asianamlitfans | Raza Ali Hasan's Grieving Shias

Raza Ali Hasan's Grieving Shias (The Sheep Meadow Press, 2006) is a collection of short, lyrical poems that bring together historical figures from the Middle East and the history of contact between the East and West.

Hasan's book would be wonderful to read along with historical materials that help to flesh out the people, dates, and events that he references throughout. Since I am, like many Americans probably, woefully ignorant about the history of the Middle East/West Asia, I could only read the poems at a level unengaged with that historical depth.

In the second poem of the collection, "In that Part of the World," Hasan's stanzas provide brief snapshots of the people and places of Afghanistan in ways that both familiarize and defamiliarize for a Western audience:

II

Locked in, its people:
nomadic, peasant or simply pleasant,
green-eyed, blue-eyed, brown-eyed or simply wide-eyed.

Its great teacher: Noor Mohammad Taraki,
the proud translator of great works
into Pashto, Dari, Durkic and Uzbek.
Its cities: Herat, Kabul, Kandar.

This catalog of eye-colors for the diverse people, the languages spoken, and some cities offer a glimpse of "that part of the world."

More than anything, Hasan's lyric sutures the historical with the cultural and religious, bridging Western reductions of the region's people into an ahistorical, barbarous mass with the complexity of long traditions that aim for the transcendant and the sublime. One example of this dynamic is in the poem "Cathedral Mosque":

The cathedral mosque appears as it must, at night,
to the seminary student finished with his studies,
on his way to the outskirts of Kabul to fight the Russians,
through the arcing pair of windshield wipers,
as a lingering, rain-drenched dream
on a mirroring lake by the road,
with its four minarets puncturing the clouds,
as if stapled to the sky,
its gusts of minnows arcing west, now east
over its watery marble courtyard sliding into water
as the cathedral and the mosque come apart.

The notes at the back of the book offer a few useful points of departure for tracking down some of the references and allusions. For this poem in particular, the note reads, "K.N. Chaudhuri's term for masjid-i-jami in his book Asia Before Europe," thus linking the startling image and idea of the cathedral mosque to a concrete text and discussion.