kamila shamsie

.|Sublime|. wrote:Why do you say that she should not be writing at all?

Huzefa Kapasi wrote: it is the same bok that charvaka (rather, his wife) recommended.

“You must write about me.” ... Shahid ignored my reassurances. He began to laugh and it was then that I
realized that he was dead serious. I understood that he was entrusting
me with a quite specific charge: he wanted me to remember him not
through the spoken recitatives of memory and friendship, but through
the written word. Shahid was unerring in his intuitions about people
and he probably knew that my instincts would have led me to search for
reasons to avoid writing about his death: I would have told myself that I
was not a poet; that our friendship was of recent date; that there
were many others who knew him much better and would be writing from
greater understanding and knowledge. Shahid had decided to shut off
these routes while there was still time.

ghosh on agha shahid ali wrote:The steady deterioration of the political situation in Kashmir – the violence and counter-violence - had a powerful effect on him. In time it became one of the central subjects of his work: indeed it could be said that it was in writing of Kashmir that he created his finest work. The irony of this is that Shahid was not by inclination a political poet. I heard him say once: “If you are from a difficult place and that’s all you have to write about then you should stop writing. You have to respect your art, your form – that is just as important as what you write about.” Another time, I was present at Shahid’s apartment when his long-time friend, Patricia O’Neill, showed him a couple of sonnets written by a Victorian poet. The poems were political, trenchant in their criticism of the British Government for its failure to prevent the massacre of the Armenians in Turkey. Shahid glanced at them and tossed them off-handedly aside: “These are terrible poems.” Patricia asked why, and he said: “Look, I already know where I stand on the massacre of the Armenians. Of course I am against it. But this poem tells me nothing of the massacre; it makes nothing of it formally. I might as well just read a news report.”

Huzefa Kapasi wrote:
.|Sublime|. you must write about me.