Cite this Essay
MLA:
Srinivasan, Shalini. “’She must be from another country’: A Critical Biography of Imtiaz Dharker.” Indian Writing In English Online, 7 August 2023, indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/imtiaz-dharker-shalini-srinivasan/ .
Chicago:
Srinivasan, Shalini. “’She must be from another country’: A Critical Biography of Imtiaz Dharker.” Indian Writing In English Online. August 7, 2023. indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/imtiaz-dharker-shalini-srinivasan/ .
“She must be from another country”: A Critical Biography of Imtiaz Dharker
In 2016, while being presented with an honorary doctorate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Imtiaz Dharker shared one of her poems, “The elephants have come out of the room and onto the Picadilly line,” a delightful and absurd image of odd visitors that plays out over the course of the poem. It was a fitting poem to read out. Outsiders of various colours and shapes – visitors, immigrants, travellers, oddities, dissenters, and the purely cussed – have populated Dharker’s work over the decades. These outsiders offer experiences and ethnographies, sorrow and joy, enrichment and impoverishment, and the many nameless shades of feeling awkward, out-of-place, and somehow, removed. The elephants wandering into a London subway – alien by species, size, and geography were, in one sense, not entirely unexpected.
Alien at Home
Born in Pakistan, brought up in Glasgow, and having lived in India and Britain, Imtiaz Dharker is a film-maker, poet, and artist. Purdah, her first volume of poetry, was published in India in 1989, but without the accompanying art that would become an integral part of her books. The art appears some years later in the British edition (Bloodaxe, 1997) that combines the poems from Purdah with Dharker’s second volume, Postcards From god (first published in India in 1994). Her poetry has been well received in India and abroad – it has been widely anthologised, including in These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry (2012) and Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe, 2012). Dharker’s honours include the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014, an honorary doctorate and the Cholmondely Award from SOAS in 2016. She is currently the Chancellor of Newcastle University. Dharker’s art has been exhibited across the world, in India, Britain, the US, and Hong Kong, and she has also worked as a filmmaker in India and Britain.
Similar themes – feminist concerns, the nature of belonging and exclusion, love and longing, the lives of the city – criss-cross across these media (Brown). “By extrapolation, this implies that Dharker herself belongs to a number of different communities in a global sense: Indian, Pakistani, British (including but nevertheless distinct from Scottish and Welsh), and even – as some of her poems portraying transnational feminism make clear – American” (Dix 55). In an interview – one of a series with different Indian poets – Eunice de Souza identifies Dharker’s work as of “social concern” (118), noting its evolving explorations of contemporary concerns, including “sexual and communal politics” (116). Her later poems travel across countries, lingering especially on the experiences of those at the borders and the edges, negotiating belonging and not-belonging: familial, social, national. This range of solidarities lends to Dharker’s poetry a large cast of characters, personas and experiences, each inhabited by empathy.
While migration and diasporic experiences are a significant theme in Dharker’s work, her concern with the peripheries is not restricted to the technologies of identity and inclusion/exclusion that are engendered in those systems. Exclusionary systems, in her work, are also to be found at home.
In Dharker’s first published volume, Purdah and Other Poems, the titular poem is in two parts. It weaves experiences of growing up with a heavy sense of sorrow:
Whatever we did,
the trail was the same:
the tear-stained mother, the gossip aunts
looking for shoots to smother
inside all our cracks. (“Purdah II” Postcards from god, 1997, 2)
There is a sense of shame and helplessness in the face of the larger social structures of which the purdah itself is only a symptom. In Nishat Haider’s reading, the purdah is a symbol, used to stand “more broadly as the elaborate codes of seclusion and feminine modesty used to protect and control women’s lives across the religious divide” (252). Lopamudra Basu argues that in earlier works such as Purdah, Dharker is critical in her “relationship to her religion of Islam,” recognising the role played by religio-social structures that “limit women’s access to the public sphere and deny full recognition of their humanity” (394). In other words, it is the societal structures themselves that engender alienation in the individual. The use of “shoots” for the helplessly overgrowing young women pits their inevitable burgeoning as natural, against a relentless social violence that seeks to confine and destroy it.
