ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the American-Kashmiri Poet Agha Shahid Ali’s collection of poems The Country Without a Post Office. The chapter proposes to read the book as resisting reductive narratives of occupation, and history, which have come to be associated with it, and seeks to examine its depiction of the complex relationship between contemporary history and the melancholic nostalgia for the erstwhile empire, the nodes of remembrances, the specificities of this memory, and finally the relationship between memory and the subject. I use empire to signify not only the days of the Raj and corresponding Dogra rule in Kashmir but also the imperialistic project of postcolonial India pre-90s where the patronage of New-Delhi created an elite class like Abdullahs, Bakshis, or Aghas that benefited greatly from it, and acquired significant cultural and material capital from allying with the state. The contradictions, re-articulations, and modernist bricolage must all be seen as a way of unholding, a mirroring of community trauma, witness and meanings of living in a contested history. The poems in their multitude of forms, fractures, allusions, and contexts foreground the limits of traditional representations. This permits a resistance to chronologies of traditional histories and oppressive discursive spaces by making poetry the vehicle of potentiality and possibility, rather than a static space of mourning. Paradoxically, the poems also yearn simultaneously for the privilege accrued from colonization, which manifests in new-old forms and spaces that articulate the different (sometimes contradictory) longings at different times. Both these contradictory strands exist simultaneous in his poetry, erasing and accentuating each other, demonstrating the necessity of guarding public memory and poetic testimony against generic, binarizing, and hegemonic paradigms.
