Abstract
This article seeks to examine how the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali explores and rethinks ideas of “home” and travel in his poetry. Ali’s poetry is a layered affective terrain in which his complex, entangled emotions surrounding home, exile, nostalgia, displacement, and travel play out. I argue that Ali’s verse, through multiple journeys ranging over locations, languages, cultures, and literary terrain, interrogates and collapses the boundaries between the “home” and the world. I read his poetry as voicing the “disturbed” and displaced home of Kashmir, while simultaneously distilling a “re-homing” desire. Such an impulse reconfigures and reimagines the home through the inhabiting and repeated “homing” of multiple, “foreign” locations. Poetic travel across geographic and literary terrain, in Ali’s oeuvre, thus speaks to the fraught and complex nature of the “home” in postcolonial and diasporic contexts, while remapping the home through the “re-homing” of the “foreign”. Arguing that “travel” is a means of negotiating and rethinking the “home” in Ali’s poetry, the article examines the intermeshed and dialogic relationship between home and travel that imbues his verse. Focusing particularly on poetic experimentation as a mode of travel, it aims to show how such literary travel makes new homes, while remembering and articulating Ali’s lost homes.
Highlights
A self-professed “multiple-exile”, a “bilingual, bicultural being” (Ali 1995, p. 77), Ali was born in New Delhi, raised in Srinagar in Indian Kashmir, and educated in Kashmir, Delhi, and the United States, where he lived a major part of his adult life
The hauntingly powerful, simultaneous presence and absence of Kashmir is the pivotal centre of Ali’s lyrical world. Remembering, recuperating andwriting his “disturbed”, traumatised homeland of Kashmir from his diasporic location of the United States, Ali’s poetry reveals a swirl of emotions and memories surrounding his ruptured “home”. It brings to the fore the contiguous and deeply entangled ideas of home, displacement, loss,longing, and travel
The imagery of the itinerant Kashmiri shawl and the globally exported saffron has, encrypted within it, narratives of global travel and adaptation. They simultaneously suggest cultural appropriation, loss and the violence on Kashmir of colonial and neo-colonial capitalism, a violence signalled in the very name and history of the world-famous
Summary
This article seeks to examine how the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali explores and rethinks ideas of home and travel in his poetry. A self-professed “multiple-exile”, a “bilingual, bicultural (but never rootless) being” (Ali 1995, p. 77), Ali was born in New Delhi, raised in Srinagar in Indian Kashmir, and educated in Kashmir, Delhi, and the United States, where he lived a major part of his adult life. Remembering, recuperating and (re)writing his “disturbed”, traumatised homeland of Kashmir from his diasporic location of the United States, Ali’s poetry reveals a swirl of emotions and memories surrounding his ruptured “home”. It brings to the fore the contiguous and deeply entangled ideas of home, displacement, loss, (be)longing, and travel. I contend that Ali’s layered and multifaceted construction of “home” inscribes both loss and possibilities It encompasses, along with his lost and remembered homes, his travels across multiple locations, physical, imaginative, and literary. As Abin Chakraborty writes, this kind of plurality “is not just of his personal sensibility or his familiar background and of the larger cultural plurality that is associated with the ethnolinguistic entity of ‘Kashmiriyat’” (Chakraborty 2017, p. 60), the distinctive, syncretic cultural heritage of Kashmir, which mingles, among others, Muslim, Hindu, Sufi, and Buddhist traditions
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
