Naiemat, A Terrible Beauty

Digital Illustration, 2232 x 4096 px

From the Artist:

The title of this work is derived from a quartet by Yeats that was used by Agha Shahid Ali as an epigraph to one of his poems.

“Now and in time to be/Whenever green is worn/A terrible beauty is born”

The idea for this illustration came from a poem written by a Kashmiri poet, Sayim Kashmiri. The poem describes a “Kashmiri bride” in the context of the revolution. I attempted to incorporate several elements from the poem, such as the grenade pin for an earring, the flowers of Hee and Maswal inside a grenade shell, the flag of Azad Kashmir wrapped around the arm. In the backdrop there are stamped portraits of several resilient Kashmiri women. The overall aura I try to delineate is that of a proud, strong Kashmiri woman, who despite being subjected to decades of torture and tyranny, stands up against the oppression.