Diasporic Consciousness in Imtiaz Dharker
Born in Lahore, Imtiaz Dharker migrated to Glasgow where she grew up as an Islamic migrant woman whose subsequent existence moved to and fro between U.K. and India so grows up in diasporic consciousness. Like most other diasporic poets, Imtiaz Dharker too remains engaged in the normal dialectics of belonging and unbelonging that usually splits a migrant’s opinion of his/her identity and the whole world of social living where one must always face diverse forms of isolation, and racial otherization. The story of Dharker’s search for an identity is in agreement with modern culture and demands of modern life which is expressed as diasporic consciousness in her poetry. It can be noted that the development of such an identity is a continuing process and in the course of this process the core of diasporic poets like Dharker has shifted and changed over time and that’s why they were pulled and pressurized by tradition and modern life. Next in the process of social and cultural transformation, there has been no flight from the traditional culture and the identity or identities it confers on Indian diaspric poets like Dharker. It can be noted that there has been no rejection of tradition and culture in Dharkers poems. It is remarkable that the great ancient cultural tradition still holds its sway on the minds of the speakers of her poemes who are actually Dharker herself, as her poems are full of autobiographical elements and characets. One can easily find in her poetry the Indian culture a fascinating and extremely varied blend of unity and diversity. It is true that her poetry incorporates a sustained quest – the quest for roots in the tradition and the quest for a higher self. The image of her birth place i.e. Pakistan and shelter place i.e. India where she grows and marries according to her choice, is very significant in her poetry. She used this image again and again in his poetry; this means she was emotionally attached with the India subcontinent. It is quite significant that her personality and character charm the critical freedom of the people because of her Indian diasporic consciousness height and perception. There is no doubt that a diaspora poet like Dharker enjoys two different lives – the one within, the one without. It is true that because of the present mobility conventional notions of exile have taken a new shape. It is true that she is deeply attached to India subcontinent. It’s visible that disturbed by the deep sense of alienation in the modern world, the poet makes an intense search for relationships through her poems. It is quite clear that Dharker was staying in two cultures – one Eastern and the other Western. The Eastern is related to India subcontinent i.e. presents India and Pakistan and Western is related to UK. Imtiaz Dharkar’s poetry is an example of these complicated discussions. Her poetry not only deals with the traditional binaries of ‘home’ and ‘away’ but also the difficult discussions that mark the many lives of the female migrant who may find herself marginalised both within and outside the domestic space. At the same time, her poetry also clears the constant endeavours to move beyond such marginalisation by finding a voice that always confronts essentialistic and monochromatic makes and the aggression required by them. This poetic influence helps to open up, what Bill Ashcroft defines as: “the liberating region of representational undecideability...a nomadic space within and between the institutional and political specificities of nation states” [8]
Alienation and banish, meant the disaster of individual identity and of cultural identity, childhood memories, familial relations, and love, homesickness for the past and cultural traditions therefore compose the themes of her poetry. In the case of her some pomes, the sense of alienation from the family or the community becomes so vast that they turn completely inward. The result of such inwardness is a highly private poetry, confessional in quality and gripped with solitude and anxiety from which the escape is sought either in the erotic fantasies or the self- inquiring of a suffering soul. Her poems thus expose her diasporic consciousness of raw Indian identity. The poetic sensibilities are leaning along three distinct possibilities: the modes of confirmation in terms of legend and history search for the self in and through love, modes of refusal in terms of desire for suspension and death. In other words, her poetry has centered itself around self in relation to society, history with family as the core unit and in relation to self, its own propelled emotions and feelings. Although she spent exile life willingly but she never forgot her motherland and always lived in the memories of Indian culture with his haunted diasporic consciousness. Her poems show that she was pulled by her motherland again and again. Her poems prove that she was not only emotionally but also physically alienated from her birth place, Pakistan, and adapted land India. This is the reason, that she writers most of her poems, both about Pakistan or India. Her poetry proves that her heart is deeply rooted in Indian culture and society. It also proves that she faced a lot of identical problems in UK and that’s why she felt alienated. Keeping all these things in view, it is very essential to see how Dharker was alienated from great Indian culture, how she felt rootlessness in a foreign country and how she proved herself as a true daughter of subcontinent India. Her diasporic consciousness about Indian society and culture brought her recognization all over the world. Therefore, it seems necessary to appraise her personality based on her poetry. As Pritish Nandi says in Indian Poetry in English Today “the Indian Poet in English represents his generation and speaks for it. Yet he knows his own generation is freak, part of an affluent subculture, rootless, often alienated from the mainstream of the Indian experience”.[9] At this moment it can be noted that Dharker’s alienation from inherent religious philosophy finds expression in several ways. Whereas alienation is the uncertain birth right of the modern artist in any society, the situation of Dharker reveals several forces at work which appear to generate especially strong sense of alienation in her. As it is well known to all that poetry reflects the poet’s argument with life and cultural values. Most of the existential problems of life are taken up by her poems. Whether a person is shifted to an alien soil for an intellectual or economic reason or else the country in which he is born and lives may be under the power of imperialism, his life gets affected by the cross cultural and religious encounters same is the case of Dharker. Thus her poetry is a brilliant by any standard, because of her alienation from Pakistan and now divides between Bombay and London. It is a fact that diaspora is a state of living in which a man’s soul has departed from his own self, his nature, his companions in which his mother, father, wife and children are included. It is true that the motif of alienation has an important place both in modern life and in literature especially in the poetry because it is a powerful mode of expression of deepest feelings. So Dharker uses her poetry for the expression of her alienation and diasporic consciousness. The physical, psychological, spiritual and mental alienations have been the powerful themes in many of her poems. As far as alienation in her poetry is concerned, it can be interpreted in many ways according to its various layers of meaning. Different kinds of alienation can be seen in her poetry. She was also alienated from her religion and that is why she has written a poem like “Pardah” which proves that she was really alienated from some important values of her basic religious Islam. For her the true religious has lost its importance in world by the misuse of so called religious preachers and she is in search of true religion even in her alienation.
