ABSTRACT
Agha Shahid Ali is the most gifted poet of his generation, gay or straight. It is noteworthy that his was the only name mentioned among poets by Salman Rushdie in the New Yorker article on post-independence writing. Ali, a Kashmiri gay, loves a poet who celebrates Palestinian male martyrs. In his own The Country without A Post Office: Poems, Ali has hymned a mythic Kashmiri boy-lover of his who falls to the occupying Indian forces’ bullets. He now can sympathise with Darwish’s Palestinian male martyrs in the translated poem sequence from the Arabic of Darwish included in his own book Rooms are Never Finished. In his article ‘Memory’s Homeland: Agha Shahid Ali and the Hybrid Ghazal’, Malcolm Woodland brilliantly argues that for postcolonial poets nostalgia for home is the content but the style of their English writing is ‘hybrid’, harking back to writing-styles of their homeland, e.g., the Urdu ghazal as in Ali’s case.
