Agha Shahid Ali, the famous Kashmiri-American poet and self-described 'multiple exile', was undoubtedly the most accomplished english-language poet of the modern era.
In many poems in The Half-Inch Himalayas, Agha Shahid Ali depicts his ancestors and ancestral objects, such as bangles, Dacca gauzes, and his parents' old home, as decaying or in the process of being destroyed. These images create a sense of loss of something that cannot be regained in the poems. Similarly, the poems "Cracked Portraits" and "Snowmen" speak of ancestors, death, and decay. The speakers in both poems both acknowledge and transcend their ancestral legacies. In the poem "Snowmen," Ali depicts his ancestors as snowmen--something that is only temporary, that melts away. "Cracked Portraits" also portrays the speaker's ancestors through objects that are temporary, the cracking, decaying family paintings.
The poems, "Snowmen," "Cracked Portraits," and "The Dacca Gauzes," from Agha Shahid Ali's collection of poetry entitled, The Half-Inch Himalayas, emphasize how heritage embodies a family's many generations. The imagery in the three poems epitomizes the legacy of the speakers' ancestors, as illustrated in the following lines from the poem,"Snowmen": "Their heirloom, / his skeleton under my skin, passed/ from son to grandson,/ generations of snowmen on my back." These images delineate what allows the speaker to merit each ancestor's story. Our speaker implies that the generations that have come before him have created the man that he is today. This paper will offer a comparative analysis of the three poems drawing on theories of immortality using psychoanalytic theory.