As the very title of the collection in her book “Postcards from god” indicates that these poems have come to the poet in the form of Postcards from god. This means that she is in a foreign land and she has been sent postcards from her mother land, not by human beings, but by God Himself in the form of emotions and thoughts which she expresses in the form of this diasporic poem. She was deeply affected with feelings of nostalgia, the web of memories help her to develop a framework of the book under the title of “Postcards from god”, within which the diasporic consciousness is expressed. In this book “Postcards from god” there is a section of poems under the same title “Postcards from god”. There are also two poems in the section “Postcards from god” under the title of the same name of “Postcard from god I” and “Postcard from god II”. In this can detect from the poems, the poet’s preoccupation with her personal and racial past.
From the very beginning of the “Postcards from god”, the speaker refers to the “strangeness of a foreign land” (Postcards from god, 16) where she recognizes herself in terms of “an untidy shape” (Postcards from god, 27) which bears a resemblance to “a scribble leaked/out of a colonial notebook” (Ibid). Such declaration emphasise how the etherizing stare of the white natives pushes the black/brown migrant into a marginal space where she must deal with a crippling nostalgia which is always unbreakable either by the looks of the citizens of the host country or by the English language she is required to speak, in poem “Pariah” which means exile:
My back bends to their voices
My hands on the ticket,
On the counter, on the thread.
When I must speak to them,
Their words take and tie my tongue.
I rarely raise my head.
Their looks are whiplashes.
Perhaps I have transgressed.
But what do they know
of sin and judgment, and
true righteousness? (Dharker: Postcards from god, 27)
It is to overcome this pervasive sense of alienation, therization and voicelessness that migrants seek refuge within the rubrics of nostalgia as they attempt to discover the routes through which they can reattach themselves to their cultural roots and thus endow their identities with that substantial shape which the needs of ligancy warn to remove, twist or disfigure. The speaker therefore either longs for the “good red soil/through fields of cane/ and sunlight delicately laced with flies” or yearns for scenes from Indian/subcontinental films marked by ghazals and Punjabi songs and heroines with chiffon veils, being courted by “a broad singing man” as from the poem “Going Home” :
Her mind rewinds
the ghazls and Punjabi songs.
The camera behind her eyes
watches as she trails
slow-motion chiffon veils, dancing,
she is the heroine
of films that come from home.
The reels spill out bright fields of amize
and a broad, singing man who flirts with her
through the dingy town. (Dharker: Postcards from god, 34-35).
Most significantly, the speaker always harks back to the world of well-known religious character which works as both shelter and nourishment. She therefore refers to the “coin of comfort” (Postcards from god, 16) related with the assistance made in the mosque and longs for a religious collectivity within which the individual may protect not singly but in group “With twenty others”. She found peace in mind when she thinks she is able to “found a home”:
The body rocked in time
With twenty others, was lulled
Into thinking it had found a home. (Dharker: Postcards from god, 17)
Dealing with marginalizing practices of different sorts and unsure of one’s own manners of belonging, the spokesperson adheres on to the religion and spirituality as those met narratives within which the microcosmic individual may house oneself. Dhaker makes a proverb type verse “The future leaves a trace/ Upon the past,” It means that she wants to make her future upon the past memories of her culture and tradition even though she is in exile, but she feels nostalgia. She has also nostalgia feelings about her ancestral religion Islam. As she uses the word “Allah” which is Arabic word for God, and also expresses the basic and indispensable tenets of Muslims that “There is no help but Allah”. It is clear from these words that Dharker does not reject her ancestral religion by heart even if she does not practice it in real life. In the core of the heart she feels nostalgia about her ancestral religion Islam even in her exile. This is expressed by her in the poem “Pariah” as:
The future leaves a trace
Upon the past, and so
I leave my face with them.
In the evening I cleanse my mouth.
