On Manic Poems: Listening for the Sense of “Azadi” in Divine Calamity

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ayesha Sitara was a patient in a military-psychiatry hospital in Azad Kashmir when we met. Her doctors considered her poetry – its uncontrollability – her primary manic symptom. Though Ayesha agreed with the doctors, poetry to her was “aafat” (divine calamity), and other times “josh” (passion). Her poetry, preoccupied with the Indian occupation of Kashmir, emphasizes Islamic militant struggle for Azadi (liberation). Here, I attempt to follow the “sense” of Ayesha’s Islamopoetics, leaving to many forking paths, but not to all (Borges, Lacan). Ayesha’s poetics signal a meaning-to-come for Azadi. And yet, she insists on certain articulations of freedom. I ask, how might a listening take shape in response to this poetry? Indeed, through the work of josh and aafat, without resolving one into the other, Ayesha provides a guiding frame for staying with the undecidability of her suffering. What is signaled in this restless orbiting between divine calamity and revolutionary passion?