Imtiaz Dharker's new book of poems
Suzy Khurram
The Terrorist at my Table is Imtiaz Dharker's latest volume of poetry (2007). It is a troubling work, interrogatory and probing about how we, both in the west and the east, live, how we work, travel, eat, listen to the news, prepare for diverse assaults. How do we differentiate between enemy and friend: what can any of us know about the person who shares this street, this house, this table, this body? When life is in the hands of a fellow-traveller, a neighbour, a lover, son or daughter, how does the world shift and reform itself around our doubt, our belief?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. It is a collection of poems alive both to terror and unicorns; responsive to ancient script and cable TV, the plight of migrant workers, and the flavour of fresh mangoes. Imtiaz Dharker is an accomplished illustrator who conceives her books as 'sequences of poems and drawings'. The poems and pictures in this book hurtle through a world that changes even as we pass. The book is divided into three sections: The Terrorist at my Table, The Habit of Departure and Worldwide Rickshaw Ride, with the first section further, and somewhat self-reflexively, subdivided into 'the terrorist at my table', 'these are times we live in', 'Lascar Johnnie, 1930' and 'remember andalus'. The book therefore grows, layer by layer, through three sequences--each exploring, in short sentences typical of our times, and the media that defines them, the different layers of what we think of as normal. Where Imtiaz can evoke a Muslim Birmingham, but is rooted in a culture of Arabic calligraphy and desert pomegranates; where she not only looks back at the lascars that were some of the first South Asians to settle in Britain, but forward to a present where identities have blurred to an extent that one cannot know what is going on in the brain of one's breakfast partner. Imtiaz reminds us, in Hanna Arendt's famous phrase, of the 'banality of horror', whether in Chechnya or in Israeli-occupied West Bank: At my back, the news is the same as usual. A train blown up, hostages taken, Outside, in Pollokshields, the rain. It can be anybody, the doctor next door, one's son: It will not come slouching out of the ground. It walks along a street that has a familiar name. This is how it will look. It will have my face. But all the bombs, fears and clatter are overlaid with a skin of love, trust and sudden recognition. With a shrug, life will go on: On the windshield a string of plastic jasmine jumps up and down with excitement. Far below, I see the world shrug. One more mad rickshaw. So tell me what's new? Suzy Khurram is a Pakistani expatriate in Boston.
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