There is no help but Allah
And the rituals:
Wash the hands to the elbows,
A fluttering of fingertips,
A kind of peace. (Dharker: Postcards from god, 28)
Such tranquility, however, is only temporary. Since the production of diasporic consciousness frequently falls back on religious doctrine to give subjects with that sense of belongingness which they often fail to find in another place both in the home and the outside world become essentially related with religious conversations. What happens in the process is similar to what happens with respect to the nationalist conversation and assist in the formations of identity.
Within the colonial world, the local individual locates the home freedom as a reservoir of pure traditions and domesticated women as pure repositories of those traditions, similarly, even within diasporic communities, the home freedom of household relationships is seen as the site where the ties of the country of origin must remain constant, even though external life imposes on them a series of circumstances that force them to accept the habits and customs of the host country. Such rules and regulations often end up condensing into a series of religious strictures which impose a number of oppressive, twisting, patriarchal burdens which subject the female subjects to both bodily and emotional ill-treatment and thereby obstruct all possibilities of the development of personal identity. This dilemma becomes clear from the various painful expressions of Dharker’s speakers. Such pain includes numerous strictures pertaining to dress, marriage, family and sexual mistreatment and different such other aspects of a woman’s survival which are ruled by patriarchal orders.
For example in ‘Purdah’ the speaker states:
Purdah is a kind of safety.
The body finds a place to hide.
The cloth fans out against the skin
Much like the earth that falls
On coffins after they put the dead men in. (Dharker: Postcards from god, 14)
The last two lines clearly highlight how the obligatory use of the purdah can often be a lethal blow to one’s sense of selfhood which seems to fade under the weight of the burqa or hijab that women are often required to wear. This, in fact, is only one small measure within an overarching system of patriarchal control and authority which shrouds women within “the purdah of the mind”. It subjects them to a life of absent choices, compulsory submission and even domestic and sexual abuse on account of any supposed insufficiency or misbehavior. But we can come to another conclusion in this poem that there is no doubt in it that Dharker has left her ancestral home for her betterment and to spend her life according to her choice in a willing exile, but she has still nostalgia feelings about her past friends of Pakistan. She has diaspric fellings for them and about the way they are treated there by the so called religious preachers, and she wants to save them from the clutches of these false heads.
The poem “Purdah II” is a diasporic poem which is set in a South Asian community in a Western country, where for the woman in the poem the muezzin's call to prayer and the time spent at the mosque are “a coin of comfort” thrown into the “tin box of your memories” (Post Cards From God, 16), in a land that feels foreign, full of foreigners. In the aforementioned interview for the BBC, Imtiaz Dharker explains how as a teenager growing up in a Muslim family in Glasgow, religion was first of all comforting. She quotes her verses from “Purdah II” and says:
I didn't necessarily see myself as a religious person, but the rhythms of the Arabic, which is really what reading the Koran is about, almost meditational I'd say... “the body, rocked in time / with twenty others, was lulled / into thinking it had found a home”, but they were “words unsoiled by sense, / pure rhythm on the tongue”. (Spiritual Journeys)
Dharker here addresses the fact that the prayers in Arabic were totally devoid of sense, as she is not able to understand the language even though she had attended a religious institute. Because the teacher of the institute does not take pains to make them understand as “Maulv’s fat dark finger,/ hustling across the page,/ nudging words into your head;/ words unsoiled by sense, / pure rhythm on the tongue.” (Post Cards From God, 16). But still on the other hand they were soothing for the memorable sound of the chanting, which is something closely associated to the sounds of poetry. It is therefore not a completely negative opinion that she has on praying in Arabic, and she confirms this in an interview on BBC, when she says how praying and chanting in a language that is not your own “does seep into the rhythms of your life”. A fluctuation of images associated to the familiar and the unfamiliar is cleverly knitted into the poem: Britain is supposed as a “strangers' land”, whereas the mosque, with its marbled floor and “familiar script” (ibid, 16) apparently stands seem to be familiar. This is repeated in other poems from that collection, such as “Grace”, where the mosque is “a space where fear is filtered out” (ibid, 22). As a matter of fact, Dharker admits in an interview that as a teenager Scotland felt like an unfamiliar land and that she “malingered for years” (Dharker in de Souza 1999, 112).
