imtiaz dharkar

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Transmediality in the Work of Imtiaz Dharker:

Gendered Spaces in Poetry and Visual Art

By

Sonja Lehmann

Sonja Lehmann, M.A.Georg-August-Universitt Gttingen

DFG Graduiertenkolleg "Dynamiken von Raum und Geschlecht" / DFG ResearchTraining Group "Dynamics of Space and Gender"Heinrich-Dker-Weg Gttingen

[email protected]
http://www.raum-geschlecht.gwdg.de/http://www.raum-geschlecht.gwdg.de/mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]


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Copyright by the CCGES/CCEAE .

All rights reserved.Working Paper Series Number b

Transmediality in the Work of Imtiaz Dharker: Gendered Spaces in Poetry and Visual ArtSonja Lehmann.

The views expressed in the Working Papers are those of the authors and do not necessarilyreect those of The Canadian Centre for German and European Studies/Le Centre canadien

dtudes allemandes et europennes.

CCGES/CCEAE welcomes offers for publications. Please send your papers to theCCGES at York University.

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The study of transmediality has been a new trend in German Literary and Cultural Studies inrecent years. Closely related to the already thoroughly theorized concept of intermediality(Meyer, Simanowski and Zeller ), a transmedial approach offers a slightly differentperspective (ibid. ). Whereas intermediality is concerned with the exchange between clearlydemarcated media entities and with the boundaries that remain intact in the intermedial

exchange, the focus of transmediality lies on the transgression of boundaries between media(ibid ). The main interest of this approach is in the effect a transmedial exchange has on theparticipating media in the process of transgression (ibid. ). As Alfonso de Toro stresses, atransmedial exchange consists of more than a combination of different media or a mereoverlap of forms of medial representation (ibid. ; my translation). Instead, in a transmedialprocess a dialogue occurs between [the different] media [involved] and a meta-medial leveldevelops (ibid. ; my translation). Thus, if a work of art consists of different media thatinteract in a transmedial way, the boundaries between these media do not remain intact but aretransgressed in such a way that the media involved cannot be examined separately in ananalysis of this work of art. On the contrary, the process of transfer of meanings between theseparate media is crucial for the interpretation since the mutual exchange between the different

media is at the heart of such a work of art. The interaction of its different parts, i.e. the differentmedia it consists of, accordingly creates a meta-medial whole.

Such an approach offers up interesting perspectives on the work of Imtiaz Dharker, apoet, documentary lmmaker and visual artist, who illustrates her poetry collections with herown drawings, which form an integral part of her books (Astley ). Dharker has oftenexpressed that there is a mutual inuence between the different art forms she employs. Whenasked how she goes about writing a poem, she says, [i]t often starts with the one line. The restof the poem grows out of that line (de Souza ). She further admits that her writing isstrongly inuenced by her visual art so that poems also often start from an image which shethen proceeds to work around (de Souza ). In another interview she describes an even

closer interrelationship between image and line: Everything starts with the image: sometimesas the line of a poem, sometimes as something I see as a visual, a drawing. No, thats not alwaystrue. Sometimes a poem can start with an idea and that can in turn spark off a drawing (Pinto).There appear to be no clear-cut boundaries between the different art forms for her. Notsurprisingly Jerry Pinto, the interviewer, adds: Poet and art critic Ranjit Hoskote called thempoems amplied by drawings to which Imtiaz only wants to add, drawings amplied bypoems. Poems and drawings can thus not be analyzed separately but need to be approachedtransmedially since only the interplay between these two media will convey the complexmeaning in Dharkers art. For, as Sudeep Sen rightly remarks, [b]oth her poems and drawingsinteract, not always directly, but very often as a counterpoint ().

