POETRY
Squatter-speak
|
`For Dharker, there is no Faustian struggle with the devil. He walks in and takes up residence: squats.'
|
IN this somewhat unprecedented publication of poetry by someone famous and alive, not famous and dead, Penguin has set the hopeful wings attached to young poetic hearts aflutter. I Speak for the Devil, first published by Bloodaxe Books (UK) three years ago, is a dedication to the poet's fundamental task of giving voice. In this case, accompanied with sketches contributed by Dharker and friends, the voice is unmistakably defiant, aiming to take us to the centre of things; the cores, the dark seats of our innards where devils sometimes set up homes, and always speak.
Imtiaz Dharker's poems are essentially an offering of hope in the face of violence; not just the violence of men, who, she says, have a "rare genius for revenge", but also from our societies, and ourselves. Her prescription for empowerment, however, may be a little out of keeping from the customary variety. Her images are powerful and sexual, demand a simultaneous acceptance and rejection of the body, and a compulsory paring down to bare bones. "Let's see," she says, "What I am in here/ when I squeeze past/ the easy cage of bone," inviting us to make similar skeletal explorations of our own.
She moves us in real geographic spheres, always plagued by indecision, always addicted to the "rush of daily displacement". So we are dragged around the world from Sialkot to Chicago, Birmingham to Vadodara, Mirpur to Beverly Hills: not to forget, but to search for this visceral stuff in the most unlikely places. A woman standing under a crippled umbrella in Chowpatty staring out to sea could be holding it, or the stranger running down the Spanish steps or at the kabootarkhana at Camden Market, or the dead Parsi neighbours in the Towers of Silence waiting to be stripped clean by the patient vultures. This peeling away, coming undone, making and unmaking, putting together again, is the essence of Dharker's search. Always, there's the effort to get at what's underneath; tear away the cloaks, the veils, the skin, the parts that can be stitched on, ripped off, traded, worshipped.
The whole book is set up on a system of constraints, transformations, and exchange. On one hand there is the thrill of submission, the raw need of giving in, of allowed invasion; and on the other, is becoming what one has submitted to, being able to give voice to it — tongue, freedom, speech. The tongue rules supreme in Dharker's hierarchy, while the body — mere sack, mere house, mere country — can be replaced like a different pair of glasses to give alternative views, "one close, clear, sharp as nails,/ one at a distance, set askew." The body is something we want to both claim and escape, just as the devil is someone we want to invite and expel. It's the same struggle of being an alien in familiar territory, an anomaly in a future world, skin abandoning itself to foreign encasings. It's a question of vulnerability.
Worse than leaving a country
Is walking out of a door
That will stand open
Because you have told all
Your secrets, and there is nothing
Left to steal.
But you have to start somewhere, as Ashrad's uncle says, after switching off the TV one day in front of the children's faces, taking it out in the street, and smashing it to pieces. This is how men play their part — stick figure boys grown into men who struggle past paunches to tie their shoes, men of angled bodies on trains, rapt in papers that save them from a sunset or sunrise, estranged fathers and lovers, kind dentists, uncles. Ayub Khan-Din drinking wine, telling stories to a woman who shows all of her legs.
And what of the women slicing sunlight with bony legs? She must find her voice too, search in mirrors, smash them in order to begin. Because children and furniture can grow in homes of their own accord. Because departures are always necessary. Because pieces are never unified. "There is always the threat/ of that delicate, dangerous dawn,/ light-slashed/ wing-torn."
For Dharker, there is no Faustian struggle with the devil. He walks in and takes up residence: squats. "The devil is a territory/that lets you believe you belong./ Happy when you worship/ At its mirrors." Everything can perhaps be crystallised, condensed to a single dot; knees correspond to beds, sofas to bottoms, chairs to laps:
Words are doors
And dreams are floors,
And the walls we built
To hold the world
Are only made
Of light and shade,
A spinning space
Where everything can change... .
In the many hemispheres of Dharker's world, the hope of god is something to be looked for between collarbones, on the undersides of eyelids, on the lifted cheekbone. It is to enter into oneself, the deep earth, and scrape the questions away. To set adrift on loneliness rather than togetherness. To dance crazily on the rooftops of Mumbai cutting the blindfolds off words. "Keeping secrets is the devil's work," she says, "But who shall I tell my secrets to?"
I Speak for the Devil, Imtiaz Dharker, Penguin, Rs.195.
TISHANI DOSHI
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