In “Pariah” – a poem from the sequence “The Haunted House”, – the speaker seems to be humiliated of her in the streets of a country where she is alleged as foreign. She feels that she is “inconvenient”, “indiscreet”, “an untidy shape”, “a scribble leaked / out of a colonial notebook” (Post Cards From God, 27) to the eyes of the locals. Once again there is a difference between one's inner self and what the others see from the outside: “the skin is a safe boundary / that holds my landscape in, / carried tight against my chest” (ibid). The center of attention is on one's inner self, on the background that one carries within, rather than on the outside world, fraught with esteemed and almost congratulated. When the woman of the poem arrives at home, at least she has the hope of religion, of ritual. That also seems unsure, though, a painful comfort, calling back to the image of the coin shocking against a tin-box in “Purdah II”. Dharker ends “Pariah” with the following stanza: hostility and inhabited by strangers. The contempt is that “pariah” is a word of Indian origin, identifying a particular set of lower castes of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, but here it is applied to an Indian woman walking down a street in the United Kingdom, where castes should not be allowed. As a matter of fact, in an interview the poet says that Purdah deals “with territory, borderlines, the whole question of where you divide people” (Dharker in Astley 2006, 57). In these poems, the setting of the Indian subcontinent, with its “good red soil / . . . / and sunlight delicately laced with flies” (Post Cards From God, 27) is the known and soothing scenery, whereas the cold surroundings of the present feels remote and foreign. Strangely enough, even the insects one can find in streets all over the Indian subcontinent are evoked with nostalgia in the last section of the poem:
There
it is – the whiplash
of a familiar pain,
and from my back, the surge
of wings. (Dharker: Postcards from god,28)
In the poem “Another Woman” Dharker uses the nostalgic feelings not for an alien country but for an alien home where she has been forced to marry against her choice. So, she takes her husband’s “house” alien and feels diasporic for her father’s. So it is a general sense of choicelessness which engulfs the lives of women. As Dharker writes:
This was the house she had been sent to
the man she had been bound to
the future she had been born into (Dharker: Postcards from god, 47)
These lines refer to an all-pervasive sense of claustrophobia brought about by the “drought of love” (Postcards from god, 40) which pushes a woman into “a crack/where the light forgot to shine” (Postcards from god, 39). It is this darkness which is again illustrated, either by the verbal abuse she faces from her in-laws or the literal silence she is forced to maintain by her husband:
The usual words came and beat
their wings against her: the money spent,
curses heaped upon her parents,
who had sent her out
to darken other people’s doors.
She crouched, a usual, on the floor
beside the stove.
When the man came home
she did not look into his face
nor raise her head, but bent
her back a little more.
Nothing gave her the right
to speak. (Dharker: Postcards from god, 46)
The search for other paradigms becomes obvious if we look through the other sections of her collection one of which is considerably titled “Borderlines”. The title refers to both the actual existence of borderlines – political, legal or communal, which are the cause the diasporic consciousness in another country. It also represents the absolute illusoriness of such shadow lines which cannot actually contradict the fundamental humanity that binds us in an alien land. Victimization thus becomes the source of a flexible vantage point that unleashes the view of redefinitions and reformulations. It is in acknowledgment of precisely this that she writes in “Outline” as:
The artist tries, time after time,
to trap the human body
in a fine outline; and finds himself, instead cut loose,
floating free through the spaces
of the wheeling mind. (Dharker: Postcards from god, 53)
Dharker, therefore, does not only wait for “The face beyond the borderline” but intentionally seeks to destroy the shadow-lines determined by history, worldwide laws and the vendors of hate. She says “Another country. . . . I must travel to.” “where words are halted,/ not allowed to pass,/ where questions form and are not asked.” As is clear from these verses that Dhaker wants to inform the nostalgic feelings by mentioning that she traveled “another country” where one is not able to express his/her “words” i.e. feelings. She is not able to raise any type of question for expressing her feelings and emotions so one has diasporic consciousness about their answer from one’s own motherland.
Checkpoint:
The place in the throat
where words are halted,
not allowed to pass,
where questions form
and are not asked.
Checkpoint:
The space on the skin
that the other cannot touch;
where you are the gurad
at every post
holding a deadly host
of secrets in.
Checkpoint:
Another country.You.
Your skin the bright sharp line
that I must travel to. (Dharker: Postcards from god, 56)
In the poem “Exile” poetic mediations of diaspora consciousness about the partitioned units of subcontinent India i.e. present India and Pakistan are reimagined as stressed, restless lovers and the otherizing discussions of nation or religion yield place to a desire that goes beyond the very need for binary-laden self definitions to arrange a meeting of the ‘self’ and ‘other’. Therefore, even as she watches a parrot soaring in the blue sky, “her mind bleed[s] into another country” (Postcards from god, 64), forgetting the religio-political divisions which comprise the dynamics of history. Dharker wants to express in this poem that the barriers and borders between two nations are for politics or preachers and not for lovers, who can feel diasporic feelings any time. She has used the symbol of “parrot” in this poem. In “Exile”, a short poem from Postcards from god, a parrot that “knifes / through the sky's bright skin / a sting of green” reminds her of that other country, but rather than a simple thing that prompts a memory it is a tear on the memory, and the poem ends with newly-found awareness that “it takes so little / to make the mind bleed / into another country”. To her, the place where she feels that she does not belong.
A parrot knifes
through the sky’s bright skin,
a sting of green.
It takes so little
to make the mind bleed
into another country,
a past that you agreed
to leave behind. (Dharker: Postcards from god, 64)
In the poem “Postcards from god I” which has same title that of the book, Dharker expresses her nostalgic feelings through the mouth of “a visitor” or “a tourist” “in this world”. She says that she make “rarely talk” only for asking “the way”. She feels that even for asking “the way” makes suspect to the people in a foreign country. In a foreign country one has to “walk around through battered streets,/ distinctly lost,” and one has to take relief from ones “past”, that means from ones mother land. So when one feels nostalgic in a foreign country one feels it necessary to speak any person from ones motherland not for others “sake” but for oneself.
