The Pen, the Throat, the Ear: On Ghazals

ہم کی اُن سے وفا کو ہے امید
جو نہیں جانتے وفا کیا ہے

I keep expecting faith from those
who know not even the meaning of faith.
—From “Dil-e-Nadaan” by Mirza Ghalib, tr. by Sarah Ghazal Ali

I joke often that poetry was a choice made for me, not by me. My parents bound me to this path when they gave me Ghazal as a middle name. What else to call this if not providence, or predestination? They considered making ghazal my first name, but as new immigrants with strong names of their own, they worried a name so guttural would be massacred in anglophone mouths. They were right—to this day, I am constantly correcting mispronunciations: no, not huzzle, guzzle, guh-zal, or gauze-el.

As a child, I disliked the weight of the word and struggled to pronounce the غ, its glottal “gh” sound. But when my father explained that I was named for an elevated poetic form, that an entire region’s poetic pride was embedded in my name, ghazals became a source of wonder for me. Indeed, the first poems that reached my ears were ghazals set to music. My father, a gifted singer himself, loved to play the Urdu greats on cassette during even the shortest trips to get gas or groceries. In my memory’s ear, the voices of Farida Khanum, Mehdi Hassan, and Begum Akhtar are entangled with my father’s. The singer would croon one verse, take a breath, and my father would sing it back without missing a beat, their voices layering until I could not distinguish between them. Call and response, sing and swell. Repeat, repeat, repeat. In her rendition of Fayyaz Hashmi’s nazm “Aaj Jaane Ki Zid Na Karo,” Farida Khanum repeats the opening line three times before continuing to the next, which she repeats twice. Singers will cycle through a line over and over, as if to tug the heart strings of a listener they know is straining for the release of the next line. In this way, I memorized dozens of poems long before I learned to recognize the constraints that made them ghazals.

آج جانے کی ضد نہ کرو
آج جانے کی ضد نہ کرو
آج جانے کی ضد نہ کرو

Don’t insist on leaving tonight
Don’t insist on leaving tonight
Don’t insist on leaving tonight
—Fayyaz Hashmi, tr. by Sarah Ghazal Ali

This is true for many South Asian, Persian, and Arab poets—the ghazal is first an auditory immersion, propelled by the matla (opening couplet), radif (refrain), and internal qaafia (rhyme). My mother, after attending my first undergraduate poetry reading, crinkled her nose in distaste. Mushai’ra ka beda gharaq, she muttered, unimpressed. She likened my polite, quiet, American reading to a sunken ship, while a musha’ira in Karachi would set sail for a far more interactive poetry performance. At a musha’ira, audience members are expected to actively participate, to clap, and shout, and affirm. Who does the ghazal belong to: the pen, the throat, or the ear? What is written is spoken is shared is sacred. After Mehdi Hassan shot to fame for his rendition of “Gulon Mein Rang Bhare,” the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz is said to have stopped reciting it at his musha’iras—it’s no longer mine, he’d say fondly, it’s Mehdi’s ghazal.

گلوں میں رنگ بھرے باد نوبہار چلے 
چلے بھی آو کے گلشن ک کاروبار چلے

Let the blossoms fill with color, let the first breeze of spring flow.
Come (beloved), so the garden can get on with its business.
—Faiz Ahmed Faiz, tr. by Sarah Ghazal Ali

Come, Beloved, so my tongue might unfurl. What good is my speech without the constraint of Your ghazal?

If you leave who will prove that my cry existed?
Tell me what was I like before I existed.
—Agha Shahid Ali

Ghazals are notorious for their resistance to narrative. A couplet might emote, might beseech, but it does so without relying explicitly on any of its neighbors. Each couplet hinges upon itself—autonomous, it carries its own universe of context. One could even argue that ghazals aren’t poems at all, but a capricious assembly of couplets that could easily part ways. Ghazal singers often cherry-pick couplets from a ghazal (sometimes multiple ghazals!) to sing; rarely do they sing the ghazal exactly as it was rendered on the page. Who does the couplet belong to: the pen, the throat, or the ear? A cohesive, linear ghazal, I dare say, is not a true ghazal.

I fail myself, fail the current coursing through my name, by desiring cohesion. I project unity upon all that bewilders me. How am I to hold the coincidence that the ghazal and Islam both arose in seventh century Arabia? I recite Surah Rahman regularly and with rapture, enchanted by the repetition (the radif, I have privately, guiltily called it, blasphemously likening a sacred text to human poetry) of “So which of the favors of your Lord would you deny?” The verse is repeated thirty-one times in a chapter of only seventy-eight verses. In the Qur’an, God swears by the fig, the olive, the sun, the stars, and an unlettered Prophet who never penned a ghazal. Still, I echo His words as though they are fragments of an elysian ghazal.

Because I wrote them in English, the few ghazals I have attempted are failures. They are too loyal to narrative, too eager to be accessible to my American peers. In workshops, I’ve been told, Your poems expect too much from the reader. I’ve been asked, Can you spell things out a bit more? There is a pulse to Urdu that cannot be translated. There is a lexicon of context that cannot, should not, be explained. There is a beat to Urdu that stiffens in my American mouth, that I betray in my angrezi ghazals.

In the winter of 2019, I drove to Northampton, Massachusetts, in search of Agha Shahid Ali’s grave. I was just a few months into my first year of graduate school and already lonely, lonely enough to heed the call of ghosts. I chose my MFA program in Western Massachusetts in part for the region’s landscape, mountains I believed to be infused with literary spirits: Emily Dickinson, Agha Shahid Ali, Sylvia Plath. Ali in particular loomed alpine in my mind, responsible as he was for popularizing the ghazal in the West. He felt like an elder to me, a literary ancestor-uncle, with our shared surname, Shia background, and tether (his as a bard, mine as a bearer) to the ghazal.

I found his tombstone within minutes. It gleamed, stark against the untouched snow, inscribed on its base with a couplet from one of his most famous ghazals:

            They ask me to tell them what Shahid means: Listen, listen:
It means “The Beloved” in Persian, “witness” in Arabic.

Photo by Sarah Ghazal Ali

I stayed on the cleared path—seeing it from a distance was enough. It felt inappropriate to sully the snow that settled immaculate around his grave—no animal prints, fallen leaves, or detritus in sight. I lowered my gaze and recited a prayer, then a couplet from Call Me Ishmael Tonight, Ali’s farewell collection of ghazals:

I who believe in prayer but could never in God
place roses at your grave with nothing to divine of snow.

I who believe in prayer and in God addressed a couplet to his grave. I think he would have appreciated it—the language inflecting the snow his own ghazal.

The ghazal deceives with its neat, rhythmic couplets, its boxy silhouette on the page. It intimates order, then shows its hand, revealing clamor, chaos, commotion. The ghazal calls to me, coaxes me to follow its song like a deer flitting through the trees. To go deeper into the woods and abandon, if only for a moment, my reliance on control, cohesion, connection. Maybe one day I’ll honor my mother tongue, my mother, my father, my name. Maybe one day I might attempt a true, Urdu ghazal. For a world—for a life—that refuses to cohere, the ghazal is the perfect form. It encourages me to leap, to wail, to spill—to open my mouth—to sing.