Much of Postcards from god (1997) deals with contemporary violence – precipitated by the destruction of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 and the devastating Bombay riots of 1993. Jerry Pinto notes that, “The events at Ayodhya changed many things for Indian Muslims,” and describes the change in Dharker’s poetic voice thus: “Rage had turned some of the poems into posters, the images into slogans.”
Speeches are read.
A few points made.
Somewhere else in the city
A blade finds flesh.
(“Seats of Power”, 139)
Short, bitten-off lines such as these are abundant in this book, accompanied by a sense of anger and anguish, and – as the postcards suggest – a constant striving to understand. “Question 1” and “Question 2” and poems like “Scaffolding,” serve both to ask existential questions and to invite connection. “Scaffolding” closes with the tentative< “Would you be tempted/ to come in” (96). The titular poem too ends on a note of opening, “Keep the channels open. / I will keep trying to get through.” (76) The volume ends with “Minority,” a poem that brings these strands of insider/outsider and speech/silence together:
I was born a foreigner.
I carried on from there
to become a foreigner everywhere …. (157)
Having set this conundrum of belonging, the poem meanders through ideas of language and translation, before bringing the estrangement home in the act of writing:
And who knows, these lines
may scratch their way
into your head –
through all the chatter of community,
family, clattering spoons,
children being fed –
immigrate into your bed,
squat in your home,
and in a corner, eat your bread …. (159)
Despite the possessive and repeated “your”, the community, the bed, and the home have been rendered into signs of isolation. These are now spaces to be occupied by deliberation, even force, rather than by invitation or habit. The poem ends, inevitably, on a final estrangement from the self:
until, one day, you meet
the stranger sidling down your street,
realise you know the face
simplified to bone,
look into its outcast eyes
and recognise it as your own. (159)
The doubling of the poet as both perpetrator and victim, as the minority who is cast out, and the caster-out of minorities, lends the poem both a certain bleakness and empathy. De Souza’s final evaluation returns to this: “Dharker’s predominant tone is elegiac and compassionate. There is deep sadness in ‘Postcards from god’ in which God wonders how people can use his name while perpetrating horrors of every kind” (120).
There are moments of grace, too, as in “Living Space,” where Dharker describes a home in Dharavi, the structure unsteady: “The whole structure leans dangerously/ towards the miraculous.” The poem then takes a turn:
Into this rough frame,
someone has squeezed
a living space
and even dared to place
these eggs in a wire basket,
fragile curves of white
hung out over the dark edge
of a slanted universe,
gathering the light
into themselves,
as if they were
the bright, thin walls of faith. (109)
The eggs balanced precariously over the lurking “dark edge of the slanted universe” are out of place with their curves and their sense of life, but they are all the same, daring and bright.
In Postcards, as in its immediate descendant, I Speak for the Devil (2001), the narrative voice is by necessity at a remove from the human condition. A poem in the latter, in fact begins, “The other bastard’s had his say/now it’s my turn … .” (“The Devil’s Day”, 69) making explicit the posturing of the speaker. This remove allows Dharker a certain vantage point in her observation: possessive ‘you’s and intimate ‘I’s are, nevertheless, at a remove from the humans who populate her poetry. She tells Pinto, “God is who you can be; so is the devil. Both, poetically speaking, were ways in which I was trying to create an interface with the outside world” (Pinto). In I Speak for the Devil the alien – and the structures of alienation – become international.
International Aliens
Dharker’s poetry is often discussed as part of the late twentieth century diaspora literature (Basu), which is to say, it deals with the wide range of cultural and emotional alienation that arises from the experience of migration. Her poetry is set in Bombay and London, in Scotland and Lahore, and the hushed and depersonalised spaces in between where papers, passports, and documentation reign supreme.
