There are two Kashmirs today, says poet Ayaz Rasool Nazki

Since August 5 this year, Kashmir has been shut down and an information blockade has silenced and invisibilised the voices raised against the official narrative of normalcy. Poetry in Kashmir in the past two decades has been marked by the appearance of resistance poetry, which Barbara Harlow defines as ‘a force for mobilizing a collective response to occupation and domination and a repository for popular memory and consciousness.’ This trend was begun inaugurated by the noted Kashmiri-American poet, Agha Shahid Ali, whose poems in The Country without a Post Office combine wit and elegance with moral passion. I’m reminded of a haunting line from Agha Shahid Ali’s poem, ‘Farewell’: ‘Your memory keeps getting in the way of my history!’ These are not passing memories of daily life in Kashmir but memories that remain as permanent scars, and the poet is left with a trail of misery, a feeling of permanent sadness, something that is ongoing and recurring, as well as a compelling urge to put it into verse, not simply to get rid of it, the whole madness and frustration, but a larger burden to fight against the imposed forgetfulness. Let’s look at two of your well-known poems that set up a contrast: ‘Uptown Kashmir’ and ‘Downtown Kashmir’, which speak of exactly what we’re talking about, a certain kind of past, a certain kind of history that you find is irretrievably lost today. ‘Downtown Kashmir’: They had/ latticed windows/ they had/ vision/ they had/ low ceilings/ they had/ heart/ they had/ narrow lanes/ they had/ open minds.In ‘Uptown Kashmir’, there is Glass windows/ for the blind/ high ceilings/ for the dwarf/ wide roads/ for closed minds/ huge mansions/ for small minds.