It is this transmedial interaction between poetry and drawings that I will focus on therst half of Dharkers collection I Speak for the Devil. Like all her books of poetry, ISpeak for the Devil comes in the form of an arrangement of poems and drawings; it is dividedinto three seemingly separate sequences, Theyll Say, She Must Be from Another Country,The Broken Umbrella and I Speak for the Devil. Thematically, it is concerned with genderissues, the spaces women are allowed to inhabit in different societies and their struggle to breakfree from restrictive gender roles. These themes are very explicit in the rst sequence, which


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traces a journey, starting with a striptease where the claims of nationality, religion and genderare cast off, to allow an exploration of new territories, the spaces between countries, culturesand religions (Astley ).

Poet and critic Arundhathi Subramaniam describes I Speak for the Devil as [a]n

iconoclastic in-your-face exultation an unabashed celebration of a self that strips off layers ofsuperuous identity with grace and abandon, only to discover that it has not diminished, but hasgrown larger, more generous, more inclusive and speaks of Dharkers unabashed embrace ofunsettlement as settlement. She is certainly correct in her assessment if only the poems of thecollection are considered. However, in connection with the drawings, the celebration seemsmuch less celebratory and hardly unabashed. The following analysis of the rst twosequences of I Speak for the Devilwill therefore attempt a transmedial analysis of Dharkers artto show that it does not offer black-and-white decisions or answers but that its only colours areshades of grey.

Dharker begins Theyll Say, She Must Be from Another Country with a note that

gives background information on the rst poem: in , the last year of the twentiethcentury, a woman was shot by family members in her lawyers ofce in Lahore for asking for adivorce. This deed was called an honour killing by the Pakistan senate, which refused tocondemn the act (Dharker ). Dharker explains that she wrote the rst poem of hercollection in response to this event (Astley DVD ). Given its background, the poem calledHonour Killing does not contain what one might expect. Its female speaker describes theprocess of stripping away layer upon layer of tradition and convention to nd out who shereally is after she has left all these things behind. She starts by taking off this coat / this blackcoat of a country (Honour Killing -), in the process rejecting a national belonging which isclearly gendered and Islamic as the black coat alludes to the practice of wearing a chador. Ablack coat of a country thus shows the speakers experience that, for her, nationality, gender

norms and religious practices are inextricably linked while also vividly pointing out the sense ofrestriction she feels because of them: the entire country is reduced to the size of the coat orchador, which takes away her independence and does not leave her much space to act. In theprocess of taking it off she realizes that this previously unquestioned part of her identity hadrestricted her in ways she had not even thought of before: Born wearing it, / I believed I hadno choice (-).

The following three stanzas repeat the process by taking away further aspects of religionand gender in a similar fashion. Thus the second stanza states:

Im taking of this veil,

this black veil of a faiththat made me faithlessto myself,that tied my mouth,gave my god a devils face,and mufed my own voice. (8-14)


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remake a new self by making, crafting, plotting / at [her] new geography, the drawing callsattention to the precariousness such an undertaking entails; the gures somber facialexpression does not appear to mirror the speakers energetic tone. As often in Dharkers art[t]he gray-scale subtlety is evident in both media, where the common strength is the lineitself (Sen ). This subtlety becomes obvious when both media and their dialogue are

examined with a transmedial approach.

About half the following poems of the sequence are in a similar tone. As titles such asHere, There, Announcing the Departure and Announcing the Arrival indicate thissection is loosely structured in the form of a journey. In a conation of metaphorical anddescriptive level, this trip is presented both as a journey towards self-discovery and self-refashioning and at the same time also as a migratory journey to another country. The poems inthe rst half of the sequence accordingly pass through different stages of travelling, some withregard to changes in location, others regarding states of mind. They are marked by shiftingperspectives and changing positionings and often show the sense of puzzlement andbewilderment that often comes with the new territory.

