Strange Alliances In This Waiting Space: Dharker's Latest

Born in Pakistan, brought up in Glasgow, married to an Indian, Imtiaz Dharker is the quintessential postcolonial cosmopolite. She makes documentary films in India, writes poetry, draws and paints, and commutes between Bombay and London. Deservedly, she occupies a position of honour among contemporary postcolonial poets--and more specifically among a new crop of talented subcontinental women poets. others among their ranks include Monica Alvi (Pakistani-British), Sujata Bhatt (Indo-British), Meena Alexander (Indo-American), Menka Shivdasani and Rukmini Nayyar (Indian)--who focus on the self in the light of Feminism and the methods of confessional poetry.

It is hardly surprising that Dharker should be impressed by the recurring presence of the departure lounge in her peripatetic life:

. . .every plane or train I catchjust brings me back
into this waiting
("Announcing the departure")

There is perhaps a more determined exploration of Dharker's sense of displacement in this new volume than in her previous work: two volumes published in India and subsequently combined in Postcards from God (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1997). The switch from the divine to the infernal in the titles not only suggests complementarily; it also takes the poet into a post-Baudelairean terrain where diabolism is an inescapable fact of human reality.

The diabolism, however, is encapsulated by the naivety of sixties-ish activist rhetoric, which greets the reader in the untitled dedicatory verse: "For all the ones/ who stood up/ and spoke out./ For the ones who are still struggling/ to find their feet/ and their voice./ For the ones/ who have nothing left/ to be afraid of./ For all the others/ who haven't yet begun./ For you,/ in hope."

Dharker's speaking out begins with a definitive rejection in "Honour Killing," prefaced by a note reminding us that in Lahore, in the last year of the last century, a woman was shot dead by her family for having sought a divorce, and the Pakistan Senate refused to condemn the murder, which they described as "honour killing." "At last I'm taking off . . ./ this black coat of a country/ . . . this black veil of a faith . . ./ that tied my mouth,/ gave my god a devil's face." The poem ends as an existential manifesto as the speaker performs a strange striptease, "taking off this skin . . .," squeezing "past/ the easy cage of bone," and begins "making, crafting,/ plotting/ at my new geography." The passionate fluency of the poem marks Dharker at her best.

The book as a whole, carefully structured as a sequence of poems and drawings, demands to be read as a delineation of the "new geography." The geography (figuratively speaking), one notes, is quite uneven, especially in the first two of the three sections, "They Say, 'She must be from Another Country'" and "The Broken Umbrella."

A number of poems don't quite gel together, and infelicitous lines and images obtrude: "stretches her voice/ languidly behind the ear" ("Announcing the arrival"); "The best words come/ like skilful monsoons" ("Monsoon words"); "Tastes explode on my tongue/ like being born" ("Dot"). There are embarrassing examples of what can only be called adolescent romanticism, which in Dharker's case would have been excusable thirty years ago: "I put my name/ inside a parcel, and sent if off/ by courier, marked 'Urgent'/ to some address/ unknown" ("Announcing the departure . . ."); "I prefer you burn/ my body,/ . . . Let them label the remains/ Lost Property" ("Not a muslim burial").

An interesting--indeed, exciting--aspect of Feminist poetry is the reversal of gender roles. Dharker's imagination seems to go further and take a transsexual turn: "And yet I still reach out/ as if I were some old/ blind lover, desperate/ to seize and hold/ and enter once again" ("12 noon"); "I'm about to love you/ like the pestle pounding/ green chillies/ into chutneyed pain" ("Chili-hot").

