When she was a young girl, she wrote a poem called Laments at Bullet, where she imagined a bullet as a piece of metal protesting that it did not want to be fashioned into something that can kill, but is made into something else.
The poem was published by Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Language & Arts. An anthropologist who teaches in the US, Ather Zia was born in Srinagar.
She defines herself as a visceral poet. Another poet says everybody here in the Indian-held Kashmir is a poet of loss, memory and madness. In a curfewed state, words flow from anguish deriving their matter and despair from scant food, black balloons, blood on the streets and burning tyres.
There’s also the narrative of an enormous sadness manifest in the news of blinding of children, the wailing of mothers who have lost their sons and the madness of frustration of not being able to counter the media narrative of the state of things on the ground.
It’s the poet’s burden to fight against forgetfulness, the new generation of resistance poets in the Valley say.
The poetry of resistance in IHK has a long history. From Sheikh ul Alam to Lal Ded to Habba Khatoon to Samad Mir to Rasul Mir, the folk Ladisha, Chakar, to the slogans and songs and elegies that echo in the streets of Kashmir, and the poems that boys who picked up arms for liberation from India wrote in their diaries, poetry has always been central to the resistance.
Poetry here becomes part of political activism, it extends the life of events, which you may be forced to forget, a massacre, a custodial killing or disappearance.
According to another poet and academic Huzaifa Pandit, in the ’90s, there arose a specific genre of music that spoke of grief and longing of a mother and sister looking for a messenger to deliver their pain to the son who had crossed the border.
“Although this has not yet been catalogued, but that too must be considered under this rubric. Agha Shahid’s Country without the post office could be seen as arguably inaugurating the spectrum.
Post-2008 uprising, the genre achieved centre stage due to the availability of social media. Kashmiris – both Kashmiri Muslims and Kashmiri Pandits began expressing themselves in unprecedented ways,” he says. Dark nights and curfewed days led them to versify their experiences, they say.
“You only have to look at the two empty graves waiting for Maqbool Bhat and Afzal Guru to know why memory and witness are precious for people in IHK, who suffer the occupation in all possible ways of being and existing – dead, alive and the unborn,” Zia says.
“When people visited Wani’s grave, they made sure to pinch some soil from there. You know why? To keep in homes; the earth from martyr’s grave is said to keep away evil. That is how he exists in IHK lives and will continue to live in artistic expressions in IHK.”
Poetry has evolved into a barometer of pain here in a protracted, low-intensity war in IHK; a war that bleeds every moment from the battlefield into the courtyard, a commodity such as milk becomes symbolic of how the occupation and siege have seized every banal reality of life.
Milk is a mundane, but also a much-needed nutrient, that feeds the young and fortifies adults and the old; it is everywhere – that Doodhwala on the Nukkad, within arm’s reach – and when that measly commodity becomes scarce – and you are forced to drink milk-less tea – it points to the extraordinary siege on your life.
It forces one to think how hard life has become, you cannot walk two steps; how constrained you are, how occupied, how oppressed your daily life is. Having said that, talking about milk is also a trope in resistance movements, which you see in the case of Northern Ireland where mothers protested around scarcity of milk; Mirza Waheed also mentions it in his book The Collaborator, Zia, an anthropologist based in Colorado says. “I am not a trained poet in any sense.
I pour out and do not meddle with what comes on paper much, to the extent that some may find me not having enough finesse. I don’t see poetry only as an art, for me it is an essential part of survival, like brushing one’s teeth or hair,” she says. “Since, often, our first response is to shy away from pain or pretend to overcome it, for me, poetry allows meeting it head-on.
It is like taking your wound in your hand, and looking at it from all sides, from all dimensions. It helps you size up your wound, and what wounds you. Hence, understanding a political wound through resistance poetry is also a means to fortify the vision and strategy for freedom and liberation.”
Zia, who is also the editor-founder of IHK Lit, says all forms of poetry are a resistance of a certain type. In a condition of occupation like Kashmir, in a climate of repression, poetry becomes a foremost lifesaver in the absence direct expression, and also of prose that can become life-threatening, she adds.
“Today, if you look beyond Agha Shahid Ali, who is seen as the de-facto father of resistance poetry in Kashmir and check out the contemporary Kashmiri poetry, you will see how poets have borne a witness and a testament to the political times.
You will see how words have been used to resist the political siege and its travails,” she says. Resistance poetry stands as a witness to correct what they call are the lies of the oppressor and of history.
It is then the poet’s burden to count the losses and dodge the comforts of forgetting their years of yearning and bloodbath.
Like Uzma Falak, a young poet from Srinagar, says the realisation and urgency to witness, remember and rupture silence, took root quite early and this later shaped into an urgency to tell stories bottom-up, beyond statistics and hierarchies. She was born in Srinagar in 1989.
Most of the new poets of resistance were born during the peak of militancy, and a few even call themselves the children of curfew. They were welcomed with the shattering sounds of the bullets, they say.
