Dear Shahid,
In response to the territorial dispute in your Kashmiri homeland, you declared to a friend during your dying days, “I wish all this had not happened…This dividing of the country, the divisions between people—Hindu, Muslim, Muslim, Hindu—you can't imagine how much I hate it. It makes me sick.” Similarly, we may feel enraged, appalled, dismayed, and frustrated with recent events that emphasize those “divisions between people” here in America and around the world. And as writers, we may find ourselves wondering how to make sense of our impulse to write when other, larger matters seem far more pressing.
Just months before you died, terrorists struck the Twin Towers, tragically killing thousands. In the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center, hundreds of men—many of whom were later released without charge—were detained at Guantánamo Bay indefinitely and denied the protections established by the Geneva Conventions. A few years later, in the midst of continued American military presence in Iraq, horrific stories of prisoner abuse began to emerge from the Abu Ghraib prison and other detention facilities. And in the face of humanity’s ongoing struggles—with violence, with cruelty, with oppression, with poverty—it may be easy for a writer to think, what’s the point? How can the creation of art have any effect on whether East will be pitted against West, black against white, straight against gay, or—as in your own disputed Kashmiri homeland—Muslim against Hindu?
If literature confronts us with our humanity, if it proves to us the shared desires and struggles of our individual lives, then literature, particularly writing by Asian Americans and other minorities, is arguably more important now than ever before. If prose and poetry permit us to inhabit, temporarily, another “I” such that our own particular sense of self is temporarily suspended and indeed, ultimately transformed, then we urgently need the voices of Asian American writers to inform our collective national/transnational/international sensibilities. Why? Because so long as we can firmly, cleanly, resolutely draw a line between Us and Them, we position ourselves to do harm, whether that harm comes in the form of what may seem to be a benign type of ignorance or as the active exploitation or persecution of the Other.
We are a generation that understands—through personal, familial, and cultural memory—another land, another life, another pulse in our blood. We ride subways in New York City but rickshaws rumble in our bones. We speak and think in English but recognize the music of another, older language. In the echoes of a panhandler’s jingling cup in San Francisco, we hear someone calling baksheesh. We have experienced dinnertime not as an event for quiet conversation but as an anchor for lively discussions about politics, poetry, for endless hours of adda. And unlike previous generations of immigrants whose ties to the “old country” have contributed to and have been subsumed by the dominant American culture, many of us may live in this nation for two, three, even four generations and still hear the question, “Where are you from?” Often, our names, our religious affiliations, and the colors of our skin, eyes, and hair continue to mark us as perceived outsiders.
Even while we remain the Other, we are fully immersed in American culture, helping to influence it just as we are influenced by it. With bonds to our native homelands that are strong, or tenuous. Through our work in laundromats, hospitals, mini-marts, corporations, taxis, schools, and in the government. Thru music and dance. Through visual arts and political engagement. Through language and literature, words that enable us to both illuminate and question what we experience as we navigate an increasingly globalized planet.
Because we often straddle two worlds, we have an opportunity to become translators and negotiators—translators of bicultural experiences and negotiators of ever-shifting identities that hold cities, countries, or entire continents. If we can create a literature that embodies the nuances, ambiguities, contradictions, and complications of our experiences, observations, and imaginations, is it possible that we might help to shape a world that is more compassionate, more generous, and more humane?
In my view, whether one’s particular Asian American identity plays prominently in one’s work is less important than whether one’s work strives to move us toward nuggets of truth. Because the truths of human experience are messy, complicated things that involve a necessary blurring of boundaries and divisions, the very divisions that enable us to pit one human against another. And for many Asian Americans, our lives are, by their very nature, both complex and contradictory.
Shahid, we can’t even decide what “Asian American” means, or define exactly who an “Asian American” is. But in many cases, we are willing to let our particularities fall away in the name of solidarity, to form alliances within and across minority groups (and beyond, with allies of every hue). We live in a time of great cultural tumult, one in which formerly marginalized minorities, through growing numbers and influence, are bringing established norms and notions into question. That turbulence holds an opportunity, a chance to forge a new American ethos emerging from a state of flux.
In emphasizing the importance of the arts in education, American author and activist Maxine Greene claimed, “sometimes I think that what we want to make possible is the living of lyrical moments, moments at which human beings (freed to feel, to know, and to imagine) suddenly understand their own lives in relation to all that surrounds.” And so, if Asian American writers can—in part, through a culturally hybrid perspective—contribute to our understanding of other lives, other stories, and other histories, perhaps all of us can begin to better understand our own—and in turn our relationships with each other, our nation, and our world.
In one of your early poetry collections, a voice urges, “The world is full of paper. // Write to me.” Shahid, we are writing—in search of the lyrical moments that may help us transcend our divisions, the moments that will set us free.
With deep respect for your literary legacy—
Ruba
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Ali, Agha Shahid. “Stationery.” The Half-Inch Himalayas. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1987.
Greene, M. Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute lectures on aesthetic education. New York: Teachers College Press, 1999.
Ghosh, Amitav. “‘The Ghat of the Only World’: Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn.” Thenation.com. The Nation , 11 Feb. 2002. Web. 14 June 2010.
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Dilruba Ahmed’s debut book of poems, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf, 2011), won the 2010 Bakeless Prize for poetry. Ahmed’s writing has appeared in Blackbird, Cream City Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Drunken Boat, and Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry . Web site: www.dilrubaahmed.com.
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