the where of it

the lost place

• Posted by Summer Wood on May 4th, 2009 filed in books, craft of writing
• 2 Comments »

I didn’t know what a ghazal was until my friend Veronica Golos showed me one she wrote. Her poem is called “Exile”, and because it’s still in progress, I can’t print it here; but the more I learn about ghazals, the more I understand why a poem on that subject might take that form.

A formal poem of Arabic origin, the ghazal is composed of up to fifteen couplets that bear a complex relationship.  It is an ancient form, originating in 6th century pre-Islamic Arabic verse, and it found its most famous modern practitioner in Agha Shahid Ali, a reknowned Kashmiri-American poet who died in 2001.  These are poems of love and loss.  “A ghazal may be understood as a poetic expression of both the pain of loss or separation and the beauty of love in spite of that pain,” says the Wikipedia entry, and though some might argue that that’s a fairly succinct way to sum up most of human life, there’s no question that it fits the bill when it comes to exile from a place you love.

It’s a big country, exile.  I’ve been thinking about the subject more since reading Veronica’s poem.  Formal exile – meaning that a return to your home would result in death or imprisonment – is the most brutal extreme, but aren’t there plenty of other kinds of unintended separations?  Sometimes, simply, we wander, and can’t find our way home.  Or maybe it was our ancestors who did the leaving or who were driven from home.  Sometimes we can’t go home because that place – the one we knew, the one that occasioned all the stories – doesn’t exist anymore.  In that case, the language of names and of memory may be all we have left of a place we have left behind, and the only means we have to pass on the sense of worth and of loss that surrounds those memories.

Even for people who may never have visited an ancestral or imagined place, the language can be enough to evoke the landscape.  Rebecca Solnit, in her marvelous FIELD GUIDE TO GETTING LOST, relates that for Jews displaced to the diaspora, the descriptions of the Holy Land are in Hebrew, not the everyday Yiddish.  Through practice of that language “an indelible image of a then imaginary homeland kept those speakers from melting into their surroundings.”  She muses further,

I wonder sometimes about the merit of that miraculous tenacity, that adherence to a lost landscape and a senescent language.  A case could be made that they would be better off melting into the landscape as no doubt many now forgotten did, adopting native tongues, stories, places to love, ceasing to be exiles by ceasing to remember the country they were exiled from so they could wholly embrace the country they were in.  Only by losing that past would they lose the condition of exile, for the place they were exiled from no longer existed, and they were no longer the people who had left it.

When I was a kid and crossed the continent to go to college, I surprised myself with a bad case of homesickness.  I missed my family desperately, it’s true; but I also missed my place, the woods and creeks and hills and pastureland and twisting back roads of northern New Jersey.  I consoled myself with the thought that when I returned for Christmas break I would borrow a car and drive those back roads for hours, letting the countryside bathe my eyes in a kind of running smear.  I did that.  I still do, when I go back.  But thirty years have passed since then and I’ve never returned to live there.

Yes, there’s a huge gap between exile and the kind of voluntary separation many of us choose.  But there are elements in common: the body-feeling (they don’t call it homesickness for nothing) of being away from the place where you belong, until you don’t; the dreadfully insular aspect of it – no one can understand your emotion but those who have experienced the place as you have, and have gone away. 

It’s customary for the final couplet of a ghazal to include the writer’s name, in one form or another.  Of course.  It is personal to each of us, that feeling of loss, the beauty of love “in spite of pain”.  But we know it well enough to empathize.

The Roman poet Ovid was exiled to the Black Sea – the land of the “barbarians” – for an, um, indiscretion.  Check out David Malouf’s beautiful and masterly novel, AN IMAGINARY LIFE, for a fictional account of that time.