Kashmir can evoke poetry both because of its ethereal natural surroundings and its fraught political climate. This debut poetry collection by Asiya Zahoor, who has documented the language and literature of Kashmir and also teaches literature there, is lyrically evocative. By ‘lyrical’ I don’t mean flowery: it’s more a tense resilience underscored by images of beauty kept alive even under duress. While describing the militarised zone, Zahoor writes tellingly: “before they lay barbed wire/ across our tongues/ let’s sing of almond blossoms”.
She speaks eloquently about the uncertain future of Kashmir in the poem ‘Gifts For My Daughter Not Yet Conceived’: “I gift you/ my unsettled struggles,/ unnoticed virtues,/ unread and half-read books,/ three-by-two inches laminated paper/ in the name of identity.” But all the political uncertainty cannot dislodge the poet’s sense of herself as a Kashmiri: “The roots of my history are in Kashmir./ The history of Kashmir is in my roots.”
The dreams and strivings of the Kashmiri people are made palpable in these lines inspired by Ghalib that deserve to be quoted in some detail: “I’m trying to shield your shadow/ running against time, trying/ to hold water in a wicker basket/... I tried to safeguard/ your ghazals, sun-dried/ with chilli peppers for winter/ wrapped in obituaries of poets/ who died too young./ I’m forcing memory to resurrect/ lines buried in dusty newspapers/ in gloomy archive centres.” Identifiable motifs include the chinar, Dal lake, almond and plane trees, and angry young boys turning “stones into gods”.
Comparisons will invariably be made with the work of Agha Shahid Ali but Zahoor is more direct in her political orientation, a fact underlined by the very first two lines of the book: “I run with the hem clenched between my teeth/ as your bomb-sniffing dogs bark at me” (‘Medusa in a Burkha’). This comes with the warning that just a glance would turn her pursuers into stone. Zahoor is given to experimentation, at least a little: for instance, there’s a graphic poem shaped like the Hawa Mahal.
Though the cover is garish, this is a promising debut, although it does seem a bit premature with just 22 poems, none of them very long. Poets these days seem far too impatient to get into print. The illustrations are irrelevant — good poetry speaks for itself and doesn’t need such crutches.
The writer has published Full Disclosure: New and Collected Poems (1981-2017).
Serpents Under My Veil; Asiya Zahoor, Tethys, ₹299
