The poems of Alamgir Hashmi

Literary Review, Summer, 1994 by Burton Raffel

Poet's cannot be kept from writing poetry, thank God. Censorship may interfere, as it did for decades in the late, unlamented Soviet Union, and as for a time it did with Alamgir Hashmi, Pakistan's fine English-language poet. Exile may interfere even more basically, not only cutting off a poet's contact with his language and culture, but even persuading a fully matured Russian writer like Joseph Brodsky to attempt work in what is all too clearly a borrowed tongue: anyone who bothers to read Brodsky's lame, stilted English-language verse can see for himself the effects of such linguistic and literary sterilization. Poets like Cszelaw Milosz, who lives in an adopted country but continues to work in his native Polish, can and do survive and prosper, and it is possible for a poet transplanted early enough, like the Israeli Yehuda Amichai, who was born in Germany but writes, now, only in Hebrew, also to thrive.

But what of poets who are born and live in one culture, speaking and leading their lives in the language(s) of that land, but who write in the sort of "world language" that English has become, participating by the accidents of time and history in a long, deeply established tradition to which they bear only the most tangential of relationships? Located as they necessarily are along an outer fringe, tilling a literary soil and tending linguistic flowers which have never existed nor bloomed anywhere even remotely in sight, are they not exposed to the same perils that hamper and oppress, even when they do not utterly destroy, poets like the pseudo-Greeks of Byzantium, who fill the later pages of The Greek Anthology with well-polished, narrowly conceived artifice? Not exiles, neither are they supported by the sort of transplanted communities that nourish writers like the Greek Constantine Cavafy, living and writing in Alexandria, or the great Hebrew poet, Chayim Nachman Bialik, who not only flourished while still in Russia, but could no longer write poetry once he had come to live in Palestine.

The answer, it seems to me, is that there are no rules, no formulas. Everything depends on the poet and how he lives both his workaday life and the inner, literary existence from which poems come. The poet is in a sense in permanent exile everywhere: his relationship to the everyday world is not necessarily adversary or hostile, but for his poetry to grow and flourish there must be a distinct, a palpable tension, between writer and written about. No classical Greek was ever more profoundly immersed in the active life around him than Archilochos, yet it is hard to believe that any other professional, mercenary warrior of the seventh century B.C. saw his world quite as he did:

Some Saian mountaineer

Struts today with my shield.

I threw it down by a bush and ran

When the fighting got hot.

Life seemed somehow more precious.

It was a beautiful shield.

I know where I can buy another

Exactly like it, just as round.

(Translated by Guy Davenport)

Nor is it accidental that I cite Archilochos, here, or that he is not the only Greek poet whose name I mention. Aurangzeb Alamgir Hashmi's poetry has something of the lyrical dash, the brightly celebratory self-assurance, of many Greek poets, ancient and modern alike:

The Trojans

Thanks.

They were really super,

extensible

to the imagination's

own stretch;

be it Sparta,

Salamis,

Corinth or Troy,

or the ebony horse's

wonder;

the whole pack;

venturing

one by one,

protected

from the legendary virus,

and with each

warlike thrust

from island to island

making

the unwritten history.

To be this deft, this clever; to achieve so genuinely bravura a tone, and in a borrowed language and a literary tradition even more remote from one's roots than the tongue in which it speaks - these things seem to me in themselves a kind of major miracle. (Only the odd and probably superfluous "the" in the final line vaguely suggests the cultural gulfs this poem has had to cross, the linguistic heights it has had to scale.)

But for all its lovely sparkle, its delightful wit, if this small, late poem from his 1992 volume, Sun and Moon, deft and clever and vastly accomplished as it is, in fact marked the boundaries of Alamgir Hashmi's verse, I would not have been moved to write this essay - for no matter how much I as a practicing poet admire technical virtuosity, I ask more of poems that I will want to read over and over, poems that I will want to carry with me in my head, wherever I go. Hashmi's lyrical verse is capable of both virtuosity and a highly individual brand (and blend) of thought and emotion. Here, for example, is the opening of a 1983 poem, "Crusoe's Island, 1976":

The French gun in the park has dated.

It is aimed at the water.

Long silent, it still fires a contour shot

into the island's body, its angular map.

I read as I walk along,

these words that time has written here

wave after wave after wave

of the ancient, emerald sea.

The last one broke against the shore at midnight.

Hashmi has "our" history at his fingertips, as well as his own; he also has Robert Lowell's sense of being both in and out of that history, those histories; and he has, too, an almost Yeatsian sense for the gracefully circumscribed grand gesture, the sagely polite invocation of classic images that some, less controlled, are fond of calling symbols." "Has the year turned over?" he asks at the end of a poem commemorating a visit to D.H. Lawrence's New Mexico ranch, and then answers, soberly but as ever elegantly, "We will have to buy a new calendar / when we get there." Unlike the professional critic or the perpetual student, he does not struggle to invest words with more than words can bear. But neither does he try to keep words in their place, or use them to trim down a reality that art can engage but which it cannot, as he well knows, ever hope to master. "Let no words imitate / what is explicit," he begins a poem "For B," and then moves at once to the particular, to the observable, to the perceived facts that are the only true stuff of poems, as indeed they are the only true stuff of all human (and therefore ineluctably fragile and fragmented) perception: a yellow rose still / in the garden that was yesterday, / illumined by a sudden shaft of light / from the heaven . . ." The poem ends: ". . . and this morning's dew is neutral, the best / evidence - not tears that only flow or fall; / you and I and our world reflect / in each drop briefly to vanish in the sun." I am reminded, reading these lines, of a Paris street scene, painted by Foujita, an early twentieth-century Japanese artist much influenced by Picasso and others. We are clearly looking at Paris; even the French words, carefully lettered in, emphatically enforce that knowledge. But what Western eye could possibly see Paris as Foujita sees it? What Western poet - for Hashmi remains unabashedly the Oriental he was born as - would see human life vanishing like dew in the sun, in quite this way? Hashmi acknowledges this fundamental birth-difference, over and over, in wryly Western but calmly Eastern ways: a poem about natural disasters, from his 1984 book, Neither this time / nor that place, concludes with this account of his young father, sent on a relief mission, once when "Quetta was smithereens" and "Government packed off fresh graduates / to bury death":