The Afterlife of a Transplanted Form
The Afterlife of a Transplanted Form: The Quest of Validating and Locating the English Ghazal in Contemporary Literary Establishment [1]
The history of the great works of arts tells us about their descent from prior models, their realization in the age of the artist, and what in principle should be their eternal afterlife in succeeding generations. ~ Walter Benjamin [2]
When Agha Shahid Ali deplores that “those claiming to write ghazals in English (usually American poets) had got it quite wrong, far from the letter and farther from the spirit,” the censure does not stem entirely from his stance as a native Urdu speaker in the lineage of Ghalib [3]. Even among those who do not explicitly disapprove of poetic experimentalism and its recourse to foreign sources, it is an oft-held belief that the English ghazal is prone to be but a poor pastiche of its Persianite prototype. The simplicity of this assumption conceals a number of more nuanced implications. English ghazal, it is hinted, amounts to nothing more than a literary bastard, born out of what appears to be an incongruous marriage. The emphasis on the pastiche identity, meanwhile, insinuates that English ghazal has little aesthetic function to contribute to the serious literary tradition, other than inanely parodying a remote alien culture (after the precedent of the English mock-haiku, the abused darling of American hipsterdom). Above all, the statement suggests a sense of double estrangement—from both the Persian and English literary traditions, or, put more succinctly, from both its ancient root and the contemporary environment where it has to posit itself. Despite the acerbity of the criticism, one could hardly condemn Ali for cultural parochialism and condescension. A good portion in the existing body of English ghazal does fail to approximate the richness of the genre in almost every possible term—of formal precision, of cultural depth, and of aesthetic value. This paper seeks to survey some of the predicaments retarding the development of the English ghazal, a process that I believe entails not only lyrical creativity, but even a considerable degree of scholarly rigor that is more typically associated with translators’ toil to bring out the spirit of the source. My final contention is that, many such perplexing shortcomings notwithstanding, there does exist room for the English ghazal to inhabit and exploit, both within the centuries-long ghazal tradition and within the English literary establishment. To exemplify how some poets have admirably poised themselves between two distant literary traditions, I will supply a selection of ghazal towards the end of the paper, and dissect their formal and thematic accomplishments [4]. Ghazal-writing—or, collaborating with any ostensibly outmoded genre, for that matter—is essentially a form of translation. On a cautionary note, I do not attempt to undo the distinction between translating a lyrical work and composing a poem using a borrowed form. The two tasks do, however, operate on the common ground, insofar that both have to produce a euphonious outcome while preserving the key components of the source, be they formal, stylistic, or thematic. Just as “the life of the originals attain its latest, continually renewed, and most complete unfolding” in great translations [5], a poetic form escapes moribundity and rejuvenates itself through continual progress through the global time-space. If translators seek to illuminate the universal appeal of a majestic literary work that shines through the barrier of obscurity, it could be stated that poets experimenting with foreign forms endeavor to prove the universality of human literary sensibility—that is, the transcendence of a great literary tradition, its power to lend form to the imaginations of all backgrounds and eras, and, more significantly, the human ability to tame unfamiliar rhymes and meters to externalize harmony. Not only do poets often make the best literary translators when equipped with the necessary scholarly rigor, but contemporary formalist poets, like translators, render what is alien more accessible for the modern audience by simulating, with contemporaneous subjects and devices, some of the effects that the form used to embody in its native soil, in its heyday. Even with such lofty ideals beaconing the path, however, one must grapple with multifold technical questions, be she a translator or a poet. Parvin Loloi classifies the problems confronting those transposing the ghazal into English into two main categories—linguistic and cultural. By definition, poetry makes productive use of every single feature of a language to yield the maximum aesthetic impact. A poetic form and its conventions are therefore bound to evolve in tandem with those very idiosyncratic syntactic, lexical, and phonetic attributes of a tongue, and to separate a form from its verbal flesh would beget distortions. Avery and Heath-Stubbs, vocalizing the frustrations of all the other fellow ghazal translators, found it “impossible to reproduce with effect, either the monorhyme or the elaborate quantitative metres of the Persian” [6]. While iambs were often substituted for long and short vowels to emulate the musicality of the form, it was usually the monorhyme that required painstaking brainwork. English falls far short of Persian in its fecundity of rhyming possibilities to begin with, and the Anglophone poetics usually sport a higher level of variegation when it came to end-rhymes, making it difficult for poets to compose lengthier monorhyme poetry that evades the dual risk of monotony and predictability [7]. While one might object that formal alterations, even at the expense of verbal cadence, were insignificant so long as they did not damage the semantics of the poem, syntactic and morphological divergences did often result in thematic and tonal shifts, concealing the kernel of the poetic spirit encoded into the language. To forgo the rhyme scheme, for instance, would rob a ghazal of its formal unity, which is often the sole adhesive that holds the couplets together, undeterred by the obvious thematic decentralization. Without the formal polish, the poem would sound schizophrenic and excessively spontaneous, directly contradicting the very ideals that had characterized the ghazal—the meticulous calculation and chiseling to percolate the subtle verbal essence. Deprived of the gender-neutrality of Persian personal pronouns, the mystical conflation of the beloved with the divine—a crucial lode of inspiration for Sufi poets—had to be compromised, as attested by the fact that translators for ages have committed the blunder of feminizing the beloved according to the norms of heterosexuality, ignoring the prominent role of homoerotic longings in the traditional ghazal [8]. The task of crossing the vast cultural gap, temporal and geographical, is even more daunting. As Loloi pronounces, since “[literary] allusion depends upon shared knowledge,” the communicability of a given allusion falls apart when “poet and reader inhabit very different, though related, cultural milieux” [9]. In case of ghazal, this cultural impenetrability is further intensified, for the form relies heavily upon a well-defined storehouse of dictions and tropes, even to