The ghazal can be a lie the poet tells themselves, a fragment of mysterium’s imagination. The ghazal is compounded fate — something broken open singing of irretrievable loss — the kind that can only be known by those who lost their homes, their lands, their identity, their everything. The ghazal is a diorama of the senses; a surgery where you are both cut open but also stitched back with love — a care tender but fraught with suffering.

There are few things that a people of a land divided after 200 years of colonial rule can lay ownership to. It feels healing and empowering as a consistently othered individual to say: This is my heritage. This ‘belongs’ to me and I ‘belong’ to it. I enjoin my reader to remember, as all the bodies affected by colonial brutality do, in their bones, that we were seen as ‘primitive’. Therefore, our culture too was assigned this designation, shorn of complexity, shorn of nuance. It follows that our literatures too were assigned this label. Our poetry was primitive. Our ghazals, primitive.

If I choose to reclaim my heritage, my languages, my body as represented by the corpus of written words then that, I believe, is an act I undertake to re-establish a sacred bond, to attempt in some fashion to create a connection where all attempts have been made to sever it.

While preparing for a panel on the idea of ‘Mother Tongues’, I spoke to a woman, the daughter of South Asian immigrants, who narrated the story of losing her mother tongue. Her parents had been told in the UK of the 1980’s that they must not speak their languages at home, only English. She was certain of the loss she had experienced, the languages being the pathways to a people she would not get to know through their folktales, poetries and songs.

The diaspora feels this severance. I teach young writers at university level and have seen this firsthand. I have also gone into primary schools and enabled small children from South Asian families to parse the tongue of their ancestors. The sense of recuperation in those small moments is overwhelming. I had a student from Bangladesh who was flailing in her poetry workshops. She was unable to adjust her sensibilities with those of English contemporary poetry. Within the scope of this education that she had travelled so far from home to receive, leaving her land and her family was an othering that she began to feel acutely. I knew this, for I too had experienced this. I said one thing to her, ‘Do you like Tagore?’ and she came alive as if from a deep sleep. ‘Yes!’ She then shared with me the extent of her relationship to Tagore, and it was vast in scope, much to my delight. I told her to just write from the place that Tagore illumined in her. I could not help but reflect on my own poetry ‘education’ in Western institutions, where I was never given any other options but to centre Western poetry written in English, almost exclusively by white poets or give up. I was never good enough.

At the moment, I am teaching the art of the ghazal to my students. Several of them have grown up with at least one family member playing ghazals sung by gifted vocalists in their presence. They have experienced the joy they have witnessed in the bodies of their relatives, upon hearing these ghazals. For Edouard Glissant, whose thinking enabled a deeper understanding of language and writing in a post-colonial era, diasporization is “being outside” but also “being outside of language.”

The first ‘approach’, as I call it, to the ghazal for all my students, is through the hearing of it. I do not believe anyone can embody the essence of a ghazal if they have not heard it sung in its original language. I do not give them the translation. Instead I ask them of their experience of listening to it. The answers I receive from students of all backgrounds are incredible. ‘It felt like an address…to something ancient…the ancestors?’ or ‘It felt melancholy, but I didn’t feel sad’. One student commented on the repetition and how that aspect of it, cut through the tenor of longing, imparting something that felt pressing, imperative, important. All these comments, to my understanding, accurately capture the nature of the ghazal, and the students had not even heard the words in a language they understood.

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Magma 92, Ownership

 

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