READING POETRY LESSON 14: GAY AND LESBIAN POETRY THE CORRESPONDENT BY AGHA SHAHID ALI

Transcription

1 READING POETRY LESSON 14: GAY AND LESBIAN POETRY THE CORRESPONDENT BY AGHA SHAHID ALI Read the poem and note down your thoughts on it before proceeding to the analysis. -- I say, "There's no way back to your country," I tell him he must never leave. He cites the world: his schedule. I set up barricades: the mountain routes are damp; there, dead dervishes damascene the dark. "I must leave now," his voice ablaze. I take off--it's my last resort--my shadow. And he walks--there's no electricity-- back into my dark, murmurs Kashmir!, lights (to a soundtrack of exploding grenades)

2 a dim kerosene lamp. "We must give back the hour it sheen. or this spell will never end...quick," he says, "I've just come--with videos--from Sarajevo." His footage is priceless with sympathy, close-ups in slow motion, from bombed sites to the dissolve of mosques in colonnades. Then, wheelchairs on a ramp, burning. He fast-forwards: the scene: the sun: a man in formal wear: he plays on the sidewalk his unaccompanied cello, the hour turned, dusk-slowed, to Albinoni, only the Adagio as funeral rites before the stars dazzle, polished to blades above a barbed-wire camp. The cellist disappears. The screen fills--first with soldiers, then the dead, their gaze fractured white with subtitles. Whose echo inhabits the night? The phone rings. I think he will leave. I ask: "When will the satellites

3 transmit my songs, carry Kashmir, aubades always for dawns to stamp True! across seas?" The stars careen down, the lamp dies. He hangs up. A haze settles over us. He opens the window, points to convoys in the mountains, army trucks with dimmed lights. He wants exclusive rights to this dream, its fused quartz of furtive shades. He's been told to revamp his stories, reincarnadine their gloss. I light a candle. He'll erase Bosnia, I feel. He will rewind to zero, film from there a way back to his country, bypassing graves than in blacks and whites climb ever up the hills. The wax cascades down the stand, silver clamp to fasten this dream, end it unseen. In the faltering light, he surveys what's left. He zooms madly into my shadow.

4 ANALYSIS Have you spent some time thinking about this poem? If not, go back and do so before you read on. The Correspondent describes an exiled Bosnian filming a documentary about the situation in his country. The context is a homoerotic relationship: the speaker is Kashmiri, his lover from Sarajevo: I say There s no way back to your country, I tell him he must never leave. He cites the world: his schedule. I set up barricades: the mountain routes are damp; there, dead dervishes damascene the dark. I must leave now, his voice ablaze. I take off it s my last resort my shadow. And he walks there s no electricity back into my dark, murmurs Kashmir!, lights (to a soundtrack of exploding grenades) a dim kerosene lamp. In the opening lines, the desire for the lover to remain in one s presence is also directed by the realisation that there is no way back to his home country for the speaker s partner. As

5 a last resort to get his lover to stay, the speaker takes off his shadow. Lest the reader should think that this is accomplished by the simple act of turning out the lights, the poet quickly provides the information that there is no electricity. The only remaining explanation, then, is one that was suggested earlier in the book: that the speaker has his country stitched to his shadow, and that despite the similarity in the political circumstances of their respective lands, it is only by shedding the mantle of national identity that he can convince his lover to remain with him. The act of taking off one s shadow is also reminiscent of taking off one s clothes; Ali suggests that sexual intimacy is a space in which national identities do not matter: indeed, that they cannot matter if genuine connections between people are to be forged. In the following stanzas, he describes viewing the footage that his lover has filmed in Bosnia for a documentary that is priceless with sympathy in its capturing of the state of the country, from bombed sites / to the dissolve of mosques in colonnades. The documentary goes on to capture with the lens various close-ups depicting the predicament of Bosnians: a solitary musician dressed in formal wear playing his cello on the sidewalk; the barbed-wire fence of a concentration camp; and the dead, whose gaze is fractured white with subtitles. The poem ends with the lovers agreeing that the filmmaker should depict Kashmir in a documentary as well. As he lights a candle, the speaker reflects: He ll erase Bosnia, I feel. He will rewind to zero, film from there a way back to his country,

6 bypassing graves that in blacks and whites climb ever up the hills. The wax cascades down the stand, silver clamp to fasten this dream, end it unseen. In the faltering light, he surveys what s left. He zooms madly into my shadow. The only way to recapture one s sense of one s homeland, then, seems to be to erase one s definitive ideas of it and to begin anew, to rewind to zero and to work one s way back to it. The process of capturing a land and its people through the process of filmmaking becomes an endeavour here to write into being one s understanding of what one sees. Significantly, the filmmaker begins his documentary on Kashmir by zooming madly in to his lover s shadow. Ali suggests that the only route to understanding lands and cultures is through the personal, and through the sensuous.