such a level that Dominic Brookshaw characterizes it as “ossified" [10]. By the time the ghazal was established as an independent genre, Dick Davis notes, the poetic dialect underpinned by the court panegyric, wrought with circumlocutory references, had become so immovable in its presence that “another dialect was not available” [11]. There existed a pre-established stock of metaphors and motifs for a poet to draw from, and no elucidation or glossaries were necessary to apprise the audience of the meaning of a poem. Such semantic layers, accumulated over the duration of centuries, were ironically what used to make the genre functional, endowing it with an insurmountable cultural depth accompanied by verbal terseness. A poetry containing cultural essence condensed to such a degree, however, appears perplexing and opaque to a foreign audience. The aforementioned translators of Hafiz were obliged to parse signs and symbols without injuring the lyrical texture of a poem, and to achieve an ideal balance between laboring the cultural information and bemusing the reader with unexplained references to rubies, roses, and nightingales, was nothing short of a literary ordeal. Similar linguistic and cultural challenges plague the modern-day ghazal poets. Unlike the contemporary sonneteers who could liberally interact with the archaic tradition by both observing and deviating from the Shakespearean and Spenserian paragons, the ghazal poets often cannot study the classical models in their Urdu and Persian originals, and even the most exacting research on the form yields little information as to the potential English reinvention of the form. To be sure, English poets are neither singular nor first in attempting to make the ghazal their own, and yet the breakthroughs of the poets in Southern India, Granada, and Istanbul took place in cultural settings that were much dissimilar from the modern Anglo-American literary landscape. Hebrew poets chose to contort their own language to meet the formal requirements, whereas Ottoman poets represented the Persian phonology and metrics by borrowing heavily from the Persian lexicon. To follow either suit, however, would be an unimaginable option for a modern poet. She cannot, for example, elongate English vowels to replicate the ghazal phonology, nor intersperse her poems with Perso-Arabic loanwords [12]. The result, if made to materialize at all, would sound unintelligible to Anglophone readers, or dangerously exoticise the culture it is supposed to represent, furthering the sense of aped foreignness that has stigmatized the English ghazal already. Culturewise, the climate inhabited by modern poets, including the Iranian poets in Diaspora, is profoundly alienated from the soil where the ghazal used to flourish. The temporal leap from the time of Hafiz and Sana’i alone is so great that Simin Behbahani herself—the acclaimed national poet of Iran—remains somewhat equivocal as to the definition of the ghazal in her present-day ambiance. Brookshaw observes how she “describes [her ghazal] as if they are in some way cultivated from ‘cuttings’ taken from the stump of the traditional Persian ghazal, [while] elsewhere, Behbahani states that her poetry can no longer be classified as ghazal” [13], and her vacillation mirrors how elusive the very notion of modern ghazal appears, even to those who reside much closer to the core of the Persian ghazal production. One could only imagine the weight of onus an American poet has to bear, who is anticipated to make her way through not only the temporal but also geo-cultural distance from the Medieval Persia. While she cannot sing odes dedicated to Persian pavilions, wine-servants, or Majnoon without bewildering the uninformed audience, she is still burdened with the duty to reincarnating the subtle poetic texture—without the full availability of allusions that ancient masters could freely take advantage of. One vexing consequence of this linguistic and cultural estrangement is the absence of a concrete definition, or a guideline, that inculcates what an ideal English ghazal ought to do. Given the profundity of the crevasse that must be bridged for the inception of decent English ghazal, few would adamantly cling to extreme formal orthodoxy: concessions are inevitable, and productive breakage of rules sounds good in theory. No agreement has been made, however, on the acceptable degree of creative latitude, and the quandaries of ghazal poets yet agin converge with those of a translator. While it is axiomatic that no translation is perfect, which compromises are licensed? Which lyrical modules are relatively dispensable, their disappearance inconsequential enough to warrant the ghazal¬-ness of the outcome? Is a ghazal still a ghazal when it lacks the signature refrain, or when it neither a love-song, nor a eulogy? What is it that comprises the fundamental spirit of the form—its amatory subject, formal compliance, or perceivably musical prosody? The query leaves even the putative ghazal pundits clueless. Agha Shahid Ali himself, the bona fide “Captain Form,” had to relinquish the use of qafia in his first attempt to write an English ghazal, and eventually acknowledged that a poet may be flexible with some formalistic restrictions [14]. In a sense, the poets’ endeavor to transfer a whole tradition into another linguacultural sphere is even more complex than ordinary literary translation, whose practitioners can always turn to the indisputable original should they need a good appraising criterion. Ghazal as a poetic form, on the other hand, lacks such an authoritative prototype—what does exist is a body of examples, of which role is only to inspire, not to dictate. After all, the very first ghazal, sung by the Bedouins, lacked many of the features that a Persian minstrel would have deemed requisites, including the radif and the takhallus. The most canonical Persian and Urdu ghazal, thus apprehended, are but variations themselves, no more or no less authentic than the modern English take on the form. Consequently, a paradoxical conclusion emerges that too many restrictions came to generate a state of creative anomie. Not knowing what it is that they are supposed to compose, many poets seem to take excessive creative liberty when writing English ghazal. If an individual “is not likely to have the requisite gifts for poetically rendering [...] the great works [which are] composed of parts so disparate, [such as] the works of Shakespeare and Goethe’s ‘Faust’” [15], and formal precision only mangles the subtle beauty of a poetic work most of the time—the poets must have reasoned—it might be a better idea simply to take the maximum freedom to produce a work that works for “English ears,” which “crave English music” anyhow [16]. It was this mindset that effected “the excessive liberties taken with the language and imagery [that make it] hard to recognize any Persian original” [17]. Many poets have likewise inclined towards sacrificing the formal restrictions in preference of catering to the English lyrical norms. Rich’s “Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib,” the best-known example of free-verse ghazal, is more a collection of plain English poems in couplets, than of real ghazal. All she took from the genre is the name and the radical