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    A Study Guide for Agha Shahid Ali's "Snowmen"
    A Study Guide for Agha Shahid Ali's "Snowmen"
    A Study Guide for Agha Shahid Ali's "Snowmen"
    Ebook36 pages23 minutes

    A Study Guide for Agha Shahid Ali's "Snowmen"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Agha Shahid Ali's "Snowmen," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 28, 2016
    ISBN9781535833455
    A Study Guide for Agha Shahid Ali's "Snowmen"

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      A Study Guide for Agha Shahid Ali's "Snowmen" - Gale

      14

      Snowmen

      Agha Shahid Ali

      1987

      Introduction

      Snowmen is a poem by Agha Shahid Ali that engages in a mythologic portrayal of the poet's ancestors as men made of Himalayan snow. Ali was born in New Delhi, India, in the mid-twentieth century, just after the British-directed partition established Islamic-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India, two countries that have been at odds ever since. A central point of contention has been the coveted borderland state of Kashmir, which has retained a Muslim majority but is part of India. Kashmir was where Ali was raised, in a progressive Muslim household that, like the broader state, represented a crossroads of cultures, including Muslim and Hindu as well as Western. Ali moved to the United States in his late twenties to further his education and remained thereafter, traveling back to India from time to time.

      Foregrounded in Snowmen is Ali's relationship with his ancestors, which in the poem's terms remains an interactive one: whether imagined as mythical figures, ghosts, or simply people from the past, the ancestors continue to play a role in the poet's conception of himself. The challenge for the reader is to grasp the nature of this role, which is cast in ambiguous metaphorical images in a wondrous, wintry time and place. Snowmen was first published in Ali's collection The Half-Inch Himalayas, part of the Wesleyan New Poets series, in 1987 and can also be found in his posthumous 2009 volume The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems.

      Author Biography

      Ali was born in New Delhi, India, on February 4, 1949, as the second of four children in a family with a high educational pedigree: his grandmother was the first Kashmiri woman to be formally educated, while his father made a career as a professor and teacher's college principal. The family was Shia Muslim by tradition (though Ali's mother was Sunni), but the household was host to an array of cultural influences. Ali was exposed to Muslim, Hindu,

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