Echoes across ruins: Poetry as resistance in Gaza & Kashmir

FOR poetry makes nothing happen… it survives…/ From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs/ Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives." WH Auden (in ‘In Memory of WB Yeats‘) captures here the paradox of political poetry: Indeed, poetry makes nothing happen but emerges from the depths of solitude and the overwhelming sorrows that beset cities ravaged by violence, siege and deceit. Therefore, to write a poem in Gaza or to recite a ghazal in Srinagar is to bear witness and speak in the face of an unprecedented crisis in the history of civilisation. It does not prescribe political ideas or actions, but helps us live in political history.

What links Gaza and Kashmir is not political unrest and occupation but a shared aesthetic and political response to a relentless condition of unrest and dispossession. In a time when libraries are flattened and buildings exist only in memory or in words, it is poetry that emerges, not as an embellishment, but as a witness, documenting a people rendered unwelcome in their own homeland.

Mosab Abu Toha, the poet who won the Pulitzer Prize this year, writes: “In Gaza, you don’t know what you’re guilty of. It feels like living in a Kafka novel."

No poet has articulated the psychic pain of Gaza as poignantly as Mosab Abu. His collection of poems ‘Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear‘ strips the rhetoric of war to its human core, speaking of bombed classrooms, dead siblings and mutilated libraries. “My library has been shelled," he writes, “but the books still whisper." In his poetry, the rubble speaks, the ruins testify: “I build my home with broken verbs / and burnt bricks of dictionaries."

The words reflect how survival and resistance are constructed from the remnants of destruction and language. Words become a lifeline, piecing together the splintered remnants of a city torn apart and forging a narrative of endurance from the shards of memory. It moves between private loss and public crisis, between the tragic past and a dark future, transforming calamity into an act of resistance, an affirmation of the survival of imagination and art in apocalyptic times.

Similarly, Agha Shahid Ali, a poet from Kashmir, writes in his collection of poems ‘The Country Without a Post Office‘ of “cracked glass", of letters lost in transit, of cities that vanish from maps. The absence of an address becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of return, for the erasure of identity by geopolitical forces.

In his poem ‘I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight‘, Shahid writes: “The city from where no news can come/ is now so visible in its curfewed night…." Here, poetry becomes both a vigil and a wake with one’s homeland imagined not merely as a region but as an idea, one whose annihilation is always imminent, yet whose memory lives stubbornly in the word.

His metaphors of disappearance, longing and fractured belonging are not merely poetic conceits but also chronicles of trauma, deeply reminiscent of Abu Toha’s words: “Knitting poems from shards of glass, concrete, steel bars, isn’t easy. Sometimes my hands bleed. My gloves get burnt every time."

If Shahid elegises a homeland slipping into silence, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish writes as the national conscience of Palestine. His poetry is fierce, lyrical and unyielding; it reclaims Palestine not as a geographical entity, but as an existential condition. In ‘Identity Card‘, he asserts: “Write down: /I am an Arab…/ I do not hate people/ Nor do I steal from anyone/ But if I become hungry/ The usurper’s flesh will be my food/ Beware…."

Darwish resists the dehumanisation that occupation requires. His words are not cries of victimhood but declarations of existence, articulating both the coarse textures of everyday dispossession and the harsh intensity of historical betrayal.

Take, for instance, the poetry of Ghassan Kanafani that embodies this spirit of literary resistance. Kanafani, assassinated in 1972 by Mossad, understood writing as inherently political. His famous line, “The cause of Palestine is not a hotel room argument; it is a question of life and death", resonates in his art. He once argued that resistance literature is not a genre but a necessity, a means for the colonised to imagine a future in defiance of the present.

In Kashmir, too, such necessity shapes contemporary poets like Uzma Falak and Ather Zia, whose verse draws not from abstraction but from lived, daily terror. Their poems map the silence between curfews, the scream that is stifled under the boot.

What unites all these voices, from Darwish to Shahid, from Kanafani to Abu Toha, is a shared recognition that poetry, in colonised and occupied lands, is not a retreat from politics but is its fiercest articulation. When the state surveils speech, when universities are raided and journalists are jailed, when even mourning is policed, the poem becomes a lethal document, a living archive of dissent.

In Kashmir, poets smuggle words across barbed metaphors; in Gaza, they write under drones and dust. Yet, to read these poets merely as chroniclers of suffering is to miss the radical hope embedded in their lines. As Abu Toha writes, “A country that exists only in my mind. Its flag has no room to fly freely, but there is space on the coffins of my countrymen." This is his way of imagining better days. Though forged in the bleak landscape of Gaza, he conjures a radiance that echoes Milosz and Kabir, insisting that beyond the checkpoint lies a childhood, that beyond the teargas there is still a language that can sing.

Poetry, thus, becomes not only the memory of what was lost but also the dream of what might still be won. Poetry becomes suffused with life, where one smells tea and roses blooming through rubble, glimpses a sunset over a sea still shimmering despite blockade and siege.

To write poetry in defence of your people is, therefore, not merely an aesthetic act but also an ethical struggle affirming pain as testimony, and rescuing memory from expurgation. As Agha Shahid Ali writes: “My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.’

When all measures fail, poetry remains to indict, to remember and to defend. Rendering the political personal and the personal sacred, the poets operate as a form of counter-historiography, a refusal to allow the occupier’s narrative to dominate. In them, we find echoes of Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history", facing backward as piles of debris at its feet. But instead of paralysis, they offer defiance. The act of writing becomes the politics of imagination, something that is often all that remains when the rest is rubble.

Shelley Walia is former Professor, Panjab University.

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