The Country Without a Post Office by Agha Shahid Ali
“If only somehow you could have been mine, what wouldn’t have happened in this world?”
Agha Shahid Ali is the poet of longing and nostalgia. His poetry is a tale of romance albeit filled with subtle sadness. He writes about home and the idea home, about loss and the idea of loss, about longing and the idea of it. He has both experienced and lived these recurring ideas that find a place in the poetry of fractured times. Fantasizing about something and going through the experience of it are two different things, for two different people staying in two different parts of the world even though they somehow share the same roots.
The blurb says “amidst rain and fire and ruin, in a land of “ doomed addresses’, a poet evokes the tragedy of his birthplace.” The poems “turn inward” in search of things that were either left behind in a distant land or were never re-visited. The poems try to find meaning in loss and endurance. It stumbles in the darkness of meaningless violence in search of the Paradise now shadowed by grey and gloom of death and derangement. If a language has the power to transport its readers back in time, Agha Shahid Ali’s poems will take its readers back to the feeling of void, longing and nostalgia. The feeling of loss engulfs like “ash filigrees roses carved in the wood of sweeping trees” that take a lifetime to cope. His poems talks of lost homes, deserted landscapes and people displaced, each juxtaposed with the contrary ideas of peace and tension.
Rich in visual imagery, his motifs such as snow, ash, dream, chinar leaves evokes a sense of transitoriness. In certain poems, I find a hint of solace in fleeting thoughts of spiritualism, at times too obvious but often lurking between the complex notion of self-doubt and acceptance. His poems are his way to speak out and give name to a lifetime of longing as he says in the Prologue “Let me cry out in that void, say it as I can.”
“When the post offices died, the mailman
knew we’d return to answer them.”
