If, as Edward Said says in Representations of the Intellectual, "…for most exiles the difficulty consists not simply in being forced to live away from home, but rather, given today´s world, in living with the many reminders that you are in exile, that your home is not in fact so far away, and that constant but tantalising and unfulfilled touch with the old place," then perhaps Agha Shahid Ali exemplifies that condition very well. A Kashmiri poet who now lives in the US teaching creative writing at the University of Massachusetts, Shahid has become a well-known figure in the Anglo-Indian literary scene. Besides his collections of poetry
(Bone Sculpture, In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems, A Walk Through the Yellow Pages and A Nostalgist´s Map of America), he is also a translator of Faiz Ahmed Faiz (The Rebel´s Silhouette: Selected Poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz).
Agha Shahid Ali´s latest book of poetry, The Country Without a Post Office, was released in early 1997. (Two selections from this book, "The Blesséd Word: A Prologue" and "The Last Saffron" were printed in the November/ December 1996 issue of Himal.) The title refers to the fact that for about seven months in 1990, no mail was delivered within Kashmir owing to political turmoil. From his house, a friend of Shahid´s father could see the mountains of undelivered mail stacked in the open at the main post office. One day, he strolled over to one of those large piles and casually picked up a letter. It was addressed to him from Shahid´s father. This incident became the motif of the book.
Here, in a conversation with Rehan Ansari and Rajinderpal S. Pal, Shahid provides insights into his work by commenting on lines from his poetry.