breaks between verses, but she seems to feel little need to defend her appropriation of the genre, simply informing the readers in the preface that Ghalib’s use of structure and metrics is much obedient to the classical ghazal rules than hers [18]. Even those who choose to adhere to the form—those writing “real” ghazal—often drop the qafia altogether, or content themselves with imperfect rhyme schemes. When an ambitious poet does determine to preserve the monorhyme, she struggles to such an extent that the poem sounds somewhat contrived. Maria Hummel, yet another ghazal poet, professed that she has to consult her rhyming dictionary in order to come up with a functional rhyme, but, even with the lexicographic assistance, her use of qafia is frequently slant or imperfect, bespeaking the demanding nature of conforming to the convention without any fear of monotony. To worsen the circumstances, a baffling amount of miscomprehension hamstrings the poets, preventing the ghazal from unfurling its full potentials in the new soil. Walter Andrews points out how “relatively few scholars have been responsible for virtually all publication in the field, […] [a]ll of which have contributed massively to our storehouse of truths about the poetry, but of this small group only a few have drawn major critical conclusions from the accumulated facts” [19]. One can discern the same phenomenon within the discourse circumscribing the ghazal, both popular and academic—particularly with regards to the issue of thematic disunity. The most accentuated feature of the genre is that it is thoroughly devoid of topical unity, bound together solely by “a technical context, a formal unity based on rhyme and refrain and prosody” [20]. Popularized mostly by virtue of the misconception regarding the “Oriental” order—praised as a potent counteragent against the “Western” idea of rationality and linear chronology—this characterization is not entirely true. Not only is the good old East-West dichotomy erroneous (so is the assumption that the Western scholarship has never encountered such peripatetic order as that of the ghazal), but it also tends to obviate any emphasis on the thematic “sum” of the discrete units, as can be inferred from Lisa Sewell’s assertion that “[t]he important unit in the ghazal is the verse, not the whole ghazal in which it appears—making the question of arbitrariness completely irrelevant” [21]. The verses could be savored individually, of course, and yet that the tradition mandates the assembly of the couplets into some order authorizes a closer examination of the thematic “whole”—that is, what effect emerges from that particular assemblage of motifs. Once presented, the sequence of the couplets is incorporated into the semantics of the poem as an artifact on its own, and the resulting whole is greater and richer than the mechanical sum of its parts. Even the famous—and frequently bowdlerised—“Shirazi Turk (“The Turk of Shiraz”)” by Hafiz, epitomizing the aesthetics of the classical Persian ghazal, disproves the thesis on disunity. At the first glance, the lack of enjambments does confirm the completeness of each line as a self-sufficient semantic unit, and individual lines seem to be each painting a fragmentary scene, ranging from the poet’s heart literally stolen by the attractive youth and the patron endowing Hafiz with a string of pearls in return for the latter’s nacreous chain of couplets. Ali’s bold claim that a ghazal must not “in any way suffer by a rearrangement of couplets,” nor “if one would simply delete some of its couplets,” however, is far from the truth, precisely because the pearls must be stringed before they are presented [22]. Hafiz’s “Shirazi Turk” does feature some thematic current, albeit an extremely subtle one, that threads together the beloved, heavenly beauty, earthly paradise, and wine. Moreover, the nine couplets are shaped into a symmetrical fold, gradually zooming in on and out of the beloved’s ethereal pulchritude that crowns the poem at the very centre [23]. The error becomes even more evident when one considers an earlier progenitor of the romantic-erotic ghazal—Abu Nuwas. The exquisite ghazal by Abu Nuwas on the beauteous Christian boy also validates the impact of the whole that subsumes all of its comprising units to amplify the message. The speaker emotes his longing for the boy in a dramatic crescendo, an effect that would lose its appeal as soon as the lines are rearranged. The boy is eyed from afar by the smitten poet on the open street, who, in the privacy of his imagination, brings himself nearer and nearer to the youth, achieves the physical union with him, and finally expels himself from the love-struck trance with a frustrated lamentation. The central theme is also vividly present in the foreground—the consummation of love equated with the rite of Eucharist and its corporeal connotations—penetrating individual verses one after another. In fact, Abu Nuwas’ other compositions, which antedate the birth of Hafiz and Ghalib by centuries, prove that the ghazal form could be employed even for the purpose of storytelling, which is certainly one of the experiments that the poets should be entitled to conduct, and yet are unjustly kept from exploring [24]. All in all, contemporary poets do not yet reside in a linguacultural space that is conducive to the production of high-quality ghazal. The inadequacy should not mean, however, that there could be no such thing as a genuine and mellifluous English ghazal. Even amidst the creative anarchy, some poets have managed to poise themselves at once as ghazal writers and English poets. Agha Shahid Ali and Mimi Khalvati are the main proponents of the form in the United States and in the United Kingdom respectively. As Diasporic writers, they introduced the genre to the Anglophone audience, and have since striven to realize a fine balance between tradition and innovation. Even among the more experimental pieces, there are plenty of poems that exhibit a rare union of grace and subtlety. One might regard such pieces as heralding the potential rise of the English ghazal as the next successor of the ancient genre. I will now discuss three ghazal by three different poets, and prove they all fulfill the requirements of the ghazal tradition both formally and thematically, while staying relevant to the contemporary literary establishment in which they have to operate. Of Mimi Khavati’s “Ghazal,” the first noteworthy attribute is its comfortable cohabitation with the pre-established ghazal tradition. Khalvati more or less dedicates the poem to Hafiz, the master of the ghazal, and thereby announces from the very outset that the poem would seek to emulate a Persian ghazal. With her monorhyme and radif impeccable, the poet obeys all but one formal restriction—that of takhallus—and the rupture is undertaken for a good reason. Khalvati signs the poem in the name of “Hafez” instead of her own, and this transgression refers back to the custome of tributary co-authoring. Aspiring poets often adopted the refrains and couplets from canonical masterpieces, a practice that was less plagiarism than a creative cooperation with the famous wordsmiths’ accomplishments. Also invoked is the Edward FitzGerald’s 1859 rendition of Omar Khayyám’s Rubáiyát, the archetype