Chapter- III the Alienated Self in Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish's

Chapter- III

The Alienated self in Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish’s Poetry

Alienation, despair and unrest are the most dominant themes in the modern English poetry. It basically emanates from a particular socio political environment where writers and poets feel marginalized and the dissent continues to be choked by the ruthless ruling class. The term Alienation involves some sort of separation; some relationship or connection that once existed, that is natural, desirable, or good, has been lost. The subject of separation can be either of a person from something or of something from something else. It is used to characterize the economic, social and political structure when that is felt to be oppressive or unrelated to one's longing desire or interests. But alienation also refers to the state of mind in which an individual experiences himself as an alien and estranged at home or away.

The term ―alienation‖ refers basically to the displacement of something from one location to another. Many literary critics believe that there are many perennial ailments in the modern society responsible to it, while as others considered it as the objective fact of man‘s life in society. Alienation in terms of emotional isolation or disassociation has been a very common theme in the popular genre of English literature i.e. English poetry. The reason behind it, many opine, is the better future, unresolved conflicts, ongoing wars, spiritual bankruptcy and hollow sophistication which has taken deep roots in our everyday mechanical life. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines alienation as "the state of feeling estranged or separated from ones milieu, work, and products of work or self". The word Alienation is actually derived from the Latin words alius, alienus meaning ―other,‖ is fundamentally different from loneliness or solitude. The sensation arises from being physically close to –but spiritually distant from ----other people. In general sense it means ‗turning away or keeping away from former friends or associates.‘ Oxford Advanced Learner‘s Dictionary of Current English gives two meanings of the verb ‗alienate‘- i) to lose or destroy the friendship, support, sympathy, etc. and ii) to cause somebody to feel different from others and not part of a group.(1988:17)

Different interpreters of alienation have given different definitions. According to Arnold Kaufman, ―To claim that a person is alienated is to claim that his relation to something else has certain features which result in avoidable discontent or loss of satisfaction‖ (1970). Feur Lewis says ―...... the word alienation is used to convey the emotional tone which accompanies any behavior in which the person is compelled to act self destructively‖. Keniston views that ―Most usages of alienation share the assumption that some relationship or connection that once existed that is ‗natural‘, desirable or good, has been lost‖(1965). According to Hegel there are two types of alienation. The first type of alienation arises due to man‘s individuality or incompatibility in his personality and social substance. The second type of alienation is of the same level as the alienation expounded by Rousseau etc., in the principle of ‗Social contract‘ in which the theme of surrender or transfer of any right is vested. According to Hegel, the situation arises when a change occurs in man‘s concept of ‗self‘. The second type of alienation is permanent and from this we can control the first type. Karl Marx however puts forth a very comprehensive and complex idea of alienation that comprises various extrinsic dimensions of human existence in socio-economic context. His concept of alienation is often classified in the following manners:

1. Political Alienation 2. Economic Alienation

Marx says about political alienation: ―The state does not care about Individual‘s existence, in a society without communion between people and that individual in his relation to such a state does not experience a feeling of solidarity, he is only able to relate himself to it as an isolated monad, an individual. He finds the concepts related to state faulty for political alienation. However the theory of alienation explained by the German philosophers and thinkers like Hegel, and Karl Marx explained alienation explicitly.

In the post-colonial epoch, the forced or voluntarily migration and post-industrial experience phenomena has made the term ‗Alienation‘ the main feature of the twentieth century world literature. In the conflict zones where usually people live on the edge are torn between the internal conflict and external conflict or the self versus society feel more

59 alienated than others. Those who faced ethnic cleansing, mass migrations, forcefully dispossession in the host countries because of their cultural as well as political identity. They couldn‘t assimilate in the popular culture which escalates this extreme alienation with every passing day. The sense of exile is purely a psychological and spiritual while the geographical dislocation is just a physical condition. The external exile can be easily suppressed in a global village that facilitates the feeling of being at home anywhere in the cosmopolitan urban quarters of the world.

This sense of alienation is more evident in the writings of diaspora writers, who are caught up between the cultural spaces of the host land and their identity. The dislocation and to locate their culture in an alien culture pushes these writers on the margins of two countries. The Indian diaspora which is a largest diaspora in the world also suffers the same fate while anticipating the host country and homeland. However the diaspora writers play a very important part in the galaxy of Indian writing in English which over the period of time has emerged as a unique variety of English literature. They face criticism by the nativists over leaving their country and serving in a foreign land. They blame them of hypocrisy who for better opportunity and good fortunes left their homeland. For these writers better future became important than the sense of being alienated or exile. In some case the internal political circumstances and the geographical reality, repressive regimes in their homeland force many Diaspora voices to express this sense of exile and alienation in the form of verse and prose. Their imaginations as well as their works are caught up in national identity and stagnant political limbos that are deep rooted in the trajectories of colonial history. This diaspora experience can be easily understood by this excerpt from Salman Rushdie:

It may be said that writers in any position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge---which gives rise to profound uncertainties---that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable

of reclaiming precisely the thing that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities, or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indian of the mind.

(1991,Imaginary homelands)

Either the diaspora writers or native writers they project the collective consciousness of third world embroiled in the name of identity, counter discourse to the totalitarian Orientalism and hegemonic use of English. Being a late product of the world literature modern Indian English Poetry is still oscillating in between tradition and modernity. And for the diaspora poets there seems to be no escape from the pre-exilic state as they continue to struggle even in the aftermaths of exile and the rootlessness. This rootlessness and nostalgia according to William Saffron becomes the main reason for academic growth industry. Indian English diaspora poetry is one such example where poets instead of achievements and good fortune are still unable to forget their roots or Indian culture. They live with it and celebrate its ethos in the foreign lands before a different audience. Their poetry mark the theme of exile and their divided loyalty between the host country and homeland but it proves if not only mentally, physically they feel alienated and isolated. The post independence period was undoubtedly the most important turning point in the Indian English poetry. It differs from the earlier era because it reflected a moving away from the traditionalist in terms of theme and modes of expression. This was due to the unprecedented changes in the socio-economic and political milieu of the country, and, secondly, because of the rise of modernism in Indian literature in English. Indian poetry in English has been sensitive to these changes given the social and political climate in India. All these factors brought a considerable change in the style and pattern of Indian poetry in English that too on modernist lines. The contemporary Indian English poets write with a sense of analysis, interpretation and evaluation of the contemporary social, political and economic realities that reflect their response to the flux of experiences. It‘s no more slavishly imitates the British or American poets as they have developed now their own style of narration.

The 20th Century authors of English poetry in India include Dilip Chitre, Kamala Das, Eunice De Souza, Nissim Ezekiel, KersyKatrak, ArunKolatkar, P. Lal, Jayanta Mahapatra, Dom Moraes, Gieve Patel, and A. K. Ramanujan, and among several others. They represent a spectrum of cosmopolitan positions, in which numerous explicitly Indian elements interact with western ones and traditional sub continental conventions and codes modify and are modified by modern ones. (Haq, Kaiser, 1990)

Today the galaxy of Indian English poetry is much larger and more varied than it was ever before. The new poets have found appropriate techniques for their perception of reality, range, variety and themes. Agha Shahid Ali is one of the celebrated modern Indian English poets whose poetry is charged with political over tunes as well as the multicultural milieu of India and Kashmir. The American poet 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) Although he tries his best to assimilate his identity into these poles so that to create some kind of relationship with them but it was only Kashmir which throughout his career and life remains a driving force for him. Ali spent his childhood in Kashmir and his poetry is an account of socio- political history in which not his personal grief but the grief of the whole Kashmir becomes explicitly evident. The forgotten historical figures become metaphors in his portrayal that are aimed to cover the long distance of five hundred years of oppression in the valley of Kashmir. Modern Arabic poetry on the other hand is historic and significant because its achievements in the world literature are numerous and worth to study. After the World War II Arab peninsula suffered a series of tragic events and confronted with the harsh realities in the political, social and cultural spheres. The Arab defeat in 1948 against the Israel brought a loss of faith, despair, disbelief, and demoralization, which deeply affected the collective Arab psyche. These defeats latter turn into be the turning point in the modern Arabic literature on a pan-Arab scale. In the background of all these dramatic occurrences, Arab poets canvassed these tragic events with a new attitude of defiance and resilience. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish is the famous Arabic poet who is seen as the symbol of resistance in the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli occupation.

Today his poetry is seen as an effective source of inspiration throughout the Arab world as an effective means in the political mobilization of the Palestine cause. His literary oeuvre played a pivotal role in enriching the resistance poetry apart from the political contours in the Palestine Arabic literature.

