DURHAM LITERATURE FESTIVAL 2000

 

IMTIAZ DHARKER

Imtiaz Dharker’s cultural experience spans three countries. Born in Pakistan, she grew up in Glasgow and now lives in India. It is from this life of transitions that she draws her themes: childhood, exile, journeying, home and religious strife. In Purdah (1989), she is a traveller between cultures, while in Postcards from God she imagines an anguished god surveying a world stricken by fundamentalism. Alan Ross in London Magazine admired her ‘strong, concerned, economical poetry, in which political activity, homesickness, urban violence, religious anomalies, are raised’ – in tightly wrought "free verse" remarkable for its supple rhythmical control.

‘The line is Imtiaz Dharker’s sole weapon in a zone of assault which stretches over the Indian subcontinent’s bloody history, the shifting dynamics of personal relationships and the torment of an individual caught between two cultures, divergent world-views’

– The Times of India

 

‘The image of purdah for me was on the dangerous edge of being almost seductive: the hidden body, the highlighted eyes, the suggestion of forbidden places. But of course it is also one of the instruments of power used to bring women to heel in the name of religion.

God has been hijacked by power-brokers to justify all kinds of acts of violence. The speaker in the first Postcards from God poem is a somewhat bewildered god.

This god looks out at a fractured landscape: Bombay, where I live, is a city of grandiose dreams and structures held together with sellotape and string (‘Living Space’). In the face of impending collapse, the eggs in the wire basket seemed impossibly optimistic.

Sectarian violence (such as Bombay has known) suddenly forces people who had not thought of themselves as religious to take a stand, define themselves in terms of the religion they were born into, confine themselves within smaller borderlines. There is a moment when the neighbours’ children become the sinister enemy, and the name of god takes on a dangerous sound.

I enjoy the benefits of being an outcast in most societies I know. I don’t want to have to define myself in terms of location or religion. In a world that seems to be splitting itself into narrower national and religious groups, sects, castes, subcastes, we can go on excluding others until we come down to a minority of one’. Imtiaz Dharker

 

Postcards from god (I)

Yes, I do feel like a visitor,

a tourist in this world

that I once made.

I rarely talk,

except to ask the way,

distrusting my interpreters,

tired out by the babble

of what they do not say.

I walk around through battered streets,

distinctly lost,

looking for landmarks

from another, promised past.

Here, in this strange place,

in a disjointed time,

I am nothing but a space

that someone has to fill.

Images invade me.

Picture postcards overlap my empty face,

demanding to be stamped and sent.

‘Dear…’

Who am I speaking to?

I think I may have misplaced the address,

but still, I feel the need

to write to you;

not so much for your sake

as for mine.