The Figure in Exile Speaking Through Poetry

It is interesting how the various tropes we have discussed regarding figures in exile present themselves in overlapping ways in Agha Shahid Ali's poetry providing a certain completeness to the image of the exile that we have built up over the semester. Throughout the course we have identified certain characteristics and traits of the characters we have read about, but in Ali's poetry the writer is the character in exile himself speaking directly to us; providing a new clarity that extends beyond identifying the traits of a figure in exile as a third person to how the figure in exile identifies himself.

He reinvents Petersburg (I, Srinagar), an imaginary homeland, filling it, closing it, shutting himself (myself) in it.

At the very beginning, in The Blessed Word: A Prologue, Ali expresses affinity with Osip Mandelstam, another exile of another homeland, yet familiar to him because of their common state of exile. Not only does this one line enunciate the affinity between exiles it also expresses the need for the exile to create a new world (as Said puts it, "Much of the exile's life is taken up with compensating for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule.") in place of homeland.

Another principal theme is the obscuration or loss of identity. In I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight, there is depiction of a scene of torture: the ultimate process of stripping one of identity. The scene ends with the tortured screaming "I know nothing." explicitly proclaiming the loss of identity (if you don't know yourself, then who does?). Thereafter the tortured boy is repeatedly referred to as only a shadow--the imagery is striking because it is a formless and difficult to identify image. 

Alone, in words whirled in the hospital, 

her heart had set--forever solitaire.  

Yet another reoccurring theme of literature of exile that presents itself in these works of poetry is that of isolation. In the piece, I Dream I Am the Only Passenger on Flight 423 to Srinagar, the poet's only company is the memories of a woman already dead. A woman who is herself alone (She had sung "Everyone Will Be Here But I") and even the memories he has of her are those of "departure". The woman's ghazal fades, hence the only company the poet has on the lonesome flight fades.