of the “creative translation.” Khalvati herself wrote a number of rubáiyát, and was probably aware that FitzGerald executed the translation with more creativity than fidelity, inhabiting “an ambigious ground between translation and original composition" [25]. What takes place is the ambiguous confusion of the authorship—between the author and the translator, the dictator and the messenger—as FitzGerald conceals himself in the nominal guise of Omar Khayyám. Likewise, that Khalvati supplies Hafiz’s name in lieu of her own penname is not an inconsequential variance, with which she assays to situate the poem in the larger tradition of ghazal composition and in the British literary history. A good number of classical ghazal motifs are visible—the moon, the wine, and the garden with a brook—a setting that closely resembles a more modest version of the Persian garden [26]. Khalvati’s choice of radif—“enough”—is beautifully appropriate, as it embodies a sense of contentment with the marvelous present moment that resembles the heaven (“Heaven can wait. To have found, [...] a bed and a roof so divine’s enough.”), the same sentiment expressed by a plethora of Arabic and Persian ghazals. The texture of the classical ghazal is vividly alive in the poem, even without the “exotic” references to Majnoon and bulbul. Overall, the imagery is harmonious even by the English aesthetic standards. Although one might not be able to fathom the poem and its multilayered allusions fully, the most uninformed reader could still appreciate it. “Ghazal” flows from one imagery to the next, at once confirming and repudiating Ali’s disunity claim. While there is no enjambment, couplets are woven together into a collage through a skillful use of lyrical associations arising from individual tropes. The vine in the garden evokes the image of wine, which, poured into a cup, reflects the moon, a typical circumlocutory invocation of the luminous face of the beloved. As the moon, or the reflection of it, dwells within the speaker’s ideal garden, the space becomes a self-contained world by itself, complete with the presence of the beloved therein. The last two couplets express the resulting sense of contentment, and the realization of an earthly heaven. The most fascinating aspect of the poem, in my viewpoint, is its diction. Earlier, I have dismissed as futile the resort to lexical borrowings for the purpose of textural replication. Nevertheless, Khalvati’s poem seems to instantiate an efficacious implementation of that very method. Little known is the fact that the word “paradise”—in dress of “heaven” in the poem—stems from an Iranian etymon (pairidaēza), which used to denote small courtyards and enclosed spaces [27]. This etymological clue bridges the crevasse between the modesty of Khalvati’s garden and the grandeur of the heaven. Any self-sufficient space devoid of worldly woes, except for the lovesickness for the beloved, could translate into a paradisal haven, a conceptual link that Khalvati brilliantly channels in her masterpiece. The sudden reference to the sun shining on the “bazaar,” which some might suspect to be reeking with Orientalism, could be interpreted in the same vein: Khalvati attempts to reproduce the Persian form by means of lexical borrowings, when doing so would not peril the poetic message. In fact, the apotheosis of “paradise” intimates that an apt borrowing could amplify the expressive depth of the poem, when approached with a sufficient level of scholarly caution [28]. Khalvati’s “Ghazal” even revives the mystic asexuality of the beloved by opting for a second-person pronoun, “you,” to address the lover, referred to as both “a beggar, a tramp” and “a rose” (a classic ghazal symbol of the regal beloved), whose identity thereby remains out of reach over the entire duration of the poem. If Mimi Khalvati’s poem exemplifies a more traditional ghazal in its subject matter and language use, Patricia Smith achieves what many people would deem the least conceivable marriage between forms with her “Hip-Hop Ghazal”—the amalgamation of the rap music and ghazal. While this peculiar pairing might sound counterintuitive, it is in fact the most natural combination, as the rap lyrics are, somewhat ironically, the most conservative in its adherence to formal restrictions among the living English poetic genres. The very definition of the form mandates the rapper to use rhymed lines, slant or exact, in a way much akin to the monorhyme of the ghazal. Roger Sedarat signals the possibility of this get-together of hip-hop and ghazal in his poem “Trapped in Form,” which is a ghazal also, in which the poet extols the beauty and power of “forms.” He broaches the power of “Notorious BIG songs” that “show how brilliantly he rapped in form.” That a ghazal poet outspokenly drew parallel between hip-hop and ghazal foretells the birth of a great crossbreed. The poem is complete in its ghazal form to such a degree that even Agha Shahid Ali would approve of its legitimacy. The rendition of the poem into couplets, the insertion of the takhallus at the end, the qafia (“woo, thru, glue, [...]”), and the use of radif (“hips”) are all executed in the most unmistakable manner. The poem does not display any enjambment between couplets, each of which is an independent thematic and syntactic unit. It also interacts with the tradition of hip-hop music through the use of rhyme words, the African-American diction, and the festive setting. The importation of sentence fragments and slang words like “gotta,” and “sista,” smacking thickly of the African-American dialect, does an excellent job of shedding light on the socio-cultural identity vocalized by the poetic narrator. Even as one should be cautious in presuming the link between any two African-American artists without substantial grounds, Smith’s jazzy ghazal indisputably inherits its language from the African-American masters like Langston Hughes and Nicolas Guillen. One witness traces of the Hughes’ use of poetic imagery [29], and, even more importantly, the poem consciously interacts with the background music of the poetic setting, as did Hughes in his poems. By using the performance of blues music as the subject matter, the poems bring attention to its own blues-like musicality. Smith’s ghazal, likewise, poses itself as “hip-hop,” and the reader instantaneously begins to hear the underlying music—the poem becomes three-dimensional at the very moment: the dancing bodies, “boneless,” and “seeping ‘tween floorboards,” almost defy the physical laws as the dancers lose themselves in the convivial celebration, tinging the scene with an extremely groovy feel. Even more interesting, if less detectable at first, is the functional and thematic resemblance the Smith ghazal bears to some of the classical ghazal pieces. The most obvious is the bacchanal, libertine theme, echoing the depictions of drunken debaucheries hallmarked by Abu Nuwaz the provocateur. The poem thus brings itself back to the very origin of the ghazal, when it was allied more closely with merrymaking than wrestling with rhyming dictionaries. As Julie Scott Meisami points out, “the ghazal retained its close connection with music,” and “the influence of performance context on its thematic and style” was long-lasting [30]. Through the union with