How Does Ghoses The Alien Transform Physical Migration Into A Metaphor For Inner Estrangement
In What Ways Does The Poem’s Treatment Of Exile Highlight The Tension Between Belonging To A Homeland And Adapting To A Foreign Landscape?
Zulfikar Ghose is one of the most important Pakistani American writers, who earned recognition as a poet, novelist and critic. His early childhood was spent in Sialkot, his birthplace, and Bombay(now Mumbai), after which he moved with his family to England, where he did his graduation from Keele University. During the 1950s and 60s, he made his living, working as a sports journalistand teacher, and earned recognition as a poet, novelist and critic. Two of his poetry collections ‘The Loss of India’ (1964) and ‘Jets from Orange’ (1967) appeared during this period. In 1969, Ghosemoved to the United States with his wife Helena, a Brazilian artist. He joined the University of Texas at Austin where he taught Creative Writing till his retirement in 2007. According to Muneeza Shamsie, a leading historian of the Pakistani literature, Ghose’s work features “a narrative complexity” informed by his colonial past as well as his experience of independence andmigration. Two other collections of Ghose’s poetry, ‘Selected Poems’ (1991), and ‘50 Poems’ (2010) deal with the themes of memory, travels and alienation. He won several poetry awards including a 2016 lifetime achievement award at the First International Conference of Pakistani Writing in English in Lahore. The following section presents some of his most representative poems followed by a brief critique of its thematic and stylistic features.
The Alien
Zulfikar Ghose
There’s an empathy between the trees and me in England, an air between us that’s constantly beneficent. With a look, the English transplant me elsewhere, though their civil tolerance permits the air of drought between us.
I frequent deserted common land Where I’m friendly with sightless things, most of all the community of grass.
From: Selected Poems (1991)
Notes: Identity, home and cultural alienation are recurrent themes in Zulfikar Ghose’s poetry. Asthe title indicates, the poem records the narrator’s sense of alienation in England, where the colour of his skin and general cultural orientation is sufficient to have him excluded and ‘othered’. “Witha look, the English transplant me / elsewhere”. Thankfully though, nature is not so unkind and unsympathetic: “There’s an empathy between the trees / and me in England”. He also finds comfortin the company of “sightless things” especially “the community of grass”, a reference perhaps to ordinary folk.
The poem follows a three-line stanza pattern; each line has an equal number of (nine) syllables which gives a sense of structure to the poem. The poet has used simple, plain language thus underlining the prosaic reality of the narrator’s life in an alien setting.
Decomposition
Zulfikar Ghose
I have a picture I took in Bombay of a beggar asleep on the pavement: grey-haired, wearing shorts and a dirty shirt, his shadow thrown aside like a blanket.
His arms and legs could be cracks in the store, routes for the ants’ journeys, the flies’ descents. Brain-washed by the sun into exhaustion, he lies veined into stone, a fossil man.
Behind him, there is a crowd passingly bemused by a pavement trickster and quite indifferent to this very common sight
of an old man asleep on the pavement.
I thought it then a good composition and glibly called it The Man in the Street Remarking how typical it was of India that the man in the street lived there.
His head in the posture of one weeping into a pillow chides me now for my presumption at attempting to compose art out of his hunger and solitude.
From: Selected Poems (1991)
Notes: The poem is a description of a photograph (the poet once took in Bombay) of an old, listless beggar, lying unconscious on a pavement. The poet gives sharp, clear images to bring home the miserable plight of the old man, who, scantily dressed, lies on the footpath. He is totally exhausted, unconscious, and almost dead, as ants and flies freely creep and crawl over his body. In the background, there is a crowd enjoying the performance of a trickster, in utter disregard of the old man’s condition. Such sights are so common in the part of the world the narrator comes from, thatthey fail to elicit any fellow feeling from the onlookers. In the end, the poet questions his own ethic by choosing to use the old man as a subject for his poem. In doing so, is he any different fromthe indifferent crowd of passersby or bystanders? Or does he serve the old man well by bringing his condition to the page?
It is a free verse poem without any rhyme scheme. There are five stanzas of four lines each. The poem features vivid imagery and word pictures which show Ghose’s masterly observation. The imagery successfully evokes the sense of place, as well as the bitter reality of the subject’s existence.