Imtiaz Dharker's cultural experience spans three countries:
Pakistan, the
country of her birth, and Britain and India, her countries of
adoption. It
is from this life of transitions that the themes of her poetry
are drawn:
childhood, exile, journeying, home and religious strife, the
body as a
territory. She is also an accomplished artist and documentary
film-maker,
and her three collections 'Purdah', 'Postcards from god' and
'I speak for
the devil' include her own drawings for these sequences.
'In 'Purdah' she memorialises the betweenness of a traveller
between
cultures, exploring the dilemmas of negotiation among countries,
lovers,
children. 'Postcards from god' meditates upon disquietudes in
the poet's
chosen society: its sudden acts of violence, its feuds and insanities,
forcing her into a permanent wakefulness that fits her eyes
with glass lids.
If the poems collected in 'Purdah' are windows shuttered upon
a private
world, those gathered into 'Postcards from god' are doorways
leading out
into the lanes and shanties where strangers huddle, bereft of
the tender
grace of attention.'
'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.'
- RANJIT HOSKOTE,
The Times of India
In 'I speak for the devil' she moves on to trace a journey,
starting with a striptease where the claims of nationality,
religion and gender are cast off, to allow an exploration of
new territories, the spaces between countries, cultures and
religions.
'Hers is a strong, concerned, economical poetry, in which political
activity, homesickness, urban violence, religious anomalies,
are raised in an unobtrusive domestic setting, all the more
effectively for their coolness of treatment'
- ALAN ROSS, London
Magazine
'Beautiful ambivalence.realistic details take on a surrealistic
menace in another context.these poems deal very powerfully with
social, religious, racial and above all sexual entrapment'
- CHRISTOPER LEVENSON,
Toronto South Asian Review