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,
tried 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. . . .
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, (Dharker: Postcards from god,75)
In another poem which has same title that of book “Postcards from god II”, Dharker expresses her nostalgic feelings when she refer in the very beginning line “My houses turn to places,” In this line she comparers her house or home with palace. She wants to see that but she is able to look that only through “satellites” or “cables”. So she wants to “Keep the channels open” so that she will be able to see her mother land. So, it shows that she sheds tears in the foreign land because she feels diasporic consciousness and takes relief from imaginations.
My houses turn to places,
turned to satellites, grown vast,
and in their flickering spaces
I am reduced,
my cables lost. . . .
Keep the channels open.
I will keep trying to get through. (Dharker: Postcards from god, 76)
In the Poem “Whim” Dhaker goes in a dream world where she poses questions to herself about her travelling life. She asks question to herself that “How did it begin?” and at the end of the poem she asks another question “What was I thinking of / when I made this?” It means that she is not satisfied with another country and feels disasporic consciousness about her mother land:
How did it begin?
Where did my whim start
its journey into this
monstrous, magical thing? . . .
What was I thinking of
when I made this?
In the poem “The Door” Dharker expresses her nostalgic feelings about the world where from man comes i.e. before birth. She expresses her diasporic consciousness through the mouth of a “child” who “screams” when he/she comes to this “world”. As when a child gives birth their flows some blood and it is the sign for future “events”. She wishes that she does not have to come to this world than to spend her life in a foreign country and feeling diaspora about her origin.
The child screams
at the door of the world.
For a moment, blood runs slow.
Events are waiting for her,
jostling at the gate.
what will she have to show
for this lie, waiting to be lived?
I wish I did not have to know. (Dharker: Postcards from god: 86)
In the Poem “Frame” Dharker expresses her painful feelings of life about her diaspora life. She informs her country men that “They have put” her in such a situation that her “hands are tied”.
They have put me in a frame
and left me here
trapped behind glass, . . ..
Can’t t hey see my hands
are tied? (Dharker: Postcards from god, 90)
In the poem “Face” Dharker feels nostalgic about her ancestral worship place, mosque. “Confronts” her name on the “wall of a mosque”. It shows that she does not forget even worship place of her motherland:
On the wall of a mosque, my name
confronts me,
blazed in a passionate calligraphy. (Dharker: Postcards from god, 105)
The poem “Trust” clearly shows that Dharker has diasporic consciousness about her ancestral religion Islam in which one has to keep full “Trust” upon “God”. Also in which it is indispensable to believe that “God is Great”. Also one should have the belief “optimistically/ to meet their fate”
On the taxi and the truck
careening to meet each other
over miles of tar and dust
ride the words
‘In God We Trust.’ . . ..
While men insist
that ‘God is Great’
and hurtle optimistically
to meet their fate. (Dharker: Postcards from god, 118)
The poem “The Key” have the similar theme that of the “Trust”. In this also Dharker expresses her religious nostalgic feelings even though in real life she does not follow that. In Islam it is necessary to have faith upon “the unseen” and upon “that which has been revealed” She also knows that those who have belief upon these basic tenets of Islam they “need not” fear the “wrath” of God. The first stanza is:
Yes lord,
we believe in the unseen; we believe
in that which has been
revealed; we need not fear your wrath.
In the poem “Place” Dharker accepts that it is for the “greed” that one forget ones birth “place”. She feels nostalgic in this poem about birdsong, which haunts in her “memory”:
Perhaps it was greed
or coming to know too much
that we forgot our place,
birdsong a memory on the mouth. (Dharker: Postcards from god, 134)
The poem “Minority” is autobiographical in nature and in it Dharker represents her diaspric consciousness about her ancestral country Pakistan. As in the poem, the migrant who had hoped for a smooth passage back to the subcontinent finds herself twice or even thrice displaced: while her ethnic identity had made her a stranger in the host country and her gender, a scapegoat within her own community, even in Mumbai, due to both her birth and her religious identity she becomes an alien, someone who cannot find any stable harbor of identity. As in this poem Dharker confesses that she “was born a foreigner.” And she will “become a foreigner everywhere” which “don’t fit” her. Dharker feels that she will continue to face identify crisis and marginalization in Mumbai. She is a ‘Nowhere Person’ who regards herself as a citizen of the world but never completely at home anywhere in it. So it shows that she has fed up with the nostalgia feelings:
I was born a foreigner.
I carried on from there
to become a foreigner everywhere...
