Re-Mapping Culture and Identity: Diasporic Theorisation and Dislocation Strain in the Selected Poems of Agha Shahid Ali

Abstract

Diasporic writings occupy a place of great significance between countries and cultures, mostly as a response to their lost homes. Addressing the predominant issues of dislocation, nostalgia, discrimination, survival, cultural change and identity-crisis, dislocation is one of the stern feelings that rip apart the diaspora community. When people find themselves dislocated from their native strain, their mental trauma haunts them incessantly, and they strive to re-locate themselves by remembering their nostalgic past. The earnest quest for self identity remains the central praxis for an individual’s social existence. But how to reach to its end –either by retreating from the world into one’s shelled cocoon or by adopting moderate adherence to Westernization remains much a debatable concern to be answered by nations as well as by the individuals at large. Diasporic literature deals with these experiences of migration and exile, cultural or geographical displacement and the diasporic writers often remain preoccupied with the elements of nostalgia seeking to re-locate themselves in new cultures. Agha Shahid Ali is a Kashmiri poet, who despite being a migrant to USA transcends all geographical, national, and cultural boundaries by the dint of his sheer poetic brilliance. He articulates vehemently his diaspora experiences of “loss and exile” in his poetry and as a visionary integrates the global and the local. In this paper my aim is to represent how literature and culture inter-relates to form the basis of an independent original expression and in turn reflect the problems and aspirations of an individual’s existence in the society. Ali the eminent Indian poet represents his earnest urge to relocate his Self amidst “cultural hybridization” asserting his transnational identity to transform ‘violent cartographies’ to ‘The Ghat of the Only World’.