WATAN MAINE THHE TOU WATAN KE LOG SATATE THHE
WATAN SE DOUR HAINE TOU WATAN KE YAAD SATE HAI
http://www3.pak.org/gupshup/smilies/flower2.gif
http://www3.pak.org/gupshup/smilies/flower1.gif
Fwd. from rediff.com
Agha Shahid Ali passes
away
By 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
From The Kashmir Times
OBITUARY
Kashmir loses its English Ghazal maestro
By Masood Hussain
SRINAGAR, Dec 9: One of the most prominent Kashmiri American and Kashmir’s only English poet Agha Shahid Ali, who was globally recognised as pioneer of ‘Ghazal movement in English poetry’ passed away on Saturday in US. Since his last public reading of his poems in April last at Baruch College, New York, he remained completely bed-ridden.
One of the finest accomplished English poets, his poetry is visibly different from most of his contemporaries. His friends term him selfless and devoid of prejudice and malice. A liberal minded, he had no hard and fast ideological commitments but was “imaginatively and emotionally preoccupied with Kashmir”, his homeland. Critics say he was a “poet of distances and of loss who perfected the art of narcissism”.
A widely travelled person, Agha would often make his friends laugh with his humourous anecdotes. Once, said one of Agha’s acquaintance in US, he was stopped by the security men at the Barcelona airport. “Are you carrying anything that could be dangerous for the other passengers?” To which Agha replied: “O just my heart!”
And when somebody asked him about why Srinagar’s Zero Bridge was called so, he said: “Anyway, when they started building bridges, they numbered them one, two, and so on. But there was one bridge that had existed before they started building the others, so they renamed it the Zero Bridge.”
Born to Dr Agha Ashraf Ali, Shahid grew up Muslim in Kashmir. Besides, secondary education, he graduated from the S P College and did his masters in English (literature) from Delhi University. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Pennsylvania State University (USA) in 1984, and an M.F.A. (a degree is fine arts) from the University of Arizona (US) in 1985. One of his scholarly books - T S Eliot as Editor (1986) was actually his thesis in the Ph D.
After teaching at various collegus in Delhi and elsewhere, he was keen to teach in Kashmir but “was not encouraged”. In US, Ali received fellowships from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and had been awarded a Pushcart Prize. Recently one of his collection of poems - `Rooms are never finished’ (2001) was nominated and shortlisted for the prestigious American prize - the National Book Award.
For most of his career, Agha was poet-in-residence with various American colleges and delivering extensive lectures on creative writing. Apart from Delhi University and a brief stint in Kashmir, Agha held teaching positions at Penn State, SUNY Binghamton, Princeton University, Hamilton College, Baruch College, University of Utah, and Warren Wilson College.
Says Prof Gulam Rasool Malik, senior teacher in the University of Kashmir and a friend of Agha Shahid: “He was our visiting professor. He would spend around three months in summer here and deliver extensive lectures. However, the disease stopped this abruptly”.
Ever since Agha Shahid’s first collection of poems - Bone Sculpture (1972) was published in India, he wrote continuously. His volumes of poetry include Rooms Are Never Finished (2001), The Country Without a Post Office (1997), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), and In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (1979). 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). According to some of his friends, he was working on another collection of poems - Call Me Ishmael Tonight - when the brain tumour made him unable to read, write or even to attend the telephone at his Amherst home in Western Massachusetts.
The name of one of his books - The Beloved Witness - according to Prof Malik is infact Agha himself. “Shahid in Arabic means Witness and in Persian it is Beloved - so the blend of the two”.
Many people are impressed by Agha’s different creations. Besides, his impressive translation of Faiz, ‘In Memory of Begum Akhter and Other Poems’ are a masterpiece. This revolves round the legendary UP singer - Malika-i-Ghazal - who would frequent Kashmir and always be the guest of Agha’s.
However, it was undoubtedly ‘The Country Without A Post office’ that rediscovered his Kashmir connections and helped paint an unbiased image of the plight of the people of the Vale before the world. “Prisons, let open your gates A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight,” Agha Shahid Ali offered a speaking portrayal of Kashmir from the days of Haba Khatun to the recent days. In predominantly elegiac tone, Agha draws parallels between Sarajevo and ancient Greece and offers a series of speaking sketches of terror and torture.
The poem aptly described Srinagar as the “city from where no news can come” and where the post office turned simply dead-letter office (“Hundreds of canvas bags all undelivered mail. By chance I looked down and there on the floor I saw this letter to you.”). It was there where “everyone carries his address so that at least his body will reach home,”… He has personally said that this book was his most accomplished one and: “There’s a certain fullness of voice in it”.
(According to an unconfirmed report, Agha’s entire works are being translated into Kashmiri and the process is nearing completion.)
“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’ll enter our last world,
the first that vanished”
The above lines of Agha Shahid from his acclaimed book on Kashmir remain ironically poignant in the wake of his eternal sleep. Observed one of his fans: “In order to put flesh to his above ethereal expression, he rushed in urgency to beseech for peace - performed a postman for a ‘Country Without a Post Office’! However, is unfortunate that he cannot see the return of those keys. And that `the first that vanished’ remains vanishing’.”
During these days when people, here, do not see an end of the tunnel - not to talk of the light, so many perplexed Kashmiris do mourn the demise of this young poet, whose foresight defied the hard realities on ground:
Agha’s demise created a huge gulf, something which may never be filled. For many generations, his immortal verse shall remain a beacon of defiance and growth in apparently alien cultures. He definitely died unwed and but not unwept, at least in Kashmir, that, according to his close friends was on his mind alongwith his mother, who passed away a few years back.
Speaking of Agha Shahid Ali, I heard him on NPR once,
and have read a little bit of his poetry, but I didn’t
know about his sense of humor: an admirable quality in
a poet.
The Wolf’s Postcript to ‘Little Red Riding Hood’
Agha Shahid Ali
First, grant me my sense of history:
I did it for posterity,
for kindergarten teachers
and a clear moral:
Little girls shouldn’t wander off
in search of strange flowers,
and they mustn’t speak to strangers.
And then grant me my generous sense of plot:
Couldn’t I have gobbled her up
right there in the jungle?
Why did I ask her where her grandma lived?
As if I, a forest-dweller,
didn’t know of the cottage
under the three oak trees
and the old woman lived there
all alone?
As if I couldn’t have swallowed her years before?
And you may call me the Big Bad Wolf,
now my only reputation.
But I was no child-molester
though you’ll agree she was pretty.
And the huntsman:
Was I sleeping while he snipped
my thick black fur
and filled me with garbage and stones?
I ran with that weight and fell down,
simply so children could laugh
at the noise of the stones
cutting through my belly,
at the garbage spilling out
with a perfect sense of timing,
just when the tale
should have come to an end
http://www.tehelka.com/channels/literary/2001/dec/8/lr120801parsa.htm
http://www.tehelka.com/channels/literary/2001/dec/8/lr120801parsa.htm
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.
Also read:
‘Mad heart, be brave’-Kamila Shamsie pays tribute
Rukun Advani on Agha Shahid Ali
Poet of loss - Alok Rai pays tribute
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