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In Memoriam
Agha Shahid Ali
1949–2001
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by Ellen Bryant Voigt
Agha Shahid Ali was—sui generis among poets, a
fractious crew—universally beloved, a reasonable response:
he loved the world. Loved it with unremitting disregard for
anything petty or pinched, timid or false, tepid or dull,
preferring the primary colors. This made him fearless but did
not cost a fine discrimination. As his students knew well,
he was forthright against the lazy and the conventional, in
politics and poetics. Of poetry in his chosen tongue he was a
fierce and learned fan. Other life-sustaining pleasures included
good food (he was a terrific cook), lively talk (he would provide
it), disco music (he danced with elegance and sang along), and
American idiom of all stripes. He liked jokes and gossip; he was never hurtful or mean;
he was a tease.
Stricken with brain cancer, Shahid undertook the cheering-up of
his worried friends ("but how are YOU?" he'd ask). When his vision
permanently blurred, following a surgical procedure, and he could
no longer read, he memorized "Lycidas" and would recite it for
you if you asked.
Agha Shahid Ali's published collections demonstrate how such a
firmly attractive character—a temperament of unstinting
openness—learns to find its authentic expression in poems.
There is, from the start, his technical virtuosity, that precise
intersection of confidence, discipline, and play. Shahid was
proud of his world record for composing in English most canzones,
a fiercely demanding form of extreme repetition; and he persuaded
innumerable and some unlikely American poets to commit the
elaborate ghazal (these comprise his anthology Ravishing (Dis)Unities),
a form he mastered in translation (notably of Faiz) and in his
own work.
Meanwhile, Shahid's subjects supplied sufficient shadow, as the
poems shouldered the twin burdens of history and dislocation,
his ill-fated homeland made present for an American audience
clearly ignorant of it. In his elegiac new book, Rooms Are
Never Finished, the lyric amplitude throughout interweaves
mythic context and personal narrative—his closeness to his
mother, her death, the fraught return of her body to
Kashmir—yoking the individual and the global. We read, in part,
to understand "the other." He wrote, in part, to help us
understand.
Keats said one first must make the soul that makes the
poems. Agha Shahid Ali possessed a rare and undisguised
radiance of soul. He lived to get that radiance into his poems.
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