the hip-hop, the significance of the performance setting seems to resurface, in a way that a lay American reader can relate to and enjoy.The speaker and her “sistas” dominate the dance floor as “the jukebox teases,” and dispel the worldly woes by means of gay songs and dances, “throat[ing] the heartbreak, / inhaling bassline, cracking backbone and singing thru hips.” That they could seep through the floor indicates an ecstatic erasure of the bodily existence, just as in Sufi religious rituals, where the practitioners would lose themselves in music and elevate into the higher realm. The erotic mood ascends and culminates in the fourth verse, with “Engines grinding, rotating, smokin',” and the fifth and the sixth couplets “pull back” the tension gradually until the poem reveals the existential crisis that has been underlying the poem all the while. The brief moment of depression, nonetheless, is cast aside with the anticipation of yet another spree—the poem may as well be a twenty-first-century edition of Abu Nuwas. Above all, black women in “Hip-hop Ghazal” are portrayed as love objects, idols, and eye candies. They are, essentially, “the beloveds,” who are at once invincible and powerless because of their bewitching physical beauty. The initial description of the dancing women resembles Hafiz’s portrayal of “the gypsies,” “jesting” and well capable of “plundering the feast” to “rob [the onlookers’] heart of patience” [31]. Several typical ghazal tropes are interspersed throughout the poem—the deadly beauty of the beloved, oft-likened to an arrow, beheld from a distance in open public spaces (“just struttin' down Manhattan streets / killing the menfolk with a dose of that stinging view”), grieving over human mortality (“Crying 'bout getting old”), ensuing sense of fatalism (“you need to get up off / what God gave you”), the carpe-diem outlook on life (“Say a prayer and start slinging”). While conventional ghazal do not narrate the situation from the perspective of the beloveds—who are at once venerated and objectified, and are often ethnic or religious minorities—Smith subverts the power dynamics by letting Black women steal the stage [32]. The poetic speaker harnesses an ambivalent tone, at once celebratory and ironic. With the provocative refrain of “hips,” the focus unmistakably falls on the seductive charm of Black females, echoing the hyper-sexualization of Black femininity in media portrayals. The speaker is acutely aware of the unceasing gaze to which she and her friends are subject to. She asks the audience to “watch” them dance, and knows that “the mere sight of ringing true hips” solicits, in the chauvinistic society, gawking eyes and rude catcalls. It remains ambiguous whether she reveals an honest description of the group, or merely a mocking iteration of what the consumptive gazes look for in Black women, who presumably must be “munching on fat,” dancing “decked out in shells and splashes,” and willingly “bringing them [the ‘menfolk’] woo hips.” By presenting a beloved that has internalized the objectifying gaze of the lover, the poem achieves both a successful interaction with the existing ghazal norms, and critiques the popular representation of Black bodies. This veering, I believe, proposes a way to liberate the ghazal from its former ideological limitations and remedy the perpetual absence of the beloveds’ voice in the tradition. Agha Shahid Ali’s “In Jesusalem” appears the least accessible of the three poems analyzed in this paper. Although his towering position has done both harm and good in the development of English ghazal, both Khalvati and Smith owe their achievements to the forefather figure of Ali, who devoted many decades to honing the formal exactitude and broadening the thematic spectrum of the English ghazal. Ali has written many a ghazal that bind postcolonial consciousness with activist messages and theistic inquiries. In his poems, the traditional “beloved” metamorphoses into either the unresponsive Abrahamic god—who, to Ali, seems cruelly discriminatory in his distribution of salvation; or into an unnamed stranger whom Ali nonetheless comes to love, through the principle of universal fraternité. “In Jesusalem” follows the latter track, and stretches the trope of exilic trauma to embrace all of humanity, portraying the earth inhabited by exiles, its heavenly qualities (symbolized with wine, just as in classical ghazal) “defiled by exiles,” and its belligerents also “reconciled by exiles” ultimately. Expressed throughout Ali’s posthumously published ghazal collection, Call Me Ishmael Tonight, the fondness for the outcasts could in fact be tracked back to the self-ostracizing spirituality praised in many classical religious ghazal, whose composers preferred honest sinfulness to hypocritical piety, and sought to be condemned—rather than complimented—by the community [33]. While the outcasts in the religious society could at least hope to be consoled by the divine grace and forgiveness, Ali’s beloveds are pagan “Jezebels” and the “pulsant bones” of Native Americans, those abandoned and persecuted even by the god [34]. Ali should be accredited especially with resuscitating the legacy of creative collaboration in the Anglophone adaptation of the form. Worthy of more attention are the diverse origins of Ali’s poetic inspiration, which derives not only from Ghalib and Hafiz, but also from such quintessentially American authors as Melville and Hart Crane. “In Jesusalem” is one of the best manifestations of that particular breakthrough, as the poem unfolds a dense network of allusions, ranging from Rudyard Kipling—“the Physician of Sick Pearls” paraphrases “the healer of sick pearls” in Kipling’s short story—to the legend of Majnoon. Whereas some of Ali’s earlier ghazal utilizing external quotations demarcate authorial boundaries with quotation marks, “In Jesusalem” aspires for more polyphony as it erases the distinction between the main poetic voice and the borrowed ones. Most noticeably, “In Jesusalem” is dedicated to Edward W. Said, and its conception is ascribable to Said’s essay on exile and its depiction of the Palestinian refugees [35]. The opening verse—depicting a Jerusalemite refuge dialing “a dead phone” (a futile attempt at the call for rescue, resonating with the muted prayer in the seventh stanza)—sings of the irony that one could be “exiled by exiles,” a phrase drawn straight from Said. Both the epigraph and the phrase “after the last sky” in the tenth couplet, meanwhile, come from Darwish’s “The Earth is Closing on Us.” Moreover, Ali’s poem is probably a response to Darwish’s “Who Am I, Without Exile,” which stages an analogous set of figures: the plaintive “I,” the unidentified “stranger,” and the “we” emergent as the two merge into a single voice. The persecuted Oscar Wilde, with his sole refuge of art (“swear not by art, Oscar Wilde, but by exiles”), is juxtaposed with the self-annihilating Mansur al-Hallaj, a Sufi mystic who claimed to be one with the One (“alone with the Alone”) and was persecuted (“crucified”) for heresy. Hafiz’s “Shirazi Turk” is pastiched in the penultimate couplet, as the speaker asks the audience to hand his silk-wrapped heart to his enemy, should the latter be solitary (echoing the loneliness of the divine in the fourth stanza) and