Thus, The Orders is marked by the sensation of seeing oneself through the eyes ofanother. Reections gure prominently in addition to the speakers disordered face (),which can only be reected correctly by a broken mirror (). Nothing at all seems certain forthe speaker, who appears to be looking at herself as if from a distance. Her emotional state isforegrounded in the consecutive poems, Here, and There, which are a reection of thegeographic distance she puts between herself and the nation she came from. Both poems arecentred on the same geographic location, but the here she came from has turned into thereif looked at from her new location. In addition, There is marked by a sense of regret. Thespeaker details that in the past, there was a chaotic, haphazard place in which somebody elsehad the power to make decisions while she had neither choice nor voice. Yet, upon her return,

she realizes that much has changed that could have led to compromise between the addresseeand herself, but she has come back too late for any reconciliation: Now it doesnt matter whenI speak. / It will always be too late (-). The speaker realizes that she cannot go back to herpast but appears not to have fully arrived in her new place.

Stitched likewise stresses her lack of belonging and lack of being accepted in anunspecied place that could just as well describe her country of origin after her return as thecountry she emigrated to. She is alienated and unable to t in wherever she is:

Someone stitched on my head and handsbut they used some foreign stuff

that pointed out the partswhere Id been mended.

And so my mouth spoke Punjabiwhile my brain heard Scots.My ears followed Germanand my tongue did French.


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It seems they were about to put me outin a garbage bag, I looked so odd.

But I survived,and they got used to the way I was.

Sometimes they act as ifIm one of them. (1-14)

Strikingly, even after the speaker had set out to remake herself and gain control of who shewas, she arrived at a new geography (Honour Killing, ) that she felt was still determinedby others. Someone () put together her new self and they () have the power to rejecther and cast her out if they are dissatised with the way she is made up.

While they is not specied any further, the drawing accompanying this poem offers aninteresting addition. Similarly to the drawing described above, it shows another naked femalegure, located in an empty space between drapes of black cloth. Yet this gure is not in the

process of leaving the cloth but rather appears to be located behind the cloth as if the viewer iscovered by it and looks out at the gure from behind it. It suggests that what makes the speakerlook odd () is the perspective and judgment of someone who is not marked by manyinuences from different nations and cultures and who has never left the boundaries of nation,religion and gender. The speaker herself, however, is not in control of what happens to her andhow her hybridity is evaluated. She is dependent on the acceptance of others, which onlyhappens [s]ometimes (). Understandably, she begins to question whether she has made theright decision and reects on whether she should not better start the process of refashioningherself all over again: Maybe its time, again, to come undone ().

The next poem, ttingly titled Announcing the Departure, marks the beginning of

another attempt to nd a place where she will t in the way she is. The search proves difcultand frustrating, however, since the speaker realizes that while being free to leave offers a kindof safety (), this safety comes at the price of being without home and in a state of completeuncertainty:

But every plane or train I catchjust brings me backinto this waiting space.Glasgow, Baroda, Sialkot, Rome.The names are roads of possibilitiesthat turn into lanes

with the undertow of home.Every city, every streetI get to pulls the ground awayfrom underneath my feet. (7-16)

The following lines express her despair and discomfort with being lost and unconnected:


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I think my body is askingto be in some promised place.I think my body is beggingfor another face. (17-20)

However, the place she longs for is unknown () to her. This realization is followed by a newperspective/attitude as the speaker again begins to wonder whether it would not have beenbetter not to leave and not to rebel against norms and traditions but, instead, to adjust to them.

The following three poems revolve around this question with markedly differentresponses. Tongue describes a visit to the dentist in the form of a humorous anecdote. Thedentist tells the speaker to keep her tongue still since it is interfering with the treatment. Thespeaker in turn reects that not controlling her tongue had gotten her into trouble before, butin a different sense: Keeping my tongue still / all of my life, / had been a highly recommendedskill (-). Continuing the pun on tongue, the speaker remarks that complying with thisrequest has by now been complicated by the fact that she feels that she has many

tongues (). Nevertheless, after the completion of the treatment, she admits in a bittersweetending that betrays her struggle with her position as an outsider that [t]heres something to besaid, / after all, / for giving in (-).

