‘Homing Desire’ in Agha Shahid Ali's Poems

Abstract

This paper extends the critical application of Avtar Brah’s theoretical concept of ‘homing desire’ to Agha Shahid Ali’s National Book Award-finalist collection, Rooms Are Never Finished (2001). While earlier scholarship on Ali frequently centres on the geopolitical fracture of Kashmir and the aesthetics of postcolonial exile, this study examines how the poet shifts the locus of displacement from the purely political to the deeply personal through the terminal illness and death of his mother. In this collection, the maternal figure and the motherland become inextricably fused; the loss of one mirrors and magnifies the permanent inaccessibility of the other. By mapping the Shi'a paradigm of Karbala onto contemporary diasporic grief, and by utilizing rigid poetic forms like the canzone and the ghazal, Ali demonstrates that the diasporic project of constructing a "home" is a permanently incomplete architectural endeavour. Through close textual analysis, this paper argues that in the face of absolute loss, grief itself evolves into a transhistorical diaspora space, rendering poetry the final, albeit unfinished, sanctuary of belonging.