unarmed—a conciliatory gesture the feeds into the final verse, in which the poet wistfully contemplates the possibility of a peaceful coexistence. The poem is laudable not only because Ali the “Captain Form” observes all of the rules governing the genre—down to the level of syllabic numbers, which are consistently kept between nine to eleven—but also because the poet’s employment of those features does much more than a mere sustention of the external form. Ali’s refrain, like those of Khalvati and Smith, effectively encapsulates the multifaceted poetic theme. While many other English ghazal opt for a monolexical—a single-word—refrain, Ali often adopts longer phrases, as was customary in the traditional ghazal. The refrain “by exiles” confers the agency on the exiles—a term that bundles up the Palestinians and the Israeli Jews, by virtue of the expression “exiled by exiles,” whereby the exiles are vouchsafed the power to protest, to destroy, and hopefully to make peace—and verbalizes a strong sense of camaraderie and allegiance, as implied by the pledge (“swear […] by exiles”) and the empathic—and thus therapeutic—act of “sitting by exiles.” Furthermore, the polyphonic verses induce the confluence of different voices from discontiguous sources, letting all exiles on earth mingle into a single consciousness. It is this unity that enables Ali to invite the oppressors in Palestine, who are themselves exiles after all, to join the communion of the vagrants, and share their solitude together with other outcasts. Does the poem, then, succeed in bridging the gaping cultural crevasse? Concerning its use of cultural references, the answer is in the affirmative. Through a considerate deployment of the intertexts, the poem combines the “exotic” with the familiar names and motifs, mitigating the bewilderment that might arise when the reader is not literate in the Arab-Urdu culture. Mansoor is not just martyred, but “crucified,” an evocation of the Galilean sufferer who became the conduit of redemption. Oscar Wilde’s aestheticism is questioned with a hint of equivocation, as Ali encases his call for reconciliation and disarmament in a web of intricate verses—is he “drowning out the Calls to Prayer” with his wine-song, or sublimating the pervading chaos into a pleasing orderliness? It is “by the Hudson [River]” that the poet’s native Kashmir is cast in the form of the sumptuous cashmere, “brought from Palestine,” covering the piano, which stands blindfolded and “beguiled” by the pro-Israeli media that neglect the injustices in Kashmir and Palestine alike. While “In Jesusalem” might be unfit for quick consumption, those readers who are fond of plunging into the text to grapple with the chess problem it poses (the fanatics of such artificers as Joyce, Borges, and Nabokov) would find the poem to be a fascinating labyrinth waiting to be decoded, which any well-written poem should be at any rate: the more one delves into it, the more one should be able to get out of it. The sampling above, of course, hardly makes an exhaustive register. Craig Arnold’s “Ghazal for Garcia Lorca,” for instance, limns out the poet’s journey “in Granada”—the refrain—and is signed off with the dual pen-name of “Garcia Lorca and I,” “hand in hand” [36]. Khalvati’s “To Hold Me” imports the star-crossed lovers, Rudolfo and Mimi from La bohème, and centers itself on their amorous tale, a fitting choice that at once re-dresses the pairing of Layla and Majnoon in the Western garment, and enables the poet to use a proper takhallus of her own first name. Maria Hummel’s “One Life” yearns, if hopelessly, for the divine consolation and the lost heaven—the same motifs patronized by Sufi poets combating hypocrisy—in a more contemporary voice that approximates a Dickinsonian mixture of skepticism and the dread of mortality. All of these poems, without forgoing the formal imperatives, imbue the tradition of ghazal with a distinctive postmodern sensibility, toying with such familiar subjects as the fragmentation of the self, the uncertain navigation in the disenchanted world, and the intertextuality that obfuscates the boundary between creation and mimicking. These models illustrate that it takes only an adequate degree of linguistic mastery and strenuousity for the willing poets to compose high-quality English ghazal. Even with the question of feasibility now cleared up, one might still inquire whether there are any benefits brought about into the English literature by the entry of the English ghazal, other than a display of literary acrobatics. While no single answer suffices, the following statement, again from Agha Shahid Ali, might provide some insight:
[T]here is a further bonus for those willing to pursue the real ghazal. Through ghazals, English can again employ full rhymes, even the most cliché-ridden, [...] because the radif enables the rhyme to lose through a transparent masking, its strained and clichéd element. [...] What an incredible gift: all those rhymes one thought could never be used again [37].
In the age of free verse, the ghazal can serve as “a way out,” or a “way in” to reinstate the obsolescent idea of “poetic form” back into the English poetics in a refreshing raiment. No one might bother to write rhymed sonnets any more, but the ghazal poses a new creative challenge. The challenge was accepted and handled magnificently by Patricia Smith above, whose awareness of the importance of form sprouted initially from the hip-hop music. The present time, in fact, is not altogether unfavorable for the successful implementation of the ghazal form. New Formalists might have failed to achieve their high-flown goal of the nineties to witness a major comeback of aesthetic formalism, but their effort did generate a renewed attention to poetic forms. Also significant are the recent limelight cast on the pastiche as an independent genre, and the consequent appreciation of the intertextuality. As Julie Meisami emphasizes, it is impossible to “exhaust the potentials of the ghazal, nor the many and varied uses for which the form has been employed,” and its seeming conservatism does not undercut the continual evolution of the form, even it is transplanted in an unfamiliar lingua-cultural ground [38]. The English ghazal, then, may as well serve as the repository of the eclectic postmodern imagination, and empower poets with a compelling structural frame to lend style to the most fragmentary and the most referential chains of images. The paucity of the proper English ghazal so far reflects little more than the transitory confusion that any genre has to undergo at its embryonic stage. The nascent offshoot of the ghazal family, of course, will have to juggle a variety of ruptures and experimental efforts before it can evolve into a full-fledged poetic form in English. There seems to be no intrinsic reason that the English ghazal, with all its quiddities, cannot be a legitimate successor of the esteemed tradition, while infusing fresh inspirations and opening up new possibilities in the English literary establishment. Such a transformation in the status of the English ghazal, nonetheless, would require a good amount of industry on the part of poets, their audience, and the critics alike—a parameter that no one can confidently predict for the time being.