A growing sense of detachment, alienation and rootlessness pervades in most of the modern poetry particularly from the third world, where social and political conflicts are still simmering. In the sub-continent, we have Agha Shahid Ali a famous Kashmiri American English poet and in the Middle East, we have Mahmoud Darwaish; a Palestinian national poet. The poetry of both the regional poets revolves around the theme of loss and identity crisis because of the continuous repression and violence faced by their countrymen. There seems to be no end in the agony of the people living in these places as the world polity is divided and discriminative towards resolving Kashmir and Palestine disputes. This chapter critically examined the selected poems of Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwaish to forground this sense of alienation. This study might help us at least in the academic circles to come out of a world that is paralyzed by the intrigues of cunning politics, propagandas and devastations of ongoing core conflicts. Both Ali and Darwish depict the extreme picture of alienation; violence and desolation inflicted on their countrymen. It is interesting to note that Modern English Poetry laments the loss and alienation while Post- English Modern Poetry romanticized it.

Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001)

Agha Shahid Ali more known as a Kashmiri-American poet than Indian English poet had a hyphenated cultural identity. He mostly spend his precious years of his short life in the places like Kashmir, Delhi and United States which occupy a very significant part in his poetic landscape. The main famous collections of his poetry include Bone-Sculpture (1972);In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems(1979);A Walk Through the Yellow Pages(1987); The Half- Inch Himalayas(1987); A Nostalgist's Map of America(1991); The Beloved Witness : Selected Poems(1992); The Country Without a Post Office(1997);

Rooms Are Never Finished(2001; (Finalist for the National Book Award, 2001). His last book was Call Me Ishmael Tonight (2003), a collection of English ghazals. He is also the author of T.S.Eliot as Editor (1986), translator of The Rebel's Silhouette: Selected Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1992), and Editor of Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000). Agha Shahid Ali died on December 8, 2001at Amherst, Massachusetts, United States because of tumor disease. Ali in fact is the only English language poet from Kashmir, who spend his entire poetic carrier in the United States of America and even died there as a new American multicultural poet.

Born in New Delhi, India, on February 4, 1949, Ali grew up in Kashmir but returned to Delhi to complete M.A in English and teach at the University of Delhi. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984, and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1985. The poet was brought in the multi-cultural environment which not only he latter celebrated but portrayed it in his poetry. The events like Post independent India, the tragic partition of the sub-continent, mass migration in the name of religion and then the mass uprising of his countrymen against the Indian rule in 1990 emboldened him into a perfect post- colonial English poet. Ali is a part of the new group of post-colonial immigrants to first world countries, whose writings are more characterized by nostalgia, loss and the political uncertainty prevailing in their countries. The poet wrote his first poem at the age of twelve, he said that it was only natural that the language of his pen turned out to be English but the main reason might be his English medium schooling. In the introduction to his collection, The Rebel‟s Silhouette, his translation of the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Ali makes an unusual distinction between mother tongue and first language. He writes:

I don‘t consider English in many a South Asian Language, I mean it‘s something worth pointing out to people that the third largest English-speaking population in the world exists in India. That is more people than the entire population in Canada. That gives people a sense of perspective. (Christine, 2002:262)

However it was this global perspective and the India‘s political troubles in Kashmir which proved to be fuel in the Ali‘s poetic discourse. According to Ali, it was an inescapable part of his temperament to avoid the historical loss. He says

I think of people who because of historical forces have lost so much, I mean these things are in my way of looking at the world. I‘m in one way another obsessed with all that. (Christine, 2002:263)

Bruce King remarks that Ali‘s poetry ―reveals exile blues, fantasies about roads not taken, longing for the securities of family and old friends, its idiom is often American and without defensive need for cultural assertion revenge for humiliations or self- congratulation for having made it in a strange land‖(1987). He throughout his short span of life remained conscious of exile, separation from his home, family, friends and its culture. In the poems, “Beyond the Ash Rains,‖ from the anthology The Veiled Suite and the ‗Post from Kashmir ‗from The Half inch Himalayas Ali delineates the pangs of separation, alienated self and loss of paradise in this way.

―What have you known of loss/ That makes you different from other men? (Ali, Beyond the Ash Rains,1-2)

These above lines are from the epic Gilgamesh that narrates the inheritance of loss and the sensitive questions; Ali uses this epigraph because he too really stood by the meaning to understand the depth of loss and beleaguered him in an eternal alienation. The childhood memories and moments spend in the Kashmir haunts Ali throughout his life that makes him uniquely a regional poet. This sense of relieving the ancestral dream he goes back to the images, lost tribes and landscape where he sets his poetic creation but ended up aching his own bones. For him 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. Being in America the ongoing public uprising and the subsequent bloodbath in his homeland pushed him on the margins of alienation and loss.

In The Blessed Word, which is a prologue to the, The Country Without a Post Office (2000) his sense of alienation reaches at its peak when the poet cries out the many names that Kashmir was now bereft of being called:

Let me cry out in that void, say it as I can. I write on that void: Kashmir, Kaschmir, Cashmere, Qashmir, Cashmir, Cashmire, Kashmere, Cachemire, Cushmeer, Cashmiere, Casmir, or Cauchemar in a sea of stories? Or: Kacmir, Kaschemir, Kasmere, Kachmire, Kasmir. Kerseymere?

(Ali, The veiled. 171)

Here Ali refers to Osip Mandelstam, a Russian poet and an essayist who centralizes Petersburg and writes: He reinvents Petersburg (I, Srinagar), an imaginary homeland, filling it, closing it, shutting himself (myself) in it. For there is the blessed word with no meaning, there are flowers that will never die, roses that will never fall, a night in which Mandelstam is not afraid and needs no pass. The blessed women are still singing.

The Ali‘s homeland (Indian administered Kashmir) is still fuming with the large scale of violence, political crisis and now termed to be as a nuclear flash point in the region between India and Pakistan. To understand and appreciate his poetry one has to go back to the historical and political background of this place, where the poet grew up with all good and bad memories. Although he did not stay too much in the valley because of his personal academic compulsions but wherever he lives Kashmir remains an alter ego for him.

Ali was born in 1949 after few years of the tragic partition that lead to the creation of Pakistan and India on the world map. According to the independent sources more than 15 million people were displaced and more than a million lost their lives in the worst communal riots in the history. However in this background of violent communal clashes Kashmir by and large remains peaceful except in the Jammu region that border with the Punjab witnessed the worst ethnic cleansing of Muslims. The heart wrenching riots in the neighboring Punjab spilled over the many parts of Jammu region too. The Australian politico-strategic analyst Christopher Snedden in his book Kashmir: The Unwritten History estimates that between 70,000 and 237,000 Muslims were killed in the Jammu

66 region in the 1947. Historians Arjun Appaduri and Arien Mack in their book „India‟s World‟ give a hair-raising estimate of 200,000 killed and 500,000 displaced in Jammu. Tens of thousands of Hindus were also killed and expelled from what became Pakistan- administered Kashmir, but Muslims were by far the biggest victims.

Then another political tragedy took place in the Kashmir when the unpopular and oppressive Dogra regime signed a secret pact in hurry with the India after tribal militia from the frontier province of Pakistan raided the valley hoping to forcefully merge it with the Pakistan. The Kashmir conflict is a by-product of the partition of the subcontinent into Hindu-majority India and the Muslim state of Pakistan in 1947. The veteran political activist and writer Prem Nath Bazaz says:

It is an irony of history that by a combination of fortuitous circumstances a tiny nation of Kashmir‘s has been placed in a position of great importance, where it can be instrumental in making or marring the future of so many. (Quoted in Bose, Kashmir,2002. 14.)

Today due to the unending political uncertainty and armed uprising the state of Jammu and Kashmir has become the most militarized territory in the world and a core political dispute between the two South Asian nuclear armed countries. The 1988 rigged election that choked the dissent paved way to the armed resistance responded by the horrific mass killings and counter killings that took place in Srinagar and other parts of Kashmir in the early 1990. At that time Agha Shahid Ali‘s poetry was the lone voice in English language that became the wounded cry of his people and captured the brutal atmosphere of violence, arson and political storm. He writes in the poem Zero Bridge;

Srinagar hunches like a wild cat; lonely sentries, wretched in bunkers at the city‘s bridges, far from their homes in the plains, licensed to kill . . . while the Jhelum flows under them, some- Times with a dismembered body. On Zero Bridge the jeeps Rush by . . . Guns shoot stars into the sky, the storm . . . rages on . . . night after night . . . Son after son taken away, never to return from the night of torture.

(Ali, Zero Bridge, 34)

Ali‘s childhood although didn‘t see any vicious cycle of death, destruction and political uncertainty because during the 1990‘s when the armed rebellion began in the Kashmir against Indian state he was well settled in America. In this ongoing conflict so far tens of thousands of people perished, thousands widowed and orphaned, mined mountains and meadows, check points and barbed wire, beautiful gardens turned into graveyards are the new metaphors of Kashmir. Ali‘s first collection of poems was published in the 1970‘s in which some of his best poems appeared like Bone-Sculpture, A Walk through Yellow Pages and In Memory of Begum Akhter. At that time, he was passing through the adolescent stage and in this collection he expressed his amateurish way of imagination. In all the poems he tried to unlock his heart and allow himself to speak of separation and alienation without admitting and defining his political position regarding the past and the present public uprisings going on in his homeland.