While her uneasiness is treated lightly in Tongue, Noon depicts a profound senseof alienation and disillusionment. The speaker is possessed by an urgent desire to belongsomewhere, which is mixed with nostalgia for the home she has left. The place she now residesin feels wrong to her. In a striking contrast to the previous Here, which described a countryalmost claustrophobically crowded (-), the new [h]ere ( Noon ) appears to thespeaker as a new country / peopled by shrill absences (-). Furthermore, she comments,[h]ere the light falls / heavily, pressing shadows / in where eyes should be (-). The rough

enjambments stress the jarring impression while the shaded eyes resemble the eyes of all thefemale gures in the drawings following Honour Killing, i.e. the beginning of her journey, upto this poem. The speaker has distanced herself greatly from the adventurous [l]ets see inHonour Killing (; ) that marked the beginning of her journey towards self-discovery andrefashioning. Now she does not want to examine herself or her surroundings anymore. Since[her] eyes are in another hemisphere. / Behind the eyelids, / it is night (Noon -), allshe can focus on is what she left behind. The speaker feels painfully out of place in the countryin which she is residing. She has become disillusioned with her constant in-betweenness whileher nostalgia and longing for a sense of home continually grow stronger as the poems endingindicates. Thinking about her continuing attempts to re-establish a connection with the placeshe has left behind, she states:

Having got here,what is there to say?What can I do with this passport?anyway? Its just a meansto travel back and forthbetween what is


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[o]nce thin boys () who have [g]rown to men who struggled / past a paunch to tie / theirfeet into shoes, this morning / along with a Bombay dream or two (-). These men areaccompanied by the looming presence of words that arrive like terrorists / on this ight (-).Vaguely threatening, they accompany the men and only seem to wait for their cue to attack:

[W]hen they untie their shoe-lacesand free their swollen feet,the stowaway words tumble outhot from tarmac and the street.

Announcing the Arrival.

Words circle above them, waiting. (26-31)

Here is another journey that does not stand for a simple change in location. These men not onlyarrive somewhere else but also in another century / another year () and clearly this new

epoch will not be theirs. They are depicted as old and inexible and soon their time will beover; eventually, the words will eat them up like vultures.

The following two poems depict a future that will belong to a new generation of womenfor whom words have a quite different meaning: they are the opportunities to change andinuence the reality of their lives. This can be seen in the girl in Monsoon Words, who runsdown a road which is full of possibilities that were impossible before: A child picks up astone. / The stone opens one eye, and blinks (-). It seems that the skilful monsoons ()of words that fall off the page / on to [the speakers] mouth (-) are imbued with the powerto change everything for the better:

Look away, and the rain will fallon to your mouth.The citys seashore driftsa few words to the left.

We belong in this time,after all. (23-28)

The citys seashore that belonged to the once thin boys in the previous poem ( ff.) nowaccommodates the speaker and other women. Because of this, she looks more hopefully both atthe present and to the future since they suddenly offer space for her to t in.

This sentiment is even stronger in the second Announcing the Arrival, which isdedicated to Ayesha (presumably Dharkers daughter of the same name). The poem wildlycelebrates the end of the century that was announced in the rst arrival poem. The repeatedstress on a new and better century connects the arrival poems with the note at the verybeginning of the collection about the honour killing in the last year of the th century ()and clearly suggests looking at the end of this century through the eyes of women. It is hardly


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surprising, then, that the speaker is overjoyed to leave this past and to create a vision of a bettertime to come that leaves behind all the things that used to constrain her: the hypocrites, theprudes / running our lives / with their holier-than-thou prissy attitudes, / the bigots withoffended sensibilities (-). She can already almost see, almost grasp a utopian futurecharacterized by girls like her daughter (-), by whom the new epoch is silvered (). She

desperately wants the beginning of the new century to be a turning point so that the potentialin goodbyes () can be used to the girls advantage. Vastly optimistic and euphoric at theprospect of change, she encourages Ayesha, [l]ets pretend the hand of a clock / movingforward by one second / can unhinge our lives (-). In her vision, the power to transformlies in the hands of the next generation of girls like Ayesha. If they want it to, [t]he worldshifts / with a lift of your hair (-) so that everything becomes possible.