Lopamudra Basu’s study traces the evolution of Dharker’s work over the decades and identifies a shift in her stance after 9/11. In The Terrorist at my Table (2006), Basu notes that the focus of Dharker’s critique has gone international, shifting from the home and the community to the larger, Anglo-American public and the public views of Muslims in that context (395). The feeling of not-fitting and alienness has widened, though Dharker’s social concerns that lie at the “intersections of gender, nationalism, and violence,” remain (Basu 398).
The international alien must also contend with the horrors of paperwork and bureaucracy. “ID” for instance, in Leaving Fingerprints, is uncompromising in its stance, “All it is, you see, / is a hook to hang a person on” (104). Fingerprints is stolid in its unravelling of all tools that may be employed to trace and pin down human beings: seals, contracts, fingerprints, photos, CCTVs, palm readings. Echoing the themes of Purdah, it is peopled with those who evade attempts at being counted, instead blending and settling into trains, countries, mud, rivers. Each attempt at exact definition is repeatedly shown to be futile. “I am sorry to say,” a poem on fingerprints is titled, flowing on from there to, “there are limits to what it will tell you. / This print ….” (102). It concludes on a note of physical assertion:
All it can say
with any certainty is
that you were here
and touched this thing. (102)
Filippo Menozzi positions Dharker’s Leaving Fingerprints (2009) solidly “in the context of current debates on migration in Europe and the technologies of recognition adopted to track the movements of migrants and refugees across the European Union” (151). He terms it “peripheral poetry” (152): poetry that defies instrumental systems of identification, that confers upon migrant subjects a carefully graded inclusion. Dharker’s work, in his reading, demonstrates the “insufficiency of the fingerprint as a technology of recognition (164). Dharker’s art carries the lines and whorls of fingerprints, marking a tension between their materiality (which is adapted, for instance into a landscape) while also noting their role in identification.
If the sense of alienation, of being an outsider is characteristic of Dharker’s poetry, it is accompanied often by a sense of possibility, of something burgeoning in the gaps and splits. I Speak for the Devil (2001), for instance, begins with “Honour Killing” and the cut direct: “At last I’m taking off this coat / this black coat of a country…” (5). The sharp social critique from Purdah remains, and migration becomes imbued with potential, a possible way out. Later in the volume, another poem begins, “There is safety in a ticket…” (12).
“They’ll say, ‘She must be from another country”” is astringent about the socio-cultural and the bureaucratic codes that grant belonging:
But from where we are
it doesn’t look like a country,
it’s more like the cracks
that grow between borders
behind their backs.
That’s where I live.
(I Speak for the Devil, 31)
The gesture is not towards mere acceptance, but celebration of the alien, the person who lives outside the rules, spoken and unspoken, “behind their backs.” Dharker’s “them” are reminiscent of Edward Lear’s; and they too stand for the crushing force of societal restrictions upon the individual.
Consider the trajectory of “Hung”, which begins with the removal of the protagonists: “We are suspended above the street/ twelve floors up, nine clouds down/ north of the river, south of peace. (The Terrorist at my Table, 37) The poem winds through the imagery of apartness: ‘floating’, ‘torn’, ‘pieces’, ‘tumble’, ‘shreds’, ‘other’, ‘parts of jigsawed parks’. It is the last of these phrases upon which the poem pivots, and the words begin to be put together: ‘posted’, ‘received’, ‘patched’. The image of the jigsaw puts together the acute disparateness of the poet and the city and turns them into potential, both creative and emotional, into “people we expect to meet” (37).
This narrative arc – outsideness carrying slivers and sparks and opportunity, alienation resolving slowly into possibility – is characteristic of The Terrorist at my Table, and indeed of much of Dharker’s other work. In her conversation with Eunice de Souza, Dharker notes of her writing that, “I love being an outsider. I’d say ‘alienation’, being an outsider is a positive. Not alienated really, but outside. Being an outsider is my country. I value that. That’s the country all writers belong to – standing outside the body too, outside the image” (114).
