in the background of the armed conflict and reflects the collective aspirations and the cultural values of Kashmir. 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 and India. In this book of poems, The Country Without a Post Office, he mourned 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. (Muske,2002, 23)

Ali is a part of the new group of post-colonial immigrant poets, whose writings are mostly characterized by nostalgia, loss and the political uncertainty prevailing in their homeland. He like others delineates the pangs of separation, loss of paradise due to

8 violence and his personal alienation. The poet asks himself this sensitive question of loss when he uses an epigraph of Gilgamesh in this way;

―what have you known of loss/ that makes you different from other men?‖ (Beyond the Ash Rains1-2)

Thus, the two lines reflect the central argument to a sensitive question which the poet puts to himself. The poet believes that the sense of loss or the separation from his beloved home constitutes the basic condition for poetry. For Ali homeland is his laila and he is the majnoon who sings the songs for his Laila to console his alienated self in the foreign shores. The public uprisings and the subsequent wave of violence in Kashmir push the poet on the margins of alienation, loss and longings. It also makes him a poet of distinction while he thematizes one experience of loss to another by providing poetic version to each expression.

Mahmoud Darwish(1941 – 2008) known in the world as the great resistance poet is also the national poet of people who are homeless at home and refugees in their own country. In his poetry he expresses his outrage over the displacement of innocent Palestinian from their land by the Israeli occupying authority. Darwish is considered one of the most eminent Palestinian poets who published his first collection of poems, Leaves of Olives, in 1964, when he was just twenty two years old. Since then he has published more than thirty volumes of poetry and eight books of prose. His major anthologies have been translated into more than twenty-two languages including English. The poem Identity Card, or Bitaqat Hawiyyah, of Darwish became a cry of defiance in the face of the occupiers who had been trying to overlook the presence of Arab-Palestinians on their homeland. Darwish articulates more keenly his attachment to that one particular place in the Arab world, the place where he was born, the place he loves and the place he has lost (Elmessiri, 1981).

Mahmoud Darwish was born in the village of Al-Birwa in the upper Galilee which is now named the west bank area of Palestine. In the year 1948 when Darwish was just a six year old kid his family was forced out of his village into Lebanon by the European Jewish

9 settlers. In the midst of ethnic cleansing, his family was forced to leave his native village. Months later when they returned from the refugee camps to their villages, it was all rubble and debris of broken memories and emotions. The great irony was that they no longer exist in the newly declared occupying state of Israel. After the ethnic cleansing of his family and village, he lived a life of an exilic soul because of his political and anti imperialist stance in his poetry. He faced house arrests and spent five years of imprisonment in the Israeli jail. In 1970, he left to Egypt and later to Beirut because of the continuous harassment by the Israeli authorities. The Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982 forced Darwish to return to Ramallah as an occupied citizen of Palestine. He died on August 9, 2008 at the age of 67, three days after the heart surgery in Houston, USA where he was under the medical treatment for many months.

Darwish and his poetry serve as fuel in the engine of Palestinian struggle against the Israeli occupation. In the Palestine territory as well in the Arab world, his poetry galvanizes the resistance struggle. Throughout his poetics, he turns to be the effective medium in the political mobilization for the Palestinian cause. As the times passes his poetry continues to play a leading role in cultural political identity of Palestinian and also enriches the modern Arab poetry. After the Nakba tragedy and the iron fist rule of Arab dictators the modern expresses pent off anger, resentment, alienation and the bitter evolving Arab reality with voices of discontent and determination.

Mahmoud Darwish published his first collection of poems, Leaves of Olives, in 1964, when he was just twenty two years old. Some of his famous English translation anthologies are: The Butterfly's Burden (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (2003), Stage of Siege (2002), The Adam of Two Eden‟s (2001), Mural (2000), Bed of the Stranger (1999), Psalms (1995), Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? (1994), and The of Human Flesh (1980).He has been described as an incarnation of the traditional political poet in Islam.

