Dead Poets’ Society

People in the Valley resort to poetry to reveal their pain and document the hidden trauma of tragedy as prose is dangerous, writes Muzamil Jaleel

The poet is an anguished, silent spectator in these charcoal drawings by acclaimed Kashmiri artist Masood Hussain, a fine arts graduate from Mumbai’s JJ School of Art

“Poetry is a complete art form. You either have inborn talent for it, or you are trained for it. I don’t qualify on either count. Circumstances have made me a poet,’’ says Shakeel Shan, a 30-year-old Kashmiri singer. ‘‘I have no other means to tell my story.’’

After years of turmoil, Shan is not the only one to seek solace in words. Increasingly, it is the ordinary young men—college students, half-educated peasants, shopkeepers, professionals—who are wielding the pen.

Not for prose, simpler though it may be, but for a poetry modified by violence, robbed of romance by bloodshed. The central motifs, too, have changed, the cool breeze of the Dal has been replaced by the symbolic irises, traditionally grown in Kashmir’s graveyards, the omnipresent beloved has given way to a mother’s agony, paradise has made way for heaven on fire.

‘‘If I didn’t write, my heart would explode like a bomb,’’ says Shan, of the poem he wrote after his friend was picked up by unidentified gunmen on a dark night:
Who knows where my friend is?
Who knows where my friend is hiding?
Who knows whether he is scared of the dark night?
Who knows whether he is hungry and unable to stand on his feet?
Who knows whether the place where he sits is not damp?

‘‘There are dozens of such poems, reactions of sensitive Kashmiri youngsters, who crave to tell their story but can’t, because of fear. Through poetry, I manage to tell the story and still don’t endanger my life,’’ explains Shan.

Poet Bashir Manzar encapsulates this fear in his poetry:
Shhhhhhhhhh...
Break the pen, spill the ink, burn the paper
Lock your lips, be silent, shhh...
Say ‘I saw nothing’ even if you do
or else, have your eyes gouged, be silent, shhh....
Make all discerning
Gouge out the eyes that discern
Keep humming eulogies, be silent, hush...
It is now the season of burying the truth, Manzar
Seal your lips, be silent, shhh... (translated from Urdu)

To be doubly safe, many of Kashmir’s new poets prefer anonymity. Says one youngster poetically: ‘‘I can’t drink water because I feel it is mixed with the blood of young men who die up in the mountains. I can’t look at the sky because it no longer is blue, it is painted red. I can’t listen to the roar of the gushing stream, it reminds me of the wailing mother next to the bullet-ridden body of her only son. I can’t listen to the thunder of the clouds, it reminds me of a bomb blast. I feel the greenery of my garden has faded, perhaps it too mourns. I feel the sparrow and cuckoo are silent, perhaps they too are sad.’’

If the younger generation seek refuge in anonymity, Farooq Nazuki—awarded by the Sahitya Akademi for his collection Naar Hatun Kazil Wanus (The Forests of Soot are on Fire)—says his poetry is the ‘‘intimate response to incidents’’.

Anguished by the sight of the blood-drenched outfit of a bridegroom, he writes:
Blood dappled apparel of bridegrooms
Is being washed at riverside by mothers
And the trousers of brides are set ablaze
The milky mother’s pine—and quiet flows Vitasta (translated from Urdu)

‘‘The character that emerges from contemporary Kashmiri poetry is a self-destructive being. ‘‘He passionately leads himself to the death-well and then turns into a mourner, a strange character who writes his epithet. His heart is seething with anger and full of commotion,’’ Nazki says. ‘‘The protagonist of my poetry saunters through a dense forest trying to catch a drop of the sun. Each sundrop, like a time spot, turns into a milestone in the treatise that is my poetry.’’

Nazki mourns the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits through the loss of his Hindu friend:
A dedication once more
Somnath Sadhu, for you...
You Know?
Your mother Kamli has run away from Kashmir
She took along with her silver plate, that you and me ate off
the food that she laid
She fled Kashmir, fearing me
You Know? (translated from Urdu)

After his acclaimed collection Country without a Post-Office, Agha Shahid Ali came to be regarded as a true emissary of Kashmir’s pain. His poems exposed the uncertainty of life and the unease in the streets of Kashmir:
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

Shahid lived and taught in America, but even on his death-bed last year, he continued giving expression to the trauma of his native land:
You must have heard Rizwan was killed
Guardian of the Gates of Paradise
Only 18 years old
Yesterday at Hideout Cafe (everyone there asked about you)
A doctor, who had just treated a 16-year old boy released from an interrogation centre, said
I 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?

Shahid’s love for Kashmir is lost. But there is optimism as well. In Pastoral, a poem he dedicated to his friend Suvir Kaul, Shahid talked of re-union:
We shall meet again, in Srinagar,
by the gates of the Villa of Peace,
our hands blossoming into fists
till the soldiers return the keys
and disappear. Again we’ll enter our last world, the first that vanished
In our absence from the broken city