Love Letters from Kashmir
In 2002 I was invited to the Breadloaf Writer's Conference where I attended on a scholarship because I served on the waitstaff. at the time I didn't understand how selective this invitation was and how prestigious the conference was. The history of Breadloaf goes back to Willa Cather and Robert Frost to name a few. Through the years it diversified. Several years before me a wonderful poet Agha Shahid Ali was on faculty (an honor for any writer). In December 2001 he died too young of brain cancer.
Agha Shahid Ali came to the US as a student from the Kashmir region. He became enamored of the poetry form called ghazal. At Breadloaf the waitstaff was each presented with The Country Without a Post Office, a book of his poetry. I always loved the lonely little line from the book: "The world is full of paper. Write to me."
The book refers to a point in time and a place. Kashmir is a disputed territory belonging to India but more aligned with Pakistan. It is here that world war III might erupt and one of the major reasons both countries sought to acquire nuclear weapons. In 1990 a confrontation broke out when Kashmir rebelled against Indian rule, resulting in hundreds of gruesome and violent deaths, fires, and mass rapes.
For seven months, there was no mail delivered in Kashmir, because of political turmoil gripping the land. A friend of the poet’s father watched the post office from his house, as mountains of letters piled up. One day, he walked over to the piles and picked a letter from the top of one, discovering that it was from Shahid’s father and addressed to him.
Agha Shahid Ali came to the US as a student from the Kashmir region. He became enamored of the poetry form called ghazal. At Breadloaf the waitstaff was each presented with The Country Without a Post Office, a book of his poetry. I always loved the lonely little line from the book: "The world is full of paper. Write to me."
For seven months, there was no mail delivered in Kashmir, because of political turmoil gripping the land. A friend of the poet’s father watched the post office from his house, as mountains of letters piled up. One day, he walked over to the piles and picked a letter from the top of one, discovering that it was from Shahid’s father and addressed to him.
Even today--headline from the BBC:
You can imagine residents taking up their pens/pencils and composing love letters. All those quick inexplicable texts, 130-character tweets, or emails that require emojis--turned into 13-page letters, where writers bare their souls.
Agha Shahid Ali
Kashmir: Letters and landlines return to cut-off region
The troubled region where some 10 million people live had been placed under a security lockdown on 5 August, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi stripped it of its autonomy and downgraded its status.
The isolation is exacerbated by an unprecedented communications blockade: landline phones, mobiles and the internet were suspended. Kashmir sunk into what a local editor called an "information black hole".
You can imagine residents taking up their pens/pencils and composing love letters. All those quick inexplicable texts, 130-character tweets, or emails that require emojis--turned into 13-page letters, where writers bare their souls.
A poignant piece in the book is "Dear Shahid" either an actual letter to the author from his mother or a facsimile. After recounting a brutal murder of an acquaintance "she" writes--"Things here are as usual though we always talk about you. Will you come soon?"
When real life has turned on its ear and turned a corner into the surreal it always good to normalize by reading poetry. It is why some of our most celebrated poets have written under duress and frightful circumstances such as the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. Here is a link to her poem Utopia about an island--read it and think about the Bahamas and the refugees being turned back now by the US, a situation that borders on the surreal.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1996/szymborska/25561-wislawa-szymborska-poetry-1996-4/
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| Agha Shahid Ali |
DEAR SHAHID,
I am writing to you from your far-off country. Far even from
us who live here. Where you no longer are. Everyone carries his
address in his pocket so that at least his body will reach home.
Rumors break on their way to us in the city. But word still
reaches us from border towns: Men are forced to stand barefoot in
snow waters all night. The women are alone inside. Soldiers smash
radios and televisions. With bare hands they tear our houses to pieces.
You must have heard Rizwan was killed. Rizwan: Guardian
of the Gates of Paradise. Only eighteen years old. Yesterday at Hideout Caf6 (everyone there asks about you), a doctor-who had just that
morning treated a 16-year-old boy released from an interrogation center-said: / want to ask the fortune-tellers: Did anything in his line of
Fate reveal that the webs of his hands would be cut with a knife?
This letter, insh'Allah, will reach you, for my brother goes
south tomorrow where he shall post it. Here one can't even manage
postage stamps. Today I went to the post office. Across the river.
Bags and bags-hundreds of canvas bags-all of undelivered mail. By
chance I looked down and there on the floor I saw this letter addressed
to you. So I am enclosing it. I hope it's from someone you are longing
for news of.
Things here are as usual, though we always talk about you.
Will you come soon? Waiting for you is like waiting for spring. We
are waiting for the almond blossoms. And, if God wills, O! those days
of peace when we all were in love and the rain was in our hands wherever we met.
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| Wislawa Szymborska |
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