19 pages • 38 minutes read
Agha Shahid AliPostcard from Kashmir
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Pain of Exile
The poem’s subject is the quest for home. The speaker is in a country where they presumably reside, but it is unclear if this country is a new home. Neither is Kashmir, the homeland of the speaker, their current home. In Line 2, the phrase “my home” refers not to the territory of Kashmir but the postcard, which implies the speaker occupies the shadowy territory of permanent exile. The speaker feels fully at home in neither the new chosen homeland nor the homeland left behind. The speaker’s sense of being unmoored resonates with the experience of many immigrants. Immigrants move to seek a better life, or in search of love, family, or knowledge, or to escape poverty or violence. Even when immigrants are forced to migrate because of conflict or unlivable conditions, their experience in the new homeland is complex. The new country may bring many advantages, but it is not perfect by any measure; nor do its advantages nullify the pain of their separation from the former homeland. For the speaker in “Postcard from Kashmir,” the pain of exile from the homeland is sharper because they see little hope for Kashmir in the near future. Thus, the speaker feels exiled from hope itself.
The pain of exile is so permanent that even the speaker’s return will not allay it. This indicates that though the physical exile may be over, the trauma caused by the memory of exile will remain. Further, the speaker hints that all the hostility, bloodshed, and animosity that has divided Kashmir will take a very long time to heal. The bad blood between various communities and stakeholders has sullied the waters of the Jhelum itself. In Kashmir’s case, the violence is all the more repugnant because of the physical beauty of the landscape. To the speaker, the violence has exiled them from the pristine idyll of the land, which was once described by the 13th-century Persian poet Amir Khusro (spelling may vary): “If there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this.”
Loss and Longing
Loss and longing are essential themes in not just “Postcard from Kashmir” but Ali’s entire poetic canon. Ali himself stated that loss was a condition of poetry for him; it is loss that spurs poetic creation. It should be clarified that Ali viewed loss not as negative but as a necessary part of life, whether it be the loss of childhood, the loss of a parent, or the loss of a culture. As an Indian-born poet who identified as Kashmiri and wrote in English because of his colonial education, Ali felt the loss of regional literary traditions. He frequently wished he could write in Urdu, one of his mother tongues. He tried to bridge this gap by studying and imbibing the Urdu ghazal, ultimately composing some of the most highly regarded ghazals in the history of English literature. The loss of language, the loss of a nation, and more than anything, the loss of Kashmir remain constants in Ali’s poems. The poet’s life experience, too, exposed him to many losses: Apart from the loss of his homeland, he lost his close friend Begum Akhtar and his beloved mother. His mother’s death in particular was an event from which the poet never recovered.
This tone of loss is evident in “Postcard from Kashmir,” which immediately establishes a sense of separation and diminishment. Primary words like “home” and “love” are imbued with a sense of quiet grief. A postcard becomes home for the speaker, while love is “overexposed” (Line 10). The speaker evokes unbridgeable distances, such as when they say, “[T]his the closest / I’ll ever be to home” (Lines 5-6). Time and space now separate the speaker from Kashmir forever, creating a permanent loss. Throughout, the poem’s vocabulary of loss and longing reinforces this unbridgeable gap. Words like “shrinks” (Line 1), “neat” (Line 2), and “overexposed” (Line 10) convey diminishment or excess, suggesting that the speaker can never confront the reality of Kashmir with equanimity. They are forever the pining lover of their homeland, unable to take its measure. The image of the “giant negative” (Line 13) recalls another layer to loss—the loss of something the speaker will never have in the first place, which is the real-time experience of Kashmir. “Negative” itself is a word associated with loss, lack, and absence, and it thus emphasizes the poem’s theme of estrangement and yearning.
The Subjective Nature of Memory
Memory is seldom photographic; in other words, it never reproduces experience exactly. The poem cleverly examines this theme through the metaphor of photography itself. The speaker’s memory of Kashmir is “out of focus” (Line 12), like a picture taken with a shaky hand or an unadjusted lens. Parts of this blurred picture are negative, comparable to black dots on a developed photograph. These negative areas denote gaps in memory and memories that have never been allowed to form. What the speaker does not experience directly—that is, what they do experience indirectly—also leaves behind a memory, and one that is all the more scarring because it is secondhand and vicarious, perhaps formed through someone else’s recollection or anecdote. Yet, the exile from Kashmir does not mean an end to the memory-making process. Through these complex ideas, the speaker explores the idiosyncratic way memories are made and retained.
Though the speaker’s memories of Kashmir are personal, they hold larger implications for the nature of memories. Because memories are so subjective, people’s recollections of the Kashmiri conflict also differ, depending on their national and political alliances as well as their lived reality. To all outsiders, Kashmir is a memento, flat as a postcard. The speaker can experience these memories now only as two-dimensional photos. It is only those who live in the territory whose memories are more three-dimensional.
