Born in 1954 in Pakistan, Imtiaz Dharker grew up a Muslin Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow and eloped with a Hindu Indian to live in Bombay. She then left India and ‘married into Wales’. A documentary filmmaker and acclaimed visual artist, she illustrates her poetry collections with austere and jeweller drawings. The poems and drawings are complementary studies of women in spiritual purdah, and of the ‘rare genius for revenge’ visited upon them by men.
Her late work includes an extraordinary suite of love poems that turn without warning into poems of bereavement. In 2019 she turned down the highest honour in British poetry, the poet laureateship, saying, ‘I had to weigh the privacy I need to write poems against the demands of a public role. The poems won.’
For this episode of BOL, Dharker reads her poem They’ll say, She must be 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.
