CALL ME ISHMAEL TONIGHT
A Book of Ghazals
By AGHA SHAHID ALI
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003. 96 pages, $21.95
reviewed by Sara Suleri Goodyear
The prominent contemporary poet Agha Shahid Ali, author of such acclaimed collections of poems as The Half-Inch Himalayas and The Country without a Post Office, was born in New Delhi in 1949, grew up in Kashmir, and died of cancer in the United States in 2001. One of his manifold contributions was his interest in the intricacies of the poetic form known as the ghazal, a form that traces its origins back to seventh-century Arabia. The affect of Urdu poetry is a ghostly presence in his writing, not only through overt reference to such masters as Bahadur Shah Zafar (1775-1862), Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869), or Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-84), but also through his appreciation of the epistemological elegance of Urdu. Agha Shahid's work is quickened with the spirit of translation, both on a literal and figurative level: his early volume, The Rebel's Silhouette, could be called a fluid translation of Faiz, a Faiz best sung by Begum Akhtar, perhaps the most renowned of all ghazal singers. More recently he edited the work Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English, which attempts to illustrate how the ghazal form itself may be available to contemporary poets. This figurative embodiment of translation lends a startling grace to each poem in Call Me Ishmael Tonight, the posthumous volume that is both the writer's triumph and his reader's tragedy.
There are thirty-four ghazals in the volume, which is briefly introduced by Agha Iqbal Ali and Hena Zafar Ahmed, the poet's brother and sister. This introduction makes a crucial reference to the Koranic version of the Abraham parable, in which the elder Ishmael, rather than Isaac, is summoned as a sacrifice to God. In the Islamic story, Ishmael is a willing participant in the sacrificial act: he assumes a responsibility that is echoed in the volume's luminous title. In the poem "Tonight," from which the collection takes its name, Herman Melville is set up in an unholy comradeship of responsibility with Ishmael, so that the ghazal can move through evocations of poetic references to Shalimar by Laurence Hope (the pen name of the English poet Adela Florence Cory, 1865-1904), and amorous absences, into the outrageous claim of its concluding lines:
And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee?The idea of exile is vertiginous rather than self-congratulatory, suggesting that exile is a precise, rather than an amorphous state of mind, a claim echoed by the form of the ghazal and the image of the many- faceted precision of a mirrored Mughal ceiling that occurs in "Tonight." (While a ghazal is traditionally described as a series of couplets, the archaism of the latter term has caused contemporary poets some discomfort. "Ghazals come in two by twos, vive la compagnie!" Agha Shahid Ali once exclaimed to me. "I don't write in couplets; I write twosomes." In deference to his spirit, I shall describe couplets as twosomes.)
God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.
Exile remains a ghostly presence in these ghazals, as in the poem dedicated to Edward Said entitled "By Exiles," but it is something that is questioned, played with, and even laughed at. This buoyant attitude is in keeping with such a master of the Urdu ghazal as Mirza Ghalib, who did not think that jokes should be banished from even the most impassioned elegy. In Call Me Ishmael Tonight, exile is frequently made a bedmate of good humor, so that the acrobatic posture of writing "Beyond English" in English can conclude with the arresting twosome:
If someone asks where Shahid has disappeared,If a ghazal remains an "other" form to contemporary American poetry, then Agha Shahid Ali must be credited with giving its very otherness a lasting intimacy. In the poem "Beyond English," the following twosome demands to be read in the absence of any knowledge of its points of reference:
he's waging war (no, jung) beyond English.
If you wish to know of a king who loved his slave,The poet is at home with his unfamiliarity, and invites the reader to be the same. This posture is visible throughout the volume and happily belies early analogies made between the ghazal and sonnets, orall too frequentlybetween the ghazal and metaphysical poetry. Ali's work is artfully casual, and seems almost spoken over the shoulder, so that the audience is drawn into the secret community that understands poetic wit. Call Me Ishmael Tonight is remarkable in its points of reference; the poems insist on being read aloud, thus establishing an invisible poetry reading within the book's pages. It is, on many levels, delightful to read in "After You" a charming will to immortality:
you must learn legends, often-sung, beyond English.
SHAHID DEVASTATES FLORIDA is your dream headline,The sweetness of this regret is one tiny mirror of the manner in which Agha Shahid Ali remains committed to the quickening impulse of the ghazal, which is irrevocably a poetry of desire.
no hurricane will ever be named after you
Because the volume is posthumous and filled with such wrenching lines as "Then how could someone like you not live forever?" it would be dangerously tempting to read Call Me Ishmael Tonight as Ali's elegy for himself. The urge, however, would be reductive, for it would reread the calibrated finesse of the work's language into simply the writer's will to keep on living. There is much celebration of life here, as is exemplified by the poem "In Arabic," which plays on the poet's nom de plumeon his name and the meaning of his name:
They ask me to tell them what Shahid means: Listen, listen:This inscrutable signature would outlive the poet in any circumstances, dead or alive. It moved this reader at least to pick up on his spirit of translation and put it this way, for him, in Urdu:
It means "The Beloved" in Persian, "witness" in Arabic.
Poochthay ho ke kia matlab he Shahid ka, to sun!My consolation is that Shahid would have corrected it for me, quite wonderfully.
Farsi me hai mehboob, gavah, Arbi men.
Sara Suleri Goodyear is a professor of English at Yale University.