The concluding poems of the sequence echo the speakers newfound optimistic andidealistic attitude. Nostalgia and homesickness no longer hold her back; she has found a senseof home in a space she has created for herself in which questions of gender, religion ornationality no longer seem to matter (At the Lahore Karhai). The culture she left can be

remembered in a shared meal with friends if she feels in the mood for it but if she does not,there are other possibilities (At the Lahore Karhai). Afliations with and attachments tocollective identities have become interchangeable and casual: This winter, we have learnt / towear our past / like summer clothes (At the Lahore Karhai -). The speaker is nowsecurely positioned in-between and has rejected the possibility of ever belonging to just onenation or culture again. Even after her death, she does not want to be associated with religionor nationality but asks for her ashes to be left in some country / I have never visited (Not aMuslim Burial -), [o]r better still, / leave them on a train, / travelling / between (-).

Nowhere is this new, positive attitude more explicit than in the sequences last poem,Theyll Say, She Must Be from Another Country. Deantly the speaker rejects everyone, no

matter where, who attempts to control her through norms and conventions because sherecognizes these as arbitrary articial constructs. She aligns herself with others who feel thesame way and discovers a sense of freedom in not belonging:

But from where we areit doesnt look like a country,its more like the cracksthat grow between bordersbehind their backs.Thats where I live.And Ill be happy to say,

I never learned your customs.I dont remember your languageor know your ways.I must befrom another country. (62 73)

By repeatedly upsetting the metric regularity in an otherwise rather regular poem and by


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subverting the rhyme scheme through the inclusion of extra lines in the course of the poem, sheshows that she has become too big for these constructions and does not t in anymore. Inaddition, she does not care anymore for the judgments of those who still belong to them andwho try to impose their values on her. At the end of her journey, she is free of all that. The endpoem of the sequence thus admittedly appears very much like the unabashed celebration of a

self that strips off layers of superuous identity with grace and abandon, only to discover that ithas not diminished, but has grown larger, more generous, more inclusive that Subramaniamdescribed.

However, the sequence does not end with this poem but with a drawing of a womansshaded eyes and therefore relates the ending right back to the speakers moment of deepestdespair (cf. Noon). Like all the drawings in the second half of the sequence, this drawingdiffers considerably from those in the rst half. While the latter were marked by the womengures described above, in the second half of the sequence they are replaced by several picturesof an umbrella, and collage-like drawings of the umbrella with small details of a womans face.The umbrella drawings seem to be an abrupt and random change when they rst occur.

However, the title of the second sequence, The Broken Umbrella, shows them to be atransmedial bridging device. They link the rst two sequences and relate certain poems to oneanother, with the poem The Umbrella as the clearest point of reference.

The Umbrella marks a radical change in attitude compared with its preceding poem,Theyll Say, She Must Be from Another Country. In this poem, there is no celebration ofunsettlement but instead a sense of loss and even an admission of self-delusion. The speakerstates that in the routine of daily life, as if it were an old umbrella, / I lost your soul ( -). Theyou addressed is not identied at this point. Looking for it everywhere she could not nd thesoul but, in the midst of all her journeys and migrations, she admits that instead [she] foundpain (). After this admission she details:

I brush past strangers and look away.Things have shifted.My eyes lock on empty spaces.I get out my boarding-pass.I have forgotten where I want to go.

At Chowpatty, a woman is standingunder a crippled umbrella,staring out to sea.

If I cant feel the rain,she cant be me. (22-31)

The speaker is utterly lost even though she does not want to admit it to herself. She tries todistance herself from who she is and begins to speak of herself in the third person in order notto have to face the pain and maybe even the lost soul that could refer to herself. She does notwant to recognize this truth that does, however, not come as a surprise. Through several


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transmedial as well as intertextual connections this poem is intricately connected to MonsoonWords and the second arrival poem, i.e. the poems when the speaker was most optimisticabout the possibilities of future generations of women. But while the shifting beach inMonsoon Words opened up space for her, now her hopes are disappointed and she looks atempty spaces (). Whereas the monsoon of words offered empowerment and new

possibilities, she is now standing unprotected against the rain she tries to ignore.