I don’t fit,
like a clumsily translated poem. (Dharker: Postcards from god, 157)
She becomes reminiscent about glorious past of her subcontinent- birth land. First she recounts the great leader of her ancestors. She feels nostalgic in the diaspora life about the great Mughal rule upon the India subcontinent. Also, misplaced, hidden things that float up from the earth come back in the collection: in “When they walled her in” the speaker tells the myth of Anarkali, a slave girl who was supposedly buried alive behind a wall by order of Mughal emperor Akbar as a punishment for having a love affair with his son Salim, later to become emperor with the name Jahangir. In the poem, Anarkali, which means “pomegranate blossom”, brings with her inside the wall the poetry she has enjoyed in life, and the speaker anachronistically lists some twentieth-century poets: Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Ahmad Faraz, Mahmoud Darwish, and Agha Shahid Ali, some of Dharker's major influences. In this poem the inner of Dharker comes out when she mentions the names of great Indian poets who have influenced her. She remembers them and feels nostalgic about them in the diaspra land. It appears evident, through these references, that Anarkali represents the contemporary subaltern woman who uses art, poetry in this case, to survive. Slowly, Anarkali starts cracking the wall where she is enclosed. Once again, the image of breaking barriers is central to Dharker's imagery. Even though Anarkali has been silenced, she is alive in other ways. As the poem “Anarkali, inside” makes clear:
my name spoken aloud,
Anarkali, Anarkali
in the open marketplace
in the courtyards and in bedrooms,
in darkened cinemas. (Dharker: Leaving Fingerprints, 57)
She makes ample use of images to reveal her diasporic feelings. Images connected to resurfacing of old things are offered in the poem “Gaddi aa gayi” , where the memory of Partition is evoked through the image of a broken china cup that is forgotten and never spoken of again. In the fourth stanza of the poem, the speaker's mother digs up the broken cup while she is planting potatoes, after many years and in another country. Suddenly, memories of Partition resurface, but they are now almost healed, perhaps made less painful with the passing of time and the resurfacing in the other country. In this poem Dharker remembers the past and feels nostalgic about Indian subcontinent’s partition. She remembers the feelings of her ancestors through the mouth of her mother when she says “She said the neighbours from the other side/ were kind.” This means that she feels nostalgic about the Indian subcontinent before partition:
She said the neighbours from the other side
were kind. They took her in and hid her.
Gaddi aa gayi tation the
Gaddi aa gayi tation the
to the country with a different name
to the station on the other side
on another train. (Dharker: Leaving Fingerprints, 76-7)
Bombay's tiffin-boxes are yet another thing in Dharker's latest collection that leaves traces behind, what she calls fingerprints in the title. The theme of traces left behind by every human person on the earth is also resumed in the sequence of poems dedicated to Indian fortune-tellers, only here the fingerprints are legible in the palm. In “According to the palm reader” Dharker writes:
This cross is where the past is buried,
that mound shows your appetites,
from this ridge strong trees will spring
and these creases here are all the children
waiting to be born.
Your thumb shows you will be
difficult, headstrong, stubborn.
You have a strong life line. (Dharker: Leaving Fingerprints, 117)
The second section of this poem offers images connected to gushes, the pouring out of life from the allotted lines:
That must be the slash through the middle,
like curtains torn apart
or earth split open, when all the prayers
I meant came pouring outstanding. (Dharker: Leaving Fingerprints, 117)
There are few pomes in the book “Leaving Fingerprints” through which Imtiaz Dharker expresses her nostalgic feelings about her childhood which haunts her even in foreign lands. The poem “Today they are shooting the teacher” makes Dharker nostalgic about her mother’s advice. As she expresses thin in the poem “My mother said, ‘Now they are shooting the teachers./ Tomorrow they will be shooting little firls.’” In the poem “Leaving fingerprints” which is also title of the whole book, Dharker expresses her views in this poem “Here I am, they say.” It shows that she is in the foreign land physically and not mentally even though she has exiled willingly. In the poem “Error” Dharker expresses her diasporc consciousness about “Bombay”. She feels nostalogic about “dabbawalla” who comes upon the “station” along with “tiffin-box”. She was at this time in “London” and wants to connect with India but she is not able to do so. In this poem she expresses her feelings in the same way as Agha Shadid Ali expresses in “A Country without Post Office”. She also mentions her contract with “Bangalore”. The title of the poem “Barkat” shows the diasporic feelings of Dharker in this poem. As the word “Barkat” is an Urdu word and there are also four verses in Urdu in this poem which expresses her nostalgic feelings which are sung by the grandmother and so expresses nostalgic feelings about her grandmother also, as: “saja chanda soja/ Meri raj dulari sloja. .. Tuje nindiya sataye saja / Soja chanda soja”. So it is clear from these Urdu verses that Dharker remembers her childhood song sung for her sleep by her grandmother. She feels nostalgic about this song and wants to listen it again and again.