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Significance of the Study

In this part of the world a considerable amount of research has not been done on Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish due to many known reasons. The first and foremost reason to unravel their poetry of loss one should know the historical as well political background of their native places. The second, is to understand Mahmoud Drawish‘s poetry one should know Arabic language, although his entire Arabic poetry has been translated into twenty six languages. The last but not the least is that the poetry of both the regional poets is full of political overtones which sometimes make them sensitive and untouchable in the mainstream research centers in countries like India and Israel. However, the significance of the present comparative study stems from the fact that the research scholar belongs to one of the conflict zone and understands the political and historical backgrounds in which both the poets have written their poetry. The present comparative study analyzed the poetry about the places and people which continues to remain the centre of humanitarian crisis.

The comparative approach of the study seeks to explore the similarities in terms of loss between Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish within a broad paradigm of resistance poetry. The comparative study will explore how the poetry of both the regional poets tends to cater more towards a trans-national ethos critiquing the failure of the dream of an emancipated post-colonial world. Their poetry manifests the dark face of consistent subjugation and repression which resulted in the series of public uprisings in Kashmir against the Indian state and the Palestinian intifada‘s against the Zionist occupation. Therefore it was very interesting to unravel the poetic corpus of Ali and Darwish to explore the aesthetics and cultures of resistance that tie the global tragedy of neo- colonialism by denying the basic rights of the marginalized.

The main purpose of resistance literature is to express a particular sentiment and delineate the struggle of people against the colonization. It is an open defiance against the political hegemony and state coercion that has been imposed on the people in these conflict zones. In both the contested lands, Kashmir and Palestine, the emerging

11 resistance literature is becoming a tool of protest after remaining powerless and voiceless for a long time. It serves as a means of empowerment by legitimizing the need to return to a culture dominated by outside influences and restore the cultural identity. In other words, resistance literature showcases the repressed spirit and becomes a lyrical voice of the marginalized people. It speaks for those who cannot speak and fight against the formidable state oppressions.

The purpose in undertaking this comparative study of Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish is to explore the common thematic elements like loss, exile, nostalgia or national identities, and the continuous political crisis prevailing in their respective homeland. Their poetry is embedded with the sense of loss, lost identities, alienation and grief but significantly also express hope and reconciliation. Darwish is considered to be the last Arab recognized poet who like his predecessors became the voice of the oppressed people, chronicler of exile while Ali and his poetry remain replete with poetic expressions of displacement, exile and longing to come back to Kashmir. Interestingly both the poets shared common themes in spite of the differences in their socio-political backgrounds.

The saga between the oppressed and oppressor has been going on in this world since times immemorial. The tyrant regimes, despots and occupiers have always been exploiting and inflicting pain on their subjects to perpetuate their authority. The marginalized people and oppressed people are still hounded, victimized, killed and exploited in the various parts of the globe by the ruthless regimes. Today, the state sponsored violence has become the order of day to curb the freedom of expression and crush people‘s movements. In this comparative approach, an attempt is made to explore the sense of loss expressed by Ali and Darwish in the backdrop of violence and political crisis that plagued both Kashmir and Palestine since decades. This research emphasizes that there is a strong need to explore the common approach of both the regional poets regarding the loss of nationhood, the vicissitude of exile and its multiple repercussions on their life and poetic discourse. This study traces how Ali and Darwish used poetry as a tool for political purposes and represent the collective conscious of their people. The

12 study analyzed the universality of their stance against oppression and violence that surpasses all the boundaries.

