Kashmir: A metaphor of pain (part 2)

Reclaiming the SelfThe body of a Kashmir woman, in the foreground and the landscape in the background, both are liberated from the clutches of official cultural production. The works de-fetishise what has been rendered exotic by the colonial gaze and represents a Kashmir woman, not as a spectator or a victim, but a mediator, witness and narrator of people's histories.How does one begin a fragmented lingering story? Perhaps from the fragment which refuses to erode? Perhaps from a banal declaration, a scream, or a desire which keeps us alive? Let me begin from the cliché then, the one I inherited from my ancestors – Hum Kya Chatey? Azaadi (What do we want? Freedom)..***Stand upright like Aleph, the first letter of Azaadi. Sing fearlessly. Do not exorcise us out of songs. Our songs are not just our protest songs. These are our birth songs. Our death songs. Our wedding songs. Our funeral songs. Our lullabies. Our mourning. Our celebration. Our screams. Our silence. Our malady. Our panacea. Our unwritten history. Our militant memory..Zoi se Zaalim: Topography of OppressionThe works represent the various configurations of a police state and its intersection with the everyday, deploying symmetrical patterns and repetition as visual strategies.Memory resides in the emptiness of our stoic staresin the gaze of their blood-shot eyesin the restraint of our legsin weight of their 'sovereign' torsosin the prayer on our lipsin the stench of their breathsin the restlessness of our feetin the sound of their boots and barrelsin our screams piercing the heavensin the stink of blood and painin our torn hems and scarvesin the creases of their uniforms, shining insignia,certifying carte blanche.Memory is an autumn of massacres and resiliencea winter of torture, rape, disappearances and resiliencea spring of siege by 600,000 outlanders and resiliencea summer of trampling jackboots and resilienceMemory is the unsettling dust of our beingsMemory is opposite of time,an antonym of their 'preamble'Memory is a synonym of our history..The Embellished Museum of Annihilation.The works use 'guesthouse' as a common motif alluding to Kashmir's various torture centers, the visible markers of a military occupation, which have been rendered invisible by the state by repressive metamorphosis into guesthouses and residences for state politicians and bureaucracy.You may embrace our poems. Sing our songs. But do not asphyxiate them like bodies in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Majdanek. Like tear gas smoke choking our uteri. Do not disfigure our elegies like the pellet-ridden faces and backs of our boys. Like barrels shoved into our wombs. Do not electrocute our beats like our bodies in Papa II, Hari Niwas. Do not torture them by strappado. Do not crush them under roller, waterboard them, sear them in secret torture chambers. Do not violate our rhythms like vanguards of your peace violate our landscapes. Do not lay siege on them like our cities. Do not our desecrate poems like you desecrate our dead..Chokh-lad Jaame (The Bloodied Apparel).The cloth has been treated as a wounded body – site of pain and memory and healing. The pink colour of the fabric, in Mukherjee's words, evokes twilight – a moment of transition. The edges of the cloth are not hemmed portraying erosion and disintegration. These works also depict love and strength in times of pain..Memory is made of loss.Body is a memory of a thousand selves—.tortured, maimed, raped, mutilated,.seized, survived..Memory is not a victim but a survivor.like grandmothers, daughters, fathers, brothers.women, men and children of.Kunan and Poshpur, Shopian, Handwor.Dardpur, Kopwor, Uri, Srinagar, Kishtwar….Memory is a festering wound:.…February 23, February 24, May 30, October 28, November 7….