In some poems from the book “Leaving Fingerprints” She expresses her diasporic consciousness in a foreign country which one feels in alienation. In the poem “Meanwhile, my letter-box” Dharker expresses her nostalgic feelings when she receives letters from her mother land. She says in this poem as, “My letter/ box scream again. Another army of words marches in, information and stands there, shouting at me, shouting, shouting, saying nothing.” In this poem Dharker expresses that her mother land has complaint against her so that is shouting to her for accepting her diasporic life. In the poem “Hand-me-down” Dharker forecasts her fate of diaspora life, that she will have to leave the foreign country as is done by others. She expresses as “The city has been taken and given,/ named, renamed, possessed, passed on./ … I too will hand it on.” By the poem “Somewhere else” Dharker expresses her inner feelings about her inner voice, which wants her to visit her own country because she feels homesick at the foreign land. She expresses as “But I wasn’t there, I hear/ my own voice say, I couldn’t/ have been there.” In the poem “Last gift” Dharker expresses again her nostalgic feelings by its speaker’s mouth. As the most important gift for the speaker of this poem is “seed” of her “birth”. So it is clear from this poem that Dharker thinks that the most important gift for a person is nothing else than his/her birth place. It shows that diasporic consciousness id haunted by her motherland in herself exiled life.
In the poem “She was seen” Dharker expresses that one cannot change ones identity artificially by moving one place to another place. As she expresses in the poem “She was seen intermittently / crossing the desert, but does that make her / a woman of the desert? … She was seen in the city, but again that does not/ means she was a woman of the city.” So it is clear from this poem that Dharker wants to give lesson that if one spends his/ her life in exile but he/she is firmly rooted with his / her birth place. This message is further strongthed by another poem “Where the river goes”. As in this poem she expresses her main message in a proverbal verse. “The river has never forgotten its source.” She wants to give lessons that in the same manner that of river one should not forgive his/ her birth place.
The returning theme of religion and of its misrepresentations and diasporic consciousness are continued in “I speak for the devil”, Dharker's third collection of poems, published in 2001. The first sequence in “I speak for the devil”, called “'They'll say, 'She must be from another country'” starts with an epigraph that narrates how a Pakistani woman was shot by her relatives in her lawyer's office for wanting a divorce, and how the Pakistani Senate refused to condemn the crime, calling it an “honour killing”. This poem clearly shows that the condition of the Pakistani women haunts Dharker even though she spends her life in UK according to her own choice. It shows that she has diasporic consciousness about the miserable life of her childhood female flock. So, the poem is full of nostalgic feelings. As the very title of the poem represents it is full of diasporaric feelings. As, “They” refers to the men of the foreign country and they believe that Dharker or another foreigner does not belong to “another country”. Also in the below given stanza the speaker says “when I pee in the vineyard/ as if it were Bombay,” shows Dharker’s feelings about her adopted land India:
When I eat up the olives
and spit out the pits
when I yawn at the opera
in the tragic bits
when I pee in the vineyard
as if it were Bombay,
flaunting my bare ass
covering my face
laughing through my hands...
they’ll say,
‘She must be
from another country,’ (Dharker: I speak for the devil, 30)
Defiantly the speaker rejects everyone, no matter where, who attempts to control her through norms and conventions because she recognizes these as arbitrary artificial constructs. She aligns herself with others who feel the same way and discovers a sense of freedom in not belonging. As in the begging of the stanza speaker expresses that from which country they are emigrated the foreign country does not resemble with that. In this speaker is “happy” that he/she has not “learned” the foreign countries “custom” and “language”. The speaker accepts at the end that he/she is “from another country”.
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.
And I’ll be happy to say,
‘I never learned your customs.
I don’t remember your language
or know your ways.
I must be
from another country.’ (Dharker: I speak for the devil, 32)
“Front door”, a poem from “I speak for the devil”, begins “Wherever I have lived,” It means that Dharker remembers past life in a diasporic mode. She feels homesickness while she remembers “walking out of the front door” of “every morning”. But at the time of writing this poem she lives in a “foreign country”.
Wherever I have lived,
walking out of the front door
every morning
means crossing over
to a foreign country. ( Dharker: I speak for the devil, 18)
It is not only the physical journey between a Punjabi-speaking house and the English-speaking outside world that the poet is referencing to: she is also discussing how certain women – used to reticence and self-seclusion – feel that to project oneself out of the borders of one's own skin, to confront the outside world, is a difficult task.
