Seeing Afghanistan’s Landscapes Through its Poetry

Anthropology and Humanism, 2017

Migration Letters, 2024

Environmental Concerns find a key space in contemporary literary writings. The main aim is to draw attention towards the rapid threats and negative behaviors towards nature and environment in the wake of modern day climate disasters. Addressing this issue is a global phenomenon that is why concerns have been raised by literary writers from many parts of the world where the issue is seriously considered. In such writings we find a tone of environme1 ntal melancholia and ecological grief. In this connection, the current study aims to investigate the similarities in approaches towards the concerns about disruption in nature’s harmony in the selected Pashto and English poems. The sample of the study consists of Muhammad Israr Atal’s poem ‘Munafiqat’ translated as ‘Hypocrisy’ and William Wordsworth poem ‘The World is Too Much with Us’ from multiple ecocritical theorists such as Cheryll Glotfelty who emphasized the readers to closely investigate a particular text for the representation of natural world. Her groundbreaking book ‘The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology’ (1996) provides many key insights on this relationship. The ideas of Carolyn Merchant as stated in her seminal work ‘The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1990) are also incorporated. The study also takes insights for its analysis from the works of David Harvey’s work ‘Spaces of Hope’ (2000). The main aim of this study is to investigate the similarities in both these works towards critiquing and preserving the environmental values and thus draws attention to imminent ecological perils engulfing the world. Key Words: Ecocirtical Concerns, Nature’s Harmony, Pashto Poetry, English Poetry.

MIT International Journal of English Language & Literature 3.1, 2016

This paper peeps into the poetry of Syed Ali Hamid who is known for his naturalness, cosmopolitan vision and loving heart. He is a poet of desire—desire which creates hopes resulting in a new life. As he writes ghazal in English, he knows how to make his poems beautiful with figures. With his poetry, he experiences life and attempts to search for the philosophical sense of the quest for meaning. He turns the abstract into concrete and thus colours the ontology of desire to make the readers feel its presence.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND TRANSLATION STUDIES (IJELR, 2022

The author in this dissertation discusses the ecological concepts and contextualises them in respect to Afghanistan as re-membered and represented by Atiq Rahimi and Khaled Hosseini in their novels. The researcher attempts here to relate the Afghan nature and the Afghan nation, and their relation to Afghan history and culture. Thus, the paper, with textual references, shows how the land and the peoples of Afghanistan interact and how this is re-membered in the fictions of Atiq Rahimi and Khaled Hosseini. Keywords: Nation, Nature, Culture, Ecology, Ecocriticism, Ecofeminism, Afghanistan.

Clinical Social Work and Health Intervention

For last 2 decades Swat has witnessed changes in almost every aspect of culture, space, and ecology. Among these changes, the environmental crisis remains a major issue addressed by different media outlets and academic and nonacademic organizations. Along with popular narratives and discourses the poets also have their take on the environmental crisis of Swat though mostly ignored in research of cultural and environmental studies. This paper aims to investigate themes of Pashto poetry in context with the environmental crisis. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate how Pashto poetry is situating the environmental crisis of Swat and how poetry works for the preservation of the environment. Findings are based on published sources of poetry, interviews, and informal discussions by using the vignette method for collection of data. The framework of social poetics is used to theorize the environmental crisis and how poets take on the crises. The findings suggest that the poetic e...

2015

The paper looks at the mystique of the poetic process and the manner in which the subterranean cultural and primal patterns of the mind of the poet – Yasmeen Hameed, manifest themselves in the lyrics. Contrary to the western paradigm of duality such patterns are studied in the light of the oriental Sufi tradition where I and you pine for each other. The thee is perceived as the core and the me is in a perpetual quest/voyage gyrating towards the core. The convergence of these two poles is the unison that has both aesthetic/intellectual relevance as well as spiritual resonances for the reader and the poet alike. This gravitational pull finds expression in an idiom that is almost metaphysical in the poetry of Yasmeen Hameed. The paper explores how the two poles of the artistic process, the technical craftsmanship and content converge and finds expression in a language that is transparent as well as veiled. It also studies the way in which the visceral, existential poetic experience con...

Bagh-e Nazar, 2018

The first step to understand phrases and verses in a text is to understand the meanings and combinations correctly. History of Linguistics and Anthropology of Iran suggests that the notation and understanding of landscape has always existed in this country and there is a meaningful relationship between the concept and the imagined space. Landscape is an old and common concept which was used in many primary Hijri centuries’ poems with similar form and varied meanings. The most prevalent changes regarding this term is its meaning which changes from appearance to inside and from an object to a subject and different narratives of seeing are depicted like viewpoint, window, porch, scene, sky and view. The term "landscape" has a set of sublunary and spiritual meanings and contains descriptive and conceptual aspects. Descriptive aspect narrates the appearance and it is an allegory of morals and an introduction to understand the conceptual aspect. This paper studies the concept of landscape in the poems of primary Hijri centuries (3rd to 7th) to indicate its importance and role in the past and now. In order to understand "landscape" and its themes, the old poems of that era are studied here.

Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 13 (2020) 49-62, 2020

Solmaz Sharif's debut poetry collection, Look (2016), has been hailed by critics for its formal experimentation and as a searing indictment of war. Using various words from the 2007 Department of Defense (DOD) Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, Sharif highlights the sterility of the official vocabulary of the US military machine and the 'war on terrorism'. The poet juxtaposes the DOD's lexicon with reflections on personal relationships, family, love and loss along with traces of the multiple sites of home of an Istanbul-born, Iranian-American poet. In this essay, I argue that throughout the collection, the poet engages in a subversive, translative act; Sharif presents an intralin-gual mode of translation in which her poems destabilize the seeming neutrality and sanitizing effect of military vocabulary by consistently juxtaposing it with representations of the effects and consequences of violence, as well as images of intimacy, in order to articulate an anti-war stance.

2019

The lay of a people is often tethered to the lay of the land that they live in or leave behind; for the land holds all the associations of ancestry, heritage, and environment that constitute what Emile Durkheim would call "the collective conscious." Landscapes may assume near mythical dimensions in forming and framing the creative impulse of writers who draw their images and symbols, themes and motifs, and aspirations and apprehensions from their terrestrial roots and routes. In the present paper, I seek to reread a few poems of the famous Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali with a view to highlighting his poetics of place that remains true to the kindred points of haven (America, the adopted land) and home (Kashmir, the homeland). Attempts will be made to shed light on the re-creative dynamics of his poetry that helps him to mythicize these two landscapes with the aid of "memory" and "imagination." My objective here is to foreground the process through which the poet's re-creation of place combines with the reader's focus on spatiality to situate Ali's poems such as "Postcard from Kashmir," "Snowmen," "A Wrong Turn," "Snow on the Desert," "Farewell," etc. In the poem, "Postcard from Kashmir" for example, the speaker holds the postcard that represents to him the land of his birth -"Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,/ my home a neat four by six inches." The persistent pains of "exile" lead him to proximate the half-inch Himalayas to this "home," because he realizes "This is home. And this the closest I'll ever be to home." Similarly, in the poem "Snow on the Desert," the poet brings to bear all his imaginative elasticity to re-create the Papago's way of living in the Sonoran desert in the South Western part of the United States. His poetic narrative brings to the surface the native history of the Papagos people whose long lost lives are imaginatively re-created by a diasporic poet, keenly aware of the ancient glory of his own homeland as contrasted with its recent abjection.

2013

This book is about a sacred place called Balkh, known to the ancient Greeks as Bactra. Located in the north of today's Afghanistan, along the silk road, Balkh was holy to many. The Prophet Zoroaster is rumoured to have died here, and during late antiquity, Balkh was the home of the Naw Bahār, a famed Buddhist temple and monastery. By the tenth century, Balkh had become a critical centre of Islamic learning and early poetry in the New Persian language that grew after the Islamic conquests and continues to be spoken in Iran, Afghanistan and parts of Central Asia today. In this book, Arezou Azad provides the first in-depth study of the sacred sites and landscape of medieval Balkh, which continues to exemplify age-old sanctity in the Persian-speaking world and the eastern lands of Islam generally. Azad focuses on the five centuries from the Islamic conquests in the eighth century to just before the arrival of the Mongols in the thirteenth century, the crucial period in the emergence of Perso-Islamic historiography and Islamic legal thought. The book traces the development of 'sacred landscape', the notion that a place has a sensory meaning, as distinct from a purely topographical space. This opens up new possibilities for our understanding of Islamisation in the eastern Islamic lands, and specifically the transition from Buddhism to Islam. Azad offers a new look at the medieval local history of Balkh, the Faḍā"il-i Balkh, and analyses its creation of a sacred landscape for Balkh. In doing so, she provides a compelling example of how the sacredness of a place is perpetuated through narratives, irrespective of the dominant religion or religious strand of the time.

Paul Seawwright, Hidden. Imperial War Museum, London, in association with Oriel Mostyn Gallery (LLanduno), Ffotogallery (Cardiff), and Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2003 , 2003

"Many of his images are, precisely, examples of the way simple objects suddenly loom, portentous and solitary, out of an otherwise empty landscape. Given the context of a war-ravaged country, these signs are inevitably read in reference to conflict: mines scattered in the sand like raisins in a cake, unidentified mounds too much like shallow graves to be anything else..."

Talk in India

Humanities

This article seeks to examine how the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali explores and rethinks ideas of “home” and travel in his poetry. Ali’s poetry is a layered affective terrain in which his complex, entangled emotions surrounding home, exile, nostalgia, displacement, and travel play out. I argue that Ali’s verse, through multiple journeys ranging over locations, languages, cultures, and literary terrain, interrogates and collapses the boundaries between the “home” and the world. I read his poetry as voicing the “disturbed” and displaced home of Kashmir, while simultaneously distilling a “re-homing” desire. Such an impulse reconfigures and reimagines the home through the inhabiting and repeated “homing” of multiple, “foreign” locations. Poetic travel across geographic and literary terrain, in Ali’s oeuvre, thus speaks to the fraught and complex nature of the “home” in postcolonial and diasporic contexts, while remapping the home through the “re-homing” of the “foreign”. Argui...