After reading early portion of Ali‘s poetry it looks that his poetic carrier is more or less greatly influenced by P.B Shelley and T.S.Eliot because he too speaks his alienated heart through their literary voice. As we know that T.S. Eliot expressed the fragile psychological state of humanity in his poetry after Europe lost an entire generation of young men to the horrors of wars. This influence can be explicitly seen mostly in Bone Sculpture. Where, ―Bones‖ for example, evokes the modern wasteland, which Eliot talked about in the wasteland, Ali writes;

The years are dead. I ‗m Twenty, a mourner in the Mohorrum Procession, mixing blood with Mud, memory with memory. I‘m Still alone. In this Mosaic-World of silent Graveyards the difference lies between Death and dying. It‘s futile to light oil-lamps here

And search for grandfather or forgotten ancestors. Their Flesh must have turned soft as dust And how can one explain to bones? (Ali, Bone Sculpture, 1-19)

In this whole poem Ali shares certain underlined assumptions which has even been emphasized by the T.S. Eliot also when he writes, ―Besides the leading motive, the reason of philosophy, there are other strata below and above, prejudice, traditions, suggestions, motives which imperfectly assimilate to the central motive, all of which combine to give the system the form it has.‖ (Eliot, 1964:177)

In the Bone-Sculpture, we can see a late autumnal mood pervades which depicts a world beyond redemption, resigned to material corruption and a legacy of bones and dust. Ali strikes an attitude in which he quotes from ―Autumn in Srinagar-Waiting for death,‖ where he writes:

Here, In this mosaic of graves I design my tomb And beat a prayer On The stone: My hands Craving the stillness Of dead leaves. (Ali, Bone-Sculpture,20-29)

In the Walk Through the Yellow Pages collection the poet blends both his jovial nature as well as his alienated aspect of his life. The below lines show us the extreme alienation and separation which the poet suffered throughout his diaspora life.

And the answer someone‘s graffiti: ―Spies have sanctioned evidence of your sorrow. I never met you Despite all the World (Ali,A Walk Through the Yellow Pages,12-15)

For a diasporic writer the obsession with the past memories becomes an omnipresent phenomenon. In America Ali was always pre-occupied with his past in Kashmir and what was unfolding there particularly after the 1990. This obsession or pre-occupation can be understood by the following words of A. K. Ramanujan. He said;

Because you can not entirely live in the past, neither can you live entirely in the present, because we are not like that. We are both these things. The past never passes. It is with us, it is what gives us the richness of – what you call it – the richness of understanding. And the richness of expression. (Qtd. in King 214)

The unforgettable memories of home and past idolized in the form of obscure images, metaphors and allusions flow in Ali‘s last phase of his poetry. Torn between his eternal love for the Kashmir of the past and his sense of horror at the existing political crisis, the poet documents in his poems the discord between a loving vision of home and its harsh actuality. The eponymous poem from The Half inch Himalayas is all about his beloved Kashmir, that have now shrunk to a picture post card dropped in his mail box. He used to open and read it again and again like a passionate lover far from the home waiting for any good news but the Kashmir(The Half inch Himalayas) remain reeling under the indefinite curfew.

Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox, My home a neat four by six inches. I always loved neatness. Now I hold The half-inch Himalayas in my hand. This is home. And this the closet

I‗ll ever be at home‖ (Ali, Postcard from Kashmir 1-6)

Ali in this poem shows how memories and pictures redeem for actually being in the homeland. Here the reference is to a postcard which shows his understanding of homeland that has become shallow and incomplete over the years due to the ongoing conflict. Memories of one‘s homeland are conditioned by alienation, nostalgia and loss; Ali remembers the bright side of the story, but at the same time also knows the present stark reality of Kashmir. Many diaspora authors have explained explicitly the pain of living in exile but one thing they share in their writings is their manner of expression that always make living in exile a painful experience. The life in forced or intentional exile has always compelled writers to think in a way as if they miss something and became isolated in their own new world. Sometime they want to talk about the place, about the people, about the mountains, about the woods with nostalgic feelings which often pushes them into the extreme corners of alienation.

Ali has always been in an academic exile, ever since he started writing poetry. Most of his poems are replete by the sense of sorrow and loss. Exile is always an undesired state for every human being and nobody likes to live away from their homeland. After Ali went to Delhi for higher studies his entire literary repertoire he composed bear a sense of alienation and loss in them. Hitherto, we see that in both the capacities be it forced and intentional ‗Exile‘ it causes an undeniable alienation.

To talk to him about ‗home‘- the events in Kashmir –makes him circumspect, except when it comes to ―the pain at the personal level,‖ the longing to know the fate of the servants who had worked in the house when he was a boy, after the New York times front paged a report about a bride who had been gang-raped by the security forces. ―One feels suddenly caught in history. Like the Kurds today or the Palestinians. (Nandini, 1992:12)

In another collection of poems, A Nostalgist‟s Map of America, Ali laments the death of a friend who died of AIDS, the death of last speaker of a Native American language, the rise of repressive regimes in Latin America, and also the layers of loss resonating with the ongoing conflict in his native Kashmir. But when he came to know the inevitable death of his life-long friend James Merrill, it was very painful for Ali as someone who had become a part of his past and suddenly died of this horrible disease and withered away so soon. In one of the ghazal in Rooms Are Never Finished, Ali writes a somber tribute over the death of his best friend James Merrill,

―I‘ll do what I must if I‘m bold in real time A refugee, I‘ll be paroled in real time‖ (Ali, Rooms Are Never Finished p.293)

The couplet shows a state of helplessness of the poet because his lost love and loneliness, becomes desolate and alienated. With no choice left other than giving in to destiny as that of a refugee a lonely Ali waits for the right moment when he would be relieved of his pain of separation with a union whether in space or in memory. Be it in New Delhi, Pennsylvania or Amherst he portrays his personal alienation and losses as well as the sufferings of Kashmir which was his last refuge which he finally sought. His pen never failed or stopped to delineate the woeful stories of men, meadows and materials of the beautiful valley. The poems like ―Post card from Kashmir‖, ―The Snowmen,‖ ―Prayer Rug,‖ ―Cracked Portrait,” or “The Story of a Silence, ―reflect the main argument relating to a sensitive question of loss and alienation which constituted the basic condition for his poetry.

In the poem „Eurydice,‟‘ which is also a prologue to the collection of A Nostalgist‟s Map of America, the poet narrates the Orpheus myth set in a Nazi concentration camp from the perspective of Eurydice, who is left behind in Hades because of Orpheus‘s compulsion to look back at her: He introduces the motifs of journey and exile, myth and politics, history and loss, that haunt this collection.

I am a woman brought limping to Hell under the Night and Fog decree. (Ali,Eurydice(14-17)

In this poem Poisonous gas and machinery warfare is used as a tool in the genocide, it also becomes an extension of the dislocations, sharp disappointments, and wrenching separations of family members, friends, and loved ones. In another poem, leaving Sonora in the same collection Ali shares his chronic loss with other religious and cultural traditions like the New Mexican Penitente virgin who is crucified at Easter and the extinct Hohakam tribe of the Sonoran desert.

Why else would a poet of this desert go deep inside himself for shade? Only there do the perished tribes live. The desert insists, always: Be faithful, even to those who no longer exist. (Ali, Leaving Sonora, 2-5)

In another subsequent poem ―In Search of Evanescence‖ Ali recollects the memory of death of an eighty-year old who was the last surviving person to speak an ancient language called Oubykh (which has a Turkish origin). Here he sees an ancestral connection with the language and the dead man because his paternal ancestors were also Turks and the first word of his name ‗Agha‘ signifies a Turkish lineage. His personal loss and alienation finds a similarity and solace in various parts of the world. For Ali death of a person signifies death of a tribe, landscape and the death of a language.

the warm rains have left many dead on the pavements the signs to route 80

all have disappeared and now the road is a river polished silver by cars the cars are urns carrying ashes to the sea (Ali, In Search of Evanescence32-40)

Ali recalls that his friend and his beloved took together down a Pennsylvania expressway, where Evanescence takes on the form of a fictitious town Ali‘s whimsical rendering of this imagined place evokes subtle feelings of nostalgia and regret;

And there was always thirst: a train taking me From Bisbee, that copper landscape with bones, Into a twilight with no water, Phil I never told you where I‘d been these years, Swearing fidelity to anyone. Now there‘s only regret: I didn‘t send you. My routes of Evanescence. You never wrote (Ali,In Search of Evanescence,‖ 21-27)

In a poem entitled ―I Dream I return to Tucson in the Monsoon,‖ the poet describes the ancient seabed that covered the hone-dry desert.

