Search results | The Beloved Witness

Title: Dacca gauzes [poem] (1983 draft, "Reading Dorian Gray in Kashmir")
Author: Agha, Shahid Ali, 1949-2001
Date: 1983, 2013-12-01
Type of item: poetry, manuscript – poem
Categories: ancestors, textiles, colonialism, family
Full Text: Reading Dorian Gray in Kashmir . . . for a whole year, he sought to accumulate the most exquisite specimens . . . of textile and embroidered work . . . the Dacca gauzes, that from their transparency, are known in the East . . . --The Picture 2; Dorian Gray Dorian Gray wore those gauzes from Dacca known as woven air, running water, evening dew, that transparent cotton a dead art now, dead for over a hundred years. No one can imagine, my grandmother says, what it was to wear, just to touch, tha...
PID: HamiltonShahid:27

Title: Dacca gauzes [poem] (published 1987)
Author: Agha, Shahid Ali, 1949-2001
Date: 1987, 2013-12-01
Type of item: poetry, poem
Categories: ancestors, textiles, colonialism, family
Full Text: The Dacca Gauzes . . . for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most exquisite . Dacca gauzes. ' — Oscar Wilde/ The Picture of Dorian Gray Those transparent Dacca gauzes known as woven air, running water, evening dew: a dead art now, dead over a hundred years. "No one now knows," my grandmother says, “what it was to wear or touch that cloth." She wore it once, an heirloom sari from her mother's dowry, proved genuine when it was pulled, all six yards, through a rin...
PID: HamiltonShahid:28

Title: Dacca gauzes [poem] (undated draft, "Reading Dorian Gray in Kashmir")
Author: Agha, Shahid Ali, 1949-2001
Type of item: poetry, manuscript – poem, Lyric poetry
Categories: ancestors, textiles, colonialism, family
Full Text: The Decca Gauzes . . . for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most exquisite 0 0 0 m.CCa. 8311265, 0 o 0 —-The Picture gg Dorian Gray Not only Dorian Gray but many aristocrats of Europe wore those transparent Dacca gauzes known as woven air, running water, evening dew. A dead art now, dead over a hundred years. "No one can imagine," my grandmother says, "what it was to wear or touch that cloth." She wore it once, an heirloom sari from her mother's dowry, proved ...
PID: HamiltonShahid:35

Title: For you
Author: Agha, Shahid Ali, 1949-2001
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Description: typed draft of "For You"
Type of item: journal, notes
Categories: colonialism
Full Text: FOR YOU For Michael Palmer Did we run out of things or just a name for you? Above us the sun doubles its acclaim for you. Negative sun or negative shade pulled from the ground . and the image brought in one ornate frame for you. At my every word they cry “Who the hell are you?” What would you reply if they thus sent Fame to you? What a noise the sentences make writing themselves—— Here’s every word that we used as a flame for you. I remember your wine in my springtime of sorrow. Now the world...
PID: HamiltonShahid:409