[1] A ghazal is a “monorhyme (aa ba ca, etc.) lyric poem originating in Arabia as a thematic genre on love and later developed into a fixed form in Persian, Turkish, Urdu, and most other Islamic literatures. […] [A]s a poetic genre, ghazal ranges in mood from elegiac to anacreontic, from defeatist to mystically ecstatic.” See F. D. Lewis, “Ghazal,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 4th ed., ed. Roland Green et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 570-72.
[2] Walter Benjamin, “The Task of a Translator,” in Selected Writings, v.1, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock and Michael William Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 255.
[3] Agha Shahid Ali, “The Ghazal in America: May I?” in After New Formalism: Poets on Form, Narrative, and Tradition, ed. Annie Finch (Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 1999), 123. A similarly phrased fulmination appears also in Agha Shahid Ali, introduction to Ravishing Disunities (Middleton, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 1.
[4] As the first two paragraphs might have intimated, this paper does not survey the potential trajectories of what other critics have oxymoronically nicknamed the “free-verse ghazal.” Adrienne Rich was the first to adopt the form of fragmentary couplets to manifest the fragmentary postmodern experience and escape the rigid formalism recommended by the New Criticism. While few would deny that the free-verse ghazal played a major role in apprising the public of the expressive potential of the tradition (to such a degree that the free-verse examples came to “represent the real thing,” according to Ali), this essay attempts to analyze the possibilities of the so-called “real” ghazal in English, for “one should know the rules before deciding to break them”—all the more when one attempts to learn from a cultural other. For a more detailed description of the appeals of the free-verse ghazal, see Lisa Sewell, “Free Verse and Formal, the English Ghazal,” in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (New York: J. Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2011), 104-108.
[5] Benjamin argued that the ultimate, rather metaphysical purpose of translation is to prove the consanguinity of all languages and their expressive essence: “Translation thus ultimately serves the purpose If the kinship of languages is to be demonstrated by translations, how else can this be done but by conveying the form and meaning of the original as accurately as possible?” I am using the idea analogically to explicate the purpose of translating a whole form and the tradition it stands for. See Benjamin, “The Task of a Translator,” 255.
[6] Qtd. in Parvin Loloi, Hafiz, Master of Persian Poetry: A Critical Bibliography (London: Tauris, 2004), 12.
[7] To realize this characteristic, one need no further than the poetic forms commonly used in English. Even the more repetitive forms such as villanelle usually have more than one refrains, and the rhyme words intertwine to lessen the monotony.
[8] In the process, the quasi-divine beloveds were often endowed with such cutesy sobriquets as “sweet maid” and “saucy sweet dames. See Anthony Shay, The Dangerous Lives of Public Performers: Dancing, Sex, and Entertainment in the Islamic World (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 166. “[S]cholars who study Middle Eastern languages, literatures, religions, and societies, attempted to expunge the utter glee with which medieval literati in the Islamic world, particularly in Arabic and Persian, celebrated the love of young ephebes. ‘For scholars intent on transforming the discipline of Middle Eastern studies beyond its Orientalist origins, there nonetheless has remained an antipathy toward investigations of sexuality, which enforces, in particular, a deliberate forgetting of the homoerotic past.’ [...] These proponents of keeping Persian and Arabic literature clean, safe, and heteronormative deliberately mistranslated Hafez and other poets, misguiding generations of readers.” For more information on the mistranslations of ungendered nouns in ghazal, refer also to Loloi, Hafiz, Master of Persian Poetry, 50-51.
[9] Loloi, Hafiz, 7.
[10] Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, “Revivication of an Ossified Genre? Simin Behbahani and the Persian Ghazal,” Iranian Studies 41, no. 1 (2008): 77. Behbahani called the classical ghazal a genre that was “crystallized” or “ossified” (munjamid), addressing the rigid set of formal and stylistic confinements a poet had to face in order to produce a ghazal piece.
[11] Dick Davis, “Sufism and Poetry: A marriage of Convenience?,” Edebiyat 10 (1999): 282.
[12] This, of course, was a viable option in the context of the Ottoman and the Urdu poetry, to which Persian was what French was in Chaucer’s days—the language of fashion, sophistication, and learning. While I will partly justify this pursuit in my discussion of Khavati’s ghazal, one need not think beyond a short list of Persian loanwords in English to realize the consequences of the dependence on lexical borrowing: tandoori, bazaar, turban, and spinach.
[13] Brookshaw, “Revivication of an Ossified Genre?,” 77.
[14] Ali, “The Ghazal in America,” 131. During his exchange with Hollander, Ali had to make some concessions regarding the precision of syllabic numbers, as the Urdu and the English vowels employ distinct counting systems. The nickname “Captain Form” references Roger Sedarat’s ghazal “Trapped in Form,” an ode to the charms of versifying in rigid forms.
[15] Loloi, Hafiz, Master of Persian Poetry, 9.
[16] Ibid, 12.
[17] Parvin Loloi, “Hafiz and the Language of Love in the Nineteenth-Century English and American Poetry,” in Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry, ed. Leonard Lewisohn (London: I.B. Tauris in association with Iran Heritage Foundation, 2010), 280.
[18] “While the structure and metrics of the classic ghazal form as used by Ghalib are much stricter than mine, I adhered to his use of a minimum give couples to a ghazal.” Qtd. in Ali, “The Ghazal in America,” 128. Rich’s choice seems partly justifiable, as she was asked by Aijaz Ahmad, who hoped to translate Ghalib into English, to stylize his more literal renditions in accordance with the English poetic norms. Ahmad hoped to popularize the poet first, and seem to have paid little attention to the formal stringency.
[19] Walter G. Andrews, Poetry’s Voice, Society’s Song: Ottoman Lyric Poetry, p.14.
[20] See Ali, “The Ghazal in America,”124. I do accredit Ali and other scholars with their successful defence on behalf of ghazal from the attacks put forth by the proponents of “Western-type” unity. One not-so-desirable ramification of their efforts, nevertheless, has been that the stress on disunity has grown monolithic in such a way that no one questions the veracity of the claim. As a result, poets might be thwarted from taking more creative initiatives—experimenting with narrative styles, for instance—that are not so incompatible with the history of the tradition.