Like Falak says she grew up in an air replete with longing and loss and it only grew stronger and intense as she grew older, trying to make sense of the everyday and its intersections with the occupation.
“Conversations of children of my generation with our elders are marked by three distinct remarks shaping our identities and imagination: A sigh, almost a lament— Your generation only witnessed desolation.
A foretelling; certainty in our uncertain lives — The world is ending! A remembering, our memory before our birth— You brought Tehreek (freedom movement) along!” Suvir Kaul, who is AM Rosenthal Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and who published a collection of Kashmiri poetry translation and critique called Garden’s and Graves says in the absence of any hope of a political response, many IHK’s have taken to venting their anger and despair, and their determination, through poems.
After 1947, both Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor and Dina Nath Nadim wrote poems that exhorted their countrymen to fight wrongs of all kinds, those perpetrated by the rich and those perpetrated by the powerful who denied Kashmiris their political rights.
Their poems too count as a species of resistance literature, says Kaul. “In the last 25 years, though, many poets have written poems about the violence they have known and about its destruction of lives and shared social relations. I have argued in my book that on occasions when writing prose (including on FB) is dangerous enough to get you arrested and tortured or even disappeared, poetry, which is allusive and open to ambiguities and misreadings, is a powerful form of the expression of political feelings.
We have to learn to read and to listen, for even when poems are not overtly on political themes, they are deeply political,” he says.
He quotes a verse titled Then and Today by Naji Munawar, who won the Sahitya Akademi award in 2002 and hails from Shopian, where the poet describes a night in the Valley.
Those are the experiences that fuel political anger and activism today, Kaul says. “Poems from conflict zones are sure guides to the intensity of feelings that result from prolonged conflicts, and which, over time, play a significant role in the perpetuation of the conflict,” writes Kaul who proves, in this book that poetry is the bedrock of serious prose.
As he was collecting poems, Kaul found that “the scholarly pursuit of poetry is no more immune to the ravages of civic strife than is life itself”.
“Strikes and curfews, public protests and police responses, ensured that no one left home unless it was absolutely necessary.
I spent days indoors or on our balcony instead of in conversation with writers or aficionados of poetry, and the sounds that carried occasionally were the slogans and shouts of massed crowds, as well as the sharper retort of tear-gas guns and rifles.
Occasionally wisps of tear gas would float past our home, located as it is on the edge of a volatile neighbourhood that has long been a stronghold of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (one of the several political groups allied under the banner of the Hurriyat Conference, which now leads the movement for political self-determination).
The musicality, formal cadences, and intelligence of poetry seemed very far away, replaced by the muscular and polarised noise of a violence-torn public sphere,” he writes. Dead, beaten, they keep me alive,” he writes in the book.
“The centrality of the poet and the poetry in the context of IHK is put is context by Sanjay Kak, whose film Jhashn-e-Azadi used poetry written by the bards of Kashmir to juxtapose it with a patriotic song about freedom and independence written by Shakeel Badayuni, and composed by Naushad, and originally sung by Mohammed Rafi.”
In the wake of the killing of Burhan Wani, the ensuing protests, the prolonged curfew and the internet and mobile phone ban, many resorted to writing verses to express despair, outrage and a sense of betrayal.
“Poetry has a very extensive place in the lives of people in Kashmir, and my guess is, it always has.
Kashmiris may not have been willing to speak about their own experiences of the darkness that they had been through, but they would easily slip into poetry to try and share their feelings.
In the absence of any other kind of archive of their experience, and of their pain, it was often only the distilled, even elliptical, words of poets that seemed able to express what people were wanting to say,” Kak says. As a poet says, they have to set the record straight.
They have to express the anguish of staying indoors fearing a bullet might just find its way into their homes, and the horrific sight of blood on the streets and the blinded boys and girls languishing in hospitals.
Most of them started writing around 2008-2010 when violence erupted in the Valley. Not everyone picks up stones, Umair Bhat, a young poet from Lolab Valley, says. And if you don’t pick up stones and go into the streets, you write. A few were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. According to reports, the incidence of mental illness is high in the state given the long years of insurgency and the collateral damages of war. Silence is not a choice, they say.
“I was almost possessed by the idea of madness and began exploring it through my works —the madness of the state in its oppression and madness of the people in their love for freedom.
My poems also cradle imageries from my (maternal) grandmother’s home – of seasons, windows, martyrdom, feet, yarn, rivers, ivy, skies, objects and spaces as sites of memory and stories which my (paternal) grandmother narrated to me as a child, which opened the doors of my imagination.
A common thread in my work, however, would be a memory. A counter-memory. A memory antithetic to the state memory, to the oppressor’s memory,” she says.
“My work is a site of this conflict as well. ”The work coming out from Kashmir is distinct and the purpose is to subvert the idea of normalcy orchestrated by the state, they say.
“There is the lot of Winter and Autumn of loss and pain in our work, but Spring and Summer too of resilience and sacrifice too,” Falak says.
Courtesy: dailyo.in