Dharker’s lines in The Terrorist at my Table often falter and break, with frequent imagery of sounds, words, mouths, breaths, each imperfect and only available in part.
Give me railway stations.
Voices on loudspeakers,
people with their surfaces pulled away
by travelling. Movement gives me words,
carried in the carriages of trains.
Give me a tea-stall on a busy street,
halves of conversations,
stories walking by.
(“Inspiration”, 106)
“Inspiration,” creates a dichotomy between “the poet” (male) and the speaker. While the poet wants hills, solitude, the paraphernalia of the Romantic, the narrator’s eavesdropping on crowds and bustle is enriching. Dharker seems to suggest that the fragments of outside voices make the poem, and widen and deepen the speaker’s work. The poem ends with a repudiation: “I will not go with my friend / the poet to the mountains” (Ibid). The dichotomy between the Romantic poet and the modernist is rendered starkly – they are friends, but the speaker’s poetry is enmeshed with the urban, the everyday, inextricably part of a larger social world. The speaker may be alien, in transit and outside the conversations, but the flashes of intimacy with strangers and the awareness of concerns and connections outside their ambit are deemed essential to their work. Arundhati Subramaniam says of Dharker’s later work: “Displacement here no longer spells exile; it means an exhilarating sense of life at the interstices.” It is in these interstices, “Inspiration” seems to suggest, that poetry grows.
Alien Forms: Art and Poetry
Dharker’s poetry is published with her art. With its stark pen-and-ink style, images deeply shadowed black and bright white, the visuality works inseparably from the text. Dharker’s visual work features a prominent use of line and texture, not unlike her poetry. K Narayana Chandran, for instance, describes her being “alone among her peers in having a highly sophisticated sense of the line—in both poems and in sketches” (872). Dharker’s work, art and poetry, is riven: veils and double-dealings, words and pen strokes slashing across the page, the cutting open of people and things and time too:
Here are the facts, fine
as onion rings.
The same ones can come chopped
or sliced.
(“The Terrorist at my Table,” 22)
In the segment titled “These are the Times we live in,” Dharker employs collage to particular effect, as newsprint occupies faults and breaks within the image.
The newsprint here accompanies lines from “These are the Times we Live in I,” which describes a woman being interrogated on suspicion of terrorism. Her person and her paperwork are weighed and judged by a suspicious officer. The poem ends with the woman found wanting:
The pieces are there
but they missed out your heart.
Half your face splits away,
drifts onto the page of a newspaper
that’s dated today.
It rustles as it lands. (46)
The violence of the imagery is softened by the rustling, by the shift from flesh to paper. Basu notes that the “lines of the lyric and the drawing work simultaneously to evoke the randomness and banality of terrorism being reduced to newspaper headlines and the tragedy of not understanding or resolving the underlying human problems that lead to these acts” (401).
Like the newsprint in the image, like the face of the woman being interrogated, the verse is splintered; each sentence is a stanza, radiating out of the margins to cumulative effect. The image reinforces the tension between the paperwork and the person in the poem. It, however, brings in the element of the public narrative – the newspaper. The inclusion of newsprint lends multiple effects to the image. The first of these is what Scarlett Higgins identifies as integral to the use of collage, “juxtaposition, disruption, and a fundamental sense of anti-narrativity” (1). Thomas Brockelman identifies one on the major effects of collage, to “represent the intersection of multiple discourses” (2), an act in keeping with Modernist and avant-garde uses of collage. Here, the public discourses of terrorism and the image of the Muslim woman are put into an unstable relationship. Is the woman speaking or is she being obscured? Is there something finger-like in the newsprint the acts across her mouth? And who does the broken word “In terror” refer to? The image is not anti-narrative, I argue, so much as limited in its movement: the use of newsprint creates a sense of nowness in the image, anchoring it to coordinates of time and space. In a study of Picasso’s collage, Magda Dragu terms the newspaper “quantifiable,” describing it as a “discrete entity with predetermined spatial and functional coordinates.” (45) In other words, the newspaper functions as an entrance, allowing ingress to the world outside the work of art.
