Post-335:  Spring in Kashmir

Below is a third poem by Roh-Hae Park (박노해) I have translated into English from his Korean original.

This one is paired with a photograph the poet took. Both are displayed at his current exhibition in Seoul.

The optimistic imagery of the first lines here are a surprise because Kashmir is known as a place of acrimony and war.

There is nothing in the poem directly about the Kashmir conflict or the political situation as such. The closest is the second-to-last line. The poem takes no side between India and Pakistan, of course. The second-to-last and last lines might be read as a call for Kashmiri independence as a solution to the problem, but that is just one possible reading.

India and Pakistan both claim Kashmir, each controls a separate part, and there is occasional fighting, often stoked by foreign Jihadis. Up to 70,000 have been killed in the past twenty-five years there. I see several parallels in recent Europe. Northern Ireland and the various civil wars of ex-Yugoslavia. Perhaps eastern Ukraine today.

There are some historical parallels between Kashmir and Korea, too, though Kashmir is much more a plaything of foreign powers than even Korea ever was. Another main difference is that there is no parallel in Korea to the flow of foreign Jihadis into Kashmir.

Speaking of this, I remember seeing an interview with John Walker Lindh, White convert to Islam, Taliban Army veteran, and the most well-known “all-American case of treason” of this era (called “the American Taliban”). Lindh said that he had had occasion to once meet Osama bin Laden personally, in Afghanistan, in early 2001. He said that the latter had advised him to choose one of three places to pursue Jihad. These were: Chechnya, northern Afghanistan, and Kashmir. Lindh ended up with the Taliban Regular Army in Afghanistan, which, after Sept. 11, 2001, was suddenly at war with the United States. Rounded up by U.S. forces, he was put in a temporary prison at a place called Masar-i-Sharif, a place from which he jumped to worldwide fame/infamy after speaking to guards in a flawless American accent, claiming to be an American, asking for repatriation. He is currently a federal prison inmate. If he had chosen Kashmir and was captured, I wonder what would’ve become of him…