…1700s, 1800s, 1900s, 2000s….Wound is our memory, our witness,.our free country..Qurbani Henz Sozini Kari (The Tapestry of Sacrifice).An old bedsheet has been used in these portraits of courage and hope. The bed sheet as a material is conceived of as a storehouse of memory, presence and absence, and testimony in itself..Who would have dreamt of coloured shrouds in war?.Sewn by pale but promising hands and autumnal eyes blinking to.Wait, witness and dream.Seamstress sat all day at her window and in their embrace.they became one –.a Witness.Who would have dreamt of remembrance in war?.She did, for she knew what forgetting meant.When she died near her window,.a thousand memories.lay trembling on her body –.a rainy memorial.embraced in moss and wild berries.she stole as a child in one long summer.She lay there, amid rain, needing no tombstone.enwombing a promise, a prayer,.a nostalgia for future, when children running.barefoot towards her would cry –.To the Seamstress who stitched our dream!.The Graveyard of Paradise.The works depict war weaponry germinating from the earth and as casting shadows from the sky, dislodging the mainstream notions of peace and beauty..I hear the army truck grumbling.Its engine howling.Dogs on the streets now silent.I am lonely, suddenly.I think of the gasoline rainbow the truck may have left in the puddle.Image in the puddle is of a massacre.Night doesn't end.I and the lamb sob.When I looked up.Sky became paper.I began writing images.With my eyes.Rain fell in unknown villages on numbered graves.1, 40, 100."And it is He who sends down rain after you have lost all hope, and unfolds His grace…".Ya Musawwir,.The Artist.Will you paint us again?.Memories surface from the deepest rubbles.like the promise of resurrection.My mind is a trellis.where.the ivy grows.inconsolably..Ro Rahe Hai Yeh Zameen, Ro Raha Hai Asmaan.The landscapes in these works are inscribed with memories and take the urgent role of witnessing; sky, earth, clouds, trees all become witnesses..Nameless trees stand intimately,.rooted but almost paralytic, embracing each other.in all seasons.waiting for the bugle.for a final march against tyranny of time.a grand march for flow..Flowing, flow, flowed..Waiting to Testify.The works shows men and women testifying and waiting for their disappeared kin. Van Gogh's The Starry Night which he painted at an asylum, forms the background of two of the works superimposed by testimonies of Afzal Guru and his wife Tabassum, giving way to conversations within these works, across time and space. Moon, Sun, Reflections as elements endow these images with poetry..Your face is etched on my being –.that quivering moment.before your existence.slipped between presence and absence..I grapple with your presence, my absence, your absence, my presence –.all boundaries blurry..Tiniest specks in my eyes carry you.like multiple reflections in broken mirrors.I wear your last kiss on my forehead as a badge.and hold your only photograph as a placard.(I know how much you hated getting photographed).testifying your presence, absence.I wait and witness with other mothers, wives, fathers, children.their stories tied to them.like explosives tied to a suicide-bomber.embracing photographs of their 'disappeared' beloved.as they last existed uncontested..I have conquered time.fought with the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, the sky.My womb is a mausoleum.My feet – rivers.Your absence has seeped into my skin.The crimson of my blood is your presence.I grapple with your presence, my absence, your absence, my presence—.all boundaries blurry..And when people ask me what do I remember of you my son.I only laugh hysterically! .Fellowship of Pain and Resistance.These works depict a reunion and congregation of protesting women. The movement for the disappeared has emerged as a vibrant space of dissent, mobilisation, expression of solidarity and sisterhood of pain and resistance. These gatherings are units of strength, support and solidarity giving way to new friendships and bonds..We know the pain of erasure. We, the poets of persistence. We, who outran our destiny. We, who cradle the ache of an unsung longing, a lingering history. We, who bear the burden of outliving our children. We, who survived a genocide of colours, a massacre of language. We, who enwomb within us evanescence. We, who have tricked forgetting..We, within whom, flows a dark river of impossible love. We, the wandering minstrels of hope. We the balladeers of dawn. We the elegists of night. We the bards of loss..We hear you. Do you?.Mourning is Loving.In these works everything is in a state of mourning – people, landscape, homes; emanating from and touching the deepest realms of pain. Mourning is an act of love, remembering, and resistance..World is an exile,.there