Postcard from Kashmir

“One Way Ticket” by Langston Hughes, 1949

Hughes’s poem, written four decades before “Postcard from Kashmir,” treats migration more unequivocally. It shows how migration is sometimes a life-saving measure, as it was for Black Americans over the 20th century. In such a state of crisis, nostalgia is an encumbrance. Therefore, the poem does away with metaphors to convey its urgent truth. The poem presents the theme of migration and exile from a different lens, of those made to flee parts of their own country because of oppression and violence.

“I Sing of an Old Land” by Ha Jin, 1996

The novelist Ha Jin grew up in China, emigrating to the United States when he was a young man. Jin’s blank-verse poem is a lament for the China he left behind. Though moving from China was necessary for Jin, since in 1989 the government began to crack down on students and intellectuals, he still grieves and craves “that land” (Lines 29, 48), the land of his birth. The poem’s tone is more direct than the elegiac “Postcard from Kashmir,” but it shares the themes of an immigrant’s complex emotions.

“Land” by Agha Shahid Ali, 2001

“Land” is a ghazal in English, part of Ali’s last collection Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals (2003). The subject is an identity caught between two homes; like in “Postcard from Kashmir,” the image of “home” recurs here. It is interesting to note the similarities and differences between the two poems, marking different points in Ali’s poetic trajectory. While “Postcard from Kashmir” follows no formal structure, “Land” is written in couplets, with the last word of every couplet being the same through the poem. The repetition gives the poem rhythmic coherence and also builds to a crescendo the emotions associated with the loaded word “land.” Written over two decades after “Postcard,” “Land” also references the violence in Kashmir. This shows the poet’s cognizance of his homeland’s worsening situation.