Poetics of Remembrance and Loss: A Study of Agha Shahid Ali’s Poems

Abstract

Diasporic literature refers to texts which record the geographical and cultural displacement of individuals or communities to a new location. Sense of loss, identity crisis, hybridity and memories of home and nation are some of the common themes examined by the diasporic writers. The characters are often struggling to negotiate between the two cultures- old and new. The memories of the lost nation or homeland are often recaptured in certain images and objects which recreate the imagined past from memories of immigrant characters. Through their supple and cultivated imagination, these writers draw on different cultures simultaneously, bringing together the two distinct physical and emotional landscapes together. Agha Shahid Ali, the renowned Kashmiri-American poet is one such famous writers among Bharti Mukherjee, JhumpaLahiri, Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, Meena Alexander, Sujata Bhatt and Sunetra Gupta, to name a few. His collection of poems The Veiled Suite takes across the themes of mourning and loss, rendering an entirely afresh legacy to the American poetic lexis. A deep sense of nostalgia pervades through his works, tinged with themes of exile and lost history. He emerges as a cartographer, mapping the ‘imagined homelands' and lost ‘nation'. This paper is an attempt to trace the themes of ‘dislocation' and ‘memo-realization' under diasporic concerns, in the select poems of Agha Shahid Ali from The Veiled Suite.