Review of literature

Ali and Darwish enjoyed considerable attention from literary scholars in America, Britain, Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, who notice in their poetry perhaps the most sustained and coherent attempt to engage with some of the most politically contentious, and therefore theoretically important, contemporary issues. Their work wrestles with the post-colonial predicament in ways that demonstrate a sense of loss. Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, argues that the culture of postcolonial resistance manifests itself in literature by pulling away from separatist nationalism—and moves toward a literature that is liberating for humans—a more integrative view of society. And yet surprisingly little published criticism or research on Ali exists as compared to other poets of his generation. Till date, only a few thesis and articles have been written on the poet. The prominent among them are Allen Bryant Voiget‘s, „In Memoriam‟, Tributes (Kashmir: Agha Shahid Ali Foundation 2002). S Mohammad Shafi Khan, “A Memory of Musk: Agha Shahid Ali, Poet of unique voice‖ Sensor 20002. H. Fong, “The Wit and Wisdom of Agha Shahid Ali” Tributes (Kashmir: Agha Shahid Foundation 20002). Rukun, Adavani‘s“Agha Shahid Ali: A few Memories.” Tributes Kashmir: Agha Shahid Ali Foundation, 20002. Lawrence Needham, “The Sorrows of a Broken Time: Agha Shahid and the poetry of Loss and Recovery,”Rewordling. The Literature of the Indian Diaspora (New York, West Port, CT., London: Greenwood Press, 1993).Amita, Kumar, “After the Last Sky”, Tributes (Kashmir: Agha Shahid Ali Foundation 2002).Amitav, Ghosh. ―The Ghat of the Only World: Agha Shahid Ali In Brooklyn.” Tributes. Kashmir: Agha Shahid Ali Foundation, 2001. Ali, The Rebels Silhouette ( Amherst: the University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Ali, Ravishing disunities: Real in English (U.S.A: Wesleyan university Press, 2000). G.R.Malik, “Agha Shahid Ali: The Poet of the country without post office and Beyond”, Kashmiri Culture and Literature: Some Glimpses (Kashmir: Hilal Printing Press, 2006).

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So much has been written on Darwish in the Middle- East and Europe, but the poet has not gained any considerable attention in the sub- continent so far. His creative material ‗Palestine‘ becomes metaphor of oppression and repression in his poetry but as the great son of soil he protects his mindset from the self censorship and lets his creative self speak up on the behalf of the oppressed people. It is not that his poetic oeuvre has replaced the material world for Palestinians, but rather his creative imagination has provided them the psychological relief that eases the pain from the actual repression. Determination and optimism are far greater weapons of resistance that do not allow the psyche to collapse. Till date various thesis, articles have been written on Mahmoud Darwish‘s poetry in the Middle East and America in addition to a voluminous body of translations. Following are the some major works on the issue. Nassar, Hala Khamis. ―Exile and the City: The Arab City in the Writing of Mahmoud Darwish.‖ In Mahmoud Darwish: Exile‘s Poet, ed. Hala Khamis Nassar and Najat Rahman, 191–214. Massachusetts: Olive Branch Press, 2008. Maya Jaggi, “Poet of the Arab World: Mahmoud Darwish,‖ Guardian, June 8, 2002. Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulnes(translated with an introduction by Ibrahim Muhawi) Berkeleyand Los Angeles: University of California press, 2009.

Scope and limitations of the Study

The researcher analyzed the selected poetry of both the poets from a comparative perspective. Therefore, the main focus was to study the selected collection of poetry by analyzing various post- colonial aspects and post- modern aspects and themes prevalent in them like loss and national identities. The research will certainly enlighten the readers and researchers, who take interest in the resistance literature and wish to study its genre of resistance poetry. As the title suggests, the research strictly limited to the resistance elements in the poetry of Agha ShahidAli and Mahmoud Darvish. Findings of the study are based entirely on the analysis of selected poems of both the poets. At the end of all the chapters a general conclusion is drawn from their selected poetry. The researcher

14 attempted to interpret the selected poetry of Ali and Darwish in his own way with the help of available critical material and his own understanding of resistance literature.

Thesis Structure

The thesis is divided into seven chapters. It starts with an introduction which is also the first chapter that explains the resistance literatures, the life of poet‘s and the main purpose to study their literary corpus.

The second chapter illustrates the theory of comparative literature, diaspora literature as well as with the resistance literature. As we all know that if we take comparative literature in a broader sense then its scope encompasses the human experiences into its envelope. Therefore all the internal human relationships in the various parts of the world can only be critically probed through the comparative study. The comparative study helps us to create a space where the universality of human relationships emanates and transcends all the human borders.