The moon turned the desert to water For a moment I saw islands As they began to sink… The ocean was a dried floor. (Ali, I Dream I return to Tucson in the Monsoon 12-15)

These lines depict a rare sensibility of poet‘s imagination which engages us into the rare moments when even nothingness, hopelessness or the image of sinking ships in the

74 lost seas fill our hearts with definite possibility and tragic beauty. Some of the poems in many collections of Ali convey intense sense of alienation caused by the separation from his homeland. It was this dominant perspective in his poetry that pushed him to see this ongoing dispute just from the humanistic perspective not from any political angle. In the poem ―From Another Desert,” he symbolizes, romanticizes and tries to become a true emissary of Kashmir‘s pain. In the poem Majnoon is a metaphor for (the struggle for independence in Kashmir) and Laila being the goal (freedom). ―Ali‘s poetry has a central theme like the other modern Indian poetry in English of loss, love, separation and search for home, for identity, for life and association and even death.‖ (Zaidi,2007:155)

Speaking about the significance of the metamorphic language of Ali, that showcases his deep sense of alienation and loss. Homi Bhabha comments:

The nation fills the void left in the uprooting of com-Munities and kin and turns that loss into the language of metaphor. Metaphor as the etymologically of the word suggests, transfers the meaning of home and belonging across those distances and cultural differences that span the imagined community of the nation people. (Homi, 1991, 139-140)

The most striking point that Ali celebrated in his early collections of poetry was the composite culture and the Kashmiri ethos which unfortunately was lost when the minority Hindu Community migrated to the Indian mainland in the early 1990. It was this unique identity of Kashmir which he suddenly lost after the 1988 rigged election that catapulted Ali‘s beautiful homeland on the perpetual embers of violence. This unbearable loss changed the discourse of his poetry and enraged his self imposed exilic life in America. Suddenly Mandelstam‘s Petersburg becomes Ali‘s Srinagar (Kashmir) as the more and more woeful stories regarding his homeland featured in the American press. It carried the vulnerability and grief for the decaying civilizations which both the places were once known of as the hub of religious diversity and multicultural milieus.

In the poem ―The Correspondent” Ali compares the awful condition of the city of Sarajevo during the Bosnian war of independence with that of violence torn Kashmir by equating his self-imposed exile with Mandelstam‘s exile. The poet unifies personal losses with the world‘s losses and narrates his nostalgia for a lost Kashmiri youth who are daily consumed by the ongoing conflict. It is evident in his chase for Irfan when he says in ―The Blessed Word: A Prologue‖;

We shall meet again, in Srinagar,‖ I want to answer Irfan. But such a promise? I make it in Mandelstam‘s velvet dark, in the black velvet Void‖ (Ali, The Blessed Word: A Prologue 2000, 3).

Ali occasionally implants human characters to portray the death and destructions plagued both the places once known as the centre of peace. The real characters bear such a metaphorical subjectivity that it becomes almost impossible to synonymise them with living beings. However it‘s ideal to locate them as metaphors for a condition that the poetic manifestation of ―being‖ renders the historical loss and sense of alienation. Ali calls himself Kashmiri-American-Poet and according to a critic, Ali reveals that American is not the end of his identity, nor the destination of his being. Placed as it 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. (Arjun,1993,796-807)

The voyage of Ali from his childhood to adulthood—from loss of homeland which he undertakes in a boat that culminates in the poem called ―I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World”. He rides in a boat continuously but his innocence remains missing even in his memory. The characters like Gula, the boatman and Rizwan, the keeper of Paradise are the lost reflections which make the poet deeply sad and infused his poetry with a perennial tone of irrevocable loss. The death of his mother in America as he was very close to her caused another unbearable grief which later merged with the colossal loss of his homeland. He writes;

I always move in my heart between sad countries. But let it not end ―IT WON‘T‖ this grief for you mother. (Ali, I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World,p318)

The poem ends on despair and weeping but the Ali‘s best friend James Merrill tries to guide him out of this state of grief. But Ali replies ''Which world will bring / her / back, or will he who wears his heart on his sleeve eaves- / drop always, in his inmost depths, on a cruel harbinger? ''shahid, hush this is me, james. the loved one / always leaves.' (Ali, I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World, p.321)

In the poem ―I dream I am the only Passenger on Flight 423 to Srinagar”, appeared in the volume of The country without Post Office, the poet invokes the spirit of Shiekh Noor-ud-din; the revered saint in the Kashmir whose shrine gutted down in a month long siege that ended with the fierce gun battle between the armed rebels and the Indian security forces in the early 1990‘s. Ali in his fantasy sits beside the saint as the plane touches down the Srinagar airport:

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

Dr. Suriya Hussain, a well known critic in one of her article shares this intense personal alienation of Ali as well as the collective alienation resulted due to the shrinking political space and the widespread cycle of arrests and torture ransacked the peace in Kashmir. She writes that in Ali‘s collection of poems, The Country Without Post office,

77 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 peoples‘ 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 Kashmiri people. He wished the people to be the master of their own lives‖. (Dr .SuraiyaHussain,2001)

In his famous book of poems, The Country Without a Post Office, which rediscovered his Kashmir connection in America, he mourned the devastation visited on his childhood home. Once the paradise, famous for his seasons, Lakes and small valley‘s surrounded by the beautiful Himalayan woods has been turned into a beautiful jail. This haunting volume establishes Agha Shahid Ali as a seminal voice of the beleaguered people who for long time remained voiceless in the English world literature. He brings into focus the suffering of generations inflicted on the people of Kashmir till now. Today the world has turned a blind eye over the unending miseries of Ali‘s countrymen that also became one of the main reasons of their collective alienation. Both the poet and people suffer this extreme alienation together even in the period importance of human rights, democracy, rule of law and freedom of speech that characterize the modern world. In ―A Prologue,‖ to The Country Without a Post Office, Shahid 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, A Prologue 34-41)

Ali‘s frequent visited Kashmir to see his ailing grandmother but what he findsin every visit now are the army conveys and the security check point, barbed wire, Crack downs, curfews, frisking and checking in the crowded markets. Even his house had been occupied by the security forces and has turned into a dingy office with dust everywhere, on damp files and broken desks. In this context, Prof.Syed Habib says:

The electric lights turned off the country without post office, crying out of pain with melting rubber, flicker under Kerosene lamps. Dreams sometimes motionless like the dead, Sometimes moving like the army conveys over the mountains, corresponds with Ali and his readers listeners and the sanctuary of his art is adorned with the red wine of Ali‘s pen ship. (Prof.SyedHabib, 2002)

In the entire collection of The Country Without Post Office, Ali brings to the forefront the intense alienation, isolation and outcry of the besieged people of Kashmir to the world. He mourns the death of innocent boys who lost their lives either in the tortured cells or in the cross firings. There is a poem in this volume, ―Hans ChhristianOstro,‖ in memory of Hans Christian Otto, a tourist killed by the unknown gunmen, it is an eulogy to a fondly remembered Srinagar cinema lamenting the death of those killed tourists far away from his home like an exilic soul in this own way;

And those defunct trains-Kashmir Mail, Srinagar Express-took Pilgrims only till the last of the plains. …and draped in rain Of the last monsoon-storm, A beggar, ears pressed to that metal cry, Will keep waiting on a ghost-platform, Holding back his tears, waving every train Good-bye and good bye. (Ali, Hans Christian Ostro,‖ 1-3, 31-36)

This sense of Ali alienation and helplessness can be explicitly seen in the poems like “A call” ―Vacating an Apartment‖ which describes the efficient way in which all symbol of his occupancy are removed by the cleaners before the landlord‘s new tenants arrive. Sometimes, he may be ―aware only of an absence‖ as in ―A Monsoon Note On Old Age,‖ capturing the past with all its memories of people and mountains in images that seem to body forth their very evanescence, as in ― The Decca Gauzes.” In the poem “A Pastoral,‖ as the title propounds, fighting against injustice in Kashmir becomes the pastoral duty of the poet. Ali harps this tragic perspective of his birth place that shattered its peace and prosperity for an indefinite period. He like a nightingale seems to be burning with the desire that one day the peace will return in Kashmir. 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. Again we will enter Our last world, the first that vanished In our absence from the broken city. (Ali, A Pastoral,1-6)

Ali‘s personal alienation is deep rooted in the series of events which took place in the turbulent history of Kashmir. It started in 1953, when Nehru removed the PM of Kashmir - due to his outspoken assertion of autonomy - and then whittled down Article 370 to the extent that Kashmir‘s lost much of their autonomy. (Kamal 2006:24) It gave rise to deep-seated resentment and anger among the nationalist political leaders and people against the Indian State. The second event was the Assembly election in 1987 when the Muslim United Front; an alliance of Candidates were robbed of seats and counting agents and candidates were beaten by pro-India political party National Conference workers sow the seeds of violence in Kashmir. Thousands young Kashmiri boy‘s started to cross over the Pakistani administered Kashmir for arms training to wage war against the establishment. These events proved to be the catalyst for resistance

