Mapping Homeland

Mythical Politics in Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish

Abstract

Mapping as an impersonal knowledge tends to de-socialize the territory it represents fostering an abstract and socially empty space. This study analyses the poetry of exile in Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish and their poetic maps of homeland—Kashmir and Palestine—created from exile suggesting an alternate tradition of cartography. It argues that while the poets implant the minority myth of Andalusia evoking mythical relationship between father and son, they tend to evoke a human bond between the nation-state and its subject-citizens as a means to create a socially erotic space. On the one hand, the study brings to the fore the patriarchal notion of bodyscaping in the discipline of humanities which the homeland as ‘mother’ evokes; and on the other, the mythical equanimity between the relationship of father-son and nation state-subject citizens counters erotic voyeurism. Moreover, the creation of Andalusia, a mythical land of perfection, demystifies the idea of homeland— Kashmir in case of Agha Shahid Ali and Palestine in case of Mahmoud Darwish—as a means to undo its geographical boundaries and sovereignty of its hegemony. And the filial desire between father and son gains a re-examination within the discipline of Humanities and the academic discourse of exile and homeland. In short, this paper attempts to make sense of exile as an illusory homeland through Islamic / biblical myths and relations such as between Yaqub and Yusuf (Jacob and Joseph), and between Abraham and Ishmael, and argues that the exiled poets as the exiled mythical sons foil the biblical strategy of plotting death of the weaker/feminine sons.