Today’s post is a guest post by Jane Sahi. It is such a joy to share the miracle of poetry with another who thinks deeply, and with care, about the art. I share with you today, this sensitive and intimate commentary to a poem by the Kashmiri poet Ayaz Rasool Nazki. I read this poem and commentary against the backdrop of Modi’s meeting with Kashmiri and Union Territory leadership recently, and the history of conflict and oppression that has marred the state for decades.
Jane has shared poetry with children and adults in different settings over a number of years and feels it is a way of learning - at any age - about ourselves and the world we are part of. Here is her take on the poem I Will Sing Light by Ayaz Rasool Nazki.
Early last year I went to a poetry reading in Bengaluru on the theme of love and war. The Kashmiri poet, Ayaz Rasool Nazki was one of three poets sharing his work. He had just arrived from Srinagar after enduring some weeks of lockdown and disruption. After he had read some of his poems someone in the audience asked him, “How can you write poetry in the midst of such suffering and injustice?” In reply he told a story
There was once a man devoted to God who was to be burnt to death as a heretic. The fire blazed and the man, so unjustly condemned, was thrown to the flames. Above the flames a small sparrow went back and forth carrying in his beak drops of water which he sprinkled on the raging fire.
The other birds gathered and mocked the little sparrow’s efforts, “What’s the use of that?” they jeered, “Do you think those few drops of water will put out the fire?”The sparrow replied, “This may or may not quench the fire but at least I must show whose side I am on...”
There is surely a place for explicit, angry and raw protest poetry but I was thinking also that poetry can by its nature undermine injustice and despair and affirm a sense of hope that is a kind of innocence, untouched by cynicism.
Ayaz Rasool Nazki is immersed in the turmoil and conflict in Kashmir and there are times when no thought or image breaks through his sense of sadness. There are innumerable ways for a poet “to show whose side I am on” and Nazki embraces very different moods including silence but never withdrawal.
One poem reads,
I am not writing
any poem today
I am in the
valley of Kashmir.
But the poem “I will sing light” celebrates for me a sense of hope that defies the political turmoil without escaping or denying its painful reality. It is a response to a troubled world by engaging with life in another way. Oscar Wilde defines a sentimentalist as one “who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” It was striking for me that Ayaz Rasool Nazki concludes this poem,
I will sing light
In this dark night
and bear the consequences
of my dreams.
Ayaz Rasool Nazki writes in Kashmiri and in Urdu and this poem was translated by the poet himself.
From Songs of Light, 2017. A Writers Workshop Redbird Book.
Stumbled upon this beautiful piece by Jane Sahi. I am so happy. Thanks Jane and poetly.