Kashmir: A metaphor of pain (part 2)

Reclaiming the Self

The 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 Oppression

The 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 stares

in the gaze of their blood-shot eyes

 

in the restraint of our legs

in weight of their ‘sovereign’ torsos

in the prayer on our lips

in the stench of their breaths

 

in the restlessness of our feet

in the sound of their boots and barrels

in our screams piercing the heavens

in the stink of blood and pain

 

in our torn hems and scarves

in the creases of their uniforms, shining insignia,

certifying carte blanche

Memory is an autumn of massacres and resilience

a winter of torture, rape, disappearances and resilience

a spring of siege by 600,000 outlanders and resilience

a summer of trampling jackboots and resilience

 

Memory is the unsettling dust of our beings

Memory 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.