‘Kashmiri-American’ poet Agha Shahid Ali passes away
Rediff
Jeet Thayil in New York
The distinguished Kashmir-born American poet Agha Shahid Ali, whose most recent book of poems Rooms Are Never Finished (WW Norton) was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Awards, passed away in the early hours of December 8.
Shahid, as his numerous acquaintances knew him, died at home surrounded by friends and family. He had been in a coma for two weeks, following a long battle against brain cancer, said nursing staff.
“His death was very peaceful,” said Nurse Patricia Bruno. “He died at home and there were a lot of people around him, a lot of family.”
Nurse Bruno was the weekend on-call supervisor at VNA Hospice during the time of Shahid’s death. She saw him at around 10 pm on December 7 and then again at 2.30 am, when she pronounced him dead.
His funeral is scheduled to be held on December 10 in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Shahid’s family requested that no flowers be sent to the funeral home. Instead they asked that contributions be made out to the Visiting Nurses Association Hospice Alliance of Hampshire County.
Born in New Delhi on February 4, 1949, Shahid grew up in Kashmir. He was educated at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, and later at Delhi University.
He considered himself “a triple exile” from Kashmir, India and the United States, but he described himself as a “Kashmiri-American.”
He earned a Ph.D. in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984 and an MFA from the University of Arizona in 1985.
He was the author of seven collections of poetry, 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 Himalayas (1987), In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (1979) and Bone Sculpture (1972).
He edited Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English, translated a selection of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poems, The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems, and wrote a critical study, T S Eliot as Editor.
Shahid received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Ingram-Merrill Foundation and was awarded a Pushcart Prize.
He held teaching positions at Delhi University, Penn State, SUNY Binghampton, Princeton University, Hamilton College, Baruch College, the University of Utah and Warren Wilson College.
New York University announced it would establish an annual reading in his name.
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10 December 2001 Home | Email | Registration | Chat | Forum | Feedback | Archive Search
Agha Shahid Ali: Fleeting Remembrances
By Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr
It was June, 1967. The second Israeli-Arab war had broken out. We were sitting in the home of Mrinalini Chattopadhyay in Hyderabad. She was the younger sister of poet Sarojini Naidu and Harindranath Chattopadhyay. On that day, Agha Shahid Ali read out his poems about the Israeli bombings and the agony of the Arabs. He was then a young man in college, and he came to Hyderabad to visit his friend Pavan. My mother was a friend of Mrinalini’s, and we used to visit her sometimes. I was there when Shahid read his poems, but I was in the 8th standard then, and did not really understand what he read. I knew he was a poet though, and that he was responding to the war.
I met Shahid again in 1991 at Tarun Tejpal’s house. Listening to him through the evening, his reading of the poems in Mrinalini Chattopadhyay’s house came back to me. I reminded him about it. Having travelled a great distance since then, he was slightly embarrassed about his poetry reading that day.
By 1991, Shahid was an accomplished poet. He had just published a volume of his poems, and come round to see Tarun at the India Today office. Later, at Tarun’s house, Shahid told us about his encounter with the legendary ghazal singer Begum Akhtar, and how he saw her through the last days, staying with her, listening to what she said, and even sleeping on the floor beside her bed. Shahid was irrepressibly boyish, talking in animated tones about his experiences.
His translation of Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poems, published by the Oxford University Press, came out next. The translations stand as poems in themselves. Here was a poet paying homage to another poet. When the lyricism of Faiz’s lines did not echo faithfully in the translation, it was clearly not Shahid’s fault but that of the English language. It was an impossible task to reproduce the rhythmic simplicity of Faiz’s Urdu. But Shahid more than made up for it with his own poetic turn of phrase in English.
Shahid is one of the finest English poets from India. There was a visible craftsmanship in his verse, which is the mark of the new poets who emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. And he used that control of the language to express his deeply felt experiences about Kashmir, his home. But Shahid’s poetry was not obscure or esoteric. A general reader could relate to the experience and the emotion in the poems. He will continue to be read.
http://members.tripod.com/~SundeepDougal/ali.html
Agha Shahid Ali
THE WALLED CITY: 7 POEMS ON DELHI
AT JAMA MASJID, DELHI
QAWWALI AT NIZAMUDDIN AULIA’S DARGAH
THE JAMA MASJID BUTCHER
THE EDITOR REVISITED
KASHMIR WITHOUT A POST OFFICE
THE WALLED CITY: 7 POEMS ON DELHI
1
From tomb to tomb,
I chew the ash of prayers.
Won’t poetry happen to me?
Caught in the lanes of history,
don’t I qualify now?
I have even seen Allah in rags
extend the earth like a begging bowl.
2
The Two-Nation Theory is dead
But the old don’t forget.
In this city of refugees,
trains move like ghosts.