In Dharker’s work here, the inclusion of the newspaper also addresses the same collector’s impulse seen in “Inspiration,” where splinters of the “real” world – fixed, immutable – are embedded into the fluid poetic line to lend it a certain grist. It is to be noted that the newsprint too – often used in collage as the symbol of the modern world of mass production and the collapsibility of form and hierarchy, to critique the text it has been cut from[1] – has been altered and obscured in its inclusion; it has been cut up, spliced, and appropriated. In this collision of mass-produced newsprint, art, and the personal poem, of media, form, and discourse, the question arises: which is the alien here?
Dharker’s exhibit, “My Breath” at the Manchester International Festival in 2021, is in some ways the culmination of her work with the line across form and medium. This work was part of the multimedia Poet Slash Artist exhibit curated by Lemn Sissay and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Dharker’s work achieves its hybridity by tying together image, text, and the body of the artist. The long lines that cut across the writer’s body, reminiscent of mummification and of jail, unravel slowly into words – a concrete convergence of lines, visual and poetic. The poem itself reworks a poem and an image from The Terrorist at my Table, “My Breath” and an illustration from a little later in the volume. This figure, a woman, hollow-eyed, her mouth and body obscured by the draped cloth is, in the book, paired with the “The Right word”. This too is a poem, albeit more fraught, about finding voice. The speaker of “The Right Word” finds her voice at the end of the poem and calls to the titular terrorist, ending on a note of hope: “I open the door. / Come in I say. /Come in and eat with us” (25).
In the exhibit, “My Breath” is a triptych, the lines of the woman’s drape extending into the middle segment act to connect the woman and the words of the poem. As in the case of the visual lines, each poetic line is repeated over and over – “Walls are paper walls are paper walls are paper” – thickening and elongating the billowing drape, their significance partly as words, partly as visual texture.
Though the joints are visible, the continuities of line (very different from the collages) demonstrate perhaps a continuity of voice and experience – the aliens have found community.
Conclusions
Imtiaz Dharker’s poetry and art insert the figure of the alien as an exploratory incision – an instigation, a way in, and a device with which to peel back layers of places and persons. Through this incision the reader is afforded glimpses of belonging and conformism, of violence, systemic and individual, of love, grief, and the role of the poet in the contemporary world.
Dharker’s recent volumes, Over the Moon (2014), and Luck is the Hook (2018) share many of the themes and preoccupations of the works discussed here, but feature too a number of love poems, and more personal lyrics. Over the Moon, in particular, is characterised by a gentle melancholy, sometimes veering into the elegiac – many of its poems are written in memory of her late husband Simon Powell. “Hiraeth, Old Bombay,” begins with nostalgia for the city of the past, and takes a turn into personal grief and loss:
I would have taken you to Bombay
if its name had not slid into the sea.
I would have taken you to the place called Bombay
if it were still there and if you were still here,
I would have taken you to the Naz café. (E-book, Ch. 6)
The poet’s realisation is that she has been detached physically from both city and lover – the exile is complete.
Dharker’s oeuvre, in short, negotiates questions of human identity and belonging, fraught and beset as they continually are by spaces, social expectations, and memories. While devices perceived as shortcuts or simplifications (fingerprinting, ID cards) are given short shrift, the real depths of identity are often invested in images that are more fluid – rivers, seeds, trees, memories, objects and spaces that are reused and repeopled. Cities, in particular, with their ebb and flow of people and their stories, are both sites of longing and poetic inspiration. Just as the spaces in “Hiraeth, Old Bombay” become one person’s repositories of love and memory, these meanings accrue and spill over.
The city has been taken and given,
named, renamed, possessed, passed on,
passed through many hands,
my hand me down. (“Hand-me-down”, Leaving Fingerprints, 73)
These slow, organic processes of growth and sedimentation are seen as seen as repositories of the self, both individual and social. Even the alien leaves hand-me-downs for others to possess.