80 movement supported by the large section of society in the Kashmir. Ali as a witness according to Ghosh has not only recorded the painful and poetic voice of Kashmir but tried to redraw its forgotten history and culture after remaining in the paws of oppression for centuries. The artistic imagery of his poems recreates the rain of fire, bullets, blood and tears that the people of state have been experiencing for over two decades now. The poet draws the heartening scenes and vivid colors on the canvass of his reader‘s imagination like the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who protests and paints the bloodied struggle of his people after they faced ethenic cleansing and barbarity from the Zionists in their won homeland. In the poem The Country without Post Office frames its text with an epigraph from W.B.Yeats (Easter, 1916): ―Now and in time to be, / whenever green is worn/ A terrible beauty is born.‖

It‘s raining as I write this. I have no prayer It‘s just a shout, held in, it‘s us! Whose letters are cries that break like bodies In prison. Now each night in the minaret I guide myself up the steps. Mad silhouette, Throw paisley to clouds. The lost are like this: They bribe the air for dawn, this dark purpose. But there‘s no sun here. There is no sun here. (Ali.The Country without a Post Office 81-88)

Ali has no prayer to invoke god. He is like common Kashmiri shouting out in despair and their outrage against the atrocities done to them. It is all of them crying out their pain in the form of letters and carries the shrieks, cries of pain when the bones break in the interrogation centers of the Kashmir. Each night the poet soaks the wicks of clay lamps in mustard oil in whose gentle and soft light he climbs the steps of the entombed minaret to read messages scattered on planets. Each night the poet guides himself up to the minaret in hope to get answer but nothing comes from the void. He has lost his past self now and has become a mad silhouette in the midst of fear and alienation. The void appears to him a form of a mad silhouette now that something doesn‘t exist and is out of reach to reclaim. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra in the Twelve Modern Indian Poets writes,

Ali‘s poems seem to be whispered to himself, and to read them is as if to overhear. This is not to suggest that they are remote or in any way indistinct, but to underline the quietness of his voice and the clarity with which he speaks. (Arvind, 2001:8)

Ali had a remarkable impact of famous revolutionary Urdu Poet Faiz Ahmad faiz who throughout his poetry stood against the oppression and injustice in Pakistan. It was the universal message of Faiz against the all odds of oppression in which Ali found solace and expression. Both the poets defy the notion of ‗art for art‘s sake‘, theory by remaining committed to the challenges of injustice.

To spread his message of justice, it took Ali six years to translate his works into English and has an honor to be the first Asian who introduced him in America. Recalling Faiz Ahmad Faiz‗s poem, ―Don‟t Ask Me For that Love Again‖, which revolves around the interconnected themes of deprivation. And in the case of Ali‘s it‘s not only deprivation but sheer alienation that haunts his self. The devastation of the holy shrine of Shiekh Noor-ud-Din in 1995 and the mass rape at KunanPoshpora village in the frontier district of Kupwara left Ali emotionally alienated.The poet not only captured these horrific incidents but conditioned his poetry by giving vent to his innate sense of loss and alienation. He writes;

But the reports are true, and without song: mass rapes in the villages, towns left in Cinders, neighborhood torched. ―Power is hideous/ like a barber‘s hands.‖ The rubble of downtown Srinagar stares at me from the Times. (Ali, The Blessed Word: A Prolgue, 173)

In the poem, “By the Waters of Sind‖ Ali portrays the biblical theory of death, alienation and loss while lamenting in a town where in which the river Sind flows besides his mother. After losing his mother he is fighting with nature and his own self because he cannot bear the loss of mother as well as of his motherland as both were very dear to him.

Ali remains engrossed with the feelings of lamentation. He appears as a post-colonial poet, mourning dead aspects of his native culture while championing the complexity of his tripartite heritage. In the poem ―I am one of the Kings of the end,‖ Ali writes:

I have passed over this land; there is no land in this land Since time broke around me, shared by shared I was not a lover believing that water is a mirror, As I told my old friends and no love can redeem me,

For I have accepted ―the peace accord‖ and there is no longer as present left To let me pass, tomorrow, close to yesterday. (Ali, Eleven Stars Over Andalusia,14-20)

These lines bring the concept of loss and alienation at another important level of realization. When a person is forced to leave his town and go to another alien place in search of good fortune the new place looks him strange in every perspective. As a matter of fact, the person placed in such a mental state feels will spontaneously fee alienated from the self and society. This sense of loss haunts him again and again, when he is reminded by his place of origin and his non-adjustment issues forced to bear. Ali might have overcome the immigrant related issues in America but the unabated cycle of violence in Kashmir, where people are consistently traumatized and terrorized was un- avoidable reality which forces him into the intricate web of loss and alienation. His countrymen have become pieces of meat to the gladiators of peace ond security as the conflict rages on. Not only the Ali felt alienated in his poetry the people of state are in utter alienation when any horrific incident becomes just a piece of news, covered and aired for the TRP race but never heard or taken seriously in the so called mainstream media or the international media. This attitude not only plunged the poet into the deep realms of alienation and loss but the entire population of Kashmir is besieged by the sense of alienation and isolation. Ali and his sudden uproar over the mayhem that caught his beloved Kashmir, was an honest attempt to represent the collective conscious of people and reach out the world. In his poetry he narrated the woeful tale of his of place

83 that world has unfortunately forgotten to listen. His mainstream upbringing couldn‘t stop him when this sense of alienation reached at point where categorically made it loud and clear that the seeds of conflict and misrule were sown in his land by the different successive oppress rive regimes to perpetuate their authority against the will of people. In the age of human rights and vibrant democracy the people of Kashmir have no access to basic human rights, democracy, and freedom of speech. Today Ali‘s countrymen are caged and find no space in the so called political systemic to express their political expression is gradually shifting them to the extreme corners of alienation. He writes;

I hide my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to myself. If only somehow you could have been mine, What would not have been possible in the world? (Ali, The Country Without Post Office,p.202)

Mahmod Darwish (1942-2008)

The continuous saga of repression and intimidation by the Israeli authorities to quell the sentiment and displace the people from their roots has further alienated and isolated people of Palestine in their own land. The disputed territory of Palestine today remains one of the burning issues of the world where misery, oppression by air, sea and land turned the place into a virtual hell. The ongoing conflict over the territory is actually a struggle between the European Zionist settlers backed by the western countries and the indigenous people of Palestine. The armed onslaught of Zionist settlers in the 1947-1948 left thousands of unfortunate Palestinian refugees in their own land and in other neighboring Arab countries. In this way the curse of exile and forced dislocation officially began which till now continues amid the failed attempts of world community to prevent the mass exodus of Palestinians. Then the series of political catastrophes in Palestine and in the Middle East made things bad to worse. The life today inside the occupied Palestine and in the various refugee camps is miserable and deteriorating day by day because of the empathy by the world community. The biggest catastrophe among all was the Nakba tragedy in which hundred thousands of Palestinians were forcefully

84 displaced by the Israeli militia. Expelled from the thriving cities, towns, and villages, were never allowed to return their places by force and by illegal legislation. These Palestinian refugees many times attempted to go their lands and see properties but they were shot dead and arrested.

More than two million Palestinians today live under the fist rule of Israeli military after they occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 war. Since then many public uprisings took place in 1987-92 and 2000 known as intifada‟s in Arabic but every time were dealt with brute force to quell them. To those who do not know the historical background of the on the ongoing conflict, the image of a Palestinian boy throwing rocks at the Israeli war machines seems not only accurate but politically ironic.

The continuous occupation and the violence since 1948, Palestinian Arabic literature in particular searches for imaginative forms to reconstruct their cultural identity. Both in prose and verse the Palestinian writers are trying to reclaim their loss and forced dispossession by emotive words. They feel alienated at home and in the refugee camps because there seems no end to their miseries and fatalities, which they suffer every day in the hands of Israeli authority. After the 1950‘s aftermaths a new kind of poetry emerged which is called the ―Poetry of Resistance‖ which portrays resilience of Palestinians inside Israel. Every book or poem of Palestinian literature is at heart the showcases the struggle of Palestinian and their sense of rootlesness.