is no home, no homeland.no faraway, no closure.Then why don't we mourn or.are we mourning by living?.Every night death thaws in our embrace.homes burn in our dreams.hope screams, desires.become memories – redundant.We cradle the ache through all seasons….We must be prepared to mourn.in all seasons.A fish never forgets the sea.Isn't it time, we mourn the undying blue in eyes of a dead fish?.The world has forgotten how to mourn.Isn't it time to remember the act of mourning.to beat our chests in grace, sing elegies.and convulse in each other's embrace?.Mourning is loving.mourn me, love me.in antiphon.when all is quiet.hold my hand and we will walk home..Language of Longing.In these works, martyrdom is evoked as an articulatation of longing and its culmination. In one work, Afzal Guru's last letter appears in conversation with a woman going on about her everyday activities in an occupied terrain. The other work is Afzal Guru's portrait as a martyr, embroidered along with stars and paisleys..Winter of my eyes took flight.Did you see?.These are not the same eyes.colors of which you would patiently decipher.sitting under the sun for hours.gray dreams refusing to dissolve in waters of Lethe..My hands clutch autumn now.My feet feel nostalgic.Spring in my veins crawls back.My eyes hid that one dream.in the rubble of countless others.I had to..Didn't you see how they gazed?.They, who trampled our fields of saffron?.They who murdered the colour.and smeared it on their foreheads..We carry gallows around our necks.Do you hear the sound of fetters?.I may not write to you again.I need to find the key.I know you saw me.carrying my heart in my eyes.I heard the rain rattling against my window.all night.You thought I wouldn't know.What can I say?.I still carry you in my each sigh.But for now my love.I need to go.to carve epitaphs.with delicacy and precision.One dies,.the other is born.They only give us numbers.but poets hate numbers.and in our country we are all poets.of loss.of memory.of madness.History has no time to repeat.It is unfinished where we live.Lingering.Like you and me in that moment.when near the creaking door.that lead to orchards,.my hem torn.and those apples we gathered.in my 'halam',.your feet covered with leaves and ash.I asked you, What will become of us?.You said, I love the winter in your eyes. .Razed Homes, Raised Fists.A binding theme in these works is the portrayal of the crumbling border between home and the street. Home, conceived of as a safe space, becomes the very center of oppression in a place like Kashmir and streets provide opportunities of mobilisation and togetherness..Memory is a room invaded.and turned into a battlefield.memory is the battlefield….Let the roads carry us barefoot.till reason loses its.last battle with madness.till Empire crumbles.and body becomes a ruin.an epitaph –.resistance to shame and silence.The witness is dead, the dead will speak someday.Till then the roads carry her..Ferrying Memory Across Lethe.Water represents time and flow. Time attempts forgetting but memory is an antonym of time. People of Kashmir carry the burden of memory across the river of forgetting..Tonight the crescent is a boat.sailing into the heart of overcast skies.ferrying.the homeless, the dreamless.the shoe-less, the sleepless.the wounded, the hungry.the runaways, the prisoners.the workers, the fighters.the lovers, the non-citizens.the seekers.through voids.where airplanes don't fly.and missiles don't reach.where birds need no wings.and rain un-becomes.where gravity surrenders.and fall is immortalised.ferried by the waning moon.we sail through.a sea of dust of.our fragile.but united fates.with no place to reach.this journey is our home.Stay put, sing a song.the boatwoman says,.night is long..To view a collection of Rollie Mukherjee's work, and read Uzma Falak's poetry please click here..~ Uzma Falak is a native of Kashmir. Her poetry has been featured in Gossamer: An Anthology of Contemporary World Poetry, What the Jaguar Knows, We Cannot Know, The Electronic Intifada, The Palestinian Chronicle, Cultural Anthropology, Kindle Magazine, Kafila, Cerebration and Kashmir Lit. Integrating creative practice and research, she is currently pursuing her practice-based PhD in New Delhi. She also blogs for Oxford-based New Internationalist.