11: Meaninglessness and Visceral Identification: Agha Shahid Ali & the Neurosis of the Elite Writer (Saad Hafeez)

While discussing Mandelstam’s poem in relation to the prologue in Agha Shahid Ali’s works, an interesting distinction came to me with regards to the plight of the elite exilic writer- his quest to identify with something ‘normal’ (the idea of actually belonging somewhere) despite the type of bourgeois and privileged people he surrounds himself with.  

“I will pray for the Soviet night

For the blessed word with no meaning”

This idea of meaninglessness is quite a recurrent theme in Russian literary works as writers as diverse as Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky have constructed narratives of struggles in a world devoid of meaning. The works of existential philosophers such as Sartre, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have further articulated the issues of abject loneliness in modern times. While these human feelings may craft a universal affiliation between people in the modern world, the world of the exile sees a double abjection which requires an even more careful identification with local troupes of normality and belonging. My contention is that exilic figures such as Agha Shahid Ali situate this universal feeling within the particular to craft a lofty sense of affiliation, which is made real through the employment of troupes that are specifically visceral and bodily in nature.

“What is the blessed word? … One day the Kashmiris will pronounce that word truly for the first time”

These last words reveal the probable meaning behind the referential poetry employed here. Otherwise, the reader would think ‘why in the world is he borrowing from Mandelstam’s work to craft a sense of belonging or a hope for a people who have nothing to do with the Russians?!’ The answer is quite simple: by reacting to a work that articulates a universal form of existential suffering through a local idiom, Ali generates a unique meaning and hope for the Kashmiri people- that these people as the descendants of rich cultures and heritages, though perceptibly torn apart, can have a constructive future which could be used as a model for others as well.

“Each fall they gather chinar leaves, singing what the hills have reechoed for four hundred years, the songs of Habba Khatun, the peasant girl who became a queen”

Again, this line shows the method employed of crafting this lofty affiliation that is, the juxtaposition of diverse universal and localized idioms along with the transformation of historical moments into ahistorical instances of hyper-creativity, of growth and learning for the future of a distraught people. Again, the mode of this juxtaposition is specifically visceral that is, using the body as a conduit to arrive at the feeling of affiliation. For the exilic writer specifically, we note that this technique is probably one of the few ways through which they can bring their elite writing into some sort of relevance or importance for a people who probably don’t even read the language in which it was written.