On the other hand Arab literary archive is replete with the narratives of exile due to disasters of displacement, persecution and suffering unleashed by the despots and occupiers from time to time. Henceforth the contemporary Arabic/Palestinian poetry is conditioned by an intensive feeling of exile and alienation. The major political and social changes in the Arab world and the subsequent public upsurges that erupted in many Arab countries were among the radical changes that greatly affected the common Arab psyche. The public uprisings against the colonialism and Zionism in the major countries of the region such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Algeria were allied and followed up with the rise of powerful dictators, who unleashed reign of atrocities and terror. They turn their own

85 countries into prisons and places of exiles for their own people. Due to lack of democracy and freedom, many Arab intellectuals and political leaders and the representatives of ethnic minorities in the Arab world were forced to leave their countries and live their rest of life in Diaspora. As Salma Jayyusi writes in the Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature,

A turning point for modern Arabic literature on a pan-Arab scale,‖ with poets reacting in unison to a new reality in which literature could participate in the battle for change. (Jayyusi, 1992)

But it was mainly the Palestinian tragedy that changed the very discourse of Arab literature and deepened the wounds of alienation among Arabs when the forced ethnic cleansing of Palestinian took place during the wars between Arab countries and Israel in 1948 and 1967. Not only the Israeli authority was harsh against the innocent Palestinians many Arab regimes to became suddenly hostile particularly towards the Palestinian refugees in their own countries. This attitude ultimately created a cacophony among the Arab governments over the Palestinian refugee problem. Their inability and failures to accommodate the swallow of refuges and to solve their problems created a state of anger in the Arab countries. The people in the Arab peninsula were disappointed because instead of the dream of unity and prosperity among the rulers, these regimes deployed the secret police force to muzzle the voice of their own citizens, who were voicing in solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

In the backdrop of all these political realities and the rise of new Arab dictators, two main categories of Arab poets came forth on the literary Arab radar with their ‗writing in exile‘. The first group includes poets who were political activists, and from the marginalized ethnic minorities living in various Arab countries. The second group mostly consists of Palestinian poets, including all those who are living under the Israeli occupation and those forced to leave their homeland. The second group has two more sub-groups like the famous poets such as Mahmud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim and Tawfiq

Zayyad. They all lived under the Israeli occupation and comprise the core of Palestinian poetry of exile and resistance. Their poetry is better known in the world as the Palestinian poetry of resistance since the 1960. In spite of all the challenges like rigorous imprisonment, censorship, torture, and assassination bids, the Palestinian resistance poets succeeded in spreading the word of loss and alienation in the world. The Palestinian poets in forced exile have suffered both physically and psychologically that‘s why their poetry expresses the feelings of death, destruction, and alienation. Their haunting oeuvres convey the loss and separation from Palestine and their ordeal of living life in exile. The Palestinians lived in fear and trauma of losing the homeland; once they were annihilated from their roots loss and alienated their rest of life.

Mahmoud Darwish is considered to be the last recognized Arabic poet and a true voice of Palestinian odyssey towards the right to reclaim their nationhood from the occupiers. His poetry is a stark reflection of the despair and alienation experienced by the Palestinians in their own country. Darwish has been the symbol of defiance in the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli occupation and many of his poems have been set to music and recited in the streets of Gaza strip, Ramallah, Damascus and Cairo for the political mobilization. He wrote more than twenty 20 volumes of poetry including some prose work, which have been translated till now into twenty five languages. At the age of twenty two he published his first book of poetry, Leaves of Olives, in 1964 after that his collection of poetry includes The Adam of Two Edens, Mural, Why Have you Left the Horse Alone, and Eleven Planets. Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems translated and edited by by MunirAkash and Carolyn Forche with Sinan Anton and Amira El-Zein published by University of California Press, and The Butterfly‟s Burden translated by FadyJoudah Published by Copper Canyon Press America

Historically Arab poets have played a very critical role in their society and have been considered the voice of his tribe, its defender and representative. Nowhere in the world are poets more actively involved in the socio-political struggles of their societies than in the Arab world. Mahmoud Darwish; the representative and the spokesperson of the Palestinian, is one fine example of the importance of the Arabic poet in contemporary

Arab society. As a poet of the Palestinian freedom struggle against the occupation he plays two roles: first, of an occupied land awaits liberation, and secondly, a national ideology and celebrates the poetry of commitment to the liberation of Palestine. Here in this chapter I will try to explore the theme of alienation in the Mahmoud Darwish‘s poetry in terms of the ongoing struggle for freedom in the Palestine.Aprominent Syrian critic, SubbiHadidi, who writes that:

All cultures, like Arabic culture, attributed a special role to their poets at a particular moment of their history. It became incumbent upon poets everywhere to speak for their communities, to find answers to existential questions, to give poetry a power that was national and cultural, spiritual and material, aesthetic and informative. (Subbi,2008)

In the Arabic poetry of Darwish Palestine serves as a metaphor for the loss of Eden, birth and resurrection, and the grief of dispossession and exile. In his early poetic journey the poet realized that only poems can be ―a threat to the sword‖ because he was consistently harassed by the Israeli authorities for writing and reciting poetry that expresses strong sense of Palestinian anger and identity. He personally faced intimidation and harassment from the Israeli security forces till he left Moscow and then to Egypt and finally settled in Beirut until the Israeli invasion in 1982. After the Beirut was invaded by Israel he became a ―wondering exile‖ in Arab capitals, settling in Paris for a while, then Amman, and finally Ramallah, moving a step closer to the home which he still cannot reach. Darwish has a very special position in the Arabic literary circles because he created a new repertoire in the Arabic language aimed to constructs his own lost homeland. He is known as the savior of the Arabic language because it was he who manages to describe the mundane events and uncover innermost feelings through the words. Besides a famous Arabic poet darwish was an active political activist who was the framed and wrote the Palestinian declaration of independence in 1988.

Darwish had a special position and a strong relationship with the Arab language and its literature which sets him apart from other Arab poets of his time. Today he is worldwide known as ―the poet of the resistance,‖ who wrote in defense of Palestinian liberation struggle and provided a poetic impetus to all those who face forceful occupation in the world.

His poem, “Identity Card,” or ( BitaqatHawiyyah) became a cry of defiance in the face of the occupiers who had been trying to uproot the Arab-Palestinians in their homeland by using force and coercion. Darwish in all his poems articulates more keenly his eternal emotional attachment to that particular piece of land in the Arab world, where he was born, the place he loves and the place he has lost (Elmessiri, 1981). In this poem the anger and alienation touches new grounds when the Israeli soldier at the airport asked the poet to show his identity in his own land.

Write down I am Arab You stole the grooves of my forefathers And the land I used to till. You left me nothing but these rocks. And from them, I must wrest a loaf of bread For my eight children. Write down on the top of the first page: I neither hate others nor steal their property, But, when I am hungry, I will eat the flesh of my usurper! (Drwish, Trans.Identity Card)

This poem should be also seen in the autobiographical context as it gives an ample insight and experience of a poet and his displacements that marks the life of a refugee. In 1948, Darwish‘s family was forced to flee Lebanon when his native village came under attack by the Israel troops; like they did with other Palestinian villages, Al-Birweh was subsequently destroyed and a new Israeli town was built over the ruins. After a year,

Darwish returned with his family from Lebanon and settled in Deir Al-Assad, near the destroyed native village. He thus became an internal refugee in a place where he was born, and under new Israeli law, was placed in the paradoxical category of "present- absent settlers‖. As Sinan Antoon in his tribute to Darwish writes;

The harrowing experience of losing his home and being an internal exile in his land at such a young age would haunt Darwish's poetry and become a central theme with rich and complex variations running throughout his oeuvre" (Antoon, 2008:12)

Exploring the theme of loss and alienation in the poetry of Darwish, one needs to delve deep in the realms of Palestinian literature. It was the Nakba tragedy that polished the creative discourse of all Palestinian intellectuals and poets, who made remarkable literary contributions in the Palestinian resistance literature. They lead from the front and their poetry took the sufferings of the Palestinians to the universal level, exposing the grave injustice, repression and the rebellious pursuit of freedom.

In the poem ―Earth Scrapes Us‖, Darwish evokes images of nostalgia and loss for his homeland:

We wish we were its wheat, to die and live again / Wish it were our mother / Our mother would be merciful to us / Wish we were images of stones that our dreams carry like mirrors" (Jayyusi, 1987:207)

This poem was written in the Beirut which depicts horrendous massacres of Palestinian refugees even in their neighboring Arab country Lebanon. In the same poem he further states:

Earth scrapes us into the last narrow passage, we have to dismember ourselves to pass,

Earth squeezes us. We have seen the faces of those who will be killed defending the soul to the last one of us. We wept for the birthday of their children. We have seen the faces of those who will throw. Our children from the windows of this last space of ours. Mirrors that our star will paste together (Jayyusi 1987:207)

The irony of Palestinian is that they became victim at the hands of victims who suffered the tragic holocaust in Germany perpetrated by the Nazi‘s. Being in forced exile, Darwish was like a sensitive soul one who wonders and feels alienated in the Arab capitals. During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the vulnerable refugee camps were attacked and thousands of innocent women and children were slaughtered in the Tel-Al-Za'tar massacre by Lebanese Christian militias supported by Israel. Not only they faced massacres but were besieged and hounded by the Arab Shi‟ite Muslim militias backed by the Syrian security establishment for more than six months in which hundreds of exiled Palestinian died of starvation.Darwish and his poetry becomes the voice of its people who are struggling to affirm their existence in a world that undermine their rights and pushes them to the extreme corners of alienation.

