A Tribute to Agha Shahid Ali
by Usman Ahmedani
At Saturday’s special tribute event, prominent writers Kamila Shamsie and Mirza Waheed tangled together reflections on Agha Shahid Ali’s literary and political legacy with their own personal memories of the man, who died of brain cancer almost a decade ago at the age of 52.
Introducing Shahid, Kamila Shamsie had ample reason to lament the passing of a poet – her teacher, mentor and friend. In an age when literature risks becoming the handmaiden of politics (to the detriment of both), Shamsie’s emphasis on Shahid as a ‘poet’s poet’ was refreshing. Shahid was so attuned to language that he interrupted conversations with lines like ‘you just spoke a pure iambic pentameter’, and when confronted by a customer survey asking him why he’d bought a Nissan Stanza car, he replied, ‘Because I’m a poet.’
For Shamsie, his singular achievement was not being shortlisted for the National Book Award, but rather popularising the ghazal form within the United States—not to mention correcting the pronunciation of numerous aspiring poets who would rush to him announcing that they’d written a ‘gaa-zelle’!
Although Mirza Waheed to his lasting regret never met Shahid, the poet was like ‘light in the darkness’ for him as an aspiring writer in Delhi. Waheed read aloud I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight, which forms the epigraph to his novel The Collaborator. Silence set upon the audience as the prophetic nature of the lines ‘of which unburied boy in the mountains’ became clear: as Shamsie suggested, Kashmir became a ‘real place’ in his poetry rather than the ‘rhetorical tool’ of government propaganda.
Some audience members retorted that writing in English, Shahid may be better known in the American academy than in Kashmir itself, a claim Waheed was quick to contradict. Beyond the bureaucratic babus who had until recently omitted Shahid from the syllabus at the University of Kashmir, Waheed insisted that Shahid was increasingly influential, and in unexpected ways. He cited the example of Srinigar-based MC Kash, who pays homage to Shahid through rap: ‘It’s a country without a post office, but we still write a letter.’
Yet given what Shamsie referred to as the ‘wild’ range of references shaping his work, from Emily Dickinson to T. S. Eliot, should Shahid be seen solely as a representative of ‘Kashmir Heritage Poetry’?
The panellists discussed an interview Shahid gave to Amitav Ghosh, in which he said that he could be a ‘national’ poet of Kashmir, but refused the epithet of a ‘nationalist’ poet, seeing this as exclusionary. This was strikingly reminiscent of another poet with a cosmopolitan outlook who remained rooted in his homeland – Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
‘Faiz’s genius,’ Shahid reminded us in his preface to The Rebel’s Silhouette (his English adaptation of Faiz’s poetry), ‘lay in his ability to balance his politics with his aesthetics without compromising either.’ In illustrating the impossibility of detaching Shahid’s poetic vision from his political foresight, this event convinced me that it would be more than fitting to return this tribute to Shahid himself.
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