Theme of Homesickness in the selected Poems of Agha Shahid Ali

The theme of homesickness is recurrently employed in English literature. Homesickness is common to many people in the world. It is an affliction caused by being away from home. It is dealt in different genres of literature- novel, drama, poetry etc. Homesickness is viewed both as a frustration and loss in life. For some it is grief-stricken and for some it is a harsh reality of life. In this paper my concern is to explore Agha Shahid Ali‟s perspective on nostalgia about homesickness by evaluating some of his poems. Agha Shahid Ali in his poems pictured the discord between a loving vision of home and its harsh actuality. Ali‟s poetry is a construction of home. It is a home where he lived his later life through his pen only. This shows his attachment towards his home, which is something far stronger than anything. His poetry deals his engagement with Kashmir in diaspora. It is about how he feels away from home and how he relies on memories to seek home. Ali considered himself to be a varied mixture of multiple cultures which have affected his identity but he still likes to call himself a Kashmiri-American. In his poetry, he blends the landscapes of Kashmir and America along with the emotions of exile (nostalgia about home-sickness) and in his other works loss, illness and morality. Home-Sickness is the central theme in many of his poems. Ali expresses his frustration for loss; his home that he will never see again. In this paper I will be analyzing some of his below mentioned poems to explore the Homesickness as the dominant theme in the selected works of Agha Shahid Ali‟s selected poems. The poems are: “The Country Without a Post Office” ,“I Dream I Am the Only Passenger on Flight 423 to Srinagar”, “I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight”, “The Correspondent”, “The Last Saffron”, „‟Tonight” ,“I See Chile in My Rearview Mirror”, “A Pastoral” ,“Dear Shahid”, “Bones”, “Another Death”, “Pilgrimage to Amarnath”, “Autumn in Srinagar”, “Painting a Kashmir Landscape”, “Legends of Kashmir”, “Pastcard from Kashmir”, “The Dream of Glass Bangles”, “Snowmen”, “The Seasons of the Plains”, “Survivor”, “A Call”, “I Dream It Is Afternoon When I Return to Delhi”, “A Lost Memory of Delhi” “Houses”, “Medusa”, “The Youngest of the Graeae”, “Son et Lumiere at Shalimar Garden”, “From Amherst to Kashmir” etc.