WORLDLIT.ORG 23 moments capturing convergence in divergence, the dance of the “contraries,” bringing together science and art, politics and spirituality, geography and history, East and West, led me to explore cosmopolitanism at the root of the ghazal form. Cosmopolitanism is defined in the dictionary as “being free from local, provincial, or national ideas, prejudices, or attachments; at home all over the world”; it is necessarily an active appreciation of disparate entities , a rejection of narrow constructs of identities, in fact, a rejection of all strictures; it is an ownership as well as a divestment. It celebrates pluralism as fiercely as it forges an autonomous voice. The ghazal, in its structure as well as its sensibility, not only allows contraries to cohabit but, in the best compositions, makes a demand to frame polarity in the same space. Once the matla, the opening couplet, introduces the refrain (or radif), the reader expects two things: one, that each successive couplet will be locked in by the same phrase/word/image of the radif, and two, that a wild freedom of perspective will be offered like a new puzzle piece that astonishes by fitting the given radif as perfectly as the previous one. The two scenes above provide a launching point for this discussion on the ghazal’s cosmopolitanism because I see the concerns of the classical ghazal enacted in them. And ghazal is nothing if not performative, a collaboration of sorts with the mushai’ra audience: another facet of its cosmopolitanism. Azra Raza, director of the MDS Center at Columbia University and coauthor of Ghalib: Epistemologies of Elegance, appears to me to enact the ghazal by paying tribute to both Einstein and Ghalib, two great people from different parts of the world, engaged in radically different enterprises , who would have completely understood each other’s urgent desire to reach an unnervingly elegant question through boldly exercising the imagination, who were not only unafraid of polarities but found meaning in placing polarities in close proximity to each other. Marilyn Hacker, long and deeply invested in a poetics of challenging dichotomies, appears to do the same by combining diverse gestures, merely out of habit; volume after volume of her poetry and translations , from earlier works to the more recent Names and Diaspo/Renga (co-authored with the Palestinian American poet Deema Shehabi), offer us insights into how to grow a robust, original thought in the thinnest cracks of established order. The ghazal registers order, follows it, and revels in agitating it—a kind of duende in its genetic code. Six Poems by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Qasida of the Bridge of Teacups The soul cleaves into two somewhere along the birth canal, didn’t you say, Plato? I send your echo back to Athens from my rug of locked antlers in Peshawar where I fill a teacup with the question of half my soul (as I watercolor a whitewashed village I’ve yet to see). In the torpor of the mango season, I am closer to the heady basil that fishermen of the Black Sea put in their boats for luck – Will I know my soul by the musk of tannin ink, sugarcane pulp, sweat of a calligrapher’s palm? The antlers are fading. From teacups of clay, bison bone, crystal, bamboo, I build a bridge to the other half. Qasida of Tea, the Daughter of Remorse Sit, I am your powdered throne, so says dust, let my busy worm-teeth suture your folly, let remorse float in your bowl as a tea leaf, let it dissolve your delusions. Hear the wood-fire-crackle of stubborn bones under the golden whisper of tea? The emperor, an outcast, bows to his only brother – the bowl, drinking water bewitched by jasmine: a slow brew coloring realization a hint from the wind to the outcast’s hill Qasida of the Fifty-foot Tea Bush The poet’s divan, his only piece of furniture, pushed against the ecstasy of the window, bears the weight of his longing for the beloved to appear. Ah Fanny! Even a tea bush in Assam knows his secret, has shot up to a bewildering height throwing a gentle shade over the flame of his...
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Dec 1, 2023
Alexey Andreychev 
Open Access