The strongest poems in the collection are in the title section, which opens with "The dijinn in Auntie" an engaging narrative reminiscent of the best of the late Taufiq Rafat, a poet who deserves to be known better. A number of poems attempt a composite portrait of the devil, who is protean as well as ubiquitous. He is in the poet, and by implication, in each of us, and at the same time, beguilingly, all around us. He is in politics, in poetry and, comically, in the TV set: in "Dealing with the devil," a Bradford Pakistani-British smashes the family TV set one day: "One devil had been dealt with/ You have to start somewhere,/ Arshad's uncle said." The devil's presence ensures the moral ambiguity endemic to our age: "It's hard to say/ Who's on which side./ All the murderers are wearing/ masks/ with god's face painted on" ("Saviours"). Some of Dharker's accompanying drawings are disappointing. The devil, for example, a corpulent figure stripped to the buff, somewhere between middle and old age, he seems anxious to get into his infernal sauna in the hope it will rid him of a few pounds. The best drawings in the book are self-portraiture, whether or not they are an accurate likeness of the artist-poet: the dense cross-hatching, the opaque eyes (as if gouged out--or at least they are like black eyes), the overall impression of clinical depression, are powerful in their impact on the viewer-reader.

Unsurprisingly, the subject of terrorism crops us a few times, most explicitly in "Slit," and--understandably enough--it raises a few questions. "Men have a rare genius/ for revenge," the poem opens. The statement is quite true if one interprets it to mean that testosterone-charged beings are, on the whole, more prone to violence than estrogen-charged ones. The poem goes on to detail men's terrorist acts and ends with the speaker dissociating herself from them: "I wasn't the one/ Who did this./ Ask the men carrying/ holy books./ Ask God./ He knows."

Now, one cannot help pointing out that terrorist acts are also being carried out by women--witness numerous women suicide bombers, Palestinian, Chechnian, and others. Secondly, many terrorist acts are carried out, not by religious fanatics, but by politically motivated activists with their backs to the wall--again, there are many examples in Palestine and elsewhere.

These caveats need to be mentioned in our post 9/11 world, where this poem could be used by, say, Christian fundamentalists raving against Muslims (evidently the book was written before 9/11 but published after that horrendous event). If that were to happen it would be an instance of the "strange alliances" that Dharker identifies as a mark of our times in "Close-circuit." Today, the poetic treatment of terrorism would have to take on board the critiques of Said, Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Arundhati Roy, Ted Honderich--to give the most prominent names that come to mind.

On less contentious topics Dharker is more often than not absolutely on the ball. Take the brief poem, "Object" for example, a sharp send-up of Puritan moral-policing: "Oh delicious./ Exquisite pleasure, to punish/ The object of our desire."

The concluding poem, "Exorcism," seems to be the triumphal consummation of the project of creating the "new geography" mentioned in the opening piece. But is it convincing, I wonder? The speaker announces that she can't be found in Sialkot, Lahore, Bombay, London, Glasgow, Delhi or Rome--or, by implication, anywhere on earth. "And if you're wondering," she helpfully informs us, "I'm up here, alone." But we are none the wiser about the location of the "here." Then she declares that

If you're looking for me
I'll be dancing on cans
and champagne bottles rolling
round the street, flying my feet
over the cattle and clunk
where the drums thump thump.

Now, surely, streets strewn with champagne bottles and cans must be somewhere on Planet Earth, but where? We are not told, but now Dharker suddenly switches the first person plural to round off gleefully:

We're taking a chunk
out of a new song,
on the move
swirling, falling

This is how we belong.

What can one say? Some belonging!

Kaiser Huq teaches English at Dhaka University.

Being Good in Glasgow

FARIDA:

I did it all: read the Koran
five times at the seamen's club
that masqueraded as a mosque on Sundays,
kept the rosas,
fasted from dawn right through
the endless Scottish dusk,
definitely never drank. Ate
fish and chips when all my
friends had hamburgers. If
I even thought of a pig I'd
Spit.

I was really full of shit.

I got fed up with being good.
It must have been a put-on anyway,
because I was hungry to be bad,
like craving food.

What I wanted, really, deep down, was sin.
To open the front door
in the middle of the morning
and let the devil in.