The poem titled "Brief Reflections on an Ancient and Beautiful City on the Coast of the Mediterranean Sea", the poet used the sea as a symbol of endless Palestinian exile and growing sense of alienation. Since 1948 the Palestinian refugees have been put up in Lebanon. The poet describes the sorrow and agony of Palestinian refugees, who were evacuated by sea.

We are the leaves of tree the words of a shattered time we are the moon light sonata we are the other river bank that lies between the voice and the stone

we are what we produced in the land that was ours we are what‘s left of us in exile we are what‘s left of us in exile we are the plants of broken vase we are what we are but who are we? (Al-Udhari 1986:130)

The poet highlights the period of Palestinian suffering and how they were forced to leave their country twice, in 1948 and in 1967, after the Israeli settlers occupied their territory. In their third mass exodus in 1982, the Palestinian refugees faced more misery and alienation: ―The Sea cannot take immigration / oh, the sea has no room for us‖. The remaining Palestinian refugees who survived the genocide of the camps and whom Darwish calls ―the generation of the massacre‖ (Al-Udhari 1986: 136) are doomed to move from one exile to another just to be killed: ―Every land I long for as a bed / dangles as a gallows‖ (Al-Udhari 1986: 136).

Darwaish is lamenting that even in the Arab countries we became exiles ―a knight stabs his brother in the chest‖ and there ―my dream leaves me only to make me laugh / or make people laugh at someone leading a dream like a camel in a market of whores‖ (136). In their exile Palestinian he refugees have been slaughtered by fellow Arabs like Lebanese, the Syrians and the Jordanians, just as they were massacred by the Zionists in Israel: ―We walk from one massacre to another massacre‖, says Darwish, (Al-Udhari 1986:138)28. The poet therefore expresses anguish, marginalization and share their extreme annihilation with the Palestinian people. He apologizes to what he calls ―the land / victim‖, for all the atrocities inflicted upon the Palestinians and their homeland:

Whenever a prophet rises from our victims we slaughter him with our own hands I have the right to speak and the priest has the right to kill I have the right to dream

and the executioner must listen to me or open the door to let my dream escape (Al-Udhari 1986: 138)

In the poem „Victim No. 48‟, which was written in the Lebanon Mahmud Darwish describes the unending ordeal of Palestinian refugees living in exile in various parts of the Arab world. How these refugees not only are subjected to the pains of exile and alienation but also to the danger of war and genocide particularly in the Lebanon: ―He was lying dead on a stone / they found in his chest the moon and a rose lantern / They found in his pocket a few coins / A box of matches and a travel permit‖ (Al-Udhari 1986:125)29. These Palestinian refugees according to the poet are deprived of passport and instead are given travel documents by the occupying authorities. In the poem ―Diary of a Palestinian wound'‖ the poet states that it is not possible now that the miserable life of Palestinian people can change in the Arab world in the presence of tyrant dictators.

Sister, there are tears in my throat and there is fire in my eyes: I am free. No more shall I protest at the Sultan's Gate. All who have died, all who shall die at the Gate of Day have embraced me, have made of me a weapon‘ (Dar Al-eHuraih,2000))

In the most of his poems Darwish reveals the inner alienation as well the longing for his beloved country which is caught up in the web of Arab conspiracies and imperialism. He says; Ah my intractable wound!/ My country is not a suitcase/ I am not a traveler/I am the lover and the land is the beloved (Jayyusi1987:202)

Even in his aesthetic or romantic representation, Palestine haunts him and he tried to regain the lost land. But the sense of alienation never left him which emerges the continuous criminal silence of the Arab dictators and the world community. In his prosaic memoir, Memory for Forgetfulness, Mahmoud Darwish gives us a hauntingly surrealist view.

He‘s looking for a pair of eyes, for a shared silence or reciprocal talk. He‘s looking for some kind of participation in this death, for a witness who can give evidence, for a gravestone over a corpse, for the bearer of news about the fall of a horse, for a language of speech and silence, and for less boring wait for certain death. For what this steel and these iron beasts are screaming is that no one will be left in peace, and no one will count our dead‖ (Darwish, Memory For Forgetfulness, 1995: 24)

The modern Palestinian poetry express extreme feelings of anger, resentment, alienation and the bitter Arab reality with voices of discontent and total disillusionment due to the presence of repressive regimes in the middle East. Darwish spend his life in imprisonments, under siege and witnessed the horrendous human rights violation by the Israeli authorities. The greatest loss for Darwish was that he was forcefully displaced from self and this perpetual punishment besieged his every poetic expression. In the poem I Belong There ,Darwish sings the lullaby of this separation from home and also outlines a deep sense of bond to a place that he will neither regain it nor visit it. He says

I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born. I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends and a prison cell With a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own. I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon, A bird‘s sustenance and an immortal olive tree….. To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood. I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a singl word: Home (Munir,force trans. I Belong There, p-7)

This kind of worst alienation results, when the community is isolated by raising the walls bigger than Berlin wall to snap off the residents from their agricultural land which is necessary for their survival. There are many concrete walls now in Bethlehem, parts of Ramallah, Qalqilya, parts of Tulkarm and throughout the Jerusalem envelope. It is 8 meters high - twice the height of the Berlin Wall - with watchtowers and a ―buffer zone‖ 30-100 meters wide for electric fences, trenches, cameras, sensors, and military patrols. In other places, the Wall consists of layers of fencing and razor wire, military patrol roads, sand paths to trace footprints, ditches and surveillance cameras. Hitherto making it impossible for Palestinians to reach family members that got separated by the Israeli- regulated walls. (www.stopthewall.org/the-wall).

These grueling circumstances that caged the inmates of his homeland and the arrogance of power exhibited by the Israeli authority stirred this sense of alienation in his poetry. Darwish has expressed it so eloquently in this way:

Perhaps like me you have no address What‘s the worth of a man? Without a homeland, Without a flag, Without an address? What is the worth of such a man? (Telegram from Exile)

For Darwish, this no man‘s land is one in which ―I cannot enter and I cannot go out.‖ Drwasih was an active political activist and spend many years in prison but was disenchanted and rejected over the Oslo Accords between the Israeli and the Palestinian leadership which according to the poet would lead to the apartheid of two separate states.

The poem, Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?appears in the collection (―I See My Ghost Coming from a Distance….‖), begins and ends with ghosts. In the poem the speaker repeats the lines again and again ―I look out‖ again and again, with the line ―I look out like a balcony on what I want‖ infuse throughout.

I look out on my ghost Godman Coming From A distance… (I See My Ghost Coming from a Distance)

Darwish‘s sense of mutual dependence of identity sometimes leads him to the realms of alienation and isolation. He further stated this sense in the poem ―A Lover from Palestine”.

Embrace me to our eyes Embrace me to you wherever you are Embrace me to you however, you are Bring back to me the colors of face and body Hearts of light and eyes‘ light Salt of bread and melody Taste of soil and homeland. (Abdelwahab M. Elmessiri, 1970, A Lover from Palestine)

These lines seem show the extreme sense of association and desperation in its final moments of his life when he needed to be embraced by his land in any condition. The loss of land and family made him sometimes pessimistic, anguish and eternal victim.

One of Darwish‘s last volume was titled HalatHissar (State of Siege), written in 2002. He composed this poetic sequence in 2002 during a series of lengthy sieges of Ramallah, effectively the capital of Palestine. In HalatHissar (State of Siege) Darwish revisits his earlier poetry and at times imagines interrogation by the people he attempted to portray in his earlier works. He feels alienation both in and out of his native land, but never lost the bond with his place and culture. In the poem “Another Road in the Road” which is full of paradox he writes:

There is yet another road in the road, another chance for migration. To cross over we will throw many roses in the river.

No window wants to return to us; there we have to go, north of the neighing horses. Have yet we forgotten something, both simple and worthy of our new ideas? (Unfortunately, it was Paradise, p.4 )

The distinction and bond between patriot and expatriate isn‘t the only paradox Darwish toys with so smoothly. He navigates the waters between self and culture, often writing of his own life as a metaphor for the whole of his people, while other times mentioning Palestine or its citizens and meaning himself. His poetic resistance to Israiel is like an engine but the loss, alienation, the pain and exile is its fuel. Darwish is widely considered the Palestinian national poet in the Arab world, who played a key role in articulating Palestinian identity and popular sentiment. In the collection of poems The Butterfly‟s Burden canvasses the life of Palestinian, draws the texture of daily life, physical beauty, longing, myth and history. Most of the poems in the collection are embedded with personal loss but has artistically delineated the common Palestinian sensibility. It‘s a single volume of three books which he wrote in a period of time. In this volume we have three anthologies like The Strangers Bed (1998), which is Darwish‘s first collection of love poems; State of Siege (2002), is another collections of poems but full of political overtones and written in Ramallah; and the last one Don‟t Apologize For What You have Done (2003), a song ―green like the phoenix‖ after the daily horrors and arson in Ramallah.

