ABSTRACT
In seeking to explain the dynamics of disruption, and attending potentialities made possible by poetry produced from Kashmir, Suvir Kaul concludes in Of Gardens and Graves that “the performative elements of a poem emphasise the emotional and psychological intensities side-lined in the affectively neutral tones of news reportage, policy documents, or standard historiography” (Kaul 2016, 136). Even as loss is a consistent and constant presence in Kashmir, it is equally true that the routines of reclaiming, resistance and dissent exceed simplistic mourning and find representation in poetic imagination which subverts “the statist strategies of dehumanisation, victimisation and pathologisation of the resistors” (Falak 2018). Poetry provides, therefore, a more privileged and compelling way to analyse Kashmiri subjectivities. This chapter proposes to illustrate these practices of visibility through a close reading of selected poems by Uzma Falak, who writes in English, and Rumuz-e-Bekhudi – the pen name of Hena Khan, who usually writes in Kashmiri, both contemporary writers, who both started writing post-2010. Such poetry, I argue, performs both the broken self and community, by re-articulating the routine of profound loss and betrayal, as it spirals into the “vertigo of traumatized subjectivity” by exceeding the mere poetic and drawing critical attention to the othering of Kashmir.
