Kashmiri Poet’s Debut Turns Silence Into Power

By Badrunissa Bhat 

Aliya Mushtaq Baba’s Ode to Silence marks an arresting and thoughtful debut in the world of contemporary poetry, one that is deeply attuned to the inner landscapes of womanhood, the eloquence of nature, and the existential weight of death. 

In a literary tradition where silence has often been imposed upon women, Baba reclaims it as a space of articulation, contemplation, and profound resonance. Her poetry is a restrained and contemplative meditation, one that resists spectacle in favor of quiet intimacy, and treats stillness not as absence but as a deliberate and radical form of presence.

The collection unfolds like a series of quiet epiphanies. Through spare yet emotionally textured verse, she crafts a poetics that privileges nuance over noise, and ambiguity over resolution. Silence, as the title suggests, is not merely a theme but a method. Her lines often trail into ellipses of suggestion, allowing the unsaid to throb with its own meaning.

The opening poem “A Room of My Own”, for instance, explore the contours of solitude and memory, evoking the emotional landscapes of a woman who listens more than she speaks, and feels deeply in a world that too often demands performance. This poem serves as a poignant reinterpretation of Virginia Woolf’s famed dictum, grounding the need for a woman’s space not in intellectual abstraction but in the visceral reality of domestic life.

Baba invokes the kitchen not just as a literal space but as a metaphysical enclosure, a place where her speaker’s womb and her hearth become indistinguishable. This spatial entrapment is further deepened by the lines “i know not how to write, / i paint signs / on split milk on the floor,” which render a haunting image of a woman creating meaning through impermanence, making art out of what disappears. 

Baba’s voice emerges not through loud declarations, but through a quiet assertion of presence within erasure, aligning with her larger poetic gesture: an ode not to speech, but to the charged, expressive density of silence.

One of the striking aspects of Ode to Silence is its unflinching attention to the bodily and spiritual dimensions of feminine experience. Baba writes of the female body not only as a site of love and labor, but also as a vessel of ancestral memory, trauma, and sacred intuition. Her voice is neither overtly confessional nor deliberately opaque; rather, it occupies a liminal space between vulnerability and restraint. The reader is invited not to consume the speaker’s pain, but to stand beside her in silent recognition. 

Nature plays an essential role in this collection—not as mere backdrop, but as an interlocutor. Baba’s imagery is richly environmental: skies murmur with withheld truths; sunsets become a bearer of unspoken longing; a bagful of chinar leaves becomes a study in impermanence and sorrow. There’s a sensibility here, reminiscent of classical Eastern poetic traditions—echoes of Persian mystics and Japanese haikuists are palpable—but refracted through a distinctly modern, Kashmiri lens. The landscape is both external and interior; it reflects the speaker’s emotional states while also offering her a kind of spiritual companionship.

The theme of death permeates the anthology with a gentle yet persistent presence. Baba meditates on loss without ornamentation. Her elegies resist melodrama and gesture towards the vastness of the unknown with humility, grounding the metaphysical in the sensory and the immediate.

In the latter section of Ode to Silence, Aliya Baba turns to the distilled form of micro-poems: epigrammatic, breath-length utterances that carry the weight of entire emotional worlds. Formally minimalist yet philosophically expansive, these poems draw from the aphoristic tradition of lyrical brevity, where silence is not a void but the medium through which meaning gathers and radiates. 

In one moment, Baba evokes the descent into madness as a kind of sacred unraveling; in another, she meets sorrow not with ornament, but with stark, unflinching clarity. But stylistically, Ode to Silence demonstrates a disciplined lyricism. Baba’s lines are carefully measured, her diction simultaneously earthy and ethereal. 

I also had the honor of contributing the cover artwork for Ode to Silence. The painting was created in response to what the poet, Aliya Baba, shared with me about her vision for the book. She wanted the cover to reflect the quiet strength and emotional depth of her poems. I tried to translate those feelings into visual form, keeping the tone gentle and reflective, just like her poetry. It was a deeply meaningful experience to bring her words into image, and to be a small part of this beautiful debut.

• – The author is an artist and a research scholar at the University of Kashmir. 

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