Expressing the Inexpressible: The Craft of the Ghazal
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi My first encounter with the ghazal had to have happened at home where my parents played ghazal LPs on their Phillips record player, along with Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Harry Belafonte and Edith Piaf. The ghazal entered my consciousness first as music, accessible only to the extent that Edith Piaf was accessible; through…
Lorca’s House: A Small Photo Essay
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi From the outside, Lorca’s summer house in Granada reminds me of childhood laughter, something he vowed never to lose: doors and windows painted promise-green, white walls, sunlight sliding like a child on snow, belly down. On my way here, I’ve seen tomatoes nearly as big as cantaloupes in a shop not…
Anis Shivani Speaks on Behalf of Hashish
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Award-winning essayist, novelist, critic, and poet Anis Shivani's second collection of poems Whatever Speaks on Behalf of Hashish was published a few days ago. Here is our conversation about his latest book: SZH: These poems are first and foremost an ideational field, one in which the emotional takes the form of…
Ice Cream Gazebo
Talismans
Transmutations of the Qasida Form and Ghalib’s Qasida for Queen Victoria
Narrative Clarity and Dramatic Tension in “Greed” by C.K. Williams
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi In a lineated poem, the line-breaks are used to produce verbal or sonic emphasis, in addition to creating a structure that is arranged such that it is easy to parse and comprehend the poem. When line-length varies, emphasis shifts and dramatic tension or narrative effect is produced. Generally speaking, in a…
If colors could talk, a scented talk…
Walking Home
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi When home comes back to you as a calamity, its name appearing with death tolls and gut-wrenching photos of its youngest population, it feels as if the place itself, its memory, is lodged inside you like a bullet. The wound, inflicted by the War-terrorism binary, is a complicated wound, worsening with…
Counting Desserts
“Her hands full of earth, she kneels, in red suede high heels:” Planting a New Language in Diaspo/Renga
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi This past summer, news of the Gaza massacres came most revealingly in images and videos taken with cell phones— the devices originally intended to connect us through voice, chronicling instead the horrors befalling Palestinians in real time, horrors that defy conventional language, and will not be chronicled with fidelity by the…
Shade
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Allahu Akbar or God is Great, the anthem stolen by the wicked terrorist, whose attack is aimed at life, what holds life together for me— the zikr: Allahu Akbar, God is Greater, greater than prayer, greater than the spectacularly leaping science, the elegance of logic, the morality police, the lust of…
Bouquet of Nerves
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Starry night, a large starry night with infinite trees, is the background of what seems to be an architectural form— a balcony, bridge, courtyard with pillars? In the foreground, a sphere with a curve draped over it like an arm. This drawing has the expansiveness that suggests eternity (or waiting for…
Shaping Ramadan
BREAKFAST OF WRITERS
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi There is nothing more exciting to me as a writer than catching a new place at daybreak— the moment that marks the beginning of a city's unique rhythms, when a traveler may somnambulate into its most secret, subtle self, its still-dreaming, unspoken quintessence. In this sliver between night and day, before…
Peshawar: Ghosts of a Frontier City
Sam Hamill Interviewed
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Photo by Ian Boyden When you listen as keenly for humanity’s pulse as Sam Hamill does, you “fall into the place where everything is music”— in Rumi’s words. This is the music where all cultures meet, where the spirit finds its truest articulation: a place impossible even to imagine in our…
Interrogating a Poet
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi You write of your country as if from a great distance. Distance is journey’s squinting twin; it courts vision. My country, you will understand, came from vision’s egg. It came from a dreamer of journeys—a poet who entertained nightly the spirits of distant poets: Plato, Ghazali, Rumi, Hafiz, Goethe— sojourners all.…