Major Works by Imtiaz Dharker
Postcards from god. Bloodaxe, 1997.
(This edition combines her first volume Purdah and other Poems that was originally published in India in 1989 by OUP with her second book, Postcards from god. It also adds illustrations by Dharker that are not present in the OUP edition.)
I Speak for the Devil. Bloodaxe, 2001.
The Terrorist at my Table. Bloodaxe, 2006.
Leaving Fingerprints. Bloodaxe, 2009.
Over the Moon. Bloodaxe, 2014.
Luck is the Hook. Bloodaxe, 2018.
Works Cited
Banash, David. Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption. Rodopi, 2013.
Basu, Lopamudra. “The Languages of Diaspora: Meena Alexander, Sujata Bhatt, Imtiaz Dharker,” A History of Indian Poetry in English, ed. Rosinka Chaudhuri. Cambridge UP, 2016.
Brockelman, Thomas P. The Frame and the Mirror: On Collage and the Postmodern. Northwestern UP, 2001.
Brown, Mark. “Imtiaz Dharker Awarded Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry,” The Guardian, 17 Dec 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/17/imtiaz-dharker-queens-gold-medal-poetry?CMP=share_btn_fb. Accessed 12 Jul 2022.
Chandran, K Narayana. ‘Review of Postcards from God.’ World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 4, Focus on Luisa Valenzuela (Autumn, 1995), pp. 872-873. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40151815. Accessed 22 Oct 2022.
De Souza, Eunice. Talking Poems: Conversations with Poets. Oxford UP, 1999.
Dharker, Imtiaz. Postcards from god. Bloodaxe, 1997.
—. I Speak for the Devil. Bloodaxe, 2001.
—. The Terrorist at my Table. Bloodaxe, 2006.
—. Leaving Fingerprints. Bloodaxe, 2009.
—. Over the Moon. Bloodaxe, 2014. E-book.
—. Luck is the Hook. Bloodaxe, 2018. E-book.
—. “My Breath Artwork/Poem at Manchester International Festival.” Youtube, 7 July 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6c8uOk1NNc. Accessed 15 Aug 2022.
Dix, Hywel. “Transnational Imagery in the Poetry of Imtiaz Dharker.” Anglistik, Vol 26, No. 1, 2015. pp. 55–67.
Dragu, Magda. Form and Meaning in Avant-Garde Collage and Montage. Routledge, 2020.
Haider, Nishat. “Voices from Behind the Veil: A Study of Imtiaz Dharker’s Purdah and Other Poems,” South Asian Review, Vol 30, No. 1, pp. 246-268, DOI:10.1080/02759527.2009.11932668. Accessed 15 Aug 2022.
Higgins, Scarlett. Collage and Literature: The Persistence of Vision. Routledge, 2019.
Menozzi, Filippo. “Fingerprinting: Imtiaz Dharker and the Antinomies of Migrant Subjectivity.” College Literature, Volume 46, Number 1, Winter 2019, pp. 151-178. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2019.0005. Accessed 2 Sept 2022.
Pinto, Jerry. “Imtiaz Unbound.” Poetry International, 2 Aug 2004. https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/article/104-2686_Imtiaz-Unbound/. Accessed 15 Aug 2022.
Subramaniam, Arundhati. “Poet: Imtiaz Dharker.” Poetry International. https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poets/poet/102-2720_Dharker. Accessed 23 Oct 2022.
“The Elephants have come out of the Room and on to the Piccadilly Line – SOAS Centenary Timeline.” Blogs from around SOAS University of London – Blogs from around SOAS University of London, https://blogs.soas.ac.uk/centenarytimeline/2016/07/29/the-elephants-have-come-out-of-the-room-and-on-to-the-piccadilly-line/. Accessed 22 Oct 2022.
Note:
[1] See David Banash’s Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption for a comprehensive discussion of the use of newsprint in Modernist and contemporary collage.
