The Aesthetics of Sensuality: A Reparative Reading of Taufiq Rafat’s Poetry

Abstract

The advent of the age of theory gave birth to paranoid reading which is based on the conception that literary works are written for propaganda's sake because they address some political issue. On the contrary, reparative reading turns the attention towards reading for pleasure to make poetry serve the function of art for art’s sake. This paper scrutinizes Taufiq Rafat’s poetry from Arrival of the Monsoon: Collected Poems (1947-78) and Half Moon: Poems (1979-83) through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theoretical lens of reparative reading. Rafat’s poetry has, so far, been subjected to paranoid reading to repress the free expression of eroticism to conform to the prevalent ghazal tradition. But the present paper is an attempt to transcend the ‘innocent reading’ practices to uncover Rafat’s uninhibited articulation of sensuality. Rafat mentions two dimensions of sensuality, i. e., it is the source of creative faculty to convey spontaneous emotions and is inherently instinctual and needs to be addressed to unveil truths about the human psyche. Rafat celebrates sexual passion with enthusiastic zeal instead of concealing it as some shameful repressed desire. Besides, the paper also pursues unfolding sexual metaphors embedded in regional sensibility.