The poem “At the Lahore Karhai” from the collection “I speak for the devil” is only one of its kinds for the absolute intellect of homesickness that it reminds. The disturbed event is the sacred ‘lunch service’ at the Lahore Karhai which is situated in Wembley, a region in North West London. The site of the Lahore Karhai is itself sarcastic because it is figurative of all those Muslim women who have had to move from one country to another. There is always a constant intellect of yearning to go back to one’s own roots. The wish, more than creating just pure homesickness, gives rise to a personality dilemma which is much stronger in the case of women. Firstly, they remain unsure of which place they actually belong to, secondly, their subsidiary position in the social ladder and within the family arrangement forbids them an exact behavior. Hence there remains a bent to locate the self in memories- “Yaad na jaye” (memories should not fade) as Dharker writes. From Wembley, we are suddenly transported to a truck travelling along the length of the Grand Trunk Road, from Punjab to Amritsar and stopping midway at a local eatery or ‘dhaba’ in order to fill the stomach with some ‘real’ home food. Dharker’s group of “truckers” present at the table are described beautifully. The refugee, who is a Sindhi and his pretty wife, the young Englishman, the girls from Bombay wearing the scent of confidence, Kartar, Rohini, Robert, Ayesha, Sangam- all are connected by the common bond of food at the feast. This kind of food reminds them of their home:
Hauling our overloaded lives
the extra mile,
we’re truckers of another kind,
looking hopefully (years away
from Sialkot and Chandigarh)
for the taste of our mother’s
hand in the cooking. (Dharker: I speak for the devil, 26)
In the poem “Outside” Dharker shows that one is not responded by the foreign land’s citizens. In a foreign land one feels alienation as “Lone men and women/ hurry”. It means that in a foreign country like UK everybody is busy with his own work.
Halogen chills the street.
Lone men and women
hurry by, their collars pulled high
against the backlit sleet.(Dharker: I speak for the devil, 36)
In another poem “Mobile” of the same nature as poem “Outside” Dharker informs that in foreign land “No one speaks”.
In the poem “Being good in Glowgow” Dharker remembers the basic Islamic principle i.e. Nimaz and she refers to that in such a way “I did it all: read the Koran/ five times at the seamen’s club”. In another poem “Have you ever lost control?” Dharker express that respects the Islamic faith by believing “Maybe it will be all right”. In this poem she wants to “Control?” her self from that which is forbidden in Islam such as “wine”. She says in the poem “The wine doesn’t reach your mouth.” In another poem “Greater glory” Dharker feels nostalgic about the exploitation of faith of Islam faith which is exploited by so called false preachers and even “God was hijacked long ago” by them.
The poem “The Terrorist at my Table” taken from the book of the same name shows Dharkers diasporic consciousness about her home. When the speaker starts to eat food upon the table and his/ her eyes fell upon cloth about which expression comes out “fine cutwork,/ sent from home”.
Here is the food. I put on the table.
The tablecloth is fine cutwork,
sent from home. Beneath it, Gaza
is spreading watermark. (Dharker: the terrorist at my table, 22)
In the poem “The terrorist at my table” Dharker remembers several cities, not only in Pakistan or India, but all over the earth, liberating herself from the claims of other people: sons, lovers, fathers, siblings and even from someone else's erotic fantasies. She tries instead to offer an impression of different kinds of women and of their attempts to be heard: while some of them manage, some of them give in. This is also evident in the image of the pomegranate from the sequence “'Remember Andalus'” in the poem “The women”, where Dharker writes. In this poem Dharker expresses her nostalgic feelings an “I scatter pomegranate seeds.” It means that humans are in “scatter” position in foreign land as she “scatter” “seeds”. She mentions specially women because they are not able to bear the alienation, and they spent time as the remember their feelings about their mother land through “the window” of their mind “day and night”. So, it is clear that she has complete diasporic consciousness about her birth place.
I scatter pomegranate seeds,
and from each seed springs a woman.
There is the one who sits
in the window, day and night,
rapt in the life on the opposite hill.
There is the one who slips out
into the garden, and comes
back with her hair undone. (Dharker: the terrorist at my table, 71)
Movement and change in Dharker's poetry represent both the physical journeys of one's body through boundaries and continents, and the allegorical trips of self-discovery of every woman. In “Call” the speaker is on the cell phone trying to connect one home to the other home in another country. As she writes, “home moved house / to bring me here” (The terrorist at my table, 118). The poem also includes references to passageways and in-betweenness in the form of thresholds. In this poem Dharker says directly that foreign counties people are “other” even though they are ones neighbors as “other people’s doors,”. So she expresses her diasporic conscioiusness by spending time upon “windows” in foreign land. The poem is about home, and about how complex it is to experience at home in one particular place. Sometimes, though, one can have more than one home:
after weeks of hesitating
at other people's doors,
seeing their lives in lighted windows,
looking in at basements, at dinner
being made, smelling the food,
all the tables laid. (Dharker: the terrorist at my table, 118)
In other poems from the same collection, this same feeling of homelessness acquires more positive connotations. In “Halfway”, the last poem from “The terrorist at my table”, for example, the speaker ends the poem saying “Halfway home or halfway gone,” She wants to mention “home” of her nostalgic feelings and she even wants to measure the distance of her motherland from the foreign country in which she lives:
Halfway home or halfway gone,
we have grown accustomed now
to travelling on the faultline
of daily miracles. (Dharker: the terrorist at my table, 158).
In the poem “Alif, Anar” she expresses diasporic consciousness not only about her home but also about her parents, as “My mother and father carried/ it home, the kind of gift”. In the poem “Nanar na lage” Dharker use the Urdu language in the title of the poem. She remembers her childhood feelings about “Gujarat or Maharashtra” about a “mother” who takes care of her children.