[21] Sewell, “Free Verse and Formal,” 108. Sewell states how “[t]his quest for unity troubles Western scholars and not scholars, poets, and readers in India, where the Urdu ghazal is still alive and well.” Noticeable is Sewell’s employment of the West-East bifurcation to justify her argument, the implication being that it is the “Western” parochialism that fails to appreciate the “Eastern” mode of thinking. The ghazal-like organization—non-linear and associative—is not exclusive to the “East” as it is purported to be. An analogy with the Romantic aesthetics, with its stress on the emergence of meaning and imagery from seeming nonsense, would prove helpful here, not least because the birth of Romanticism is often credited to the importation of Oriental art forms and philosophy. Jacques Rancière’s following summary of the Romantic poetics may as well be a pithy characterization of the unity-through-disunity represented by the ghazal aesthetics: “The backbone of story is not the causal continuity of the action [...] but the variable signifying power of signs and assemblies of signs that forms the tissue of the work, [...] the power of metamophoses by which a combination of signs solidifies into an opaque object or deploys itself in a signifying, living form, [and] the power of reflection that gives a particular combination the power to interpret another combination.” In addition, Monika Greenleaf describes the Romantic aesthetics especially in terms of pictorial collage, not unlike Hafiz and Rumi’s own use of couplets to supply a collection of independent images than a coherent narrative: “the peripatetic art critic of Diderot’s Salons creates a certain narrative associatively linking the individual paintings in display, a narrative that depends entirely on the accidental order in which he has encountered the paintings,” which are fragments like the ghazal couplets, both “cut off from its narrative context by the formal frame.” Few critics, however, attempted to digest the ghazal through the framework of Romanticism, and the absence of such integrative thinking furthers the prejudice that the Anglophone world cannot effectively collaborate with the Eastern form. See Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 160; and Monika Greenleaf, “Romantic Fragment: A Genealogy,” in Pushkin and Romantic Fashion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 27-28.
[22] Ali, “Ghazal: To Be Teased into Disunity,” p.121.
[23] (I am using Julie Scott Meisami’s translation here for the analysis.) The luxuries in the first couplet, which the poet is willing to barter off for the beloved’s beauteous dark mole, resonate with the jewellery bestowed upon him by the patron in the ultimate lines. The second couplet matches the penultimate one, as both contrasts the earthly delights at the Shirazi palace, represented with the vinous trope, with the unknowable Eden and the enigma of aging, death, and afterlife. The third and the seventh couplets sing of the virtue contrasted with the youthful impatience, while the fourth and the fifth couplet emphasize the flawless beauty and the cruelty of the beloved who declines the lover’s “imperfect” longing and compliments. The central verse depicts the image of a dramatic union, expressed with the allusion to the biblical beauty of Joseph.
[24] Maria Hummel’s “One Life,” which will be briefly referenced later in this paper, for instance, would well benefit from the inclusion of an Abu Nuwas-esque narrative flow, as the poem, however elusively, is telling a biographical tale—of the childish belief in God, of marriage, of childbirth, of death, of the loss of faith, and of the muffled, almost subconscious struggle to regain the heaven.
[25] See Loloi, Hafiz, Master of Persian Poetry, 50.
[26] Dominic Brookshaw, “Palaces, Pavilions and Pleasture-gardens: The Context and Setting of the Medieval Majlis,” Middle Eastern Literatures 6, no. 2 (2003): 202. “Islamic gardens are often interpreted as earthly reflections of the gardens of Quranic Paradise, which is characterized by lush, verdant vegetation watered by fountains and streams.”
[27] Tom McArthur, The Oxford Companion to the English Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 143.
[28] Khalvati centers one of her rubáiyát on the trope of lilacs, with which she signifies her deceased grandmother’s sublime love. “Lilac,” not surprisingly, is a Persian loanword as well, testifying that Khalvati uses pregnant Iranian words for the purpose of expression.
[29] The depiction of blue-colored human corpus as “gliding, boneless, and clinging” causes the reader to perceive those bodies as separate from the humans who own them—an oft-utilized ostranenie technique by Hughes.
[30] Julie Scott Meisami, “The Persian Ghazal Between Love Song and Panegyric,” in Ghazal as World Literature I: Transformations of a Literary Genre, ed. Thomas Bauer and Neuwirth Angelika (Beirut: Orient-Institut, 2005), 328.
[31] Qtd. from Hafiz’s “Shirazi Turk” discussed earlier in this paper.
[32] The dynamics of objectification surfaces in the example of the Christian boy, and many other poems depicting the erotic longing consummated through what would be considered sexual violence by modern standards. For a more exhaustive list of homoerotic tropes in Abu Nuwas’ ghazal, refer to Philip F Kennedy, Abu Nuwas: A Genius of Poetry (Oxford: Oneworld), 2005.
[33] See Leonard Lewisohn, introduction to Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry (London: I.B. Tauris in association with Iran Heritage Foundation, 2010), xxiii. “Hafiz’s predominant social attitude is shown to be anti-hypocritical, and his condemnation of hypocrisy as the ‘supreme sin’ traced back to its antecedents in Sufi thought [...]. [T]he Sufi sources of Hafiz's counter ethic of malamati bacchanal piety [...] redresses counterfeit religiosity and remedies the vice of hypocrisy.”
[34] Qtd. from Agha Shahid Ali, “Bones,” in The Veiled Suit: The Collected Poem (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009), 357; “Ghazal” in The Veiled Suit, 193: “Damn you, Elijah, I’ll bless Jezebel tonight.”
[35] Edward W Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile: And Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 177. “Perhaps this is the most extraordinary of exile's fates: to have been exiled by exiles—to relive the actual process of up-rooting at the hands of exiles. [...] It is as if the reconstructed Jewish collective experience, […] could not tolerate another story of dispossession and loss to exist alongside it.”
[36] Craig Arnold, “Ghazal for Garcia Lorca,” in Ravishing Disunities, eds. Agha Shahid Ali, 19. The Spanish poet Garcia Lorca had composed a free-verse ghazal himself, and that Arnold composes a full-fledged formal ghazal to pay homage to Garcia Lorca suggests an ironic tone mixed into the poem.
[37] Ali, Ravishing, 10.
[38] Meisami, “The Persian Ghazal,” 341.
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