Framing Selves: Home, Gender, and Politics in the Poetry of Imtiaz Dharker

Abstract

Imtiaz Dharker is an important voice in South Asian diasporic poetry. Her work enunciates the challenges that various marginalized communities face in their quotidian dealings with society and the state. This article reads her poems and drawings from I Speak for the Devil (2001) and The Terrorist at My Table (2006) to highlight the internal and external conflictual negotiations involved for women in the formation of resistant selves that aim to critique gendered, societal, and political norms harshly imposed on women. Her poetry consciously reframes selves and expresses the questions and possibilities that inhere in this process. The emergence of a productive instability of poetic form and meaning in her work charts avenues and modes for her poetic subjects to rediscover agency in their private and public lives. The article shows how Dharker's poetry invests the future with potential for the emergence of consciously political selves.