The chapter also sheds light on the diaspora literature as both the poets were part of it after they left their homeland intentionally or forcefully. However the displacement, whether forced or voluntary in both terms is a calamity. Interestingly in this inevitable calamity the writers often excel in their literary endeavors as if it suits their literary world. Diaspora has always been read and analyzed between the emigration and settlement of people who live far away from their homeland. However, the term ‗Diaspora‘ generally signifies a homogeneous entity of people mostly laborers and slaves who were geographically displaced in the colonial times from their homelands. They are often referred to as exiled or expatriates and their cultural identity in the host countries is another significant critical framework of the Diaspora Literature. It was also explained in the chapter how Indian Diaspora and Palestinian Diaspora today has become an indisputable living reality of the world literature and its global presence marked by such diverse cultural and political phenomena. The rise of Resistance literature and especially resistance poetry is also explained explicitly at the end of chapter. It was observed that in

15 the post colonial era resistance literature had become the voice of voiceless, who do not have a place in the new world and are striving to create an identity.

The third chapter analyzes the theme of alienation in the poetry of Agha Shaid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish. For the analysis, many selected poems of both the poets were examined to know the cause of their alienation. It was observed that the continuous detachment from the homeland and the blood timed tide of violence created ripples in the hearts of Ali and Darwish. The way world polity is divided and discriminative towards resolving these two issues is detrimental to keep the pot of violence burning in both the territories makes them alienated. They wrote poetry in the shadow of alienation but still had a craving desire to see peace and prosperity in their respective homelands. It was seen in the chapter how they portrayed the somber picture of alienation; violence and desolation inflicted on their countrymen.

The fourth chapter is about grief and sorrow in the poetry of Agha Shaid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish. It was critically examined how the sorrow is engendered by an ongoing struggle which is not yet consummated in Palestine as well as in the Indian administered Kashmir. Another observation was the battle between grief and sorrow in the poetry of both the regional poets is explicit and intense given the circumstances in which their personal lives and the people of their homeland are still caught up. Despite the geographical and cultural gap that separates Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish they share a lot as for as the unending miseries, violence, grief and oppression are concerned. It was because of these circumstances that both the poets led a life of bitter struggles marred with personal losses. They used poetry as a medium of expression to be the voice of voiceless that made them the spokesperson of the oppressed people. Their poetry reveals they were neither t propagandist nor a political extremist but created such a literary language in which their countrymen could speak their innate sentiments.

The fifth chapter is about the complex concept of national identity, which is not only present in the poetry of Ali and Darwish but is much celebrated far away from their homeland. To maintain their unique national identity and cultural ethos in the times of conflict has always been a big concern among the people in Kashmir and Palestine. It was

16 observed how both the places are often misrepresented and misinterpreted by the mainstream media when the frame oppressed people caught between the horns of religion and proxies wars. It was seen how the unending subjugation and suppression to muzzle the voice of people gave rise to the strong nationalism which not only echoed in the political discourse but is getting enough space in the literature coming from Kashmir and Palestine. The poetry of Ali and 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. It was 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 sixth Chapter deals with the theme of reconciliation in the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish. Because both the poet lived in the myriad of experiences, witnessed the worst human tragedies, major political crisis and the horrendous aftermath that shattered the peace and harmony in their homelands. The dream of return to their roots and reunion with their families and lovers always rendezvous in their exiled poetry. Being separated, traumatized by the circumstances at home Ali and Darwish embarked on a literary journey to unravel the past political conundrums and anticipated the peaceful future for their besieged people. It was observed in the chapter how Ali and Darwish in their poetry not only delineated the picture miserable people but try to overcome the sufferings, pessimism by craving for reconciliation and peaceful settlement. Their wide appeal for harmony and co-existence irrespective of ethnicity, religion, language was an intense outcry that goes beyond politics, ideologies and the regions. Their literary production shows the vortex of loss, of forced displacement, of doomed efforts, but at it also talks about the hope for peace and political reconciliation. It‘s neither a retreat nor a brazen surrender to talk of reconciliation before the oppressor when the people have immensely suffered due to the state repression in both Palestine and Indian administered Kashmir. In the conflict zones

17 sometimes reconciliation is seen as the last resort to end the misery and trust deficit between the people and state. However their strong urge for Political reconciliation could not materialize on the ground as the conflict continues to ravage their homeland. The seventh chapter is the conclusion of the study with main findings which follows the scope and suggestion for further research.

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