The old don’t forget.
My friend’s grandfather,
hoarder of regrets,
cautions: Those Muslim butchers:
Be careful, they stab you in the back.
I lost my beloved Lahore.
My friend and I are rather simple:
We never saw the continent divide.
3
The streets light up
with the smiles of beggars.
Words fail me,
for I need a harsh language.
But I’m comfortable
like an angry editor.
4
I carry the beggar-woman’s hunger
in my hand
as her eyes follow me to my poems,
follow me into the coffee house
where I’m biting into her,
eating morsels of her night.
5
The bootblack brushes my shoes:
Does my heart beat in my feet?
His knuckes carry the memory
of this city.
My shoes shine like death
as I wait at the bus stop
for Delhi’s dome of sweat
to break into a monsoon of steel
and rip my Achilles heel.
6
Believe me,
he sat here in this dirt corner
winter and summer, winter, summer.
This morning he wasn’t there
with his ancient beard
and his stretched-out hand.
The sweeper said he took him away
with the morning garbage.
7
A safe distance of smells.
The restaurant airconditioned,
I drink my beer.
Outside the beggars
laze in empty tins,
peeling the sun,
their used beer-can.
Waiter, get me another beer!
AT JAMA MASJID, DELHI
Imagine: Once there was nothing here.
Now look how minarets camouflage the sunset.
Do you hear the call to prayer?
It leaves me unwinding scrolls of legend
till I reach the first brick they brought here.
How the prayers rose, brick by brick?
Shahjahan knew the depth of stones,
how they turn smooth rubbed on a heart.
And then? Imprisoned
with no consoling ghosts,
bent with old age,
while his cirgin daughter Jahanara
dressed the cracked marble reign
his skin kept up for so long.
QAWWALI AT NIZAMUDDIN AULIA’S DARGAH<
1
Between two saints he shares the earth,
Mohammad Shah Rangeele
(evoked in monsoon khayals).
The beggar woman kisses the marble lattice,
sobs and sobs on Khusro’ pillars.
In a corner Jahanara, garbed in the fakir’s grass,
mumbles a Sufi quatrain.
We recline on the gravestone,
or on the saint’s poem, unaware
of the sorrow of the pulverized prayer.
Time has only its vagrant finger.
Knowing no equal, it pauses for massacres.
2
Suffering has its familiar patterns:
We buy flowers for Nizammudin’s feet,
dream in the corner to the qawwal’s beat.
The saint’s song chokes in his throat.
The poor tie prayers with threads,
accutomed to their ancient wish
for the milk and honey of Paradise.
3
I’ve learnt some lessons the easy way:
I’ve seen so many, even a child somewhere,
his infant bones hidden forever.
Stone, grass, children turned old:
The dead have no ghosts.
4
These are time’s relics, its suffered epitaphs:
I come here to sing Khusro’s songs.
I burn to the end of the lit essence
as kings and beggars arise in the smoke:
That drunk debauched colourful king
dances again with hoofs of sorrow
as Nadir skins the air with swords,
horses galloping
to the rhythm
of a dying
dynasty.
The muezzin interrupts the dawn, calls
the faithful to prayer with a monster-cry:
We walk through streets calligraphed with blood.
THE JAMA MASJID BUTCHER
Urdu, bloody at his lips
and fingertips, in this
soiled lane of Jama Masjid,
is still fine, polished
smooth by the generations.
He doesn’t smile but
accepts my money
with a rare delicacy
as he hacks the rib of History.
His courtesy grazes
my well-fed skin
(he hangs this warm January morning
on the iron hook of prayer).
We establish the bond of phrases,
dressed in the couplets of Ghalib.
His life is this moment,
a century’s careful image.
THE EDITOR REVISITED
You still haven’t called me a poet, Dear Sir,
and I’ve been at it,
this business of meanings, sometimes delayed,
selling words in bottles, at times in boxes.
I began with a laugh, stirred my tea with English,
drank India down with a faint British accent,
temples, beggars, and dust
spread like marmalade on my toast:
A bitter taste: On Parliament Street
a policeman beat a child on the head.
Hermaphrodites walked by in Saffron saris,
their drums eching a drought-rhythm.
The Marxists said,
In Delhi English sounds obscene.
Return to Hindi or Bengali, eachword will burn
like hunger.
A language must measure up to one’s native dust.
Divided between two cultures, I spoke a language foreign even to my ears;
I diluted it in a glass of Scotch.
A terrible trade, my lip service to Revolution
punctuated by a whisly-god.
Now collecting a degree in English,
will I embrace my hungry country
with an armful of soliloquies?
This trade in words continues however as
Shakespeare feeds my alienation.
Please note, Dear Sir, my terrible plight
as I collect rejection slips
from your esteemed journal.