Being as a poet of exile Darwish has no choice and chance to be a poet of loss and alienation. He spent most of his life far from his homeland, living in Lebanon, France, Egypt, and other countries. He writes:

I Won‘t return to my name in the wilderness, Never nevernever. (Wedding Song, The Stranger‟s bed,42-45)

In Darwish‘s poetry, identities shift and merge. But tossing himself between the two poles is not a divine; it has to do with an irreparable loss of self and with a deep yearning to return his roots. When one has lost so much, love has no choice but to follow suit. Throughout Darwish‘s work, we witness lovers torn apart by circumstance. Such passages are all the more heart-wrenching because Darwish‘s language (and Joudah‘s translation) makes it so simple and unassuming:

What will we do with love? You said While we were packing our suitcases Do we take it with us, or hang it in the closet? I said: let it go wherever it wants It has already outgrown our collar and spread. (Joudah(trans)The Butterfly‘s Burden,p.79)

In the ―State of Siege,‖ which is Darwaish‘s another collection of poems showing these pessimistic and anguish side of his personality. His uses the images of war and siege: tanks, guns, bombs, soldiers, martyrs, guards, and mothers grieving for their sons. For instance, he writes, in the poem ―(To a killer :) If you‘d contemplated the victim‘s face / and thought, you would have remembered your mother in the gas / chamber, you would have liberated yourself from the rifle‘s wisdom.‖ Here he makes a clear statement that how long and how many more portraits of their lost sons these mothers will have to carry.

If you are not a rain my love Be a tree Soaked with fertility be a tree And if you‘re not a tree my love Be a stone If you are not a stone my love Be a moon In the lover‘s sleep… be a moon

(Joudah,(trans)The Butterfly‘s Burden,p.139)

In a poem titled ―We Move on to a Country‖, Darwish expresses his innate feelings of alienation experienced by him and 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. (Jayyusi 1987:208)

Mahmoud Darwish‘s poetry revolves around the deep sense of alienation and the longing for homeland. He as a representative of the Palestinian people brings forth such aesthetics that spoke truth to power and exposed the madness of occupation and its repercussion. He says in a documentary interview:

Poetry is a dangerous game. It sometimes drives people to find a substitute for absence. It happens to me sometimes. At such times, I feel a sense of dangerous repose, that what I have written has given me respite from inner torment, has liberated me.

(Darwish, 1997 Documentary)

His poetry presents images that set our conscience and imagination shaken because of the continuous repression and Darwish‘s poetry brings out those images which remind us that, despite being in alienation or isolation and whatever has been lost can be regained. Palestinian Arabic poetry reflects the rich cultural background that is in contrast in many ways to the dominant Israeli culture. Some people wonder why Palestinians didn‘t assimilate in other Arab countries because they have deep and spiritual affiliations

99 with the place they believe is their eternal homeland. They long to return to their homeland simply because their relationship with Palestine is not based on material or political assumptions but it‘s an inseparable and peculiar bond to the Palestinian people living in exile. The Palestinians are attached to their homeland because Palestine, to the Palestinian poet unfortunately it has been occupied by a ruthless enemy, thousands dead and maimed, thousands were uprooted and the world community watched like a spectator. In Darwish‘s poem, Palestine also takes the shape of a widow who has lost her husband in the never-ending battle for freedom and independence. Darwish promises his innocent and beautiful beloved to sacrifice himself for the sake of her eyes. To Mahmud Darwish, Palestine is personified as a refugee woman forced to live in exile. In “A Lover from Palestine”Darwish says: ―yesterday I saw you at the harbor / travelling without relations or provisions‖

His poem To My Mother expresses a deep longing for his mother‘s bread, coffee, and touch, especially because he lived far from her when they were forced to leave their homeland (Galilee). This poem became a distinctive feature of Mother‘s Day in the Arab world and a companion to every Arab traveler or refugee who feels alienated because of being far from his mother or homeland. Many critics argue that he takes his mother as a symbol for his country. He says:

Childhood memories grow up in me Day after day. I must be worthy my life. So if I die, I will be ashamed of my mother‘s tears. (Adab, 2005)

Darwish died in 2008 but his love for 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!‖

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(The Diary of a Palestinian Wound)

Darwish‘s writing on separation began in his second collection Olive Leaves in 1964. In a poem called On Man in this collection, he draws attention to Israel‘s aggression against the Palestinian people who are punished without committing any crime and their land is illegally confiscated and forcefully driven out of their homeland.

They put chains in his mouth They fettered his hands to the rock of the dead And said: You are a killer They drew him away from every harbor (Translated by Mansson, 2003: 65)

The title chosen for another poem Who Am I, Without Exile? in the same collection implies that the sense of exile and alienation became a necessary component for his poetic survival and artistic creation. He starts the poem with:

A stranger on the riverbank, like the river… Water binds me to your name. Nothing brings me back from my faraway To my palm tree: not peace and not war. (Translated by FadyJoudah, 2007: 89-90)

Here he depicts himself in exile as a stranger or desperate refugee who has no hope whatsoever of going back home. In the same poem, writing exile takes the form of talking to an absent beloved. He says ―and we are now loosened from the gravity of identity‘s land‖. He can write or do whatever he wants without any restrictions imposed on him by Israel. He says:

What will I do without exile, and a long night There is nothing left of me but you, And nothing left of you but me. (Translated by FadyJoudah, 2007

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Here he presents his readers with the pangs of suffering and the perpetual pain in exile, but sympathizes with himself over the feeling that he carries his homeland inside himself and mutually his homeland carries him inside. The suffering of exile manifests itself in Darwish‘s And He Returned in A Shroud. The title of this poem implies that the hope of return again has diminished. Here, he appears a homeless man, alienated and hungry traveler moving against his will.

Haven‘t you seen a vagabond A traveler not good at travelling! He left without provisions. Who will feed the youth If he becomes hungry on his way? Who will show the stranger mercy? (Translated by Mansson, 2003: 56)

Although he is not happy in his exile, he sends a message to his mother: ‗do not worry about me‘. I have become an adult and I can depend on myself to earn my living. His verses here look rather ironic:

I‘ve become a man of twenty Imagine me, mother, becoming twenty Like other men I face life. I carry the burden like men do. I work In a restaurant…and wash dishes. I make coffee for the customer I paste smiles on my sad face To please the customers (Translated by Mansson, 2003: 49)

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Feeling lost and alienated because of the loss of childhood, home, and language. Darwish also missed the stable sense of identity in its full range, both physical and symbolic. The image of alienated split self is therefore frequently reflected, especially in exile poetry. In a number of poems, he tried to reconstruct his fragmented identity through talking to himself in the first place and to the ‗other‘ in the second. This ‗other‘ can be himself, an absent friend, a beloved, or an occupier. To Darwish, the overall goal behind his poetry is to show that he, like others, deserves to be identified as a human being and like himself as a poet to exist. In I was Not With Me in the same collection above, he appears indifferent to emotion, time, and place due to the loss of ‗identity‘. He sees himself as ‗nothing‘, ‗absent‘, and ‗non-existent‘, and probably as a ‗ghost‘ or ‗shadow‘ who does not feel pain. He does not know the reality of his feelings: he is ‗neither sad nor happy‘, and he has nothing to do with ‗emotion or time‘.

I was absorbed in nothing, In total, complete emptiness Separated from my being, And free from pain. I was neither sad nor happy, For nothingness has no connection To emotion or to time. (Translated by Catherine Cobham in Darwish, 2009c: 81)

Both Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish represent the identity of oppressed people that struggle to live a life of dignity and honor. Their poetry challenges the definitions, stereotypes of the oppressors and voices their historical claim of right to self- determination. They showed the plight of being exiled and how almost they lost hope of returning to their homeland particularly after the gruesome violence and political strife besieged their respective homelands. Ali‘s throughout his poetry pleads the tragic loss of his mother, friends, beloved Kashmir and his poetic sensibilities were fashioned with the themes of gloom, alienation and loss. In his odyssey figuring his homeland, he himself became one of the images and once broke down in an interview with his close friend

103 when he expressed his last wish ―I would like to go back to Kashmir to die.‖(Gosh) on the other side Darwish at the age of six encountered his first exile and was forced to leave his homeland. He became a refugee within his own homeland and that had a huge impact on his poetic imagination. It was this separation and alienation which genesis a kind of poetry that speaks volumes of loss, alienation and nostalgia of land that remained at the core of their literary productions.

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