A VOYAGE ACROSS SPACES AND BORDERS: SPATIAL IMAGINATION AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF HOME IN AGHA SHAHID ALI’S POETRY

Abstract

This article examines how Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry reconstructs the idea of “home” through spatial and spatio-temporal imagination rather than through geography alone. Drawing on three poems from The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems (2009), “Postcard from Kashmir,” “A Lost Memory of Delhi,” and “Lenox Hill,” the study applies a close-reading method informed by Joel Kuortti’s concept of multi-locational diasporic space, Femke Stock’s notion of the “remembered home,” and Kim Knott’s idea of “distinctive spatiality.” Ali’s poems do not simply mourn a lost Kashmir. They use compressed images, collapsed timelines, and the merging of personal grief with collective history to construct an alternative, poetic home that exists between Kashmir and America rather than in either place alone. Treating space as a poetic strategy, rather than as background setting, opens a productive line of inquiry for diaspora studies and for Ali scholarship specifically, where spatial vocabulary has typically been read as incidental to thematic concerns like exile and nostalgia rather than as the organizing device itself.