THE HALF-INCH HIMALAYAS (1987, Wesleyan University Press)

Because of his status in American poetry as the prophet of the ghazal, it is especially interesting to look at Agha Shahid Ali’s earlier work. Moving backwards from the ghazal collection Call Me Ishmael Tonight (2003), through the long-lined, historically-alluding collections like The Country Without a Post Office, to his early poems, particularly The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), the lines get shorter, the line breaks more jarring, the punctuation more irregular and the language more personal.

This poetics runs in tandem with speakers who have fallen out of time. “A Lost Memory of Delhi” places the speaker in a time where “[he is] not born” and he his watching his newly-wed parents: “[His] father / He is younger than [him]” and “[his] mother is a recent bride.”  Moreover, “They don’t they won’t // hear [him],” making it clear that that the speaker has come unpinned from time and has floated back to a memory that could not possibly be his and in which he is attempting to interrupt “the night of [his] being.” But this is true of the parents, too, even though they are bound in a more discreet time and space where they are able to interact with each other. The house that they enter “is always faded in photographs” and oil lamp that lights it that speaker “saw broken in the attic.” The past-perfect, in this case, is treated like the present.  In this space where the past coexists with the future and the future coexists with the past, it is the present that is absent, the present from which the speaker has fallen out into a non-presence, where he cannot be perceived.

Later on in the collection, in “Vacating an Apartment,” this idea of imperceptibility and ghostliness reappears. The speaker is the voice of the now-absent (perhaps dead) previous tenant: “They ignore my love affair with the furniture / … / The landlord gives them my autopsy; / they sign the lease.” In a third poem, “Survivor,” the speaker’s place in his mother’s house has been supplanted by a strange sort of double: “The mirror gives up / my face to him // He calls to my mother in my voice // She turns.” The primary tension in these poems comes from the speaker’s presence, or rather, the dramatic irony of the fact that the others cannot see him and are carrying about their lives while he looks on.  In “A Lost Memory of Delhi” the newly-weds are about to conceive a child; in “Vacating an Apartment” a young, pregnant couple are signing a lease for an apartment; and in “Survivor” the speaker’s mother is enjoying a different son. The primary action in the poem does not involve the speaker, cutting the poems into two halves that the speaker is reaching to reconcile but cannot.

The exploration of dual times, spaces and identities that was previously handled through Ali’s short lines and the delay caused by abrupt line breaks in his free-verse poems would seem to lead directly to the appropriation of the ghazal form. The ghazal that yokes unrelated couplets to coexist through a unifying refrain and preceding rhyme. Interestingly, the multiplicities can now coexist peacefully, and the tension is merely the momentary delay, through the long lines, in the reconciliation of the refrain at the end of the couplet.  Consider these examples:

from “Of It All”

After Algebra there was Geometry—and then Calculus—
But I’d already failed the arithmetic of it all.

White men across the U.S. love their wives’ curries—
I say O No! to the turmeric of it all.

“Suicide represents…a privileged moment…”
Then what keeps you—and me00from being sick of it all?

from “Even the Rain”

Of this pear-shaped orange’s perfumed twist, I will say:
Extract Vermouth from the bergamot, even the rain.

How did the Enemy love you–with earth? air? and fire?
He held just one thing back till he got even: the rain.

This is God’s site for a new house of executions?
You swear by the Bible, Despot, even the rain?

From “In Arabic”

At an exhibition of miniatures, what Kashmiri hairs!
Each paisley inked into a golden tress in Arabic.

This much fuss about a language I don’t know? So one day
Perfume from a dress may let you digress in Arabic.

A “Guide for the Perplexed” was written—believe me—
By Cordoba’s Jew—Maimonides—in Arabic.

Look We Have Coming to Dover!

Opening Nagra’s award-winning debut collection Look We Have Coming to Dover! is a poem meant to be heard, not read, starring an Indian immigrant to Britain, a newly-married, drinking, dancing workingman, brimming with energy and appetite. A more lovable version of Berryman’s Henry/Mr. Bones, he is talking to us, we are almost certain, though we don’t know who he thinks we are. With a vulgar voice uncannily reminiscent of one’s Punjabi uncle, the speaker is of a sort rarely (successfully) rendered in Indian Diaspora poetry, which has hitherto featured elegant, editorial speakers who wield the Queen”s English with ease, self-consciousness, and occasional guilt. Not told through the mediation of second or third generation children, nor the subdued hindsight of a grandfather, the poem and its speaker make of the past the present.

On one hand, Nagra does what poets do with their immigrant speakers. Things exist in pairs: his English pop culture references are mixed with Punjabi syntax, he tangos to the Pakeezah record, his wife makes him roti at home while his mate Jimmy John’s girlfriend shoves “his plate of / chicken pie and dry white / potato” at him “like Hilda Ogden”. In nearly each line, Nagra gives the speaker both the ordering force of Old English style alliteration and conversational idiosyncrasies, making him at once a bard and an enthusiastic friend. This happens right off the bat, in the memorable first stanza: “Di barman’s bell done dinging / so I phone di dimply-mississ, / Putting some gas on cookah, / bonus pay I bringin!”

On the other hand, the polarity between English and the speaker’s “Punglish” diminishes when we read the only other italicized dialogue in the poem, spoken by Jimmy John’s girlfriend: “Heeya, eaht yor chuffy dinnaaah!” And as the poem progresses, it becomes difficult to distinguish between the dualities the speaker contains, until they become one in the final sentences: “Darling is so pirouettey with us / for whirlwind married month, / that every night, though by day / we work factory-hard, she always / have disco of drumstick in pot. / Hot. Waiting for me.” No longer taking turns, there is at once linguistic convolution and eloquence, marriage and bachelorhood, food and sex, weariness and humor, tenderness and machismo, et cetera.

Nagra complicates the more-than-oft-discussed binaries that exist in the immigrant (Punjabi versus English, opportunity versus nostalgia, for instance) with a verisimilitude rare in other Diaspora poets. In “Darling and Me!” these binaries do not merely push against each other, interacting at the interface. Rather, they enter and become each other, become a new territory that is bordered by neither Old Country. The shortcomings of the speaker’s English—the run-on sentences, adverbs acting like verbs, the expressionism of a barely-comprehensible chain of monosyllabic words, the gerunds that take the places of indicatives—fuel the eloquence and velocity of a voice that celebrates rather than yearns. His language is not broken, but galloping across the planks of a never-ending bridge.

Writing Home: Issues in Diaspora Writing is a critical reflections column kept by poet and LR staff writer Mrigaa Sethi.