The effect is further reinforced by the umbrella drawings. Conspicuously, the rstumbrella appears in the collage-like drawing located next to Monsoon Words and in additionto a small greyish white umbrella also includes a detail of a veiled womans face, including hereye, and several white, grey, or black squares. The following two drawings, which are positionedaround Announcing the Arrival (For Ayesha) show the umbrella being blown away by thewind. Furthermore, the umbrella is now no longer light in colour but has black patches thatgrow larger in the second drawing while its outline becomes more rigid with every drawing,thereby foreshadowing the one beside The Umbrella. In this collage-like drawing the squaresand the detail of the female face have become part of the umbrella. The womans eye is in

shadows now, the umbrella squares surrounding it are all black, and the outlines of umbrellaand squares clear-cut. It seems as if the umbrella of xed identities that was lost in the previoussequence has returned and been combined with the speakers state of being in-between assymbolized by the woman with the shadowy eyes. The drawing seems to suggest that any kindof permanent positioning, even if it is settling in unsettlement, will lead to alienation anddisillusionment: any radical positioning will not offer protection against outside forces. The oneextreme inexible national, cultural or religious identications appears as harmful as theother a rigid rejection of these same things. Thus the speaker in The Umbrella is standing inthe rain, drenched by the words that seemed so promising in Monsoon Words and especiallythe second Announcing the Arrival

The following development can be briey outlined since it follows a familiar pattern. Asin the rst sequence, much of The Broken Umbrella consists of constant negotiating,evaluating, and re-/positioning of the speaker and her situation. Initial disillusionment graduallypasses, again through a transfer of the debate to another, more personal level which allowsquestions of national, cultural or religious belonging to be approached differently. Accordingly,the poems of this sequence focus ever more strongly on interpersonal relationships in whichindividual solutions are found and a middle ground is negotiated. With this approach come newinsights, such as that [k]nowing doesnt make / a straight line (Today We Spoke -) andthat only continuing dialogue can lead to understanding. Only after mutual understanding hasbeen achieved [w]e have found the voice / we share (Dot -) can individual freedombe established for the speaker. Understood and accepted, it is then possible for her to see:

Nothings broken. / I just feel a bit / more rounded suddenly (Knees -).

In the end, the speaker feels optimistically realistic and states, I am busy makingdreams / for the daylight to eat / when it gets up (Yellow Today -). It shows an acceptanceof the fact that, for her, identity and belonging will always be a process of negotiation andpositioning that will some times be easier than others. Uncertainty and nostalgia will probablynot leave her completely, but she appears to have found a way to deal with them productively


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and to position herself on a exible middle ground. The drawing that closes the sequencesuggests the same thing. It shows another umbrella made up of squares of many differentcolours and textures. Its contours are uneven and indicate room for both individual andcollective development. In addition, this is the only one of all the umbrellas that is not viewedfrom above or in the process of ying away but in such a way that it actually might provide

shelter from the rain.

Yet, the female face is not part of the drawing anymore. It is hard to say what thisabsence is supposed to symbolize. Is gender no longer important under the umbrella? Is thespeakers impression of any form of collectivity irreconcilable with her ideas of gender? Whatdoes this umbrella protect from? As usual, there are no clear-cut answers, nothing black andwhite, only a constantly shifting perspective of a speaker who looks critically at herself, hersurroundings and her positioning within them. Things may change again on the next page sothat the perspective may need to be readjusted in the next poem or drawing or through theirinterplay. The only certainty this collection offers is the uncertainty that comes with the highlyself-reexive speakers distrust of denite positions. I can therefore only agree with

Subramaniams assessment that, [h]ere is no glib internationalism or modish multiculturalism.If you trust this voice, its because its bigness is never grandiose; it is arrived at through aprocess of concerted exfoliation. Reading the different media involved as part of a transmedialwhole only further emphasizes the highly complex and differentiated nature of Dharkers art.


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