Postcard from Kashmir

The unrhymed 14-line lyric poem is divided into four stanzas: The first two are couplets, the third is six lines, and the fourth is four. The 14-line structure and the poem’s melancholy romanticism have led to it being called a sonnet by some; however, the categorization is debatable. Many contemporary poets and critics think the iambic pentameter (each line containing five pairs of the da-dum syllabic sounds) is what makes a sonnet a sonnet, while others consider any contemporary 14-line poem a sonnet. “Postcard from Kashmir” is best considered a bow to the sonnet form, both because of its number of lines and, more importantly, its tone and subject. A sonnet was traditionally a love poem, and “Postcard from Kashmir” is a bittersweet love letter from an exile to the homeland they left behind. In the poem’s context, this separation from the beloved homeland is even more poignant because it is a land riddled with conflict and violence. It is an idyll that has been corrupted for the speaker; they can never return to the pristine beauty they left behind, even when they travel there physically. Thus, the speaker is forever estranged from their home.

The speaker uses an elaborate metaphor involving photographs to comment on the double-estrangement from Kashmir. The metaphor stretches across all of the poem’s stanzas, unveiling a new aspect of the speaker’s relationship with Kashmir in each. In the first stanza, the postcard from Kashmir is a metaphor for the territory itself; despite its physical grandeur, the land has been boxed in by conflict and reduced to news headlines. Further, a postcard is two-dimensional, which symbolizes how the speaker’s impression of Kashmir no longer has life and depth. Kashmir lives on in its three-dimensional reality, while the speaker is left with the flatness of the photograph.

The speaker’s regular access to Kashmir is also lost, making Kashmir a living memento for the speaker, much like the touristy postcard. The diction in this stanza evokes closed spaces and a coffin-like geometry. Kashmir “shrinks” (Line 1) into the speaker’s “mailbox” (Line 1). Kashmir is condensed to a postcard that is a “neat four by six inches” (Line 2). Immediately, the speaker conveys the idea that Kashmir is now also, for them, associated with loss. Yet, Kashmir is also “my home” (Line 2), a phrase that introduces the poem’s bittersweet tone of yearning.

The second stanza introduces a double diminishment; not only is Kashmir a postcard, the Himalayas are now only a “half-inch” (Line 2) tall. The half-inch Himalayas are a metaphor for the devaluation of Kashmir. The effect the speaker creates here is of someone zooming into a photograph to discover newer details. The more the speaker studies the postcard—their home, Kashmir—the more its diminishment becomes clear to them.

In the third stanza—the longest in the poem—the speaker now compares the reality of Kashmir to an overexposed photograph or film frame. Left too long in the light, its colors have bleached and faded; likewise, when the speaker visits this real Kashmir, it will pale in comparison to the picture-perfect postcard. The speaker’s words evoke the vivid beauty of the postcard Kashmir—“brilliant” (Line 7) and “ultramarine” (Line 9). The real Kashmir will be the same as neither the postcard Kashmir nor the Kashmir of the speaker’s memory, because his love has “overexposed” (Line 10) the real Kashmir. That is, the speaker’s love for the former Kashmir is so great that the real Kashmir will disappoint them. Here, the speaker refers both to the universal experience of an immigrant whose remembered homeland and the living homeland begin to diverge, and the experience of the Kashmiri exile in particular. For the speaker, the waters of the Jhelum won’t be as “clean” (Line 8) and blue because Kashmir is now damaged and divided by regional hostility. In a sense, the lines about the dulling waters of the Jhelum prefigure the real-life worsening of the conflict in Kashmir after 1989. At the time the poem was written, the situation in Kashmir would have been tense, but not at its worst. However, the poet keenly perceives that the ground reality in Kashmir may deteriorate.

The poem’s ending stanza continues with the metaphor of photography to describe the speaker’s relationship with their memory of Kashmir. Now, the poem shifts to the speaker’s memory of their homeland, indicating that this is where the home is permanently located. The speaker’s memory of Kashmir from here on will be “a little / out of focus” (Lines 11-12), like a blurred picture taken through a shaking, malfunctioning lens. Thus, the poet’s memory of Kashmir is distorted and unreliable, since they cannot reconcile Kashmir’s past, its present, and their own romanticized version of Kashmir. Significantly, not only is this photo blurred, in it there is “a giant negative, black / and white, still undeveloped” (Lines 13-14). The metaphor of the undeveloped photo film refers to the parts of the speaker’s memory that have never been allowed to form because of the estrangement from Kashmir. Because the speaker cannot live in Kashmir, these undeveloped parts will not be exposed to light to produce a clear image. The metaphor of the undeveloped photo also evokes ideas of something festering and dormant in the speaker’s psyche. The alienation from the homeland has left a wound that cannot even be articulated in all its dimensions. With the final, bleak image, in such contrast with the vivid beauty of Kashmir previously referenced, the poem ends on a particularly dark note. The speaker seems to suggest that there are yet no answers to the conflict in Kashmir, and no remedy for their separation from their beloved land. The poem echoes the themes of longing and loss that mark Ali’s oeuvre.